>>4770431
>Arcane Dimensions
Haven't played that, but I've played the first Quake map released by the main author of AD, nickname "sock" (Simon O'Callaghan), the map was called Midnight Stalker. It will probably be the last map by that author I will ever play as well.
Why? Because the internal logic by which this map works is something along the line of "Oh, sweetie, you are probably not good enough a player to appreciate my IIIIIINTRICATE and BEAUUUUUUUUTIFUL and THHHOUGHFUL level! I am sorry, scrubs are simply not welcome here, so you'd better not disappoint me, or you won't see the rest of the level, and what a MARVEL it is, you TRULY would be missing a lot".
It's skill-centric, and noticeably mannered both in layout and, more importantly, the encounter design, which feels INCREDIBLY contrived and artificial. It's almost like not really a level and more like a sequence of short in-your-face challenge courses that just pretends to be a level and to form some semblance of unity or something. Like the level itself is just some fancy-schmancy backdrop, like it's more of a matter of environmental design, than the layout design. In other words, layout design here matter gameplay-wise only on the individual rooms scale, and other than that those rooms could just very well form a completely linear sequence, there wouldn't be jack shit of difference beside it looking less "nice" and "thoughtful".
In a way, out of classical mappers, that style of mapping is quite similar to Levelord's.
Anyway, I don't really like being treated that way, and I didn't really find any of the content all that inventive really, so I guess that's kind of it for this "le auteur". Gotten myself redpilled in relation to Arcane Dimensions as well.