Reply to Re: Epic length
If you don't have an account, just leave the password field blank.
Perhaps I should talk a little bit about my own DMODs and their size, it might provide an interesting perspective.
The first DMOD I uploaded was Quest for the Gems, back in 2005. I actually uploaded it as a quest, but whoever approved it on TDN (I think it was Tal) put it into the romp category, probably because the map was fairly small. I told myself that I was to blame and that I had overestimated the DMOD's size. (Which I still believe I did by the way.) Still, looking back at it I doubt that it actually isn't a quest, gameplay time certainly isn't too far away from the hour mark. I noticed that Skull's playthrough on youtube has a total running time of 1 hour 16 minutes which obviously includes some intro stuff. Everybody playing it seemed to accept it as being just a romp though, something that I can still see why. But perhaps this experience made me rank DMOD's more conservatively myself.
Because of this I also decided I should be a bit conservatively on ranking the Scourger. I thought it was probably a small epic but decided to upload it as a quest anyway because it has less scripts and less screens than the original. Surprisingly people did comment this time that it probably should have been an epic. I don't really know myself what it should have been. It did feature quite a bit of playtime stretching by hiding multiple storyline-essential items in a maze that had to be collected in a certain order. This really artificially increased playing time, so I think in retrospective the decision to call it a quest was the correct call. This being simply because of a lack of content rather than playing time.
I've also thought about quel, my most recent addition. I uploaded it as a romp as I never thought any other way about it. Now doing the co-commentary with Robj I realized that it probably should be a quest. I can't remember how many parts we did but I think the total time was over an hour. Before that I never even considered the idea. I never bothered to find out how long it took to complete because I set out to make a relatively small DMOD. I set out to make a romp, so a romp it was. And I'm not alone in this, if Quel was a quest than I think it's main competitors in the throwback competition probably were quests as well. Both Paul's and Scratcher's entries were larger than mine, even though they too are only marked as romps. Actually Scratcher's lost forest romp nearly has as many scripts as quest for Dorintia 2 and that is labelled as an epic! Only Dink and the 4 towers was marked as a quest, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually the smallest of the four... In a way Quel taught me how much you think of a DMOD in the spirit in which it was started.
It also probably means that our ideas of what is required for a quest or an epic might have inflated over time, probably because of a lack of small romps. We don't even know what a small romp is anymore! Looking through cocomonkey's playthroughs reminds me of how small the average romp is. I had forgotten because so few tiny things have been released in recent years.
Take these as examples as to how hard it is for me to properly say in what category a DMOD belongs. I can't even tell you for my own DMODs. Only Dink learns music, that is 100% surely a romp. It also shows that debates about length have been around for at least as long as I am around, which is close to a decade already. (Man, time flies!)
The first DMOD I uploaded was Quest for the Gems, back in 2005. I actually uploaded it as a quest, but whoever approved it on TDN (I think it was Tal) put it into the romp category, probably because the map was fairly small. I told myself that I was to blame and that I had overestimated the DMOD's size. (Which I still believe I did by the way.) Still, looking back at it I doubt that it actually isn't a quest, gameplay time certainly isn't too far away from the hour mark. I noticed that Skull's playthrough on youtube has a total running time of 1 hour 16 minutes which obviously includes some intro stuff. Everybody playing it seemed to accept it as being just a romp though, something that I can still see why. But perhaps this experience made me rank DMOD's more conservatively myself.
Because of this I also decided I should be a bit conservatively on ranking the Scourger. I thought it was probably a small epic but decided to upload it as a quest anyway because it has less scripts and less screens than the original. Surprisingly people did comment this time that it probably should have been an epic. I don't really know myself what it should have been. It did feature quite a bit of playtime stretching by hiding multiple storyline-essential items in a maze that had to be collected in a certain order. This really artificially increased playing time, so I think in retrospective the decision to call it a quest was the correct call. This being simply because of a lack of content rather than playing time.
I've also thought about quel, my most recent addition. I uploaded it as a romp as I never thought any other way about it. Now doing the co-commentary with Robj I realized that it probably should be a quest. I can't remember how many parts we did but I think the total time was over an hour. Before that I never even considered the idea. I never bothered to find out how long it took to complete because I set out to make a relatively small DMOD. I set out to make a romp, so a romp it was. And I'm not alone in this, if Quel was a quest than I think it's main competitors in the throwback competition probably were quests as well. Both Paul's and Scratcher's entries were larger than mine, even though they too are only marked as romps. Actually Scratcher's lost forest romp nearly has as many scripts as quest for Dorintia 2 and that is labelled as an epic! Only Dink and the 4 towers was marked as a quest, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually the smallest of the four... In a way Quel taught me how much you think of a DMOD in the spirit in which it was started.
It also probably means that our ideas of what is required for a quest or an epic might have inflated over time, probably because of a lack of small romps. We don't even know what a small romp is anymore! Looking through cocomonkey's playthroughs reminds me of how small the average romp is. I had forgotten because so few tiny things have been released in recent years.
Take these as examples as to how hard it is for me to properly say in what category a DMOD belongs. I can't even tell you for my own DMODs. Only Dink learns music, that is 100% surely a romp. It also shows that debates about length have been around for at least as long as I am around, which is close to a decade already. (Man, time flies!)
