Marathon: Tempus Irae Redux #18 Ameseno, Italy, 2023-03-19

Note: Tempus Irae Redux is still in development and not yet available. We will hopefully have it ready to open up to widespread testing soon.
Design: Kain Osterholt, Aaron Freed, James Hastings-Trew
Music: Kevin MacLeod - “Mind Chaos” (see freepd.com)
This is one of the levels we’ve changed the most for Redux. One unfortunate quirk of the original design is how messy it was. This was not precisely the fault of the mapmaker, Kain Osterholt; the testers discovered a crash late in development that Nardo suspected was caused by an engine bug at the time caused by arranging too many points in a straight line. The crash turned out to be caused by an unrelated issue, but no one ever moved the points back, so as a result, this map’s original release had almost no straight lines anywhere, which seemed awfully incongruous with the architecture of… basically the entire rest of the scenario. Thus, for Redux, we’ve taken the liberty of fixing this. It still has some pretty jagged architecture in places, but at least it looks like the stone masons knew what they were doing. (The “too many points in a line” crash also seems to be fixed in Aleph One; AOPID would crash all the time if it weren’t.)
That’s perhaps the first change players will notice, but it’s far from the only one. Another flaw with the original map is the anticlimactic placement of the manuscript. Players might expect that, after picking up the manuscript, they’d have to fight a huge battle. In the original, that isn’t what happens. Instead, the cavern you’re in simply floods. That’s it. No big fight, not even any real threats. Redux handles the manuscript placement in… a very different way. It’s not apparent in this video, because I YOLO the entire fight using the secret invincibility, but players who employ more conservative strategies will encounter three waves of enemies, which I engineered by combining Marathon 1 and Marathon 2/∞’s styles of monster activation.
The boxes in the manuscript room are conspicuously placed in a way that might lead players to suspect they conceal some sort of secret. Which, in fact, they do. There are at least two ways to get up to said secret. The first is by grenade jumping. The second, and by far my preferred solution, is to complete a complicated box-jumping puzzle. Doing this takes you to one of the weirdest secrets in the entire game, which begins with a weird 5D space section with some ammo floating underwater. If you’ve already picked up the manuscript, this in turn leads to another weird 5D space section that takes you to a waterfall near the start of the level, from which you can jump to one of the houses that’s otherwise inaccessible.
James made several other changes to this level’s above-ground segments, largely to improve its signposting (which was legitimately a mess in the original release). I’m not going to run through all of them, but almost all the level’s important sections are now lit by candles (that the rain somehow hasn’t extinguished). It is, of course, worth noting that the diary message near the start point shows players exactly what areas are critical to progression (and they’re listed in order, to boot). However, the signposting shouldn’t depend entirely on players putting two and two together there.
One final change I made concerns the level’s central structure. Its interior is clearly taller than the rest of the level, so its exterior should tower above the other buildings - I don’t think the Renaissance Italians had TARDIS technology yet. I took the liberty of reconstructing parts of the level to ensure that this was the case.
Hopefully, all this adds up to us having changed one of the blandest levels of the game into something actually memorable. That’s up to players to judge for themselves, of course.

[@aidan6998]

This looks genuinely incredible, it's heartwarming how many amazing scenarios Marathon still has being built for it. So looking forward to playing this, Eternal, WMAID, and Chronicles at some point.

[@wallyhackenslacker]

I can't wait for this scenario to drop!

[@livingthedream915]

I dig it

[@ShiceSquad]

This is gonna be epic!