Defragmentation Factor (DEFRACT.WAD)

DEFRAGMENTATION

FACTOR

by Eugene Guschin aka "Wraith"

Defragmentation Factor is Wraith's /idgames debut, a Doom II MAP01 replacement published in 2006 to be played in any source port. Guschin was a member of Clan [B0S] during its heyday with Da Will, Sacrament, and A.L.T., but he had established a cornerstone in the community a few years before "Russian Realism" with Wonderful Doom. He has a few other works mentioned in the PWAD's .TXT, among them Wonderful Doom's E1, so this isn't the first thing that he apparently produced. Through contacting Wraith, I managed to figure out the location of most of these proto-works, but I'm still not sure about MySchool.

Wraith doesn't have a story to go along with this one. Doomguy appears to have arrived at some sort of tech facility that's been overrun with demons. Hell pits overrunning random rooms as well as Satanic wall décor, well, that's par for the course in infestations. Some of the other manifestations are a little weirder, though. In some areas, the fabric of reality shows evidence of painful adjustments, as if the base elements of rooms were rearranged. Occasionally, the shape of the base alters while you're in the process of traversing it, blocking off the route you came from but opening up new ones. Is this just an advanced infestation or was this some sort of experimental tech facility? The world may never know.

I feel that it's safe to say that Guschin is a very classically-minded author on two fronts. Wraith clearly adores the original Doom or else he wouldn't have gone through the trouble of making the tweaked parallel universe WD. He is also a fan of labyrinthine, non-linear layouts that you really have to turn around in your brain, as evidenced in his work in Alpha Accident. Whether this is an extension of his love of OG Doom or a fan of the '90s era, well, I think that it's arguably both. To point 1, Defragmentation Factor is a huge, sprawling level (six doors to check off the starting area!) that features vast, secret areas. To point 2, the first thing that I heard when I loaded up this map was the Das Boot techno remix, a mainstay of 90s PWADs, also appearing in AA_E1's "Distillery" (E1M3).

To be fair, two of these doors don't go anywhere at first. One of them houses the teleporter to that leads to the exit, but it's gated off by blue key bars. The door opposite it has the blue key switch that lowers the bars. Good! That's an objective. Find the blue key. In your way are about 240 monsters, a relatively tight ammo and health balance, and two new enemies, a plasma gunner and a "double gunner" who fires double tap shotgun blasts, neither of which drop ammo. Did I mention that there's also a red key? Well, you'll find out that you need one sooner or later. There's a BFG, too, locked away in a closet that's opened by the odd switch out. It's really easy to see the switch that you need to flip in order to open the door, but getting there is its own, separate adventure.

In 2016, Toooooasty published the crazy "Hazmat Hazama" as the Japanese Community Project's MAP29. DEFRACT has a similar sort of wild-ass aesthetic, so if you're into levels that are falling apart into equal parts Hellish vacuoles and fractal, abstract insanity then this one is definitely worth a look. The area that really nails the sort of recontextualization of the material world in my eyes is the brick chamber with the teklights accessed through the starting area's northwest door. There are other bits, to be sure; places that feel less like spiritual corruption and more like the elements of the universe have been broken apart and jumbled back together.

Defragmentation Factor sort of gives me the vibe of a roided-up Deimos level. I think that this is largely due to the sort of "corrupted techbase" vibe and Guschin's spiritual alignment toward Hall's sprawling installation layouts. Looking at Wraith's Level Process Diagrams, an attempt to scientifically process whether levels are linear or non-linear, part of the reason that this level feels as huge as it does is because of the vast swaths of secret areas that dominate the level's southern portion. There's a huge Hell cave that links back to the rocket launcher room and which leads to a tech maze that eventually dumps you out via another secret into the southwest outdoor crate / wooden outpost yard. The top third of the map is reserved for areas accessed by teleporter. Three of these are completely isolated from the main playing area but are required in order to complete the map. The fourth one is reached via a secret teleporter but actually leads back to an area viewable from the main playing area.

I also have a nebulous feeling where certain areas evoke memories of Doom and Doom II. I don't know if it's the geometry or the texture combinations, but I just felt a sort of classic feeling wash over me. I have no real example for, say, the room with the barred soul columns that's right before the rocket launcher chamber, but it just felt... right. The marble star-shaped colonnade where you battle the Spider Mastermind is a sort of geometric echo of "Dis" and the "reactor" room where you're subject to a nasty teleport ambush has vague overtones of the circular chamber in "Deimos Lab". The E2M4 vibes may be a bit stronger, as DEFRACT's blue key crusher feels like an homage to "Lab"'s similarly large evil eye squisher. There's also a large crate area so, duh, "Containment Area".

In terms of combat, this is a brutal level. It feels like the ammo balance is overtuned on UV, so combine this with most of the upper-tier weapons being tucked away into side areas and you have a recipe for disaster. I would strongly suggest trying Defragmentation Factor on HMP or lower and finding out all of its secrets and figuring out where its weapons are and treat UV as a sort of arrange mode. The combat shotgun is pretty close to the start, for instance, and knowing the route to the secret chainsaw would help save ammo with demons, lost souls, and anything else that you're comfortable biting into with it. Same with having the BFG for, say, the Mastermind or the Cyberdemon, really.

I really resented having to deal with the plasma and double gunners. These zombies move slow but are ammo sponges, making them horrible to run into early on considering that they don't drop any ammo when slain. It didn't seem like I could reliably kill them with point-blank super shotgun blasts, either, not that I had a lot of practice on my first playthrough. The SSG was an embarrassingly late-game acquisition for me. The chaingun really felt like the MVP in player/zombie relations, well as it should be. I dunno; considering how stressed I was the moment I knew that I was dealing with one, they're pretty effective at evoking that survival horror-lite feel of playing Doom for the first time.

The combat is mostly room shooter-type stuff but Wraith does have a few surprises up his sleeve. One of these, a fairly sizable teleport ambush, has already been mentioned. It's kind of a fun one, too, as you can whip the beasties into an infighting frenzy until most of them are toast. Some of the Doom II monster placement is baffling, almost as though Guschin felt contractually obligated to use every creature in the kit. The mancubi, arachnotrons, and pain elementals each have their own rooms, beyond which you won't see them. Revenants and arch-viles do a bit better, but most of this level's connective tissue is staffed by monsters that are more in alignment with OG Doom.

Whatever I may say about the perils of exploring open layout levels like this, I had a lot of fun with Defragmentation Factor. Sprawling, interconnected map is pretty much my favorite Doom genre. Pair it with enormous, secret-bound areas and you've got a winner with me. It's not hard to see the Wraith who would go on to make Wonderful Doom or Alpha Accident in this work. Here's hoping that we get to see Alpha Accident's E2 sometime in the future. For the record, I've played through its first three maps, and it is AWESOME.