Wow, what a gorgeous map.

Ha! I'm the Secret Captain!! Seriously a must-play. Great lighting! Great layout! Great design! Fun use of runes and good gameplay overall.
The secrets were well crafted. They were also well hidden...or not ;)

I love that this screeenshot contains the smartest secret in the enitre map ;)

entire* FFS.

A strong contender for this year's best. Superb map.

Honey was released this year, there is no competition.

I thought the two might go head-to-head. :)

the was so great. wonderful atmos. better than honey for me

Just started playing Quake over the weekend after years. Got halfway through E2 and stopped to find a better modern engine, found this site... had no idea there was such a rich history of community mapmaking, and still active. This is the first map I downloaded and played through. Infrikkincredible! What a way to get back into a game. I may never have to play another FPS again. (Well, maybe Borderlands 2.)

Re: the Honey comparison... I wouldn't say there is no competition. Honey was overall much easier than this one imo, mostly due to monster placement—too many places where the terrain gives the player ridiculous advantage, sniping's too easy, etc. In terms of layout and design, Subterranean Library and Sheer Hellish Miasma could go head to head, but Constantly No Respect didn't stand out as much imo. All three were great fun, of course!

Have to agree with Lane Powell above – this is credible competition for Honey; at least for Constantly No Respect. Beautiful, complex, interconnected and fun map with great use of special effects and set pieces, good monster selection and placement (even those annoying green blobby things worked well here) and so many secrets (with amusing messages). Some are very easy to find, but still feel really clever. It was a little jarring when the map referred to the first bookshelf secret I found as the second, and when I was once told to “find the ruin first” when I already had it -- but these are hardly significant problems.

Overall, this is a bit like a medieval/fantasy counterpart to Plumbers Carry Shotguns: subterranean, complex, interconnected, beautiful, detailed … and very easy to get lost in. But since that adds to the realism (in apsp2 and here), I am willing to brave the frustration. Besides, if you do find yourself wandering around wondering where to go next in this map, you might very well stumble upon one of the many, many secrets.

i have mixed feelings on this... when it is working, it kicks major ass! however, it is easy to miss a beat and end up wandering around now and then looking for the next area. despite this, it is well worth playing and oozes professionalism.

This is the one of the most valuable customs maps I ever played! Everything is perfect: level design, item placement, gameplay, balanced difficulty, feel of mystery and a lot of secrets!

Thank you Andrew 'than' Palmer.

I'd be hard pressed to find a fault in this map. Also loved the big amount of secrets, only found 9/20 though.

...I forgot how to get the secret...

Loved this one. I'm a big fan of knave maps (that ended up in my own knave map for Arcanum) and this one is really awesome. The layout, the atmosphere, the balance, the visuals. Great job, Than.

Well made! I love the use of vents and windows to look at other parts of the map. That design choice is underused.

Truly one the greatest maps I've seen...

I can't believe I never got around to rating this, after all the times I'v e played it! It really is a classic: long, involved, atmospheric, and with with wonderfully innovative ways of revisiting areas that you've seen before. A real sense of achievement in completing it, too. (I finished on 218/222 kills on Hard, and 14/20 secrets. Many of them quite satisfying.)

Unbelievably good. The best Quake map I've played thus far.

Ajora: regarding the controversy in the earlier comments: have you played <i>Honey</i> yet? :-)

Bookshelves are awesome

A great one, big, painfull, detailed, and with a nice monster selection. FXs are awsome and help to drive the story and the game. However, I will not give a perfect score because two apparent flaws: First, after replaying it twice, I still somehow manage to get lost and wander here and there untill something attacks you, some backtrack blockers could have improved this a lot. Second, I love exploring and still missed 6 secrets, to the point that I start to suspect that there was something broken in the map. Surely it is not the case and the secrets are too clever for me, but it makes no good to upset the player so much and ruin my self-confidence for a whole day.. Finally, I have mixed feelings about the final stages (from the last rune onwards). I love challenging encounters but in this case, in Hard level, it is just insane - unless you have found All the secrets, which helps a lot. Overall speaking is a great map and deserves to be in any "mustplay" list but closer to the B+ than to the A+.

