Unpopular Doom Opinions

[yakfak]

i need less badass metal cringe and more personal cringe in my doom wads, i don't relate to a version of doomguy who's good at the bfg or who listens to nevermore but i know how to feel like shit

[baja blast rd.]

A lot of what people praise as 'smart combat' is just surface-level attributes, like being able to obviously see what roles monsters are playing from the jump, or how 'carefully' closets/triggers/etc. seem to be set up.

 

But to me 95% of what really matters for how smart combat is how setups play as systems: which implies many trials, many approaches, in many ways. 

 

Sometimes a setup that looks like a messy, sloppy brawl is amazingly robust and varied and fun. Sometimes a setup where every monster or faction is doing one specific clear thing...is just defused by one obvious tactic.

 

It works the other way too: sometimes a setup can be minimalist and really genius with its mechanics. Sometimes a messy, sloppy brawl is really just dumb. 

 

But the way the fight looks if you're just looking at its components, and way it looks if you only play it once, is just the tip of the iceberg, and so much more matters than that.

 

That's one reason I find the "fights with monsters used efficiently and smartly" vs. "fights that emphasize quantity and spam monsters at you" to be a distinction that doesn't hold up when it comes to thinking about how smart and well-designed combat is. 

[baja blast rd.]

People saying "[map] didn't even make it onto the 100 Most Memorable Maps list" ('even' lol) or "how was x the only map from [wad] that made it on," which are comments I actually see reasonably often, are mostly revealing that they have a poor sense for the scope of the Doom community's output.

 

I mean fair; that's not something everyone will know. But it is still a good learning opportunity! 

 

100 is a really small number. That's 4 maps a year on average in the 1993-2018 span. 

 

For scope comparison, if you took even one map from 10 wads a year on average (which might be fewer than 10 wads in earlier years, more than 10 in 2010+) you'd produce a 250 Most Memorable Maps list. And 10 wads a year is in no way having to strain into "bad wads" territory (for the maps that are chosen because they are good). 

 

In fact you could easily pick 2 maps from 10 wads, and 1 from another 10 -- without straining and having to pick maps that are merely "decent." Like...that's the best map or two out of just 20 wads, which is still going to be full of top-flight options. That would be a 750 Most Memorable Maps list.

 

Hell, even merely 'decent' wads sometimes have one or two really good maps in them. I think community output would definitely support a (theoretical) 1500 Most Memorable Maps list without having to pick anything that doesn't rank high on either combined quality + memorability (+ infamy). 1500 seems absurd, because I don't think even most experienced players can easily name 20-40 wads in a year off the top of their head, much less 1-2 very good or memorable maps from each of them, but that's the thing: it's silly to rely on "what someone can name" to make that judgment, because those wads and maps actually exist. 1500 would be pretty reasonable (in theory). 

 

Ultimately they chose 100 partly (I'd guess) because they are humans with time-energy limits and not paid for this lol (and wanted it to be readable)! But it's a pretty small roster all things considered, despite "100" sounding like a large number. 

 

So to think a wad for sure deserved an extra spot out of 100, or that a particular map should have been an obvious shoo-in from others' perspectives, implies a huge misjudgment of scope (that or tunnel vision and not being able to understand that not everyone will like Your Favorite Wad exactly as much as you do) -- which is a good mistake to correct. 

 

(But I've actually seen people who know what they are talking about make that mistake too -- so it's probably also that issue where humans generally have bad intuition for numbers and magnitude.) 

[The Nate]

On 8/20/2022 at 9:16 PM, The Nate said:

I hate the Slayer lore and the kind of impact it's had on the greater Doom community and I really wish id had stuck with that "F-90" stuff they had at E3 2015 and prior

Following on from this, I think the only way it can be salvaged is if they pull a "legacy character" thing post-TAG2 and have someone who's "just a guy" again earn the title of "Doom Slayer"

[baja blast rd.]

two different thoughts:

 

1) it's really silly when people hyperfixate on the most irrelevant of minutia about what the 'true experience' constitutes, while not having a single interesting thought about said experience…or any experience really. 

