So I recently played through the first two episodes, and given how much I enjoyed them I suppose I feel I should comment a bit on how I felt about the whole experience? Or something.
I don't usually come from playing doom wads and feel like I played something entirely different, yet familiar to doom anyway. But this really does give me that sorta nostalgic feeling while also being totally new, I think Enjay a few posts ago equated it a bit to the various wolfendoom sets and I gotta really say, that's the exact feeling I seem to be getting. A lot comes together and it makes me genuinely curious about the world I'm playing in. Ill freely admit to having just jumped into the first episode with no reading up until things began to actually grow on me, then I broke out the manual PDF and read the intro to the episode. I'm probally gonna go read the third episodes story now actually.
The weapons also feel pretty damn good even if the spritework on them is a bit inconsistent right now. But given this is beta I suppose that's on the list somewhere, for the rifle at least I'm sure there's some rifles out there that could be hacked up into the odd BAR knockoff the pickup sprite appears to be. I also can't help but feel I'm too much of a pray and sprayer because in both this and your set Strange Aeons I kept feeling like I was on an ammo crunch! At least for non shotgun weapons. Though there was a few times in episode 2 I nearly ran out of shotgun shells too. I suspect this is less a map thing and more a personal "Hit what you're aiming at for fucks sake!" problem.
I guess on any criticisms/suggestions, I enjoyed using the much stronger knife and the ballistic knife, but both being separate weapons made things feel really clunky if I needed speed on occasion. Would it be a good idea to merge them into a single knife and use an altfire for the blade launch? It might be a little odd since it's so far the only weapon that would have an altfire but it's also the only weapon with retrievable ammo so... Maybe not that weird.
Second, I know there was some complaints about voices early in the topic, but that's not exactly what I'm questioning here. I personally think they seem to fit fine for the most part, though some of the sillier lines seem to clash with the more overall serious tone of the mod, but the one thing that seriously stood out was the Vampire docs had exactly one sound for when you kill them. Considering they tend to be in groups and die quickly it means occasionally getting a chorus of "OW OW OW OW OW OW" which is very strange.
I also can't help but feel the default huge brown rocket looks very weird coming out of the various sources for it, maybe something smaller and more grenade like would look better.
I also found one minor texture bug. On map12 there's
a fence with no backside to it. So far that's the only weird thing I ran into.
Anyway I think I'm gonna give episode 3 a try, good luck with the mod(s) and your writing! I will say, it's kinda inspiring me to really try picking my own stuff back up instead of giving up on it.
