Doom Overrated?

[Juza]

To clarify, I stand with the mindset that Doom 1 and 2 haven't aged well. Their user mods/maps have.

 

@ReaperAA That's almost entirely things Doom 2 has that Quake doesn't... Both games have considerably different gameplay due to the difference in the roaster, but each has unique qualities to them. Personally, I'd say Quake's outwit those of Doom 2's.

 

- Lack of reliabity on heavy RNG rolls, and higher and fairer skill ceiling. Since the monsters and player have fixed damage / insignificant RNG difference, the game is consistent to every player and has nearly reliabity on luck. The enemies' rate of attack and movement is irrelevant to the player, since those can be fastly countered.

- Jumping, bhopping and rocket-jumping allowing for much faster gameplay, and creative ways to traverse a level, generating a higher skill ceiling due to the amount of versatile movement.

- Enemies have so many abilities that account for many of Doom 2's enemies. Ex.: Quake's Hell Knight is as versatile as Revenant with his fast movement, melee attack and projectiles. He's often put together with Ogres, which fire continuous grenades at you. The Enforcer has a fast projectile that he fires often, it's not exactly a Chaingunner, but his job and influence on the player is practically the same.

- Cannon fodder isn't present throughout the entirety of the game, for most of the game's combat. (Looking at you, Doom 1)

- Real 3D, allowing for more opportunities in just about everything, from combat situations, to secrets.

- Higher accessibility to high damage / fast-firing guns such as the Rocket Launcher, Super Nailgun and Grenade Launcher, allowing for an even faster playstyle.

- Consistent quality throughout all of its episodes, unlike Doom 2, where it's generally agreed upon it goes downhill starting from the city levels; less than halfway through the entire game. For Doom 1, episode 2 and 3 are quite mixed in criticism.

- Immediate weapon switching, allowing for more opportunity with combos.

[ReaperAA]

7 hours ago, Juza said:

That's almost entirely things Doom 2 has that Quake doesn't... Both games have considerably different gameplay due to the difference in the roaster, but each has unique qualities to them.

 

I don't deny that that there are certain qualities in Quake that Doom 2 doesn't have (most notably the true 3D gameplay, rocket jumping, bhoping and the lack of huge RNG variance) but I still stand by my opinion that Doom 2's monster roster is overall superior.

 

7 hours ago, Juza said:

Personally, I'd say Quake's outwit those of Doom 2's.

 

l agree to disagree here. But each to their own.

Edited March 14, 2020 by ReaperAA

[Nine Inch Heels]

10 hours ago, Juza said:

 

@ReaperAA That's almost entirely things Doom 2 has that Quake doesn't... Both games have considerably different gameplay due to the difference in the roaster, but each has unique qualities to them. Personally, I'd say Quake's outwit those of Doom 2's.

 

- Lack of reliabity on heavy RNG rolls, and higher and fairer skill ceiling. Since the monsters and player have fixed damage / insignificant RNG difference, the game is consistent to every player and has nearly reliabity on luck. The enemies' rate of attack and movement is irrelevant to the player, since those can be fastly countered.

- Jumping, bhopping and rocket-jumping allowing for much faster gameplay, and creative ways to traverse a level, generating a higher skill ceiling due to the amount of versatile movement.

- Enemies have so many abilities that account for many of Doom 2's enemies. Ex.: Quake's Hell Knight is as versatile as Revenant with his fast movement, melee attack and projectiles. He's often put together with Ogres, which fire continuous grenades at you. The Enforcer has a fast projectile that he fires often, it's not exactly a Chaingunner, but his job and influence on the player is practically the same.

- Cannon fodder isn't present throughout the entirety of the game, for most of the game's combat. (Looking at you, Doom 1)

- Real 3D, allowing for more opportunities in just about everything, from combat situations, to secrets.

- Higher accessibility to high damage / fast-firing guns such as the Rocket Launcher, Super Nailgun and Grenade Launcher, allowing for an even faster playstyle.

- Consistent quality throughout all of its episodes, unlike Doom 2, where it's generally agreed upon it goes downhill starting from the city levels; less than halfway through the entire game. For Doom 1, episode 2 and 3 are quite mixed in criticism.

- Immediate weapon switching, allowing for more opportunity with combos.

 

 

Quake's monsters are perhaps more interesting individually, at least on the surface, but they usually suck in groups or get in one another's way even more so than in classic Doom. That's why you don't see OG Quake maps which feature very many groups of monsters, or if several are used, they're usually spaced apart and often even perched. Hardware considerations of the time aside, it simply doesn't work that well. 

 

Also, RNG has nothing to do with skill, or rather the absence thereof doesn't necessarily raise the skill ceiling. Players in Doom need to be able to mitigate high damage rolls to survive every so often, and that is a skill quake doesn't demand of players anywhere near as much. Recovery strategies are easier to work into quake speedruns than they are in doom, because in doom that 80% damage roll from a rev, or the 45% from a shotgunner can occur just about everywhere. Also, pain states in quake last an eternity when compared to doom, allowing speedrunners to place a shot here and there while running past most things uncontested. You can also pull that off in Doom, fwiw, but you can't buy yourself another second worth of time as easily in doom as you can get it in quake.

