— hitscanner apologist ⚡
— tired trans woman ⚧️☣
— not always grumpy, she just looks like that 💀
— level/environment designer 🔨
— Current work: Skin Deep (at Blendo Games) 🐈
📍 Adelaide, Australia
Private page (for friends): @garbagegrenade
I think it's cool how often in the early days of Doom/Quake people would be like "yeah I made this map for single-player but you can play it in deathmatch if you want" because we hadn't yet honed the tropes of either design pattern to the point where they would seem mutually incompatible.
They might not have been good for deathmatch, but sometimes it's a fun novelty to just briefly frag each other in a space that wasn't built for it, and see how long until the cracks begin to show.
Multiplayer audiences used to be so much more receptive to novelty and I miss it so much. Back in the day you'd log into some pub server and they'd be playing a CTF map that kinda sucked but it had a unique theme or a fun gimmick and then it'd cycle through and an old standby would come up. It feels like today every competitive multi level needs to be balanced and sharpened to a razor edge, and there's no place for me in that, either as a player or as a designer.
Yeah, I've complained about this before. Novelty doesn't last long, but it doesn't need to last long when you have a healthy, active community of designers. Multiplayer level design isn't allowed to be disposable any more -- it has to be eternal.
Some of the best multiplayer experiences I've had in recent memory are loading up our personal Doom server, setting it to an 8-10 player cap, and playing a big mix of different Doom DM WADs. Almost none of them were made to handle this number of players, so it's mostly an incoherent mess of an experience, but it's also just fun because it's so absurd and not balanced at all. The laughter and chaotic feel of cramming 10 people into a 4 person map makes sure everyone is still having a good time.
God, yes, that sounds so good. I should host a Half-Life deathmatch night with random maps sometime.
the weirdest thing to me is that quake's e1m2 became a staple of the team deathmatch scene, even long into the era of people making quality dm maps. THEY PLAY 4v4 ON IT. i don't even know how you fit 8 people into that map
adjacent to this is Perfect Dark's "Counter-Operative" mode, where one player plays a campaign level as Joanna Dark and the other controls a random enemy on the map (and keeps respawning as other enemies until there are none left). completely unique as far as I know!
