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DNF #1
Duke 3D #1
Blum and Levelord are two different beasts. Blum's maps (well, the two popular ones) genuinely felt like maps from the original game, except just being larger and more detailed. Sure, he laid an egg with the other two, but in his interview he said he didn't really care about those, especially the boss map, where the pathway to the boss was just made in a few hours. High Times could have been a great map though if he cared about stuff like new sector effectors, new gameplay elements, new babes in the windows, and especially, the new art/textures that aren't so out of place. Despite this, the level showed some of Blum's class, it had a sense of place, it looked real for most part, and it doesn't look like some random city, it was Amsterdam. It was just not polished enough, and the remake of Lunatic Fringe in the end was ridiculously cheap and rushed.
Based on Mirage Barrage and Golden Carnage, Blum didn't lose any edge of his Build knowledge, and honestly I can't even think of a single usermap from the last 20 years which is better than any of them.
Levelord on the other had never been very talented. TerminX once said that The Abyss had been remade many times before it was getting into the final shape, Blum and Broussard spent lots of fine tuning and feedback for some of his levels, and even with this, his maps were clearly inferior to the work of Blum. Levelord is an extremely talented gameplay creator though, he had a good sense for monster placement, but as a layout designer he was average at best and needed lots of quality control. The result in WT was something when the guy didn't get this said quality control. The funny thing is that he went into modern mapping styles, his maps felt like stuff Pascal Rouaud could make. I think if he was on his own back in 1995-96, his levels would have looked as crowded as these new maps look.
To be fair, even Levelord's maps are quite good on their own. Just remove all that french/russian jazz from his levels, and you got a 88-93% Mikko-score for both Red Ruckus and Tour de Nukem. The latter even had some genuine Duke3D-ish moments in its second half which reminded me of Sewer, his absolutely best piece of leveldesign.
The problem overall wasn't their lack of knowledge. The problem was there was nobody out there who could have given a proper vision for the episode. Levelord could have released his own stuff in a separate little mapset, while Blum could have released his two best maps as single player releases. As an episode it was a total hodjpodj, and had no coherence sadly. And that was Randy's fault honestly.
I still hope (especially in the case of Blum) that they return to Build mapping once more, and make a coherent masterpiece like LA Meltdown. Blum is absolutely capable, and with the proper help, Levelord can be a great support man for this.
Despite all the errors in WT, including the flaws of the engine, it can't be written in the same sentence with Nuclear Winter. Okay that NW is 20 years older, but everything, literally everything was wrong with it. Ugly levels, cheap remakes (heck, even Hangar was remade), unattractive design, buggy coding, lack of sounds, etc etc etc, WT, while it was a massive disappointment is just a solid ride, with some outstanding and some poor stuff in it, I'm glad it was created.