 

like, you'll see entire vehement, vapid discussions and arguments about: 

 

- what the right medkit color / symbol is 

- NEIS e3 "are e3m5/e3m6 secret maps or normal maps"

- whether D64 should be played with a controller or keyboard >:-D

- censorship

- Hitler's mustache

 

and then you see that no one who cares about that will have a single interesting critical thought or anecdote, in their whole body of posting, about that experience they so carefully Hitlerkept.

 

just 'was it legit or not'-type silliness.

 

it feels like the sort of people who are obsessed with collecting things but transposed to 'experience' rather than physical objects, and they don't care about what's on it, only if it's what they think of as 'real' or 'fake'. but unlike collecting physical objects, where it at least makes sense because yeah those can be real or fake, there's no real thing as a real or fake game experience. the mere act of engaging with a game creates a new experience even if you have the exact same settings, hardware, as another person; even if you follow the exact same route in the game and do the exact same thing; you're bringing in a different perspective and skillset and perception and gaming history and lived experience to reference than everyone else and that cascades, within minutes, into a massively different experience than everyone else, and the variation in that is 1000x more than whether you're playing with a certain setting or not.

 

*

 

2) in fact it's even larger than pistol starts v. continuous, saves vs. no saves, or the other common gamer fixations. 

like two people can play Sunlust w/ the same settings and same mode but if they bring vastly different perceptual, problem-solving, and experiential toolboxes to it, they are destined to have very different experiences on the exact same mode (like pistol starts UV or whatever), and that would be the case even if they have the same skill level (!).  and meanwhile you can probably find a pairing of people where one does UV-pistol start and the other does HMP-carryovers that have much closer experiences to one another than that UV-pistol start duo. and yet you never see threads handwringing about problem-solving techniques and which are emphasized or something like that.

 

with navigation-taxing wads, no one discusses "do you you try to deliberately hold important points of emphasis in your head and think of routes to them and how you might get from place to place vs. do you improvise and go where ever it takes you" even though stuff like that makes a much bigger difference than whether one gets that very last secret or exits content having found 27 out of 28. or with story wads, you don't hear people talking about things like, "so, uh…when you enter areas, do you focus more on your conception of the setting of the map and where this one area falls into it -- or do you focus more on what individual details mean and signify and what history might be underneath?" (for example) instead of it all just boiling down to "hah! I killed the last few imps, now I got the Full Experience."

 

not saying that the more sophisticated things should be used instead as battle grounds for determining what constitutes the true experience either. because doing that at all is stupid. (although threads about that would be better!) it's that defining that is basically an intractable problem because of factors like that -- and as such handwriting about saves/etc. is misguided because it's potentially drowned out by all those factors that can never be fully accounted for and controlled for and that are even more meaningful. also those threads tend to be silly because people blissfully fixate on saves vs. no saves as if little else matters for how "serious vs. casual" are playing, when it's really more the tip of the iceberg.

 

everyone should create their own 'terms of engagement' -- and as long as it's fun and coherent and works for you, that is what matters. personal 'house rules' can (and implicitly do) go a lot deeper than basic settings.

[Kwahn]

I literally created my account just now to make this hot take. 

Any fight that relies on good RNG is a dumb, bullshit fight.  If I need a cybie to shoot 9 rockets in 5 seconds or I lose the run, it's dumb and I hate it.  

I love fights that rely on good infighting for a safer time, and give you the tools to survive long enough to smooth out any RNG fluctuations, but I hate fights that NEED in-fighting, especially quick in-fighting or relying on the firing cycle of a single specific jerk.

 

I'm just bitter about Abandon map3's first fight, tbh.  A wonderful concept marred by needing cybies to play exceptionally well to not get Checkmated by mancubi/revs on the backend.

