Favourite Boom monster replacements (2018 megawads)

[JDR]

Following two VERY (IMO) succesful experiments with altering bestiary made by skillsaw (Valiant, Ancient Aliens), there were numerous megawads with new monsters released this year.

What bestiary update was your favourite? I'm torn between picking Struggle and Eviternity, but gonna choose Eviternity, even though i thought most of the additions were somewhat too deadly.

[Tristan]

I'm going to get called out because of my involvement, so I'll just say off the bat that the monsters were nothing to do with me, but people have said Eviternity's Astral Cacodemon is too powerful, but for me that's the beauty of it. I find it a truly terrifying monster even all on its own and for me throws back to the early days of playing Doom, when I was scared of that one hell knight around the corner in Virgil, for example. I've not really had that feeling from custom monsters out of any year, so that one in particular really stands out from the rest.

[JDR]

Astral cacodemon could take 100% health in half a second after he spawns near by a player with a point blank attack. Other than than i could say that every monster deserves a pat on the back for being such an *sshole.

[galileo31dos01]

Struggle isn't boom though. I haven't fully played any of those yet but I have to agree with Eris that astral cacodemons from Eviternity looked creepy, thus gorgeous. Dimension of The Boomed (not a megawad) has the spawn which is THE actual faint-inducing monster, originally from Quake, that thing made me legit jump from my seat the first time. Probably not my favourite custom monster out there but it deserves a mention. 

[antares031]

I've seen many people, mainly from stream chats on Twitch, that Struggle is a boom megawad. It's actually designed for limit-removing compatibility, and its dehacked system is still based on vanilla doom. Which means that I had to use limited amount of frames, that support code pointer option. So I had to borrow some code pointers from other frames, and that's why lots of monsters are just standing still with one single frame, instead of walking with two frames, during their idle state + arch-vile's flame has significantly less frames than the original + and so on (lesser frames for mancubus' walking state, no gibbing state for the player, etc.) Despite the limitation, Struggle provides 8+1 new custom monsters; Chaingun Elite, Antaresia, Afriest, Afriest Statue, Afriest Turret, Leviathan(+ spectre variation), Antaresia Elite, and Inquisitor. Among them, Afriest Statue needs a special mention, since it only uses 5 frames.

 

Eviternity is a MBF megawad, and I could use lots of resources for its dehacked system, compare to the vanilla one from Struggle. Not only MBF has an option to implement code pointer to every frame, but it also supports a helper dog and doom beta stuffs, allowing me to use more frames and more custom things, without modifying the original things. In Struggle, lots of custom monsters are originally decorative things, like hanging corpses. Speaking of which, while Former Captain is basically the palette-swapped version of Chaingun Elite, Astral Cacodemon's behavior is based on the scrapped custom monster from Antaresia Legacy. Yes, there was a plan to make a boom compatible mapset with that name. But it was cancelled, and it's merged to the last episode of Struggle, leaving its name as a subtitle.

 

It's kinda tough for me to decide between Struggle and Eviternity. But my vote goes to the latter one, because it has better final boss design. I only had less than 10 code pointers to use for the final boss of Struggle, so its behavior was ended up with something pretty simple, and even kinda boring. For Eviternity, on the other hand, I had a plenty of resources to design the mechanism of final boss that I truly wanted, thanks to MBF's extra frames and a new RandomJump code pointer, allowing the Archangelus to have more variant attack movements.

[Joshy]

I concur. That astral cacodemon scared the shit out of me.