It's been almost 10 years since I last played - returning to V6 made me bawl

[Nekolord]

Hi all,

I'm with a 99% certainty a forgotten fossil of this community, and looking at the stuff I wrote in here around 10 years ago makes me hope I've been forgotten, hahaha. I'm a whole lot older and wiser now - starting with the fact that I don't use names like "Nekolord" in online communities anymore, god bless my soul for not continuing that.

Anyway, I've opened this thread because I just, from the bottom of my heart, want to thank this community for all of their efforts in making MM8BDM what it is today.
This game is such an underrated gem and it hurts to see the plummeting player numbers on the Zandronum Server List, but nevertheless I've pushed myself to download it again after all this time just to see what changed ever since I left.

For the record, 10 years ago was when Gamma was still considered the final boss and we had only just gotten the preview versions of the MM7 Weapons and Maps. Back then, I never would've imagined that this game would crush all of my low expectations I had for the game at the time. After all, this was still just a Doom iwad with a lot of leftover stuff in it like BFGs, the cursed "Summon Impse" incidents and a whole lot of "This is a fangame, don't expect AAA quality" vibes.

Cut forward to today and... holy shit. You guys already had me getting goosebumps at the

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Player + Protoman vs Darkman boss fight

but then you kept one-upping it with every single boss to come. Suddenly I was fighting

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Bass

then

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Duo

then

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the completely original Evil Robot fight

My decision to come back and play this game again after all these itches in my body told me to check it out one more time was one of the best I've made. I can't believe that you guys still continued all of those years and never gave up like I gave up on the game. It's such a passion project and deserves so much more recognition in its current state.

I really, really hope you guys will have a miracle and get some kind of content creator to check this game out and huff new blood into the multiplayer community - you deserve it. I've just completed the final boss and still can't believe how much you creatively pushed this old engine to do all these cool things. The way you revisited bosses like the Guts Dozer was so well done, too.

It's 10 years overdue and the old me who fell in love with this fangame would back me up in this, too:

Thank you for continuing development on this game and knocking me out of my seat 10 years later. Thank you!!
And I'm terribly sorry for the awful formatting on the Spoiler tags.

[Korby]

Howdy.

I'm really glad to hear you've enjoyed what's been done with the game over the past 10 years! It's kind of crazy how far we've come, and sometimes I forget just how long that much time really is, lol.
It's true the game's population has dwindled a fair amount over the years, but we are still sticking around. Frankly, it's kind of surprising to me how tenacious our playerbase is.

I still remember launching v1 and its super cramped Light Lab, consisting of roughly 2 rooms and only the barest skeleton of a story. After the Ivory-lead MM8 expansion, people latched onto the more story-heavy content and we (mostly Mike) went back and redid a lot of the older content in a fairly massive singleplayer update, v5b, and the game was forever changed.

The amount of absolute witchcraft our team has been able to mangle Skulltag/Zandronum into doing is frankly amazing to me, and I'm forever grateful to everyone who's worked on this game for creating something that I'm proud to have been a part of. From early supporters like FuPoo, Mr. X, Splendidland, and DTD, to the team we have today, this game wouldn't exist without all of them.

Our next update will have a few features to make new player onboarding a little easier in addition to the easier installation of our recent update, so I'm hoping that if we do end up getting a boost from some content creator, players will have an easier time hooking the game up than they historically have. Needing a walkthrough to get a game up and running is not great for retention, lol.

Ultimately though, thank you for playing, both 10 years ago and now! It really means a lot to me and the rest of the team.
(Yeah, I also hate the new spoiler formatting. It's gross.)