Edited August 30, 2022 by Kwahn

[SleepyVelvet]

Sunlust is overrated and actually has some of Ribbiks' poorest work.  For example, the final fight of Map10, Maru, is unfair, poorly laid out, and clearly not well balanced for the Xbox 360 controller.

 

edit -   :^)

Edited August 30, 2022 by NoisyVelvet

[Nefelibeta]

3 hours ago, Kwahn said:

Any fight that relies on good RNG is a dumb, bullshit fight.  If I need a cybie to shoot 9 rockets in 5 seconds or I lose the run, it's dumb and I hate it.  

It's the strategy that needs good RNG to work, not fight relies on RNG to be beaten.

[Nefelibeta]

3 hours ago, NoisyVelvet said:

Sunlust is overrated

Yeah fuck Sunlust, hyshw and crumpets are my jam now :^)

[Ravendesk]

3 hours ago, Kwahn said:

I literally created my account just now to make this hot take. 

Any fight that relies on good RNG is a dumb, bullshit fight.  If I need a cybie to shoot 9 rockets in 5 seconds or I lose the run, it's dumb and I hate it.  

I love fights that rely on good infighting for a safer time, and give you the tools to survive long enough to smooth out any RNG fluctuations, but I hate fights that NEED in-fighting, especially quick in-fighting or relying on the firing cycle of a single specific jerk.

 

I'm just bitter about Abandon map3's first fight, tbh.  A wonderful concept marred by needing cybies to play exceptionally well to not get Checkmated by mancubi/revs on the backend.

I think rng-based fight is totally fine if it's the first/second fight of the map. It is really hard to balance some fights between being fun and being consistent, so putting it at the start of the map is a good compromise imo.

[Lucius Wooding]

Doom doesn't exist to reward your every move, the unpredictability and chaos is a part of it. Sometimes the monsters won't cooperate for anything but others they'll save your ass when you don't deserve it. The mapper can try to make allowances for the player and set up infighting opportunities but there's only so much they can do. I don't feel it to be necessary for the mapper to mod the AI of that cyberdemon turret so the fight will beat itself, for example. 

 

I know I've gotten annoyed from deaths before, but if you're playing hard maps on the edge of your skill level it's silly to be frustrated by not being able to 100% survive them. Fights that are barely beatable have been part of the mapping tradition for years and the skill ceiling has gone up tremendously over that time. 

[baja blast rd.]

In my experience fights seeming like they are down to RNG is a sign of not using the right approach, or not accounting for RNG is part of the strategy (which can be really fun imo and a lot of the depth of finding a good approach). 

 

For example SWTW m02's secret bridge cyb just refuses to shoot sometimes, which has drawn complaints, but if you use an infight-heavy approach you can melee induce the HKs/barons forever. It's still scary but obviously beatable like 100% ^{by a better player}.

 

 

If someone is circling-strafing a fight, which sometimes works, but sometimes  cyb disperses infighting rockets and kills them, then maybe "circle strafing idly" is not a good approach. 

 

A lot of RNG-heavy fights are more that RNG wins sometimes and bails out a subpar approach / gameplan, rather than needing to get lucky to win. 

 

Also some RNG-heavy fights -- that still have a component of RNG that can't be abstracted out -- need gameplans, not strategies. A strategy is like a linear set of actions usually, but a gameplan is more like "if this happens, then I do this, but if this other thing happens, then I do this instead." 

 

Also related take: difficulty/RNG is sometimes overrated as an eval metric. A lot of RNG-dependent fights (or rather, fight-strategy pairings) are imo still extremely exciting and fun. People sometimes try to prove "this fight has no RNG" as in "it's well designed" but that doesn't always equate that. (I actually don't like the SWTW 02 bridge fight all that much even though I'm one of the apparently few people who feels it has no RNG, mostly because of the nearby impassable midtex being awkward and how queasy the cell ammo grab feels to do. :P)

[Trar]

There should be a parody sourceport called Crappy Doom.

