MAP26: Sever the Wicked (PlayStation Doom)

MAP26: Sever the Wicked is the twenty-sixth level in the Ultimate Doom episode of the PlayStation and Sega Saturn versions of Doom. It is based on the original E4M3: Sever the Wicked, with modifications made to adapt the map to the consoles' limitations. The author of the original map is Shawn Green.

Secrets

 * 1) (sector 30)
 * 2) (sector 31)

Bugs

 * Inherited from the PC version: a plasma gun (Thing 22) has no flags set for any of the three difficulty classes, so it does not actually appear in the level. The two player starts (Things 1 and 21) also have no flags, but because of special handling in the engine, they function normally in the level.
 * Two spectres waiting near the entrance to the dungeon (things 202 and 203) are flagged to appear on easy skill level and all others respectively, and both have the same blend modes, flagged to ambush and placed almost at the same point. As a bugfix the PSX port of the map could have only one spectre having to appear on every difficulty setting.
 * In the penultimate room behind the red door, some wooden walls were improperly offset resulting in slight rendering distortions.

Geometry simplification

 * Several staircases in the level have fewer steps:
 * The staircases next to the elevators in the starting area's lava pits have two steps each instead of four.
 * The curved staircase leading to the blue door has nine steps instead of twelve.
 * The staircase connecting the starting area to the interior of the wooden building has one step removed.
 * Numerous steps were removed from the staircase leading to the secret soulsphere.

New design

 * Because the starting area would consume most of the PlayStation system's memory, several changes were made:
 * The metal grates surrounding the platform that holds the blue skull key have been replaced with solid walls.
 * The window directly in front of the blue door was removed, and several other windows around the exit teleporter were shrunk. A side-effect of this is that the monsters behind the blue door cannot be woken up without opening that door.
 * The walls of the first room in the wooden building, accessed using the staircase on the west side of the starting area, are one-sided linedefs rather than two-sided.
 * In the same room, a barrier was added between the two staircases to the south.
 * The middle texture concealing the tunnel on your left as you start the level was removed.
 * There is a partial invisibility powerup on a small ledge above the western lava pit in the starting area. The ledge has been widened to account for the player's increased radius.

Bugfixes

 * A rocket in the northeast island over the lava pool (thing 225) accidentally placed outside the map was moved to a proper point.
 * Several linedefs created by mistake in the western-most room were removed.
 * The rocket launcher room in the south-west corner of the map contained a mechanism which allowed players to seal and unseal the entrance to the room. By pressing use near the center of the room, part of the floor would rise to block the entrance and crush anything standing on it; a skull switch on the south wall of the room could be pressed to lower the floor again. While it was created primarily for deathmatch, the column could not be lowered from the other side which might lock the player out and make it impossible to get 100% secrets in some cases. Both the rising floor and the skull switch were removed from the PSX port.

Other

 * Brightness has been toned down greatly, especially in sectors without colored lighting, to fit the different light mode and make the port look similar to the original, thereafter.

Music
The map uses the following music tracks:

Player spawns
This level contains four spawn points:
 * 1) facing west. (thing 0)
 * 2) facing east. (thing 281)
 * 3) facing north. (thing 282)
 * 4) facing east. (thing 283)

Things
This level contains the following numbers of things per skill level: