[Pxtl]

For so many games of the era, that was a bug not a feature. How many hours did our generation spend lost in some poorly-rendered flat walls trying to figure out where the heck the next content was? I actually am one of the few gamers that was excited to see the move towards linear maps. I spent enough time in Doom and Hexen living in the Automap view, I'm done with that.

[vezzy-fnord]

That seems like an excuse for laziness or not wanting to expend much thought into a game, but rather just to passively consume it. Quality level design was one of the key things that made '90s FPS so great, and is what's sorely missing in today's games.

To an extent, this might be attributed to the simplicity of engines and level editors at the time (I don't think I've seen an easier map editor to use than Build), but level design has definitely been dying over the past decade or so. Procedural generation is set to kill it off completely, but at least it can still offer non-formulaic environments. Potentially.

[Pxtl]

I'm perfectly willing to play a mentally challenging game. There are plenty of good puzzlers out there that I've enjoyed. What I wasn't willing to do was spend half my play-time staring at the map. Many "shooters" in the '90s were as much "shooter" as "cartography simulator". Not that it was wrong that a few games included this as a major element, but too many games aped Doom and Descent's labyrinthine map-designs.

[DanBC]

Doom did it well, and that does make a big difference.

As a different example compare early Burnout with recent Burnout games. The early games gave you tracks you had to drive on. If you failed it was really quick to try again. Later Burnout gives you a city to drive around, with tracks overlayed on it. You have to be at a certain point in the map to trigger the start of each event which sucks when you're driving back to the start to restart the event.