 

Quake's roster isn't very impressive. Anything aside of ogres, vores, shamblers and maybe fiends it is rather generic, and looking at these 4 monsters in particular, they're nothing "too special" either: There's the "I shoot homing shit" monster, the "I charge an attack that usually can't be evaded without cover" monster, the "I'm a purely melee centric monster", and then you have the ogre, which is kind of like a miniature cyberdemon/HK-crossover on the surface, but it is also a straight up pushover even with the shotgun equipped. What's left then are some lower tier monsters, like your bog standard hitscanner, the stronger "enforcer" (both of which don't even show up often in the game to begin with) and that's the end of the quake roster. So it's usually 4-5 monsters that define most of a map's gameplay in quake, and none of them are anything new in the grand scheme of things. Nothing there that makes it "smarter" than doom2's bestiary, and quake's "spores" aren't a redeeming factor either as far as I'm concerned. Neither arch viles nor pain elementals have an equivalent in quake, meaning players are never under the same time pressure due to a monster's intrinsic abilities as they would be in Doom2.

 

Also, quake's monsters are often a lot more bullet spongy than doom2's monsters when fought with a similarly tiered weapon, but that doesn't make them "better" in any way shape or form. As a matter of fact, 100% runs of quake have to route maps around quad damage powerups, in somewhat unintuitive ways at times, if any are available, because otherwise quake's monsters would take much longer to get rid of. It even gets to a point where 100% runners sometimes "wake up" as much shit as possible and then backtrack to a quad, because the added killspeed and ammo conservation still outweighs the time lost due to backtracking. It should tell you something when game devs feel like a powerup that quadruples player damage output is good to have in their game, for that matter. Likewise, most 100% runs usually use rockets, grenades, and the super nail-gun (which is about equal to doom2's plasma rifle in output) for their runs -so it's mostly weapons of a higher tier than doom2's SSG- but that doesn't mean quake's roster is better, or that quake's weapons are better, or that quake is the faster game. It's simply different weapons and powerups for rosters and maps with different mindsets. On that note, if Doom had a plasma rifle available in every other map, with sufficient ammo to boot, it would also play a whole lot faster, but it doesn't -not because it's not possible in theory, but simply because it doesn't have the firepower at the ready in many of the IWAD maps. That's a "map-design-issue", not a "this-game-is-objectively-faster-issue", and many PWADs are more generous than OG doom, which is why they're also much faster paced than the IWADs.

 

 

 

Unless you're actually speedrunning quake, slope boosts and grenade- or rocket jumps as well as bunny hopping in general are entirely irrelevant. Also just hopping around in quake in and of itself does fuckall for your speed, optimal jumping in quake has nothing to do with b-hopping just like optimal SR50s in doom have nothing to do with pressing the correct keys. As far as grenade or rocket jumps go, hate to burst your bubble, but those are not as fancy as you might think. Rocket jumps in quake are fairly easy to get right, grenade jumps are trickier until you get the timing down, I'll give it that, but even less than optimal grenade jumps will get you where you need to be in many cases throughout the game. Basically those rocket jumps are among the first things people learn, long before they even get into any optimizations, because they're not that hard. In case you wonder why I boldly make these claims, I've played many doom RJ maps, I've also played a good amount of quake3 DeFRaG recently, and even looked into Team Fortress 2 rocket jump maps for a while. Obviously I've also tried my hand at OG quake's maps to see if I could get the major skips and jumps right that I've seen in many of the quake runs, and I can say with a good amount of confidence that quake's rocket jumps aren't very "special", and most of them are definitely not harder (as in more precise) than other tricks in quake speedrunning, or doom speedrunning for that matter.

 

The tricky shit in quake speedruns (or speedruns period) is optimization, and optimization isn't something only quake has going for it. Which brings me to doom, and its rather extensive array of things speedrunners need to get right if they want optimal times: (void) Glides, Zero-press, SR50, linedef skips, wall-runs, etc... Yeah, sure, most of doom2's speedrunning tricks don't look as spectacular as a rocket jump in quake, but looks don't matter when you're talking about skill-ceilings. Looking at all the tricks in doom, all of which are relevant for speedrunners at some point, and comparing it to quake, I'd say that notions of a higher skill ceiling in quake are at least flawed if not entirely wrong. The games are difficult to speedrun optimally for entirely different reasons (most of which have nothing to do with RNG, for that matter), and arguing that one game requires more skill than the other, or has a higher skill ceiling than the other, is utter nonsense, full stop.

Edited March 14, 2020 by Nine Inch Heels

[Juza]

@Nine Inch Heels

Have you actually played Quake past episode 1? Monsters are paired with each other quite often. Saying they're "alone more often than not" is just plain out wrong.

 

Quake speedrunning is fair for how every movement can be predicted and countered, and even manipulated to a greater scale than that of Doom. Doom has always been about predicting where the monster will go; for most of the time, it's about improvisation. Getting shot by a Shotgunner and losing large amounts of HP because not all of your pellets didn't connect, or didn't do enough damage to kill it beforehand, can end a run in a way that is entirely out of hand. That's just how Doom is programmed.

 

Quake having fixed damage means an Ogre will always take 4 SSG shots to die if your aim is right. In Doom, it's basically up to luck whether a Pinky will die with 3 or 2 Shotgun shots, you can't control it, the game rolls it for you. If you can't see how this leads to a fairer "competition", you're blind.

