Difference between revisions of "Key"

Revision as of 15:50, 26 December 2011

A key is an item used to open designated locked doors or switches.

Description

There are two types of key: electronic keycards, and skull keys which resemble glowing monochrome skulls. If the player encounters a locked door and attempts to open it without the correct key, the door will not open (and the player will receive a message to that effect). Once a key is obtained, any locked door of the corresponding color on the map can be opened. All keys are lost upon exiting a map.

Multiple keys of a given color may be picked up in the same level; the status bar will display whichever type was last taken. Doors in vanilla Doom are affected identically by keycards and skull keys. In stock maps, as a cosmetic guideline, a bar of coloured lights surround a locked door when keycards are used, while a column of coloured skulls are used for skull keys. (However, this is occasionally violated, such as in E2M3: Refinery which had keycard pickups but skull doorframes.)

Keys, as other things, can be flagged to appear on certain skill levels. This allows the map designer to place a key in a more challenging spot for higher levels of difficulty. The original games include a couple of instances. In E3M6: Mt. Erebus, the blue skull key can be found quite effortlessly in the center area when playing on the easiest levels. If played on Hurt Me Plenty or higher, the key is instead hidden inside one of the buildings. Thus, in addition to being attacked by a larger population of monsters, the player also has to explore more areas to find the key. In MAP06: The Crusher, the blue keycard will appear at one of three possible locations in the great crusher hall. The more difficult the skill level is, the bigger effort the player has to make to obtain the key.

In multiplayer deathmatch games, all keys are removed from each map, and players spawn carrying all keys.

Enhancements

• Ultimate Doom and Final Doom introduced "locked" switches, which cannot be activated without a key of the appropriate color. However, the feature was limited only to toggles that open fast doors permanently. Such switches were already supported in Doom II but the level designers never used them in the game.

• Boom introduced door types that require the key to be of the right type and not just the right color. Such doors are supported in most source ports.

• Certain source ports (including Boom) also allow the use of locked doors requiring multiple keys, a situation sometimes approximated in the original games by placing several locked doors in front of each other (e.g. E2M6: Halls of the Damned).

• Doom 64 introduced a key-activated, or "locked", tripwire in MAP30: The Lair; the player needs to be in possession of the yellow key and pass through the tripwire in order to lower a switch on the wall. If the player does not possess the key the switch will not lower, the Marine will "Mmmph!" and the line "You Need The Yellow Key" will appear on the top of the screen. (Boom also has this feature).

Data

The yellow keycard in MAP02 of Alien Vendetta

The red skull key in MAP09 of Alien Vendetta

The blue keycard in ATTACK.WAD from the Master Levels

Appearance statistics

The IWADs contain the following numbers of keys:

Blue keycard

Red keycard

Yellow keycard

Blue skull key

Red skull key

Yellow skull key

Doom RPG

Keycards appear in Doom RPG, but skull keys do not.

See also

• Hexen keys
• Strife keys
• Monsters open locked doors

External links

• The Doom II Key FAQ at Doomworld/idgames
• Doom RPG FAQ by Tony8669, at gamefaqs.com