Okay, I'm lost on this one. Playing at skill 2, I get to the room with the ogres on top of the bookshelves, and when I kill them all it says "sequence complete" but nothing happens. Finally watched a play-through on Youtube and it appears that pentacle in the middle of the floor is an elevator that goes down when they all die... but mine doesn't. Quakespasm, if it matters. I played to that point twice with no results.

... HOKAY, so, never mind. Evidently I had an out-of-date version of Quoth, somehow. All works now, and I must say, the level is quite nice!

Who was the first Q1-mapper, who used Unreal's rock texture?

This map is ridiculous - than has put a lot of thought into the look. It's great even. But is almost unplayable because he hasn't put nearly as much thought into progression and gameplay. Chaotic, poorly thought out hunt for obscure buttons that are harder to find than the secrets - yes, I found most secrets before the buttons. You spend most time stepping over the same corpses again and again thinking wtf am I supposed to do now. Also, there are situations where the monster / weapon balance is seriously tedious. Three shamblers with a shotgun. Yes, it's possible and I did it without cheats on hard but it's boring gameplay. In-out-in-out n=100. y'all know what I mean by that. Would rather have four shamblers and a quad. It's just more fun. 2/5. For the look. Otherwise it would ahve gotten 1.

That is an unusual opinion. Are you sure you installed it correctly??

Masterpiece. I'm replaying this now in Nightmare mostly for secret hunting and enjoying every bit of it. The progression is clear, and letting the environment decay over time is an excellent idea. Too bad Andrew doesn't seem to make maps anymore.

The map is suprisingly silent (yes, I know, it's a library), except when the ground shakes and the walls crumbles. I realise I made the same comment on mfx's Pain in the Arch, and it never really bothered me when playing other maps. Maybe it's just me, expecting for some reason that this kind of map features more music (or even just sounds).

(suRprisingly, crumble)

@'than', your stuff is the quakest. What an amazing map. Paradoxically, I did not finish it. I got to about halfway through, if to estimate by the amount of enemies defeated - having collected the first major rune, the one with 'Doom' borrowed image behind it. Afterwards, I became simply lost. I hardly do stomach wandering around without clear indicator where is it that I need to go next or what to do. Maybe I am just a linear person, I do not know; maybe you should add some waypoint for stupider people or something? Lovely level - coherent, dense, non-linear, deep, artfully crafted; I love it, but simultaneously, I just could not bear it.

Incredibly cool map. Extremely immersive due to all that buried underground library atmosphere. Layout is pure genious. The way the map mixes rocky curvy stuff with kinda orthogonal library sections is astonishing. In simple words this map is a masterpiece. THANKS

Very pretty, I liked the part where a blood gutter bursts out of the floor to show you the way. Sadly in other places it was not clear where to go, and the combat felt repetitive.

An atmospheric map that absolutely nails the "Lovecraftian forgotten library" theme, but unfortunately also replicates the insanity such a place should cause thanks to having one of the most confusing layouts and progression I've seen in a Quake level.

I loved finding as many secrets as I could, and the way the map changed as earthquakes shake the environment was cool. I just wish the progression was a tiny bit clearer, but this seems to be an issue with this mapper in general from what I've seen so far.

I suppose if you really like exploration than this will be your kind of thing (although I normally do, but maybe not to this extent), but I found it a bit too frustrating at times and that's a shame. Maybe you need to be in the right kind of mindset for this one.

Replaying this, I am struck by how amazingly interconnected it all is — how many times you revisit old areas from different directions or at different heights or viewed through a window. It really is the most extraordinary thing.

For the record: this time (on Hard) I finished with 217/222 kills and 14/20 secrets.