 

I never said Rocket Jumping and Grenade Launching were difficult. They're creative and allow for much more movement and opportunities than Doom. But they have to be used right, otherwise you can easily F yourself over, especially in Deathmatch -- it can change or end a round, and I say it quite raises the skill ceiling.

 

And, what's exactly wrong about routing levels around Quad Damage? It's supposed to make the level end faster. Isn't that the point of speedrunning?

 

No skilled player will have a problem with Quake's "bullet sponginess". Rockets, Nails and Cells are provided more often than are more available for use in short ranges than Doom. The double-barrel is not supposed to be your only gun.

 

In Doom 2, it takes 3 seconds to fire 3 SSG shots, the average to kill Doom 2's new enemies, which are mostly medium tiers (including the Revenants, if you get an unlucky damage role, lol).

That's exactly how long it takes for fire 6 SSG shots in Quake, to kill an Fiend, the highest ranking medium tier enemy in the game or maybe even the lowest high tier. So in a way, Doom 2 is spongier than Quake. 

 

Edit: By coincidence, I'd been planning on uploading one of my favorite Quake demos to Youtube yesterday. I did it now, due to being reminded of this discussion, and it's a really awesome speedrun by Thomas Stuubgard, if you wish to see how cool Quake runs are. https://youtu.be/Dj6MvcEDd0M

 

Edited March 15, 2020 by Juza

[seed]

11 hours ago, Juza said:

Edit: By coincidence, I'd been planning on uploading one of my favorite Quake demos to Youtube yesterday. I did it now, due to being reminded of this discussion, and it's a really awesome speedrun by Thomas Stuubgard, if you wish to see how cool Quake runs are. https://youtu.be/Dj6MvcEDd0M

 

But also more tedious when not optimal, as the readme posted in the description indicates (that it isn't an optimal run I mean).

 

He lost quite some time killing the tougher enemies, and it felt pretty slow in these parts of the demo.

 

11 hours ago, Juza said:

Quake having fixed damage means an Ogre will always take 4 SSG shots to die if your aim is right. In Doom, it's basically up to luck whether a Pinky will die with 3 or 2 Shotgun shots, you can't control it, the game rolls it for you. If you can't see how this leads to a fairer "competition", you're blind.

 

Not necessarily more fair, but more predictable instead, as it makes anticipating the outcome much easier. In Doom one can easily die to all sorts of random BS, but I wouldn't label that as unfair.

[Juza]

3 hours ago, seed said:

 

But also more tedious when not optimal, as the readme posted in the description indicates (that it isn't an optimal run I mean).

 

He lost quite some time killing the tougher enemies, and it felt pretty slow in these parts of the demo.

 

Not necessarily more fair, but more predictable instead, as it makes anticipating the outcome much easier. In Doom one can easily die to all sorts of random BS, but I wouldn't label that as unfair. 

 

It's a 100% kills run. He has to kill all enemies. How could he have lost time killing enemies? 

 

It's not optimal, and how can it be tedious just because of that? It's not like ZeroMaster's world record runs are entirely optimal either... does that make them tedious, in your logic?

But unlike with how results can be with Doom runs, it's not unoptimal because the runner didn't get a good roll. The only time lost was because of the runner's own mistakes (flawed movement in some areas, misfiring, bad aim, etc.) and not because the RNG didn't collaborate with him. 

 

Your last text is confusing. You say Doom has "all sorts of random bullshit that you can easily die to", which sounds like just another way of saying the game has moments where consequences aren't dependant on the player, therefore conclusion being that the game is unfair when results are out of your hand -- but you don't admit to it. Why?

 

I don't think you're making any sense. How is a predictable outcome entirely dependant on the player's skill not any more fair than, rolling an 8-sided dice to get the needed outcome, regardless of your skill (such as 2 or 3 shotgun shots to kill a Pinky), like in Doom?

 

You didn't disprove any of my points either. You're just going by "but I think".

Edited March 15, 2020 by Juza

[Nine Inch Heels]

15 hours ago, Juza said:

Have you actually played Quake past episode 1? Monsters are paired with each other quite often. Saying they're "alone more often than not" is just plain out wrong.

Good thing I never said they're "alone more often than not". What I said is that when several (several as in: a handful at once. not groups as in: a dozen or more) are used, they're often spaced apart or perched, to make sure they don't get in each other's way. And yes, I've played quake in its entirety. In fact, if you actually read my post entirely, and got to the point where I mentioned that I tried quake's rocket and grenade jumps myself, the question as to whether or not I actually played more than 1 episode wouldn't even present itself.

 

15 hours ago, Juza said:

Quake speedrunning is fair for how every movement can be predicted and countered, and even manipulated to a greater scale than that of Doom. Doom has always been about predicting where the monster will go; for most of the time, it's about improvisation. Getting shot by a Shotgunner and losing large amounts of HP because not all of your pellets didn't connect, or didn't do enough damage to kill it beforehand, can end a run in a way that is entirely out of hand. That's just how Doom is programmed.

