Any good singleplayer missions?

Descent mission help and more WARNING: Spoilers inside!

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LightWolf
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Any good singleplayer missions?

Post by LightWolf »

Hi. I've recently run out of missions, and I've really been feeling more like playing than building. Here's what I'm looking for:

- D1 or D2 (No D2X or D3)
- Reasonable structure quality
- At least 3 levels
- A challenge is OK (though not ridiculous difficulty)

Go ahead and upload a link to your favorite missions here, and I'll take a look!

Edit: Now accepting D3 levels.
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Re: Any good singleplayer missions?

Post by Lothar »

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Re: Any good singleplayer missions?

Post by LightWolf »

I'll check it out for sure.
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Xfing
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Re: Any good singleplayer missions?

Post by Xfing »

What an interesting mission! Playing it right now.

The geometry is not very florid, but that doesn't affect gameplay, which is pretty good.
Descent 1,5: Level layouts done: 52/54 Secret level layouts done: 1/6
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Re: Any good singleplayer missions?

Post by Alter-Fox »

Yeah I prefer a little more polish in my missions but the robot placement's clearly well thought-out, which is honestly something rarer than good geometry anyway.
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Xfing
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Re: Any good singleplayer missions?

Post by Xfing »

Well, my impressions on the mission are quite mixed. Some things are brilliant, some are lackluster.

The briefings are very good and a lot like what they'll look like in D1,5 (in my vision at least). Sadly the background planet images don't match, but that's no big deal - I can suspend my disbelief. The mission's feel overall closely matches that of Descent 1 and that is one of its strongest points (the difficulty is hellish, though!)

The texturing in most levels is very, very beautiful and carefully done (no surprise since Naphtha was involved) with some very creative themes for the Kuiper Belt mines which can serve as an inspiration for this section. Since before the credits rolled I thought this was all made by a single person, my thoughts were that they were definitely a better artist than they were an architect, and what I would call "creative liberties" in the case of a veteran mapper, I'd instead classify as "rookie slipups" for a newbie designer. And this mission did have some of those, as well as some of those liberties, such as insertion hatch doors used as standard doors in the Kuiper Belt levels, liberal use of passable walls as secrets and matcens with no texture to signify them.

But there were also legit slipups such as doors on flat walls. And the geometry - Dravis' levels are very rudimentary when it comes to the geometry, with the default cube reigning supreme and a huge and regretful overrepresentation of long, winding tunnels, and even if the width becomes bigger, the height remains at default. This becomes grating by level 12 or so - before that the solid gameplay makes you let it fly, but more and more levels of the same uninspired tunnel after tunnel really get old after a while. Good thing some of the others lended their hand here and there to create some detail and nice rooms here and there at least.

Obviously level 21 is the best one in this pack and it stands apart from all the rest immensely in terms of geometry - the texures not so much IMO, seeing as how the matcen texture is used liberally in a rather unorthodox way, but other than that the level captures the Plutonian feel like no other.

Difficulty: B (too hard!)
Geometry: C-
Texturing: A
Briefings: A
Gameplay: B+
Descent 1,5: Level layouts done: 52/54 Secret level layouts done: 1/6
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Re: Any good singleplayer missions?

Post by LightWolf »

I'll keep the difficulty factor in mind after I got to "Hostage Hell" in "Ironblade". (Or was it Ironstar?)
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LightWolf
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Re: Any good singleplayer missions?

Post by LightWolf »

If you feel like uploading your favorite D3 level now, go right ahead!
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