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I originally made the coins (and gems) as maximum health up items like the adrenaline for Quake2.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! 

infinite spawning enemies = bad.
especially with a big boss to defeat.

i sat for ages picking off the minions so i could take on the cyberdemon 1 on 1 before i figured they were endless, by which time i just popped god mode on. ending is indeed too hard... although having just played alistair in painkiller, fuck that was a bitch of a battle as well!

should have just removed the ledge to prevent sniping him off, and had a 1 on 1 with the hideously skinned cyberdemon. its only a fraction of the entire pack though, so not a big deal. overall it's very good! 

was just the summoner followed by a dragon, which i enjoyed.
... 

Maybe it would be cool if the spawn cube could be destroyed. To stop the spawning of new enemies. Then it would still be very difficult but at least you can clear the field in a (relatively) peaceful manner.

Anyway, I really loved this pack, thanks guys,great work ! 

I like that idea Ron. But I think to destroy it you should need to use the grapple hook to get behind it and do something, to make it a bit more about exploration rather than just standing in a safe corner bombarding something with bullets. 

And a new model, Tronyn's head on a stick. 

Then he'd be immortalised like Romero. 

Loved it. Played on easy. Didn't find any secrets. Going to play again on harder level and look for secrets. Didn't use the grapple but it was cool as was the bow. Wish it had more ammo (the bow). Still fighting the big guy at the end.
Layout was fantastic. Nothing not to appreciate.
What a way to start 2010. 

but what a great new year's present! Thanks guys.

I played on easy and found the horde combats were a reasonable difficulty, and I could carelessly blast through some of the less populated areas. Anyone else try to chainsaw the line of scrags outside the castle in roman1? :)

I loved the music also, and the gruesome texturing. Still have to beat the end boss and try some higher skill levels. 

Things I Liked:
- Excellent unique theme. Bloody Roman Hell Metal has never been done before to my knowledge.

- Wide open epic architecture. I'm a sucker for this stuff. I can easily see that this was done over a 10 year period, too (not a bad thing - it's great that all this mappery gets a proper release).

- The wand was quite fun to use. Limited range, low fire rate, infinite ammo, special fire mode - it's well balanced and eases ammo pressure considerably in the latter half. I was blasting all kinds of enemies with the powered-up shot once I got the hang of it, and the knock-back is cool as well.

- Challenging but not insanely hard. Played on medium, did not die much at all until the final boss. I guess I just do not have the white-knuckle, split-second reflexes to deal with 50 bajillion enemies attacking me all at once.

- Extra monsters, mostly good. The nail ogres stood out as the most used and best addition, as they really mix up closer range combats. Gremlins were only used once? I thought that was somewhat odd. Flying imps were somehow more enjoyable here than in NSOE - I think they had previously left a bad taste in my mouth from their respawning in nsoe2. And surprisingly, z-aware grenade ogres did not annoy me nearly as much as I thought they would; I think that's because these ones occasionally under- or over-shot me, as opposed to some others I've seen that have impossibly perfect aim every time.

Things I did not like:
- The weapon order. Why is the uber-special crossbow, with something like 10 shots in the whole game, placed between the super-shotty and nailgun? The following happened to me several times: I'm stalking around corners with the SSG out, then come across fiends or some other close combat monster. I flick my scroll wheel up one notch which usually brings out the nailgun, and start firing away. But in this mod, I switch to the crossbow and waste a precious arrow before I realise I've got the wrong gun out. What I'm saying is, the crossbow should be after the lightning gun, or somewhere way up there, in weapon order.

- Also, why does the Super Nailgun replace the normal Nailgun?

- Did not like the fire-spitting dogs, I thought they were ill-conceived and the skin was terrible.

Don't let these relatively quite minor annoyances detract from the overall awesomeness here. One of the best of 2009 for sure. 

The wand has been a controversial addition, with more negative feedback than positive. It also looks out of place in just about any level that does not have a medieval fantasy theme. Therefore, the wand may get scrapped unless Tronyn says otherwise. For future projects, the wand will probably be replaced by a flare gun, which will be a light source launcher with minor damage potential.

The reason the crossbow is placed where it is at is because it felt like an appropriate choice for an impulse 3 (shotgun) weapon slot. For what it is worth, Tronyn voiced a similar complaint. It may get fixed in a patch later. Speaking of the crossbow, it seems most people lament the lack of crossbow ammo. We may add another crossbow and/or more ammo, especially if the wands will be removed.

As for the super nailgun replacing the nailgun, there are only a few reasons why people may use the nailgun once they get the super version. One, to light up dark areas with muzzleflash, and waste one nail instead of two per shot. Two, to shoot secret doors. Three to snipe around the corner with the right barrel. In the Roman mod, the super nailgun can shoot one nail at a time (at least in single player); and the offsets are changed, so the nailgun is pointless once the player has the super nailgun. 

or should I just dive in? 

I do not know yet. I would like to build a devkit that can be released with the patch. A few days ago, I started writing an entities file for the BSP editor, and will try to do the same for some of the other map editors. Once I finish writing entity files, the documentation is next. 

may as well play it now anyway. 

roman2 and roman3 were really impressive and fun. Difficulty tuning was really solid, never found it too hard but it was challenging enough to kill me a few times.

That is, prior to the boss. I haven't killed him yet, so I can't say whether it's a good fight yet. I'll let you know when I do...