So both quake and doom are about predicting where monsters will go? Cool beans, thanks for proving my point in that regard I guess. Also thanks for proving my point that mitigating RNG in doom is actually a skill, which means your skill ceiling argument is right out the window in that regard, too. By the way, manipulating monster movement, or "crowdshaping", is very much a core skill in more difficult doom maps (and quite handy in some IWAD maps, too), and it can be done in a very reliable fashion as well. Instances where movement RNG actually messes up players in doom can happen, but it's the same for quake at times, too, because movement of monsters in quake isn't 100% deterministic either, especially not when they bunch up but don't infight at all.

 

15 hours ago, Juza said:

Quake having fixed damage means an Ogre will always take 4 SSG shots to die if your aim is right. In Doom, it's basically up to luck whether a Pinky will die with 3 or 2 Shotgun shots, you can't control it, the game rolls it for you. If you can't see how this leads to a fairer "competition", you're blind

Except every runner in doom needs to deal with the RNG, the game rolls it for every runner in every run, because people run the same game. Hence, it's fair competition. If you don't see how playing the same game under the same conditions is fair competition, then you're the one who has a problem with his eye-sight. Also thank you for reminding me why you got banned from the speedrunner's discord, seems old habits die hard, eh?

 

15 hours ago, Juza said:

I never said Rocket Jumping and Grenade Launching were difficult. They're creative and allow for much more movement and opportunities than Doom. But they have to be used right, otherwise you can easily F yourself over, especially in Deathmatch -- it can change or end a round, and I say it quite raises the skill ceiling.

I put myself out there and tried these things for myself. Never mind that I have at least something to show to prove that I made some efforts, which is not something you can say for yourself as far as I can see, or did I miss any of your demos that you recorded for either quake or doom? And sorry, uploading somebody else's runs to your YouTube channel doesn't make you an expert on the subject. Matter of fact, if you were that knowledgable and good at quake, you'd upload your own runs instead of somebody else's. Now that I think about it, you were in the speedrunner's discord about a year and (maybe) a half ago, and you were on record for saying that we're taking demos too seriously, isn't that right? Actually, now that I look at the history, it would appear that you also said you didn't wanna do doom speedruns, because it wasn't the casual/hobby-affair that you were looking for. With that in mind, please explain to me why anybody should trust your opinion wrt skill ceilings when you also say people are taking speedrunning too seriously (which is an attitude that actually helps with developing skills to begin with).


Look, it's nice that you explain things to me that I am already more than sufficiently aware of, but either something isn't particularly difficult, or it raises the skill ceiling quite a bit. In order to raise the skill ceiling "quite", as you said, it also needs to be "quite" the skill to have. And rocket jumping doesn't move the needle when OG quake and OG Doom speedrunning are compared to one another (classic doom speedruns also employed rocket boosts, for a very long time, in fact). Having more things one can do in a game doesn't make the game harder, or the skill ceiling higher, it's never been like that. Complexity and difficulty are not the same thing, there is no correlation between the two, which is easily proven by how some of the not-so-complex games in recent past (cuphead, celeste, etc) are also some of the most difficult ones to beat, and that's not even talking about skill ceilings, it's just beating the game.

 

 

 

But let's say, just for argument's sake, that "more tech" means a higher skill ceiling... Quake speedrunning is largely a matter of dealing with slopes in the best way possible, as well as "damage boosting" and skipping parts of maps by way of grenade/rocket jumping when possible, plus the usual movement optimizations, of course. The skips aren't very hard to do, I did all of them successfully myself already. Optimizing slopes on the other hand is genuinely hard and takes lots of practice. Likewise, damage boosting can be tricky, too. But now let's look at how much "speed-tech" OG doom has:

Well fuck. That's a lotta tech right there, and the thread doesn't even account for passing doors optimally, damage boosting with rockets, optimal SR50s, or all the other small details that go into doom speedruns.

 

15 hours ago, Juza said:

In Doom 2, it takes 3 seconds to fire 3 SSG shots, the average to kill Doom 2's new enemies, which are mostly medium tiers (including the Revenants, if you get an unlucky damage role, lol).

That's exactly how long it takes for fire 6 SSG shots in Quake, to kill an Fiend, the highest ranking medium tier enemy in the game or maybe even the lowest high tier. So in a way, Doom 2 is spongier than Quake. 

15 hours ago, Juza said:

No skilled player will have a problem with Quake's "bullet sponginess". Rockets, Nails and Cells are provided more often than are more available for use in short ranges than Doom. The double-barrel is not supposed to be your only gun.

 

And? No skilled player has a problem with Doom2's monsters either, because the SSG isn't supposed to be their only gun. And again, providing more and higher grade ammo and weapons says nothing about which game is "faster", it simply tells us that having lots of higher grade weapons and ammo makes shorter work of monsters, which is universally true believe it or not. Place a PR and a RL in every other doom2 map, add ample cells and rockets to boot, and then look at how fast doom becomes, because that's what you need to do for a "fair" comparison with quakes grenades/rockets and the super nail gun. Arguing that quake is the faster game, based solely on how players have access to any "tier 2 weapon" (that being anything better than normal nail gun, but worse than lightning-coil) with ample supplies is nonsense. It is, and will remain, a map-design-issue. It is not a this-game-is-faster-issue. Also, if you look at combat chains, you inevitably come to comparisons like for example between vore and revenant, or between arch vile and shambler, or between hell knight and deathknight. And it doesn't take a genius to figure out which of these monsters have more bulk than the other in the context of their respective games, it's clear that at least 2 of the 3 comparisons end up with quake's roster being more bulky. Want another? Pinkies and knights: Pinkie - 1 SSG blast, knight - always at least 2. Yes, quake's double barreled is faster, but you can't beat "one and done".

