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88b5a8425360dbef4e16151d17a80771b868792d83bdf51598aee1f7d7af22da
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4.486111111111112
40
Unregistered user “Anon” posted:
Great map, love it, atmospheric. I played it on nightmare, wasn’t hard, but balanced and found 6 secrets. Also, what’s up with most quake mappers having good music taste??
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I was having a pretty good time on this map until reaching the exit corridor. I’m not generally too fussed about missing secrets and a few stray kills but the message about the Warden still being alive, plus the ~60% kill count, compelled me to carry on playing. I struggled for a long time with working out to do next and eventually resorted to noclipping… after which I found the shadow axe I forgot to pick up earlier on, facepalm (I went for it on initially seeing it but missed the jump). Also took me embarrassingly long to find the opening to the ‘smells toxic’ door. I preferred the main boss fight to the Warden fight though, kept falling down dodging scrag pellets.
Visually though, this map is amazing. The style, brushwork, vertical layout, fog, details etc, all incredible. The Quaddicted preview screenshot is one of the best I’ve seen. Really wanted it to be more satisfying than it was
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Just finished “The Warden” 100% kills but missed 1 secret. This is an awesome map. I love the “Honey” style textures and ambiance. A great layout and great gameplay! My only complaint - which is very minor, is the use of “base” type monsters in a very gothic setting, but that was only in 1 secret section. Similarly the first release of Z-374 in Quake Brutalist Jam there was use of knights in the subterranean chambers that was later revised to genetically modifed running ghouls with the conversion to Alkaline. Far more fitting given the story and modern base/brutalist theme. That is also an awesome map! But please, as I said, very minor. The use of Arcane Dimensions was FANTASTIC! - that being my favorite mod! The Warden could have easily been part of the original Arcane Dimensions collection. Bravo Mr. spootnik on authoring a masterpiece. LOVED THE MUSIC TOO!
Nightmare 100% kills
Music really is something special. Trent Reznor’s soundtrack completely elevated Quake and forever colored it for many people as this really dark and ambient shooter where the player is traversing unknown dimensions while gunning down hordes of the forces of Quake. It’s oppressive, it’s metal, it’s completely welcoming for people who gravitate towards these things. Mapper spootnick did not use any of Quake’s music, but would he have chosen “Only Child” by Julia Kent (from her album “Character”) had it not been for Trent Reznor’s influence on the perception of Quake? Very likely not. spootnick chose phenomenally, and like Trent’s soundtrack for Quake, Julia Kent’s song here elevates The Warden infinitely. Whenever I hear this song, I’ll think about that tower.
From the outset I really fell for this. With the music in your ears, you see the tower above you, the pool of muck all around, the texture work, the dark and dank atmosphere, and the way Arcane Dimensions monsters fit into the gloom of it all. I was pulled right in to this map. Fell in love with the setup, and fell in love further still with the texts revealing that souls are trapped here, that a Warden haunts the place, and in order to free those souls the player needs to cut their way through with the Shadow Axe, all while ascending a beautiful tower of fights. What a premise, really.
I’m getting all that niceness out of the way because I have less nice things to say now. The map doesn’t follow through in three major places, not enough to fall apart, but enough to let down those incredible opening few minutes.
- Summoning the Warden.
For the Warden to appear, there’s a map-long puzzle involving using the Shadow Axe on fiend corpses to free their souls. The last corpse is tied to what amounts to a mapper’s trick instead of solving some sort of greater mystery to the Warden, or its prisoners’ circumstances. Now, the map didn’t promise anything like that, so if that doesn’t do it for you, then the chief complaint here can be boiled down to “summoning the final boss who is haunting this prison and trapping souls amounts to firing a grenade launcher at a button”. It’s incongruous with the stellar atmosphere set up. In fact I even completed the map proper before I had to go back and find that grenade launcher bit, which made it doubly disappointing. Thanks to alexUnder for providing a playthrough on youtube.
- The identity of the Warden
The Scragmother is awesome, but she doesn’t feel right for the role. She feels more like one of the Warden’s beasts, or the final beast before tackling the Warden directly. She doesn’t seem sapient enough or authoritative enough to embody the figure who’s turned this sanctuary into a prison of poisoned flesh and souls. In fact, I really thought the Warden would have been the Drake derived Baron replacement, the Justice knight or the Judicator. I was so certain he was going to be the Warden. One of the texts in the map reads “Once a sacred refuge / For holy breath of life / Now the Warden drains it / In a prison of flesh and poison”. Would it not be suitable, then, that the Warden take the form of the Justice knight? Or the Judicator boss? Someone so knightly and poised, failing in their task as Warden due to some malevolent misguidance by the forces of Quake along the way? This all leaves the Scragmother feeling miscast.
Similarly, I don’t agree with the Bog Lord guarding the super nailgun. The Bog Lord feels more like the Warden than the Scragmother. It felt immediately strange to see this hulking beast with such presence guarding a weapon instead of in some ceremonial chamber or in a prison of its own at the heart of the tower.
- The freeing of the souls.
This gimmick raises questions that the map doesn’t answer. This is a prison, right? The Warden was keeping everybody in this limbo, trapped in this poisoned prison of a tower; souls trapped in their corpses, trapped by the Warden’s curse, and we use the Shadow Axe to free them by destroying their flesh. I love that. But why are the key souls tied specifically to fiend corpses? There are human bodies impaled on pikes for quite a bit of the map. Why aren’t those the souls I’m freeing? Why are the fiends the ones whose bodies matter? Did the Warden favor fiends? Were they prisoners too? Bear in mind, I’m not going out of my way to lay this out, these questions came up very naturally after seeing that summoning the Warden really does involve freeing the souls of fiends. The setup is evocative, but the payoff doesn’t quite clarify what the fiends mean to this prison.
It falls short in these major ways, and I have to highlight this because this is a special map. A must-play in the realm of Quake 1 content, make no mistake. The atmosphere, architecture, the premise, the music, oh man the music; the Shadow Axe gimmick, and the central idea of a haunted prison tower make this a gold bar of Quake goodness that will be among the first maps I recommend to prospective Quake custom content explorers. I leave The Warden with immense, immense admiration. But I also leave it thinking about how those first few minutes tantalize with something transcendent, and it’s blissful, and I think about how those first few minutes could have been matched by the end of the map.
I almost adore this. It combines my three favourite things in Quake: the Honey aesthetic, the Arcane Dimensions brutality, and a ton of exploration. But in the end I found myself disappointed because I'd only found four of 12 secrets, failed to locate two (I think) fiend carcasses, missed out on the end-game, and exited the level with only 188/249 kills. It would be very mean of me to take points off for all this, when if the extra content simply didn't exist I'd be raving uncomplicated about how great this map is. So I'm awarding all five stars, even though I came away feeling dissatisfied. I guess it's motivation to reply. But I really wish warden_readme.txtcontained a secrets guide.
I noclipped through the "Smells like death" door and enjoyed the zombie fights. But where is the key for getting through there legitimately?
And then I noclipped through the "Smells toxic" door, and enjoyed one of the best areas in the whole game, including a properly shocking surprise. But where is the key for getting through the door legitimately?
Behind the toxic door was the penultimate fiend. But where is the last one?
(These cheats and some other exploration have got me up to 232 of 251 kills and nine of 12 secrets. It's 251 kills now and not 249, as there were a couple of spawning monsters that I dealt with pretty efficiently.)