176. Alchemist's Masterpack (2024).
https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/1 ... s-46-maps/
About 10,5 years ago I wrote a spontaneous and, initially, not very informative note, which was subsequently moved to the very beginning of this topic. In a sense, it served as a harbinger of the subsequent, long-lasting direction. Today, there is another spontaneous reason to return to what is known to the general public as "Master Levels for Doom II" (1995).
A week ago, a guy under nickname
elf-alchemist posted an updated release, which, unlike the original, turned out to be much closer to the original concept, both conceptually and technically.
As a result, initially many levels literally turned out to be bits and pieces from full-fledged planned episodes, and contact from id Software, apparently, was established in a hurry. In particular, we can separately note the set authored by
John W. Anderson, which was supposed to ultimately consist of 9 levels and play on Dante Alighieri's "The Divine Comedy", which I once talked about earlier, when reviewing one of the wads. The release included 5, without any structural component. Here this aspect was taken to its logical conclusion.
The 'Master Levels for Doom II' were by far the lowest quality official release by id Software in it's classic days.
In short, it is a grab-bag collection of various unstructured, unorganized WAD files, all made by various map authors with a wide variety of styles and design conventions.
Most of the authors involved in the project, made these maps with the intention of them being a part of larger episode or campaign overarching a certain theme even before being contacted by id Software for this project of theirs. John W. Anderson, for example, directing a series of 9 total levels themed around the first third of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Inferno.
However, not all maps made by these authors were accepted by id Software, being later released freely by their creators after the fact, with some of them even continuing their work further, beyond the original submitted level sets.
With all this in mind, why should anyone play the works of these masters in their original amorphous format? Why should we accept the way things are? Why should we allow people to miss out on the great works of these authors just because the pieces are all over the place? Why should we be holden by the shackles of someone else's bad decisions? Why are we not allowed to have fun with some of the best level designers of 1995?
This script fixes that and much more, by taking everything made by the authors past, present and future to the original Master Levels release and bringing it together in a single WAD file for your enjoyment. All 45 relevant (plus 1 bonus) map are now fully playable as 5 separate, organized episodes. And with this, you can now properly enjoy the works of Doom's early great authors, some of early Doom's most timeless work.
Otherwise, the result was a wad of five full-fledged episodes and 45+1 maps. The first episode, "Inferno" (for context, see
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Inferno_(series)), plays on the above themes.
Despite the changed formula over the years, my attitude towards "Master Levels" has not fundamentally changed - "TEETH" and "Bad Dream" remained my personal favorites, and it was also interesting to see the full compilation of the "Inferno" episode. For this reason, I limited my excursion to the passage of only the first episode.
Some of the compact levels may still look fresh indirectly, but that's about it, and the "Titan" episode, with its penchant for huge spaces and large numbers of monsters, feels tame by both today's and 1995 standards.
Settings and features:
* GzDoom 4.12.1, UV difficulty.
* There are some specifics to the launch, details can be found
here.
* On E1M7 - "Vesperas" I did not find how to pick up the yellow key without noclip. It seems impossible to perform a rocket jump, no switches were found that would raise the platform and not a single teleport leads to the desired segment.
* E1M9 - "Waters of Lethe", according to the wiki, is listed as unfinished, but there is a map in this set. To complete the episode it is not necessary to explore the entire map and its many secrets, just find the way to the center.
* Completing E1 will take ~ 2 hours.