 

 

 

So now that I've spent enough of my time here, I'll cut you a deal: You can have your personal preferences, and dispense them all you want, but leave arguments about skill ceilings or "fairness of competition" out of this, because not only are you yourself not even competing to begin with (not in classic Doom as far as I can tell, and I haven't seen you run quake yet, either), but also because arguing that quake has a higher skill ceiling invariably implies that doom speedrunners and their accomplishments are something "lesser", and that is a downright reprehensible and unfair (in the literal sense) implication as far as I'm concerned.

 

I'm not going out of way to declare doom's skill ceiling higher than quake's just because doom has more "speed-tech", because it would be just as wrong as declaring quake's skill ceiling as higher due to fixed damage values and jumping. There's the fine but very important difference between you and me: I can appreciate either game's speedruns without indirectly shitting on the other. It's different games, with different engines, and optimal runs in either game are difficult to do for different reasons (most of which being something other than RNG, even though RNG in doom can be annoying at times). One does not have a higher skill ceiling than the other, and claiming that one is more "skill-based" than the other is opinionated garbage.

 

 

EDIT: And by the way, I saw that line of text you conveniently edited out:

 

"Compared to Doom runs, it's quite amazing." Good thing your opinion is so unbiased- oh wait, it actually isn't.

Edited March 15, 2020 by Nine Inch Heels

[Juza]

@Nine Inch Heels

 

Why are you comparing a low-tier, cannon fodder enemy like a lone Pinky to a medium-tier enemy like the Death Knight? That's just a redundant comparison. That's like if I tried saying "Quake's Grunt takes 1 shot to die compared to Doom 2's Mancubus, which takes 3 or 4 shots." 

In my comparison, I actually gave Doom 2 the upper hand, and it's shown for a fact that Doom 2's medium tier enemies take just as long to kill as Quake's high tiers, disproving your belief that Quake is too bullet spongy.

 

Quake is not only faster due to higher access to high tier guns in its original levels (different from Doom, where in comparison, it's quite lower), but due to the movement.

 

And, yes, it's quite logical that the lesser luck a game requires, the more reliant on the player's own skill it is. 

You're trying to say that "Rock, Paper, Scissors" is on the same par as Chess.

 

You're trying to use the "devalorization" card to defend Doom's poor design choices, just because it's a popular game. But you can't disprove the fact that Quake, with its design choices, is a consistent game with higher skill ceiling due to unreliancy on gambling: different from Doom, where a significant part of a player's run is dependant on rolls, rolls, and rolls.

 

Again: gambling VS chess. That's just how the games were designed. P_Random is part of Doom's code regardless of what you try to say. But Quake will always have fixed values.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love Doom, but just like Quake, it's far from perfect, or being as "great" and "challenging" as many say.

Edited March 15, 2020 by Juza

[Nine Inch Heels]

1 minute ago, Juza said:

Why are you comparing a low-tier, cannon fodder enemy like a lone Pinky to a medium-tier enemy like the Death Knight?

I didn't compare pinkies and deathknights, I compared pinkies to knights. Learn to read.

4 minutes ago, Juza said:

And, yes, it's quite logical that the lesser luck a game requires, the more reliant on the player's own skill it is. 

You're trying to say that "Rock, Paper, Scissors" is on the same par as Chess.

It is quite logical that when an outcome is slightly unpredictable, then the success depends on player's reflexes and quick thinking to compensate for variance.

 

6 minutes ago, Juza said:

You're trying to use the "devalorization" card to defend Doom's poor design choices, just because it's a popular game. But you can't disprove the fact that Quake, with its design choices, is a consistent game with higher skill ceiling due to unreliancy on gambling: different from Doom, where a significant part of a player's run is dependant on rolls, rolls, and rolls.

Except you don't need to rely on gambling in classic doom either. You're simply talking out of your ass if you think that everything in doom is merely a series of coinflips which make player agency non-existent.

[Juza]

@Nine Inch Heels I don't like the attitude you're taking of insulting me at every possible chance. My texts might seem 'heated', but it's all directed torwards video-games. I'm sorry if I offended you with saying "you're blind if you don't see this case", I thought of it as an expression rather than an insult. I don't feel comfortable continuing this if you're going to resort to personal attacks, but I'll clarify three things:

- Yes, I think Quake runs are better than Doom runs, what's wrong with that? It's my opinion, and I wager you think the exact opposite of it, so why am I the bad guy for it?

- I was banned from the "Doom Speedrunning" discord for giving constructive criticism on a beginner's level, and was confronted by him and a friend of his for that, for they saw it as an insult, and when I tried defending my position, I was banned. I didn't attack anyone personally, I simply commented on a level and was banned for not being aligned with other people's opinions. Say I'm trying to play the victim card, but it's for a fact what happened, and you must be able to know and research, if you got that much information.

