[TAS] Doom: Eternal III - Map 29 UV-Max in 9:58 by vdgg

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Dimon12321

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Published on June 22, 2020 10:39:36 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT4AklLovi0

Game:

Doom Eternal (2020)

Duration: 10:16

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5

I have more or less the same opinion of the level as Andy had in his Visions Of Doom site. It is clearly a Couleur creation, but it repeats motifs seen before. The yellow key area is a bit like the final area from MAP22 ("The Seeker"), but much smaller. The level is big, of course, with 4 keys this time, and it takes time to complete it: UV Max record is one of the longest Eternal demos as I'm writing this, surpassed only by gigantic MAP24 and monster-heavy MAP26.

I find monster placemen mostly clever, but sometimes stupid: take a look at thing #136 in DoomBuilder if you have time.

As for the blue key section (behind the RK door), I decided to go for the berserk first as in TAS it is the fastest weapon after the rocket launcher (and BFG and plasma, but there is barely any plasma ammo in this level. This route had an adverse effect also (I think) in the soulsphere secret, I will mention this later. It wasn't difficult to invent and to implement revenants vs. arachnotrons infighting, but I didn't expect a caco would join the battle and die caught in the crossfire. Awesome! Watch it with camera mode if you want. I liked "rocket punch punch rocket" method of killing the caco-revenant duo near the eye switch. When killing the arch-vile, I took advantage of the chaingunner's placement. After clearing the area I went to the soulsphere secret.

Now I shot just one rocket at the cacos behind the fence and ran like hell to the box of rockets to prevent revenant from returning to his tunnel (in other words, provoking a different behaviour). Luckily the revenant started fighting a caco, so I ran back to the cacos behind the fence and the arachnotron. I quickly left entering the fortress again. The arachnotron moved in such a way that it was impossible to deliver a second rocket, rockets didn't reach it. When inside, I killed a sergeant and a caco and was building these two kills 4 times. 3 times the aforementioned revenant won against the caco (a result I didn't like at all), then finally I killed the sergeant, open the door, killed two imps, killed the caco and thanks to this artificial RNG manipulation, the caco won over the revenant by a wide margin (about 150 HP left). Go figure.

At first I just ran to the door, opened it, and I noticed my health being brought down. OK, a chaingunner started firing, I may as well get rid of him now, I have to wait for the door anyway. For some reason I chose the chaingun, killed the HWD and continued building until the next revenant. Then I had a break, I said to myself "why the chaingun when you can be faster with the SSG?". It was true, the killing with the chaigun, while fast, lasted longer than the door opening, a direct SSG shot made possible starting running earlier. Now I was building happily for quite a while, making a full circle, up to the soulsphere, killing 17 monsters on my way. Then I stopped again, watched the demo a few times, watched the automap with IDDT x 2 and... I realized the monsters started teleporting in already! I thought I didn't have to worry about them until the red skull, but I was wrong, only 3 arch-viles teleport in at this moment, the rest starts earlier. Now, what about the SSG pit TimeOfDeath was warning me about and I was fearing about? Why, of course. An imp is down there! I just sighed.

OK, first things first, can I *not* delete what I just built and kill the imp? I thought. Yes, it turned out, as firing a rocket against one of the pillars should do the trick. This is not something you would do in a normal run, you'd probably need about 8 rockets, as you wouldn't know the exact location of the imp. OK, so it can be done. Another question: do I *want* my demo like that? Visiting that location again, maybe even saving a precious rocket for one stupid imp? No, thanks, I've already had this in the MAP27 demo. But realizing that, in case of a failure, I could kill the imp made me calm. I realized it chose the "wrong" teleporting branch when I was SSG'ing the chaingunner and rushing through the YK door.
What if I had chosen the chaigun, as before? Voila, the imp goes to the correct teleporter! So I had to rebuild quite a long sequence, but also an easy one, and of course it is faster now, because every long section built one more time tends to be faster, as you have par times you can compete against.

The rest was just about registering the remaining secrets and killing the remaining monsters...
Some of the were quite nasty, it is rare the teleporting pain elemental goes where it went, that BFG shot could have been spent on other monsters had the pain elemental gone in a better place. On the whole, I think it is a great run given the circumstances, it was very tricky indeed.

Demo and full comments are here:
http://doomedsda.us/lmps/527/1/et29x958.zip

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