[Lippeth]

I genuinely prefer the sound of random pitch shifting over static playback, at least for the stock sounds, and will always be slightly disappointed that it was accidentally removed from 1.4 on. Most if not all ports allow for it which is great, and letting me adjust the range is a huge plus because it can get out of hand very quickly.

 

Doom 1.2 had the most subtle and natural sounding pitch shifting from what I've played, and it wasn't until playing classic Doom with the BFG Edition on the PS3 that I even cared about it. There was just something about the rapid fire of the chaingun combined with random pitch shifting and controller vibration that felt really good, and now even on pc with a keyboard and mouse I prefer it over hearing the same samples over and over like a bad prank call with a sound board.

 

It's like I know I'm wrong, but it just feels right.

[Lucius Wooding]

The chaingun with pitch shifting:

 

[baja blast rd.]

random pitch shifting is good

 

 

[Lippeth]

9 minutes ago, Lucius Wooding said:

The chaingun with pitch shifting:

Without pitch shifting:

 

Edited August 30, 2022 by Lippeth

[Grain of Salt]

10 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

[video]

 

 

Good god

[Trar]

49 minutes ago, Lucius Wooding said:

The chaingun with pitch shifting:

 

 

Well now we need someone to make this a chaingun sound replacement.

[baja blast rd.]

More "obscure opinion" than "unpopular": 

 

Ambitious UV-max speedruns have a very low success rate per attempt mostly because the runner asymptotically goes for "as low a success rate as I can possibly get without being annoyed by the run" in order to get as low a time as they can reasonably get. That's the main mechanism involved, not that playing so quickly is inherently dangerous. 

 

In fact unless there is some low-probability trick involved in the run that is required for that fast a time, what happens is that increasing slack very quickly improves the success rate of the route involved. 

 

It would not be uncommon for a run that ideally is shooting for ~5:00, and has a 1 in 100 exit rate per attempt at that pace, to survive 80+% of attempts if the runner used that route but allowed themselves slack to exit in around 6:00 or something. Even ~5:30 would be a huge increase in survivability relative to the more exacting run.

 

(Also to be clear: the key part of this is that slack is added to the route's "ideal time." A slower run (for example 5:30) that has a slower route (5:30 ideally) would now be extremely risky again. Usually what happens with maxrun back-and-forths that have substantial time improvements is that the route gets a lot better, rather than simply more attempts / rolling for better RNG.) 

The run would still look "fast as hell" to a viewer (although with some clear slowdowns to, like, grab health, or chase down a monster, or tolerate a bad outcome, or something that would be absent in a more exacting run, but those would still look "fast").  

 

Part of the reason the exacting (competitive max) run would be ultra low-probability is that the player would do stuff like: reset if they missed an early SSG shot or something, or not grab health because it's out of the way (adding 3-4 seconds by grabbing some health can be pretty bad), or keep diving into the fire if something crazy was happening instead of just taking a moment to let it cool down. All of that would drive down the likelihood of getting an exit. Like a run that clearly is on pace for 5:15 in that case would be pretty much useless to the runner. 

 

But with even a bit of extra slack added to the backbone of the ultra-fast route none of that is required anymore, and then the route becomes way easier to survive. In casual play, small bad events that would lead to resets could be safely ignored, and "taking a moment" becomes an occasional option.

 

Some effects: 

 

- The best survival routes tend to be modifications of learned fast maxrun routes, just, now, slower, and maybe playing cautiously in that part that is dangerous no matter what. A very slow route is unlikely to be ideal for survival for someone who can do a faster one, simply because of the conjunctive odds involved with being exposed to more risk for longer. At the very least, a slow survival route can just add the ways of playing faster that decrease overall risk and difficulty (which is common) and leave out all the ways that have a neutral effect or increase it. The best way to beat a long map comfortably and consistently in 8 minutes is to have the route plotted out that can once in a while survive it in 6 minutes ;). 