- No, just because the game rolls the dice for everyone, it doesn't make it 10/10 fair. Hypothetically: If two players competed side by side, while playing one level the exact same way, and one of them died because multiple hitscanners shot them in an unavoidable closet ambush, while in the other player's screen, the hitscanners didn't react as fast, or didn't do as much damage. That's rock, paper, scissors: A game reliant entirely on luck, whether you win or not -- In a video-game that is supposed to present a challenge, that's not fair. Now, in real life, it'd be.

Edited March 15, 2020 by Juza

[Nine Inch Heels]

Just now, Juza said:

Yes, I think Quake runs are better than Doom runs, what's wrong with that? It's my opinion, and I wager you think the exact opposite of it, so why am I the bad guy for it?

I don't care what you think is "better". Your preference is not my concern. But saying that one game has an objectively higher skill ceiling in speedrunning, is plain BS, and I've made a good deal of effort to explain why that is the case, none of which you have yet addressed (most likely because you can't, since all you have is personal preference, but no hands-on expertise to back it up).

 

2 minutes ago, Juza said:

I was banned from the "Doom Speedrunning" discord for giving constructive criticism on a beginner's level, and was confronted by him and a friend of his for that, for they saw it as an insult, and when I tried defending my position, I was banned. I didn't attack anyone personally, I simply commented on a level and was banned for not being aligned with other people's opinions. That's for a fact, if you want to look it up.

I already did look it up (like I said previously, I looked at the history), and the differences of opinions were not why you have been hammered. Playing the victim card is usually best done when you're actually a victim.

 

4 minutes ago, Juza said:

No, just because the game rolls the dice for everyone, it doesn't make it 10/10 fair. Hypothetically: If two players competed side by side, while playing one level the exact same way, and one of them died because multiple hitscanners shot them in an unavoidable closet ambush, while in the other player's screen, the hitscanners didn't react as fast, or didn't do as much damage. That's not the definition of fair. That's rock, paper, scissors: A game reliant entirely on luck.

Nonsense again.

 

Your "theory" fails to explain why it's usually the very same small group of people who claim world records, while others can't even get anywhere near said record times. According to your theory, I should have no problems beating ZM's D2ALLs, because I would simply need the dices to align, and that is plain and simple not correct. Also, according to your theory, any poker player ever would have a shot at the bracelet, but for some reason it's usually a very similar group of people who find themselves at the final table while the common "nobodies" don't get to cash in. Also, according to your theory, you could easily beat my UVmax of phmlspd map 12, or mayhem18P map 19, simply by way of being lucky, so why don't you actually make an effort to prove your point, instead of arguing with air? You know what I think is gonna happen? Nothing is gonna happen, because you know for a fact that luck isn't everything in doom, which is why you're going to argue your way around my proposal, instead of proving that your point of view holds any merits whatsoever.

[seed]

22 minutes ago, Juza said:

- No, just because the game rolls the dice for everyone, it doesn't make it 10/10 fair. Hypothetically: If two players competed side by side, while playing one level the exact same way, and one of them died because multiple hitscanners shot them in an unavoidable closet ambush, while in the other player's screen, the hitscanners didn't react as fast, or didn't do as much damage. That's rock, paper, scissors: A game reliant entirely on luck, whether you win or not -- In a video-game that is supposed to present a challenge, that's not fair. Now, in real life, it'd be.

 

Eh... no, that's actually not the case at all.

 

In virtually any FPS an enemy might choose to shoot you on sight or not, that isn't specific to Doom or Quake. In that case we could all just say all games are luck-dependent on whether the AI wants to kill us or not, which is not the case since you can die to environmental traps, failed jumps, failed tricks, and so on any time.

Edited March 15, 2020 by seed

[Juza]

@seed It's rather an issue when there's no way to counter a death that would be inevitable in case the player had bad RNG.

 

@Nine Inch Heels I never said Doom is entirely a coinflip. I said it has too many possibilities of screwing the player over because of an unlucky RNG call, and compared it to Quake, where that can't be an issue.

 

Doom is a highly skill-required game for sure. Not anyone can do what some runners can. I bet you're better than most too. It just has too many ways to fuck the player over because of its RNG calls, and due to the fear of that, players hold back. To me that's a big flaw and a huge waste that could be avoided if the game had fixed values.

 

So in comparison, I think Quake allows for higher skill plays due to unreliancy on RNG. I still don't see disproval of my logic that, the less luck required, the more of the player's own skill is required.

 

Forgive for it's rude to say, but I think you're biased, which is completely understandable, because you've probably been a fan of Doom for years. I've played Doom far longer than Quake, and still do. It's not just a matter of me liking Quake more due to personal opinion, I see it as a matter of logic. I can love Doom while still accepting that it's not that great. For a reason that might be minor to some; I think that's a fair way to call it personal opinion.

Edited March 15, 2020 by Juza
better wording

[seed]

24 minutes ago, Juza said:

So in comparison, I think Quake allows for higher skill plays due to unreliancy on RNG. I still don't see disproval of my logic that, the less luck required, the more of the player's own skill is required.

 

I think the problem here is that you're blaming RNG a bit too much. Yes, it can fuck you over when, say, you have 70 health with no armor and a Revenant decides to casually throw an 80 damage rocket at the player - but how common are these instances really? If you play well, the chances of RNG ending your run are significantly lower.

