are secrets that the player can get locked out of really all that bad?

12 minutes ago, roadworx said:

you're supposed to think!!!

There would have to be clues for the puzzle to be solvable.

Not necessarily a message hint, but a visual hint.

Otherwise, how would you differentiate between an inaccessible door and a door that monsters can only open?

This is why wolf 3d is not liked much when it comes to secrets. You just gotta hump every wall in existance to find secrets

Not gonna lie, these are pretty furstrating for a person who cleans the level out after the fights are finished.

If they are clearly telegrahed as missed, ie Leave Your Sol Behind, then it's fine.

42 minutes ago, roadworx said:

who says that secrets that can lock you out have to be centered around going fast? they can also be about routing, guiding monsters to open doors for you, platforming, all sorts of stuff. you're just not being creative about it is all.

To be fair, I did use a reductive example, but I also said:

1 hour ago, Fonze said:

What resonates with me more is if I miss a secret because finding or unlocking it was really cool in itself,

1 hour ago, Fonze said:

Mapping is an artform and there are no hard rules not meant to be broken.

Literally this. I'm not damning the use of secrets that can be missed. They have their place and I in fact like their use. I have put missable secrets in my maps and will continue to do so, so I think this is a misunderstanding or maybe I didn't word my previous post the best. My overall point was that I disagree with the "it's for replayability" assertion, primarily on the grounds of accessibility but also because the notion that a secret purely being missable will lead to replayability is categorically untrue. Cool secrets can lead to replayability, sure, as any interesting aspect of a level can. But that's independent of the secret being missable.

I think it's fair to be annoyed by them, but just like any other "sin" you can commit while mapping it's not that big a deal. Everyone has their preferences and most maps won't fit all of them. There's a bunch of other things that I dislike much more that are far more commonly acceptable.

Personally, it doesn't add anything for me. If I play a map and decide I wanna look for secrets before the exit, and then can't find some, I sure as hell don't go "wowie, can't wait to play this map again and magically find those secrets I'm missing!", unless it's one of those rare maps that I know I will definitely play again sometime. So I really can't see how it would add replayability any more than just a well-hidden secret that you could find but didn't. If I can't find every secret, I either just move on and forget, or look it up in doombuilder if I'm REALLY intrigued. At which point finding out it was missable might take some points away from the map if I feel like it was too pointless, but not a lot, because I'm fine with not being able to find every secret anyway, no matter how much I want to. When mapping though, it's something I will never do out of principle, same as points of no return or inescapable pits.

4 hours ago, roadworx said:

are secrets that the player can get locked out of really all that bad?

Yes

I think Sigil II has an interesting approach where every map has a timed, missable secret. Something about going into a map with the knowledge that there are missable secrets makes them feel less like a gotcha and more like a valid game mechanic. If you get to the exit missing one secret, and you missed the 30-second one, you at least know you got all the ones that are still open to you.

I think it gets back to the idea of clarity versus ambiguity. In Sigil II, it's clear what is and isn't permanently blocked off from you after 30 seconds. In other mapsets, it's not always so clear-cut. Missable secrets often feel of a kind with points of no return, unmarked exits, and the classic "is this MARBFACE a remote door or just a regular wall?". Any kind of ambiguity can be perceived as annoying by some people, especially if it rubs against their expectations - this is what creates issues when people expect maps to be UV-maxable on a blind run and then get irritated when a particular map isn't.

Not to say that annoyance and ambiguity have no place in mapping. But some people have a lower tolerance for them than others.

idk, marked secrets like we have them in Doom are a weird concept anyway

I mean, I'm biased, because the more obscure, frustrating, and meandering a map is, the more I tend to like it.

But I will say overtly that the "locked out secret" gimmick is in fact wildly underused, and I'm impressed John Romero had the nads to go hard on them. I always figure if a map yields all of its secrets to you the first few playthroughs, they aren't hidden well enough. But that goes hand in hand with my general philosophy of challenge being seen as a filter.

25 minutes ago, Blast_Brothers said:

I think Sigil II has an interesting approach where every map has a timed, missable secret.

I've only started Sigil II recently, all I've done so far is uvmax'd the first map after some attempts. Looking into doom builder, the one door that's set to close after 30 seconds is opened with a switch anyway. I wonder if this won't be true for the later levels then?