 

- While it's true that a record UV-max run probably required lots of practice and attempts even for a very good player, such a player, on an intuitive-enough map, could probably pull off superficially similar runs with not much more than "I played this casually once then godmoded it a couple times to get a feel for what a fast route feels like to execute"-type knowledge. They'd be like 10-20% slower but that would still look similar on viewing.

[Dusty_Rhodes]

Not some intelligent critique, but maybe unpopular:

 

I really, really dislike Romero's Doom 2 maps. I think Gotcha is the ugliest IWAD map, is in the top five of stupidest layouts of the official games, and is in the Doom Hall of Shame when it comes to being fun to play. Circle of Death, The Living End, and Industrial Zone are excellent and are outliers but the rest just stink. Boring combat, weird layouts, ugly visuals. Sandy has some not so great levels (Downtown, Nirvana, etc.) but he also has Entryway, The Pit, Tricks and Traps, Refueling Base (with Tom Hall), Suburbs (one of the best maps in the game in my (not so) humble opinion), and The Chasm. Sandy gets wayyy too much hate in Doom 2.

 

Also I don't dislike Romero or his work, far from it. His maps are my favorites in Ultimate Doom, especially Episode 4. Just don't get the love in his Doom 2 maps.

[Lucius Wooding]

I mean, you like 3 of his Doom 2 maps out of 6. I agree that maps 20 and 17 are kinda shit (although I think Abandoned Mines is ok by comparison) but how are half of them "outliers"? 

 

But yeah I do agree Sandy gets too much criticism. He has some of the highlights of both games although he suffers from having to create most of the filler in a limited time. None of the mappers from either game was that consistent IMO in terms of quality, they were all using some gimmicks and experimenting on some of their work.

[Lippeth]

3 hours ago, Trar said:

 

Well now we need someone to make this a chaingun sound replacement.

You think it'd be neat, and then you actually do it.

Spoiler

 

https://www.mediafire.com/file/g9b23bbxc59kbnm/flintstone_scramblegun.wad/file

 

[RataUnderground]

I can play most of the wads in UV difficulty, and I did, until I realize I have more fun in most of the wads in HMP. Its not that I'm not a good player (though certainly not a Doom god), Its just mappers have the bad habit of fill the UV difficulty with bullshit because its fun to see others suffer at our mercy.

Edited August 30, 2022 by RataUnderground

[XK 47]

Screw the chaingun. Those barrels are large enough to fit presumably 50.cal rounds. Why can't doomguy load in 12 gauge shotgun shells in there instead?

[heliumlamb]

all the media says is "SR50, John Romero, BFG9000, Blockmap, Slaughtermap"

i just wanna

For My Own Sake!

[Codename_Delta]

23 hours ago, XK 47 said:

Screw the chaingun. Those barrels are large enough to fit presumably 50.cal rounds. Why can't doomguy load in 12 gauge shotgun shells in there instead?

Or better, berserk punch them and avoid damage like he'd do with any demon with melee.

[Gougaru]

I actually like a little extra blood when playing classic( Nash on super low as an example) Maybe some wall splatter. Nothing crazy but just enough.  I know the majority of pure vanilla enjoyers don't but I feel a little extra feels right.

[TheSlipgateStudios]

I know this might be controversial, but I prefer Doom 1 over Doom 2. Yeah there are more monster types, the super shotty, but I prefer the simplicity of the first game more.

[kinker31]

4 hours ago, TheSlipgateStudios said:

I know this might be controversial, but I prefer Doom 1 over Doom 2. Yeah there are more monster types, the super shotty, but I prefer the simplicity of the first game more.

Not entirely, The 8-level (plus secret map) episodic nature of Doom 1/Ultimate Doom's a lot easier to digest than the 30-32 map gauntlet of Doom 2, at least if you're planning on doing it all in one shot.