I replayed the 3rd level (last one) and I am a little bit deceived by the end: wtf a cyberDemon has to do here ? I would have seen another big boss to defeat here: either a giant vermis, or a giant dragoon, or a retexture CyberDemon a least (not so yellow-shine-ish)...
Anyway, this is a great pack overall: keep it up !! 

...the point of spoiling the boss is...? 

...the point of spoiling the boss is...?

... it is just my personal feeling I am expressing here: I think the end boss (CyberDemon) is out of place in this map, or at least I would heve seen it retextured as the dogs...
It does not mean the pack is pure crap, far away from myself to think such thing. The pack is great, it deserves to be said, I just think the end would have been different with a different monster as a CyberDemon.

That's all :P 

He meant spoiling the surprise, not your critique of the monster. 

...that was my intention... Just got back from the first chunk o' holidays and did not have the chance to play the thing. Doing it tonight, though... 

sorry.... 

Fucking Awesome pack!
beat it on skill 1, only died like twice, until I reached the boss fight, where I died like 200 times. Too hard but I never got frustrated for some reason.
I thought the second level was the best overall, but the whole pack was pretty fucking good, if not up to SOE 2 quality. Love that pack, more than any other!
Didn't really like those spiders, either... I prefer the guys from Kinn2 and Travail. Minor, minor complaint.

Great job guys, looking forward to whatever you cook up next! 

Roman1 coulda used a little more Scrag.

Dynamite maps. 

...is a great map. A little crazy, but lots of action in an interesting space. Spent ages running around in god mode debugging.

When you get on the raft, throwing the axe (double-click) at the scrags cleans them up magic. The rumble and vibration of this and the Mirv... love it. And different enemies always coming at you from all sides.

Roman1 coulda used a little more Scrag
I _think_ he's being sarcastic ... ;> 

The maps are pretty much superb. At first I thought that the theme was a bit weird (not a fan of crazy texture combinations), but it is used consistently and it mostly works well.

Roman1 definitely felt like two maps fused together in the middle. You have this impressive, very 3 D front piece that's a little like a remake of e1m4, and then the very DOOMy part after that. Like the first part somehow ran out of juice.

Roman2 is excellent, although the gameplay basically consisted of "press five buttons" and "kill X amount of monsters". The layout was neat. The feeling was neat. The music was, for the most part, neat.

I did not find "the platform to the roof" on the first playthrough, even after some looking around, so I went "WTF?" and quit. That broke the experience. A "hello folks" to the playtesters here.

I found it now, but you can only expect Quake veterans to notice the bubble sprites in the "water". Anything that you want the player to find (and you want the player to find this, because otherwise they can't proceed and will become pissed), should be pretty big and visible. The messages in general were not descriptive enough ("opens elsewhere" doesn't cut it).

Roman3 was again very impressive architecture and layout, but the gameplay was a bit over the top, especially the boss fight.

The summoner teleports too quickly and is unpredictable, and I think the c********* model isn't Quake-y at all. If you aimed at being ridiculous, you did it. :)

I gloriously simply switched on god mode for the entire pack, because I thought I knew what to expect, and that's what I got, too. It's just not my cup of tea. I think that on Easy skill, players should be allowed to just take a walk in the park and take in the architecture while shooting the occasional monster.

Please allow players to turn off the music, like in This Onion. It was much better and got on my nerves less than in the Halloween map, but after a while, in each map, I wished I could turn it off, although I like the Doors. The music sounded weird in Fitzquake(SDL) - like lots of little underruns. One of the reasons I played in Darkplaces.

The mod part of the pack was certainly very impressive. I liked the blaster, especially since it had a matching skin, but you should make a new model for that, too. I liked the wand this time, because it was immediately clear that it was useful against zombies (still, weapons (and monsters) taken straight from other games feel a little like a compilation patch to me). It was a bit confusing that there were so many different weapons - why have both the SSG and the crowd controller in a map?

I like the design of the powerups. I noticed the Tome of Power (and I think a ToP weapon powerup system can work very well in Quake), but since I was totally in Godmode at this point, which has to do with the general gameplay, I wasn't really motivated to play around with it and really figure out what it does. Compare Hexen2, which gives you the first ToP very early when there aren't many monsters around, so you can experiment and see what it does. I think that's smarter than giving it in the middle of a crazy horde combat map. In general, you should consider giving the player some sort of test area, or shooting range, to get to know all the new stuff.

The book thing was underused this time. :)

I'd prefer armour shards instead of the coins.

Played in Darkplaces, since in Fitz the lighting seemed to look all stripey, at least in the startmap.

Comparing the pack to RMQ, it seems almost like the opposite, since fighting monsters in RMQ is gererally a quicker thing (with the more powerful shotguns etc) and hence horde combat doesn't feel quite so abusive. ARWOP combat feels a lot more like Quoth.

-> Nice. Please think of the kids next time. Having some people who are not from the Quake community playtest it would probably be beneficial. 

Hmm, nevermind, the FQ lighting issue was that I use mh's lit files and Fitz loaded id1/maps/start.lit and used it for your start.bsp, producing this:

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/arwop_litbug.jpg

... 

Just finished the final battle in godmode because there is no way I could have managed otherwise. The final boss took ages anyways, I already thought there was a bug and it was unkillable... Needless to say that I found it annoying and frustrating. :(

THe architecture and flow is great, I love the style. The monsters not so much. Especially the hell hounds were bugging me.

