Impromptu Minidido

I watched a little bit of elmle streaming this wad. I saw him flash the automap and I saw 3,000+ monsters. Yeah no thanks.

It seems really irresponsible to me to make a single map that demands so much of the player's time. With all 3000 monsters stacked on top of each other so they couldn't move, it would still take as much as an hour to BFG them all to death. Sorry to everyone involved but I'm not touching this

Sometimes I want to listen to short, punchy songs and sometimes I want to listen to progressive rock sidelongs. I would hate hate hate to have to cater any levels I made to a playerbase that I perceive as being notoriously fickle due to the sheer amount of content that is already out there. That's too much like trying to make an entertainment product and while I understand that Doom WADs are at the most utilitarian level an entertainment product I find the art and artifice of their creators to be more interesting to me than whether they press the "right" buttons to hold the average player's attention.

That's good, I hope you enjoy it then. I wasted too many hours trying to get through maps with 800 monsters or more only to die close to the end and forget to save after killing the first 100. The maps in question are often pretty mediocre and uneventful.

There are rare occurrences where a map with that many monsters felt worth my time, and in nearly all of these circumstances the map was created by a reputable mapper such as dannebubinga, joshy, timeofdeath, or skillsaw. Usually these mappers have a way of creating climactic events that really make for a memorable experience. But if a map has that many monsters and its made by a mapper I dont know very well, I can often bet that its a long strenuous monster grind with some occasional bullshit moments.

I'm not saying that that's what this is, but there are a pretty large helping of mappers in this project of whom their design philosophy is either questionable or completely at odds with mine. For that reason it feels appropriate to segregate these people's mapping into their own mapslots so that player can pick and choose what to play.

If I had mapped for a project like this id be kind of disappointed that my section of the map could be buried behind some other sections that were much worse in comparison. What if the players can't get past the garbage and make it to mine? They might never have known it was there before they quit. It's likely that the parts they do like aren't very reliably credited without doing a lot of background research which I doubt most people have the motivation to do. (I certainly dont)

I just think that molding a bunch of peoples mapping into one super giant megamap is a lot of wasted energy, as there are few people with the time and energy to play something like that. Theres a lot of good comments applauding the amount of effort put into this but there's nothing about this that says to me that getting through this will be a fun and pleasant experience.

I think this style of project works for the ZDoom community and would probably work here because there's a small sample size and more easily aligned philosophies. On Doomworld it's simply got too wide a set of mappers to draw from to have much appeal. Especially with the very vocal and present slaughter group, who instantly turn me off of any project. I didn't even read the OP past "Grain of Salt".

I haven't actually played anything released by rdwpa but if I recall correctly the author is predisposed toward high-difficulty levels so in that respect the project was probably going to be open to slaughter gameplay on some level. It's not like it would be difficult to start another "Minidido"-like with a no-slaughter caveat here or elsewhere, including Doomworld. The bane of any such effort is finding an organizer capable of both starting it and seeing it through to completion which is a much rarer resource than the people making the fragments. I haven't played many such collaborations; the only ones that come to mind are Quadruple Threat, Exquisite Corpse, and of course ZDCMP2. I am skeptical of championing the ZDoom community as any more capable of manufacturing a successful product given my personal experience with the Hell portion of ZDCMP2 and the bunker that precedes it but that may just be an inevitable consequence of having Tormentor serving as the coordinator given his grind-heavy difficulty sensibility.

Nope I thought that was the title every time I read it. I blame KDiZD.