If it's a complete random fuck-you, like there are two equally prominent routes for the player but one of them locks out the secret, perhaps not even knowing there was a secret there, then I don't think that's great design.

If it's just "the player can take actions that lock them out of the secret if they aren't being careful" then that's much more defensible in my opinion.

Example of the latter:  Say there's a room with an obvious visible secret item, like a soul sphere high up in an alcove or through a window at some point.  Suppose that at some point there's also a walkway that the player needs to raise in order to proceed onwards, and it's obvious that a particular switch will raise the walkway (perhaps the player has raised identical walkways earlier in the level).  But once the walkway is up, it blocks off the access to the secret.

In this sort of case, I think it's fine.  The player saw the secret; the player knew they were about to take an action that could permanently alter the navigability of the space.  If they didn't care enough to find the route to the obvious soulsphere when they first saw it, they're not entitled to suddenly start caring about it after.

It is mainly aggravating to completionists who want to take the time to find everything. However I don't believe it's an inherently flawed design decision. I also believe secrets should be more creative as opposed to being a closet behind a misaligned texture. 

I dislike when maps lock you out of secret exits, like in Requiem MAP15 where you need to do an archvile jump over the gap. Oftentimes I just check the Doomwiki before playing maps 15 and 31 to see if I need to look out for stuff like this. Other than that, I don't care.

It's a niche gripe and forgivable for sure; to me it usually speaks to an over-reliance on scripted/curated progression that railroads the player through a specific path. Linearity isn't inherently bad, but closing off the openness of a map tends to result in snags like these.

I think it's only bad if the secret in of itself contains something that would be really useful to the player. Like if the player finds cell ammo everywhere but no weapons in sight to put em to use and whoops there goes the secret for you to obtain that BFG/plasmagun. Or a megasphere that could really come in handy when the map is stingy with health. It almost feels passive-aggressive when it's done so like that.

Don’t really care unless the secret was necessary to reach the exit of the level. If it is entirely optional then it doesn’t matter to me. 

I have never once cared about 100%ing a level, ever. So I do not care. But for someone determined to do so, it should be pretty clear why they consider such secrets a bad thing.

My gripe with it is that it feels like you're supposed to magically know it's there before it becomes inaccessible, or otherwise... fuck you? Just seems too hostile for my liking.

2 hours ago, VoanHead said:

I think it's only bad if the secret in of itself contains something that would be really useful to the player. Like if the player finds cell ammo everywhere but no weapons in sight to put em to use and whoops there goes the secret for you to obtain that BFG/plasmagun. Or a megasphere that could really come in handy when the map is stingy with health. It almost feels passive-aggressive when it's done so like that.

Well, I'd argue those are things that shouldn't have been in secrets in the first place, locked-out or otherwise.

But yes -- if/when I do make lock-out-able secrets, I'll populate them with things that aren't that important.  Like health/armor bonuses, or perhaps an early drop of a powerful weapon that's available normally later.

I don't think mappers should jump through hoops to make sure everything is accessible at all times. For something like Leave Your Sol Behind (Ancient Aliens MAP16), it makes perfect sense that you can't go back for stuff that you missed, and I wouldn't want to see concessions made to appease tourists who want to pass by each sight exactly once. However, there's also no sense in blocking something off for the hell of it, it's not an interesting design choice on its own.

I agree with @wallabra that the concept of a "secret" that the game tells you about and that players have come to expect to find is just weird, and I'd rather think of other ways to use the feature.

16 hours ago, Li'l devil said:

Yes

no

7 hours ago, maxmanium said:

My gripe with it is that it feels like you're supposed to magically know it's there before it becomes inaccessible, or otherwise... fuck you? Just seems too hostile for my liking.

i know that in a previous post i made this sorta secret out to be just that, a fuck you, but this isn't necessarily true. with this type of design, you actually aren't supposed to know that it's the case; expecting people to know something like that is absurd. the point is to provide the player with foreknowledge so that if they ever decide to replay the level, there'll be something extra for them. in truth, it's less hostile and more giving extra content should someone decide to replay the map, likely because the map is replayable in general rather than because of the single dumb little secret.

roadworx did u eated a cheese?

re: 'fuck you' secrets that you were "supposed to have prior knowledge of", or whatever

I don't know if the definition of the word "secret" has changed or whether it's just me being an aged autistic who's a little hung up on the meaning of the word, but IMO secrets by their very nature are things that could possibly remain obscured, or hidden, or not found at all; for perhaps long periods of time or even ever. They're secret.