The hook model felt a bit out of place to me. But hey, Quake's weapons/items are weird anyways. I liked using the hook in the final map to stroll around and find secrets.

The music was super super super annoying in the second (and I think also the last) map. Since it has almost no dynamics there is a constant wall of noise hitting your brain. 

Yeah, I have to agree about the music.
Annoying indeed.
Also I'm not sure if the game is beatable on Hell mode. I've got no more ammo and shitloads of big monsters do deal with. I doubt I can take down a Shambler with the hook, not to speak about that boss. And I always get frustrated when I don't know how it works. I mean, does the spawning ever stop ? If it doesn't, the game can become un finish able. 

...once said something along the lines of : "We could easily write monsters that hunt you down and kill you without mercy, but I don't think tht much people would find such a behaviour that much fun. The whole point of FPS is that you have to be able to win..." 

And Steve Polge once commented along the lines of AI and behaviors with something like : "The challenge is to make a creature appear intelligent when it's only alive for 2-3 seconds after the player sees it. It's tough." :) 

I couldn't finish the game on Hell skill.
I kept killing the smaller enemies but others would appear again. It's a shame, the whole pack seems very well playable on Hell skill except for the end game.

Has anyone actually tried the game on Hell skill and finished it ?

I'll try it again from the start of the last map later,I'm a bit bored with it now. 

...I wasn't able to beat Nightmare for the same reason. On hard spawning stops after final boss' death. On Hell I barely Made it through the 1st room of the 1st map, got bored and quit. 

maybe we should make ammo respawn on Hell mode.

Notes for the update of this pack: music optional, add roman2 platform message.

Notes for Arcanum: music optional, and I'll make the gameplay much less about hordes (ie, not my usual style of monster placement).

Thanks for the feedback, especially gb that was a lot of really helpful detail. 

I could not find the underwater platform on my first play through roman2. I was a bit too impatient and did not see the bubbles, so I thought it could have been my fault for not taking time to look around. The platform message did not help me either.

In roman3, during testing before the cube spawner was added, I thought the cyberdemon by himself was too easy. With just him in the arena, I could turtle on the high ledge and shoot at the cyberdemon from above, using the floor as cover. We thought about giving the cyberdemon special abilities such as teleportation, but that felt too gimmicky and ruins the Doomy feel. Eventually, we settled for the cube spawner, which adds more monsters continuously and yet another nod to the Doom games.

Also, in roman3, there used to be a quad damage instead of the tome of power. However, I abused the quad like the munchkin I am by luring the summoner, who teleports after you, over to the quad. Then I fry him in an instant with the quad lightning gun.

I originally made the coins (and gems) as maximum health up items like the adrenaline for Quake2. In fact, I wanted various treasure items to work like experience points and as a score of sorts similar to classic arcade games from the early 1980's, when the point of those games was to live and get a high score. When I joined Tronyn during Indian Summer development, I offered them as armor and health powerups similar to potions and helmets from Doom. That has stuck since.

I will try to get a new viewmodel for the blaster. No guarantees though.

Hell is meant to be unfair. Like Nightmare skill in Doom, monsters never stop respawning. With that said, Doom gave double ammo for its Nightmare skill. I should increase ammo yields similarly.

Tronyn, please keep hordes, at least on Hard. Hordes rock! This was one thing I liked about Doom more than Quake in the early years, before engines with expanded limits came along. 

Impulse 17 toggles the music. 

I REALLY like your usual style of monster placement!

The final combat was definitely too hard in this pack. But the insane difficulty level in your shit is an important ( and in my opinion integral) component of your, uh, maximalist style, which is as close to my standards of perfection as possible... other than CZG maybe.

I guess it would be cool to have an easy 'easy' difficulty. But PLEASE keep the horde insanity intact for normal skill levels and upwards.

Also - love the music, but agree that optionalizing it is a good idea. 

Maximum ammo limits that vary by skill, and maybe by map?

For instance, Easy gets 250 everything, Normal has standard limits, Hard and up get the ammo limits as seen in Roman.

Also, with a powergaming mindset, which would you prefer: 200 nails and 100 rockets as in standard, or 250 nails and 50 rockets as in Roman? (I would take the extra rockets myself.) 

Your style doesn't need to change, just the balancing of the skill levels. Luckily, there are skill levels in Quake :)

Differentiate them more. Especially, have a much easier skill 1 and a ridiculously easy skill 0. For people with Zero skill ;-)

You don't really lose anything by doing that. 

Good stuff as always, Tronyn and PM. The architecture was phenomenal! I especially enjoyed the music and the horde combat. On Normal, there is plenty of ammo, health, and eye candy to make it through until the end.

The end, however, was way too much for me -- especially with my machine ch-ch-chugging along. It felt like too many things were being introduced at once for me to make sense of them. I did like the teleporting Hexen baddie and thought he could have been your final boss. Maybe the other guy would have been easier in a separate arena.

Top notch!!!

P.S. I missed those big roman numeral models from the scraps *sniff* 

yay, finally had a chance to load this up.

got through the first map and like half way through the second.

very cool so far. a little haphazard with the themes, but it still works pretty well. fun fights and the guns are cool and new. the last fight at the end of map1 was pretty tough though, but i managed it on my second shot.

excellent so far!