Is anyone else disappointed with no return of SNAPMAP? I know the big hit of 2016's was the badass campaign, but after reinstalling out of excitement for Eternal, I played one level and then got bored and went back to roughing out new games modes in SNAPMAP.

I can't get over how complex yet approachable the logic system was in SNAPMAP. While watching Vinny's Dreams steams I was struck by their game-logic nodes and said "yo, that's SNAPMAP." I feel like it could have approached some of the gameplay creations reminiscent of Starcraft custom maps, but it just never reached that level of popularity, even while being packaged with that universally lauded campaign. How did MW's Zombies ever get so far?

I know SNAPMAP will still exist in our hearts and in the 2016 game, but if the promise of Eternal's campaign is to improve on 2016's in every way, I'm afraid that none is going to look backwards, and SNAPMAP is destined to be a ghost town forever more.

Zombies and other things like it worked because the devs provided a curated list of maps.

The "dirty secret" of the mods era was that most (?) never really got off the ground and had incredibly small communities. The ones that took off were generally either a complete stroke of luck (Team Fortress, DOTA, etc) or were because of heavy sponsoring and curation from the base game devs (Rocket Arena, Chaos UT, etc).

Nexus Mod Manager is still too "out there" for most people. Steam workshop has potential but is a complete clusterfuck (like most things Steam). I've never had the patience to download a mod through Bethesda's mod manager

And iD didn't even bother to provide basic curation for Snapmap. Hell, it was a separate binary if memory serves so a lot of us never even wanted to wait to switch binaries to see if anything cool had come out.

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This is also why I expect Dreams to pull a LBP. There will be some amazing "game jam" style prototypes but the average gamer will lose interest after one too many "PT Remakes"

It's probably gone for good. I kinda feel for Hugo as he mentioned during the E3 couch talks that it definitely burned when they didn't get Giant Bombs GOTY because of how lackluster the multiplayer was. To this day it's a really weird argument that a game is brought down by an extra mode when everything else about it was so good. I think SnapMap was a pretty cool idea, but maybe Doom 2016 wasn't the best place to use it. Would have been cool to see them try to innovate it in Eternal - as far as I know it will not be using that system in lieu of hand bespoke dev made maps.

I want to see Snap Map as a separate, potentially free executable kind of like the Halo Forge. I think putting that out there people could make some really cool stuff, and it could stand separate so they don't need to re-release it or port in the new content with each sequel. Asking for it to be free is maybe a lot so they could try something else but spinning it out makes sense to me.

I got a kick out of your insistence (rightfully so) of properly capitalizing SNAPMAP.

Truthfully I completely forgot the feature existed until this very moment. A friend of mine used it a bunch and said there was awesome stuff there. It just wasn’t something I was ever looking for.

@nateandrews:Thanks

@gundato: I thought the actual secret to the mod era is that there were thousands of them, and even tho the ratio of ones that stay in obscurity to the ones that get popular stay the same, but the specific numbers of each go up. The only reason dev curated maps / modes hold popularity is because when there's only one option for what to play it's impossible for the playerbase to get split up.

Plus I think it's a little harsh to say there wasn't even "basic" curation. There's tags for what kind of creation it is, search, bookmark levels, bookmark creators, and a dev curated showcase that I saw swap out more than once in the time that I was checking in on a fairly regular basis. I'm pretty sure that that's already more than Mario Maker had in the way of curation. Plus There was at least 3 content drops that increased the toolkit of pieces that creators had to work with, so there was post-release support from the devs.

As far as being a separate binary...at least you didn't have to dig through folders to launch it, it was there from the main menu. But can't deny how rough it was that it took a separate load that was probably longer than the initial boot, and without even having a some kind of showcase preview before that load to convince anyone why that load is worthwhile. Plus the multiplayer was the same way, and to @humanity's point, I think people got caught up with the disparity between the campaign and the MP that SNAPMAP wasn't even a consideration. I had fun jumping into the MP for a little while because it was somewhere on the level of a q3 or later arena shooter, and really in I think people found it a letdown because even though it was /fine/, it didn't surprise or advance anything about the genre the way the campaign did, and it stood out.

There was probably also the problem that people weren't ready to thinking about coming to Doom for a content creation toolkit. You might think differently with the long (and still active) history of community Doom WADs, but maybe 2016 was far enough removed that people were looking to compare it in terms of modernization - compare it to Halo and CoD rather than it's own history. @thievingsince95 brings up that stand alone Halo Forge, which I was super pumped about when it was first announced, but even I constantly forget that it exists. There was a lot of good content created for Forge, but it was really being tied to a package that got people into it. But that initial load for SNAPMAP (plus all the character customization unlocks were completely disconnected from the ones in MP) really made it feel like something with a high initial investment, vs Forge that IIRC was just a tab over that you could even kind of wind up in accidentally.

Dreams could go LBP, but both of those will reach a higher standard because you go into a Media Molecule game knowing it's about browsing and creating community content. The first comparison I think of is Trials Evolution. That was a side-scrolling platform racer that had tools powerful enough to let people turn it into first person jumpscare houses, but then we got a few interesting things and then a sharp falloff, maybe because those weren't side-scrolling platform races.

I was super psyched for SNAPMAP, until I realized you couldn't create/play full blown multiplayer maps with a full load of people. If I'm not mistaken snapmap only allowed 4 in a game at a time?

Yeah. That was a bigger bummer than the load time. I guess custom game logic was a pretty heavy load so I understand it, and 4 player coop is pretty standard, but I was really hoping for at least 6 players. You could do interesting stuff with 3v3 or 2v2v2.

I only played the campaign in Doom 2016; had no interest in the SnapMap or multiplayer, so I don't personally care (sorry). The campaign DLC should be cool though, I hope.

I played Snapmap a whole lot more than actual multiplayer, albeit less than the singleplayer. I especially liked the update where they added assets from the classic games. Hope they bring it back...