Author:
Jaime Wolf
<
q2b6
>
189.210.117.248
Use
this link
if you want to link to this message and its entire thread of discussion.
Date:
6/2/2019 10:34:32 AM
Subject:
RE: Has anyone played Sigil?
Played, finished it, liked it a lot with only few complaints. Many of the first wave of complaints were unfounded: "Why play Sigil when Eviternity is so much better!" is akin to comparing apples to oranges when this was intended as a vanilla style set of maps using no Boom/MBF tech. You don't even need PRBoom/ZDoom to run this, it runs perfectly fine on the original Doom executable.
A lot of complaints about unfair difficulty, which is funny coming from a ton of youtubers who claim to be decent at classic Doom, then I go and watch their videos and they're dumping 12 shotgun shells on a baron when the exit sector is right there behind it. This wad is not hard on ultra violence if you use a bit of common sense and don't play like an idiot.
So, actual complaints: Too many hurt sectors, like, way too many fucking hurt sectors everywhere. The bit with the crushers in E5M6 was lame, breaking up the action in a way that a classic Doom map shouldn't. The boss fight on E5M8 is underwhelming in its design, with a crapton of cell ammo for the BFG dumped on you boss fountain style right when it starts, which trivializes the fight completely. Romero's fascination with the puzzle cyberdemon (Where you're supposed to evade it and telefrag it rather than fight it) continues here with multiple instances in E5M2, E5M5 and E5M9, I know a lot of people like maps with puzzle cyberdemons but I really don't. The start of E5M6 is poorly paced in relation to the end of E5M5, where you're likely going to be coming in with low health from E5M5 and there's no stims or medkits at the start of E5M6.
Other than that, it was all good. Map design is great, with my common measure being how easy it is to get lost and have to wander aimlessly looking for the next point of progress, which didn't happen a single time for me in Sigil. The majority of the maps are horse shoe designs so it's hard to get lost in these but there are a couple of maps that use central hub area designs, Romero uses a neat trick for these where as you reach the end of a branch, acquire a key and are teleported back to the central hub, the entrance to the branch gets closed off so you don't wander back in by mistake, you are also teleported in such a way that you'll be physically facing the direction you need to go. There are many other nice touches like that sprinkled all around the wad.
The visual design is also good considering it only uses vanilla assets and no ZDoom trickery, the architecture is mostly E3 style with a hell motif throughout the wad. The maps are all deliberately designed to be generally dark and care should be taken to select the proper lighting settings if playing on a source port so as to not ruin the effect.