 

It's easy to die to all sorts of things in Doom when you haven't mastered it, but once you reach that point the chances of triumphing, with good results too, increase dramatically, and because your understanding of the game's mechanics is now much deeper you cease to see everything as just damage rolls. Don't forget about bugs that occur in vanilla Doom as well, which can be an even bigger bitch than merely bad RNG - like a small Pinky blocking the hallway in front of the exit where the blockmap bug just casually decides to show up and the blast doesn't register. Or the long-wall bug, for that matter. That's another show-stopper when trying to break records, that costs anywhere from 1 second to a few, and that means the run is over.

Edited March 15, 2020 by seed

[Juza]

@seed

I think RNG takes a big role because it affects even the guns you use. Mancubus either taking 3 or 4 SSG shots to die, Pinkies taking 2 or 3 SG shots to die, Arachnotrons taking 2 or 3 SSG shots to die, Barons taking 5 or 6 SSG shots to die, etc... So it happens all the time.

 

Ambushes with no escape happen all the time. Especially in wads like Plutonia 2, where they love putting you in small rooms with large quantities of enemies. It can be inhumanly impossible to avoid all shots, because afterall, you're human and you make mistakes... but I don't find it reasonable to have to gamble every time I do so.

Edited March 15, 2020 by Juza

[TheNoob_Gamer]

2 minutes ago, Juza said:

Arachnotrons taking 2 or 3 SSG shots to die,

Should be replaced with Cacos, 'cause I've never seen Arachnotrons dying in 2 SSG blasts before.

[seed]

Just now, TheNoob_Gamer said:

Should be replaced with Cacos, 'cause I've never seen Arachnotrons dying in 2 SSG blasts before.

 

Same here, even with the max dmg rolls from the RL or SSG I've never witnessed them die in 2 hits, both in my experience and from the demos I've watched.

[Juza]

9 minutes ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

Should be replaced with Cacos, 'cause I've never seen Arachnotrons dying in 2 SSG blasts before.

 

7 minutes ago, seed said:

 

Same here, even with the max dmg rolls from the RL or SSG I've never witnessed them die in 2 hits, both in my experience and from the demos I've watched.

 

It's quite rare, but happens. https://youtu.be/eHlhrrZuakc

 

[MassiveEdgelord]

IMO DOOM 1 and 2 have aged very well with the exception of not being able to jump without a sourceport. Or climb in general.

Edited March 15, 2020 by MassiveEdgelord

[Nine Inch Heels]

3 minutes ago, Juza said:

I never said Doom is entirely a coinflip. I said it has too many possibilities of screwing the player over because of an unlucky RNG call, and compared it to Quake, where that can't be an issue.

See, but that's not something that I think anybody would dispute. The point of contention is quake's skill ceiling being higher due to the lack of RNG. That's where I am going to drop my anchor and argue that RNG, or lack thereof, says nothing about how difficult a game is to optimize. The fact that RNG can get in the way of a runner, and "burn" an attempt, does not take anything away from how skilled the player is, or how hard a run to optimize. Some runs take pretty great risks early on, where runners may need to reset quite often, if they want optimal results, and I'll happily concede that this is annoying to do because I've been there myself often enough, but this has no impact on how high or low doom's skill ceiling is, because there is too much else in doom that is not down to RNG. You don't magically get a world record on a highly contested map just by virtue of being lucky. You have to be skilled enough to see the whole thing through at a fast pace regardless. If anything, quake's system might take some of the frustration out of the equation, but this is a different matter entirely, and it does not reflect on where a game's skill ceiling is or isn't.

 

15 minutes ago, Juza said:

 It just has too many ways to fuck the player over because of its RNG calls, and due to the fear of that, players hold back.

From a casual-play-perspective sure, if you're down to 80 HP, you're gonna double check for homing revenant rockets and such, but from a speedrunning or maxrunning POV this doesn't really apply as much in optimized runs. Unless it's an extremely long run, runners will often pull some pretty risky moves late into a map, and even quake speedruns employ "marathon strategies" too, where the most difficult but effective plays are being avoided in favour of seeing the run through successfully.

 

19 minutes ago, Juza said:

So in comparison, I think Quake allows for higher skill plays due to unreliancy on RNG. I still don't see disproval of my logic that, the less luck required, the more of the player's own skill is required.

See, this is where the problem lies...

 

The less luck is involved with a run, the greater the relative difference that the player's skill makes, yes. But this is not the same as: The more luck is involved, the less skill is required. And your posts here so far implied the latter rather than the former, and that's the one huge difference.

 

You can make the argument that, in a 100% deterministic game, the display of skill is "more pure" due to lack of variance, and you wouldn't raise very many eyebrows if you did. However, you can not make the argument that a 100% deterministic game has a higher skill ceiling than a game that involves RNG. There is no evidence to support such a claim, since you haven't provided any thus far.

 

29 minutes ago, Juza said:

Forgive for it's rude to say, but I think you're biased, which is completely understandable, because you've probably been a fan of Doom for years. I've played Doom far longer than Quake, and still do. It's not just a matter of me liking Quake more due to personal opinion, I see it as a matter of logic. I can love Doom while still accepting that it's not that great. For a reason that might be minor to some; I think that's a fair way to call it personal opinion.