I mean, okay, that's overly pedantic and most function as bonuses for the more-observant players (or creative ones, or whatever) but the attitude that "I must be able to get ALL the secrets. First try. I must be allowed to go back in the map after it's otherwise beaten to look for them. I must be told how many there are so I know when to stop looking for them" is just fuckin' weird to me personally.

It's just a word that means a videogame-specific phenomena, like level/map or boss in doom. The bosses aren't commanding anyone, and both level and map AFAIK mean something else other than what a doom level / map is. In doom, a secret is traditionally something hidden that is accounted for in the end level screen. Just a convention.

Whether they are locked forever or not isn't part of the definition in any way, since the game that established them has both. It's just a personal preference that some people want to not be locked out of these "secrets" and there is absolutely nothing weird about it. Just like a pit is still a pit whether it's escapable or not, but some people don't want to be trapped in inescapable pits while playing a level.

It all depends on what type of wad or map you are making, and what the player expects going in. If your wad is an exploration-heavy magnum opus, then yes: hard-to-find easter eggs and convoluted secrets (including secrets that you can get locked out of) definitely have their place, as they provide an incentive to replay the levels and explore "deeper" into them. Case in point: No End in Sight. 4 of the the secret levels can easily be missed on a first playthrough and become inaccessible if you make a wrong move. E3M7 has lots of optional content that can only be accessed through convoluted one-time sequences ... and that's completely fine! :) It contributes to the "you're not in Kansas anymore" atmosphere that of that mapset. 

Absolutely not.

In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that in MBF21 and UFMF format that other ways of permanently locking someone out of a secret without just using some unintentional softlock be found. Completionism is a self-imposed cancer that arises essentially from a particular set of expectations. Though of course, unless it contains the intutive placement of the ones in Sigil II, I'd probably advise against it. I think Use3D had the right idea in his Doom: The Way Id Did map, even if the structure itself didn't lend itself to such intuitivity.

Completionism is fun and good, and one could argue that a game that explicitly tells you completion percentages at the end of every level should be completionism-compatible at the very least. (By which I don't mean first try, just eventually.) It's extremely weird to me that people are fine just shitting on a playstyle seemingly endorsed by the game's design. What's next, is speedrunning cancer?

But the worst that locked secrets can do is waste one's time if it's not clearly communicated they are locked forever, and somebody wants to see all the secrets before being done with the map (usually in cases when there's no expectation of replaying it).

Quote

are secrets that the player can get locked out of really all that bad?

no

Maps that don't let me secret hunt at the end annoy me. This is because I actually enjoy secret hunting, and usually prefer to do most of it at the end. At that point the only reward for finding the secret is actually finding it, but that's enough generally for me. They're like little puzzles to solve. I'm probably not going to criticize a map author for locking me from a secret though, at least not anymore. That's why cheats exist after all. If a map tries to prevent me from secret hunting I just break out idclip and do it anyway. I do limit myself, so if I start getting bored I just use "iddt" or UDB to figure out what I missed. I can really appreciate a well designed secret that I couldn't find, or that takes a while to find. The only secrets I actually don't like are just the badly designed ones.

If you're worried about replayability, then don't bother. I'm almost certainly not going to ever replay a map. I simply don't play enough Doom to justify ever replay anything except under special circumstances. But because I already know I'm not replaying a level before I even start, I do try to max it the first time. Maybe this isn't fair to map authors, but it's not really something I have control over. Maybe when I'm retired I'll have time to give every map it's due.

fine to do in a short level or when you're deliberately trolling completionists, imo

Doom community: It must be possible to complete a map without finding any secrets.

Also Doom community: You should be able to find all the secrets first try.

I don’t really get either of these attitudes. As many have said, I don’t love lockout secrets but they’re generally fine. I agree with the people who said Sigil II is one of the best implementations of the concept. E3M7 from NEIS is a great example of one I loved, where if you take specific actions there’s a massive section to the map that’s (un)available. I hated it in DTWID E2M5 where I got locked out of the secret exit without knowing because I walked down the wrong hallway.

Honestly though the other attitude bugs me more. Really? I’m not allowed to expect people to notice at least a couple of these secrets in this thirty year old game that’s always had secrets?