In my last Doom musing, I looked at Hell Revealed, a mapset known for its difficulty and for having the most amount of demos on the speed demos archive. There's a reason for that. Despite all the faults that Hell Revealed may have that many others have done better than it, one thing remains true, and that is it is "speedrun-friendly".
If you looked at some of my Doomworld reviews, some of them will have me using the hyphenated words "speedrun-friendly", or sometimes even "max-friendly" as well as the "unfriendly" variants. What these have to do with, they are referring to levels inside the WADs. As I have played so many WADs over the years I got to understand many of the ways several maps can be played. I pick out routes of travel that will net me better outcomes as well as pinpoint places that could be potential exploits. I'm no speedrunner, but I play to analyze the individual maps for those who wish to speedrun them. Or max them (meaning UV-Max). Either way, Hell Revealed's maps definitely are speedrun-friendly, assuming you can study the many demos and routes that many have taken before you and replicate them to the best of your ability. Many other classic sets from the 90s and the 00s will contain speedrun-friendly map layouts, but many more exist in those sets that are "speedrun-unfriendly".
Maybe I should have titled this post What does it mean to be "speedrun-unfriendly" because I'm gonna show the mechanics and things that make some maps speedrun-unfriendly right now.
Forced arena fights
I pick on this quite a lot in slaughtermaps, because a lot of slaughtermaps in the modern age seem to employ these things as an excuse to make a slaughterfest fight, but it doesn't end up good in most cases. Basically you enter a big arena-like room, get locked in, and once you get what you need, the monsters start teleporting. All the while something is consistently lowering. It's something so prevalent, and as you might expect, some do it better than others. Some try to make it seem like new waves every now and then, the best example would be Hell Revealed's The Descent and all its derivatives, as the platform you're on is the one constantly lowering. But regardless, a caveat to consider is that faster players, or those who are playing on lower settings and have to deal with less enemies, will probably get done with everything faster than usual, and then they are basically forced to wait until whatever it is that is lowering finally lowers all the way. These forced arena fights do seem like fun to some, but for speedrunners, they pretty much are just prolonging the overall level length.
Unintuitive backtracking
The best wads tend to not have these thankfully, but all the ones that are practically B-listers have this in some form. Two come to mind, Urania and Illuminatus. Let's use the latter as an example. So I press this switch, what does it do? I go a long, long way to figure out what it even did. That sucks. To be frank, backtracking can always be decent if you provide the ways to know where you're going and to add extra monsters, because that always signals that you are definitely going in the right direction. Indicators, which can be basically anything, lights on the floor, bars near the switch that match up with the bars elsewhere, and what not, help out. I know that you can also use automap markers in some cases, although I'm probably the only modern player who even uses them nowadays. MAP12 of Eternal Doom basically is built for this premise, but also after you hit each marked switch, you will be greeted by new monsters, which is proof that the author definitely makes sure that the backtracking isn't gonna be unintuitive or such. The worst kinds of backtracking are across huge expanses with nothing to go for though.
Generally bad usage of lifts or floor/ceiling triggers
Not in the way that The Descent or derivatives use, but a few that come to mind include Requiem MAP27 (way too many lifts, stairs are more speedrun-friendly) as well as those maps that do include waiting triggers but without any fighting, often found near level exits. I don't really have a lot to really say about this item to be honest, just know that waiting for a lift to go down and then all the way up may just be leaving me groggy at times.
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