Doom Overrated?

[Deleted_Account]

I remember growing up, my circle of friends never really liked Doom. It was a shitty deal that I was the only fan of the game. I remember them criticizing the games graphics/inability to look up and down/no story/mindless gameplay/satanic imagery. And yet games like Duke Nukem (For example) would get constant praise from them, even though the game wasn't actually that different. And now look, it's 2020 and the Doom series is still going strong while other games from the era have gone into obscurity. Even the Dooming community is still highly active.

 

The fun part of this is my big brother introduced me to Doom back in '93 and videogames in general, even though he himself wasn't a gamer. He was into sports and mixed martial arts lol.

[Nine Inch Heels]

42 minutes ago, Cynical said:

https://learntocounter.com/apples-and-oranges-and-morons/

 

It doesn't matter what the author of the write up you linked thinks an "apples and oranges" argument implies. If your only argument is that Power B-hops in quake are harder because players need to tap the move-forward key, then maybe you should spend some time trying to beat hangtime2 to get a grasp as to what the nuances of the supposedly so much easier DeFrag strafejumps are.

 

In fact, I could quite comfortably make the argument that strafejumping in quake is easier to control by virtue of it being slower paced than CPM in DeFrag, as well as being a lot more forgiving and flexible with regards to mouse movement. I could have also brought up that not every damn jump in quake speedrunning requires the supposedly super human feat of tapping the forward key instead of holding it down. I could have also made the argument that DeFrag is harder by virtue of not only having strafejumps and rocket/grenade boosts, but also having sections where you need to climb walls with the Plasma Rifle, which is a skill that quake doesn't even ask for. Your air control argument is null and void, since CPM also has air control, and not too little of it, or in other words: You wouldn't even have brought it up, if you were aware that air control isn't "unique" to quake, because it would have been too easy of an argument to brush off. So why didn't I bring all that stuff up in the first place? It's because I'm not interested in shitting on one speedrunning scene in favour of parading something I personally like around as the supposedly "better", or for the sheer thrill of derailing a thread to all hell and back just to argue for arguing's sake.

 

It doesn't matter if it's classic Doom, quake, or DeFrag, all these games are hard to optimize, and some of the reasons as to why they're hard to optimize are so obviously different that arguing how much harder one game might be - or which one's the hardest/easiest - is simply pointless, not because comparing is pointless, but because it's ultimately going where engaging in a discussion with you also usually goes, namely: Nowhere.

[Cynical]

The reason I didn't bring up air-control with regards to CPM is because CPM turns it off whenever you're holding down W+A or W+D, and tones it down greatly whenever you're holding down just W, so that you can still do VQ3-style strafejumping to gain speed.  CPM movement is actually the easiest of the three for just moving around (for deathmatch combat, it's actually a lot harder because of how it privileges forward movement, which results in needing more flicks, but that's not an issue for speedrunning or DeFrag) since you can air-control around corners while having easy VQ3 strafejumping; VQ3 has the additional mechanical task of needing to re-circlejump to get around tight corners, QW is harder to accelerate in because you have to keep changing your movement direction (note, NOT facing!  Actual movement vector!) up to 45 degrees each way from desired direction of travel, and do it repeatedly and quickly (and it's really NOT more forgiving in terms of mouse movement, there's still an optimum turning speed, it's just a much faster turning speed than in VQ3). 

 

There's a reason why the internet's biggest speedrun database started as a Quake 1 speedrunning site, not a Doom or DeFrag site.  There's a reason why so many of the early great Doom speedrunners moved on to Quake 1 and founded the aformentioned site, instead of sticking with Doom.  Quake 1/QW has the most challenging set of movement mechanics of any FPS game ever for speedrunning, and it's not even close; pretending otherwise is just burying your head in the sand.

Edited April 12, 2020 by Cynical

[Chip]

This is wrongly titled. This isn't asking is the game is overrated, it's asking if it's still popular.