 

So, firstly I'm not what I would call a Doom-fangirl. I like this game, and what I can do with it when it comes to custom maps, but it is not my favourite game at any rate. In fact, the list of things I would criticise about classic Doom is a pretty extensive one, because it is very far from a "perfect" game: Technical limitations, elastic collisions, blockmap bugs, the huge power gap between weapon slot 1-4 and 5-7, discrepancies between sprites and hitbox sizes, mancubus projectile clipping, the way the auto-aim nudges projectiles to the sides at times which means rockets can hit corners in the player's field of view, the "safety pin" which means I need to spam click when I switch to RL or BFG and wanna start firing quickly... it's a damn long list is all I'm saying, and trying to sidestep my POV by slapping a "fangirl label" on my posts is kinda "meh", to be honest.

[Juza]

@Nine Inch Heels fair enough.

I'm not saying that just because of the RNG, you can be a bad player and still win -- very much the contrary. You can be an amazing player, know all the best routes for every official level in the game, know the exact location of every enemy in the level but still get screwed over because, oh, this Chaingunner survived a point-blank Shotgun shot and didn't get a pain state, and reacted fast enough to kill me while I pumped the Shotgun.

 

That doesn't mean Doom is a low-skill game, it just means it doesn't reward skill as much as it should, and also rewards luck by a significant part.

[Redneckerz]

Never in any other community would you have such a veraocious discussion about classic Doom mere days before Eternal comes out.

 

Ill be looking forward to the inevitable take that Eternal's Nightmare Mode rewards luck and does not reward skill as much as it should.

 

@JuzaLet the past be the past.

[hybridial]

On 3/11/2020 at 5:17 PM, The Icon of Sin said:

after you strip away how revolutionary Doom was at the time and look at the base gameplay is doom overrated today?

 

No. I still like it more than most games in the genre that have been released ever since.

 

I also like how it looks a lot better than most modern games. I think there's a mindset one can have where they're more swayed by abstract aesthetics because it's more stimulating to the imagination. When we talk about visual art, style is what really matters, you don't see people say Picasso's work is worthless because it's constructed out of simpler pieces than a high detailed horse painting by George Stubbs (a name I only know because I did my art essay in high school on his work, which was very technically impressive). It's really the end result of what is achieved that matters and I think any reasonably artistically inclined person would agree on that. And I think Adrian Carmack's work on Doom was of a very exemplary standard, that when his work is put through the necessary steps for a source port to run at super high resolutions, it all still looks very good and true to the original intent. 

[snapshot]

Subjective but I'm inclined to call certain upcoming entry that (and to a certain degree the one that came before it), but I'd rather not get into a pointless debate considering doing so is considered blasphemy, being pretentious....etc

 

I still think the one that came before it is a good game but..... I think I've already listed why I think that in another topic so I won't bore you with the details.

Edited March 16, 2020 by sluggard

[jazzmaster9]

On 3/16/2020 at 6:40 AM, sluggard said:

Subjective but I'm inclined to call certain upcoming entry that (and to a certain degree the one that came before it), but I'd rather not get into a pointless debate considering doing so is considered blasphemy, being pretentious....etc

 

I still think the one that came before it is a good game but..... I think I've already listed why I think that in another topic so I won't bore you with the details.

I would incline to say the two particular games released in the 90s are overrated due to how the "new enties" needs to be a copy paste of those game or it will be considered Dum or not real Doom.

 

It think they are all of equal quality... well maybe not TNT

 

Edited March 17, 2020 by jazzmaster9

[snapshot]

20 minutes ago, jazzmaster9 said:

I would incline to say the two particular games released in the 90s are overrated due to how the "new enties" needs to be a copy paste of those game or it will be considered Dum or not real Doom.

 

It think they are all of equal quality... well maybe not TNT

I didn't say anything about the "two particular games released in the 90s" nor do I think the "new entries" need to be "copy paste" of those games or be considered reel Dum or whatever, my issues with the game are completely unrelated to that nonsense, but sure thing, whatever floats your boat.

Edited March 17, 2020 by sluggard

[jazzmaster9]

15 minutes ago, sluggard said:

I didn't say anything about the "two particular games released in the 90s" nor do I think the "new entries" need to be "copy paste" of those games or be considered reel Dum or whatever, my issues with the game are completely unrelated to that nonsense, but sure thing, whatever floats your boat.

I wasn't pertaining to you in particular, getting defensive there.

[snapshot]

8 minutes ago, jazzmaster9 said:

I wasn't pertaining to you in particular, getting defensive there.

Just like you were getting defensive with your earlier statement? lol

Edited March 17, 2020 by sluggard

[jazzmaster9]

4 minutes ago, sluggard said:

Just like you were getting defensive with your earlier statement? lol

i knew you would take the bait.

what way was i being defensive? im just pointing out my observations

[snapshot]

8 minutes ago, jazzmaster9 said:

what way was i being defensive? im just pointing out my observations

You're being defensive about the whole NuDoom thing, my intial post was just a test to see if you'll waste a chance to hop in and defend NuDoom, looks like it worked.

Edited March 17, 2020 by sluggard