2017 Cacowards

Yeah not enough original thinking there for my liking, most too nervous to rock the boat. Question everything!

The people defending lilith.pk3 remind me of this guy... all while Lilith is sitting there shouting "I'm Pickle Riiiick!!" and "Wubba Lubba Dub Dub!!".

Edit: okay that was slightly mean, haha.. I'm sorry.

Graf's stated preference for quite a while has been for stuff that is Doom, but enhanced. I'm not sure he's much of a fan of weapons mods or vanilla/limit removing map sets on their own, although the latter is certainly where his fandom started. To be fair, I think he's got a decent point, but presents it bluntly enough that people would rather just act like he's said everything is shit and all of the authors should die in a fire. It's much more notable for somebody to either push at limits in an interesting fashion (something I believe he lauds BtSX for) or work with an expanded featureset to produce something more unique. I'm so uninterested in most current Doom WADs precisely because they're not doing anything new, they're just harder or slightly prettier than the average from a few years ago. New textures and music on anything less feature rich than Boom isn't even a draw, to be honest. Waterlab GZ was fantastic, IMO, and it being so well-realised with the latest features was part of the appeal to me. Difficulty was accessible and it feels just enough like Doom that I was at home with it and could enjoy the flooded base aesthetic and expanded enemy roster. Hell, even this forum has a discussion about why the standard MegaWAD isn't interesting anymore - we are seeking novelty at this point, because Doom 2 has been done to excess. I'm willing to check out something traditional if it's not going to take too much of my time, but I'm not going to be impressed even if it is good, because I've probably played better years ago. The Cacowards barely caught my interest this year and I'm not going to make much of an attempt to try any of the WADs out that I've not already. Making stuff for the game is more intersting to me than playing yet another map set, whilst playing other games is even more interesting than that.

The fact is, it's his opinion, much like everybody else has theirs. It doesn't matter that every year he pops up and decries the prevelance of stuff he's not interested in, because everybody does that. Just like we all think somebody was robbed. Personally, I thought Alfonzo being Xaser's biggest fan and going into great depth on the matter is a strong sign of the inherent flaw with assigning any value to these awards. It's hobbyists in a community picking from stuff that mostly that community makes, so obviously it's just the opinions of some people who are just qualified as the rest of us, but have looked through peoples' suggestions, checked everything out and colluded on an opinion piece.

Dunno why all the hate for Plut3 though, I saw some real potential in it. Perhaps the name is a bit pretentious but it's a perfectly fine mapset.

fund it

Plutonia 3 sure is interesting enough for me to download even if it's not a real sequel.

Doomworld for our equivilent of the Cacowards; the Lost Souls, specifically the Mockaward category.
The Doominati should be slapped for such an idea of dropping it.

Not a bad idea.  I like the name too.

I second the 2019 Lost Souls!

Now that some time has passed since the Cacowards, I'm curious to know if you played any of the winning & nominated WADs and what you thought about them.
I've only gone through Brigandine, Waterlab and Hellscape, and that was long before the awards were handed out. Of course, the latter pair were only mentioned, but still.

Brigandine was visually impressive. Its style reminded me of Arcane Dimensions, a high-profile Quake mapset. The gameplay was solid. Verdict: Good but forgettable. Maybe I'm boring, but I didn't think it was all that special. Perhaps it got the medal for the looks alone?

Waterlab looked good and played well. A bit cramped at times, maybe, but I don't mind. The ending wasn't my cup of tea, so to speak, but I liked it more than the others I tried, and it is a good example of how I think a map in the UDMF format should be made. Maybe I'm even more boring, but they tend to suck in general. Not because of the format itself, but because of the inexperience or different background of the mappers. There is seemingly a wanton inclusion of features just for the sake of it, rather than letting them complement Doom's excellent, already existing gameplay. This wasn't the case with Waterlab, though, and if I had a say it would probably be a winner rather than just a runner-up.

I've played too little of Hellscape to comment in depth, but yeah, the maps were similar to the originals but better looking.

On that note, I would really like some suggestions for crappy releases in the last year or two. The trash needs to be shown to the world damnit.

The thing about the DW cacowards is that it's mostly only "best of the best" of that year. It would be probably best to go to something like "This project was selected for an award due to it's original/entertaining/innovative use of X" instead of what doomworld normally does; So, they'll likely get all the top candidates for that year, but what we should focus on is those that wouldn't normally slip in, or are otherwise valuable outside of their quality (ae: inspiration+learning )