[cabalcrow]

6 hours ago, Cynical said:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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6 hours ago, Cynical said:

The reason I didn't bring up air-control with regards to CPM is because CPM turns it off whenever you're holding down W+A or W+D, and tones it down greatly whenever you're holding down just W, so that you can still do VQ3-style strafejumping to gain speed.  CPM movement is actually the easiest of the three for just moving around (for deathmatch combat, it's actually a lot harder because of how it privileges forward movement, which results in needing more flicks, but that's not an issue for speedrunning or DeFrag) since you can air-control around corners while having easy VQ3 strafejumping; VQ3 has the additional mechanical task of needing to re-circlejump to get around tight corners, QW is harder to accelerate in because you have to keep changing your movement direction (note, NOT facing!  Actual movement vector!) up to 45 degrees each way from desired direction of travel, and do it repeatedly and quickly (and it's really NOT more forgiving in terms of mouse movement, there's still an optimum turning speed, it's just a much faster turning speed than in VQ3). 

 

There's a reason why the internet's biggest speedrun database started as a Quake 1 speedrunning site, not a Doom or DeFrag site.  There's a reason why so many of the early great Doom speedrunners moved on to Quake 1 and founded the aformentioned site, instead of sticking with Doom.  Quake 1/QW has the most challenging set of movement mechanics of any FPS game ever for speedrunning, and it's not even close; pretending otherwise is just burying your head in the sand.

 

I'm sorry, but this is a shallow view on the strafejumping in CPM and in VQ3. One aspect that makes the SJ in Q3 or DeFRaG that complex is the snap zones. Because the game needed to support multiplayer thought internet back then, Id used a lot of rounding off numbers to reduce the package size that had to be sent through the internet. Because of these snap zones, different angles in regards to the "north" in the level gave you different acceleration. Because of this depending on which direction you want to go, you need to use different mouse movement, which makes everything extremely complex.
This is also where the CPM air control makes things more complex - you can do micro turns in air that change the angles thus giving you better acceleration, something you cannot do in VQ3. Those micro turns can last just a couple of frames (8 ms per frame) and you need to make turns with different size depending on your current speed and your current direction. This all makes even speedrunning a level that is a straight line extremely complex in DeFRaG and 20 years in people still makes new records on those.
As for the complexity of VQ3, the lack of air control doesn't mean that the difficult part is that you need to CJ on each turn - it is played more around skimming (clipping) on walls and using the level layout to turn while losing speed in a certain direction. In essence, the complexity comes from spacing, you can't just correct your spacing with air control like in CPM, which makes both strafing and weapon usage extremely location dependant. Both disciplines in DeFRaG have their own hard and easy areas in terms of skill, and stating that one is outright harder than the other is an ignorant opinion of how they work.

P.S.: This is also only about strafing in DeFRaG, this don't even account for all the extremely complex weapon movement mechanics in DeFRaG compared to the original Quake. As for the powerbhopping in Q1, where you need to press w for minimal time on landing, I would just mention that in Q3 and DeFRaG holding jump lowers your acceleration thought strafejumping a lot. This essentially makes timing your jump the same as timing +forward in Q1.

Edited April 12, 2020 by cabalcrow
formatting issues

[joe-ilya]

Doom is better than Windows.

[Scrabbs]

doom 1 and it's original three episodes are amazing but don't hold a candle too the likes of the 3D Build engine games. Doom 2 for the first 13 episodes it's just as good if not better, but the rest of the game severely nose dives quality. I believe people only really like Doom 2 because of modding, super shotgun, and monsters. But that doesn't matter because 64 is better than both.

On 3/11/2020 at 3:57 PM, SirJuicyLemon said:

In any case, at least nowadays, I feel as if Doom is underrated

 

God no, I've never met a person in IRL or online that hates Doom. Don't t care for sure, but out hate? No way

[SirJuicyLemon]

4 hours ago, Scrabbs said:

doom 1 and it's original three episodes are amazing but don't hold a candle too the likes of the 3D Build engine games. Doom 2 for the first 13 episodes it's just as good if not better, but the rest of the game severely nose dives quality. I believe people only really like Doom 2 because of modding, super shotgun, and monsters. But that doesn't matter because 64 is better than both.

God no, I've never met a person in IRL or online that hates Doom. Don't t care for sure, but out hate? No way

To underrate =/= To hate

Not equal things (not even similar to be honest)

[Deadwing]

As far as modern gaming go, I also believe it's underrated.

 

At least for me Doom is basically FPS "Minecraft" with one of the best in-game mechanics ever. Even without the modding aspect, it's still a superb game.

Edited April 14, 2020 by Deadwing