Unpopular Doom Opinions

[benji]

The kills, monsters and items counters needlessly gamify things that should be their own reward. It's not nearly as bad as the new Doom games' "everything is a collectable, everything is a mechanic" approach but I still think the game would be better without them.

[CFWMagic]

I have quite a few of those actually ...

1. I have inverted tech-base fatigue. How does that work? Simple. Any level that is NOT tech-base is less enjoyable to me, with some being actively infuriating. (More on this later)

2. I detest Plutonia. Specifically for the same reasons most people like it: I absolutely HATE it's texture work. The temples, predominantly rocky textures and bright green colors (I'm colorblind) make my head hurt and I can not play plutonia for longer than 30 minutes at a time. TNT on the other hand, having many more tech-base levels, feels like a breeze of fresh air.

3. If me saying TNT > Plutonia didn't already infuriate most people ... Then wait until you hear just how much I loathe Plutonia 2. Being colorblind, any imp, in any Plutonia 2 map is completely invisible to me. And there are even MORE temples, jungles, greenery, vines, wood ... But there is more. I once spent 30 minutes in Plutonia Map 16 ... And couldn't finish it. Despite all the monsters being dead. Why? Because I couldn't find the switch to open up the exit. It almost certainly is a skill issue, but I can't overstate it ... There NOTHING I hate more than Plutonia 2. I hate every single bit, fiber and cell of it. I despise it's mazes. I absolutely hate it un-intuitiveness where I have no idea what ANY switch does, let alone where those switches are. I am literally blind 90% of the time because everything is green. The worst part? I know that it's a skill issue and user mindset problem. So, I actually forced myself to finish the whole thing on UV-Fast, regardless of how much I hated it. Worst decision I've ever made. I forced myself to not play any other wad until I finished Plutonia 2.

The result? It actually made me a productive member of society because I actually refused to play Doom 2. The whole experience was such a chore that I actually would take week long breaks between play sessions. I actively dreaded trying to play Doom at all. It took me a whopping 3 months to fully UV-Fast PL2. And forcing myself to do it only cemented my hatred towards it even more. You can probably tell by the amount of vitriol in this point alone ... But I really can't help it. Even if I know it's only personal taste and personal user experience ... I truly wish for Plutonia 2 to burn in HELL (pun intended).

4. Conversely, I actually like TNT. And again, for the same reason most people hate it. I like it because it's boring. Because it's extremely straightforward (for the most part), I don't get lost. Because it has a lot of greys, metal and browns, I can actually see enemies and engage them reliably. Because it barely has any puzzles or mazes, I don't get stuck and can breeze through it on UV-fast. To be honest, I actually prefer TNT to Doom 2, even.

5. My least favorite enemy is the revenant. I'm not quite at a point where it makes me nerdrage, because the reason I dislike the revenant is ... How they're used in a wide variety of WADs. The revenant, in my view, is overused to the point of oversaturation. It feels like every single WAD has at least a few maps where the revenant is spammed into oblivion. Don't know what to place in the monster closed? Default to revenant. Don't know how to fill the gap between complex fights? Spam over 9000 revenant fights. Need a monster? Place a revenant. Other monsters exist? Nonsense. We need more revenants. Ultimately, I'm grateful to these wads, because this revenant spam gave me enough muscle memory where revenants aren't a threat to me at all on their own, and it takes some clever placement and monster usage to make them threatening when paired with other monsters ... But it hasn't made revenants any more fun. They're not challenging. They're tedious and boring.

6. My least favorite weapon is the supershotgun, followed by the rocket-launcher. Much for the same reason that I dislike the revenant. The sheer amount of overuse. Supershotgun much more so than rocket launcher. The super-shotgun is the answer to 99% of problems. And unless I'm really tight on ammo ... There's no reason to ever use the shotgun ever again. If I'm not playing slaughter maps, then the super-shotgun is the only weapon ever worth using, ever. I can either stunlock things with the chaingun ... Or just outright kill them with a supershotgun making the chaingun moot. I can cut through enemies with a plasmarifle ... Or again, just kill everything with the supershotgun and not bother spending BFG ammo. I can bother with the rocketlauncher ... Or remove all danger to myself because the supershotgun can take out groups of fodder safer and cheaper than the RL. Rocket Launcher I have less problems with, because I can't just spam it on auto-pilot. It's not as effective against bosses, and I need to not blow myself up ... But SSG? Hold-left click to automatically win. Unless, of course, I'm going for high-challenge WADs.

7. I don't like PrBoom+ and legacy comp. Purism is the way to go for demos and in general ... But I really, really dislike it. Mostly because of weird bugs. The biggest of these being noclipping projectiles and blockmap bugs. It's especially infuriating when playing high-challenge maps/slaughter maps. I'm not a really good player, so it takes me quite a bit of effort and concentration to do good. And then, when the Vanilla doom bugs gets me killed ... I get frustrated. As a result, I've moved to GZDoom and Skulltag for my casual faffing about. Though I do use Odamex when I do need to play legacy. And I do still occasionally force myself to play full legacy just so I don't get too comfortable.

8. I actually do like Brutal Doom. Though not the way most people do. See, I view Brutal Doom in the same way as I view Doom Eternal and, to a lesser degree, Doom 2016. To me, all three of those aren't Doom. They're Quake. And having grown up with Quake 3 Arena and Quake 3 DeFRaG ... It's right up my alley. Mind you, I actually had to re-balance and re-code brutal doom to iron out it's performance issues. Another thing I like doing is counteract #6 above. And that I usually do by making every weapon useable against nearly every enemy. The way I did this was by buffing fodder and mediums, while also buffing bullet weapons. The assault rifle I built, for instance, is nearly as powerful as the plasmagun. It's just as effective, just in a different way. It reloads very slowly, has a small magazine, has heavy recoil, but has a scope, a semi-automatic mode and is extremely accurate. It's just as good and cheaper at killing barons as the plasma, for instance. But you REALLY don't want to be using it instead of the plasma if you're dealing with large groups or rapid enemies. In doing so, I actually solved BD's biggest problem: All the weapons being essentially the same. My build has all weapons be equally useful, and with practice, most bread and butter weapons are equally powerful. But each has their own situational strength and weakness, without overall being better or worse than other weapons. That solves a lot of my gripe with classic doom weapon progression, i.e.: The pistol is useless if you have a chaingun. The chaingun is (almost) useless if you have a plasma rifle. The shotgun is (almost) useless if you have a supershotgun. (And again, exaggerating for comedic whining purpose. But I'm sure you know what I mean. Weaker weapons become situational once you get bigger guns)

9. I actually like Tom Hall's vision for classic doom. I do agree that Romero and Carmack took Doom in a better direction, but I can't help but wonder what could have been if Doom was more story and lore driven. Mostly because I also grew up with classic System Shock and, at the time, it left a much more pronounced effect on me than doom did. Obviously, after playing both for decades, I know every corner of SS, while Doom still remains fresh. And, to some degree, Doom 2016/Eternal kind of IS Tom Hall style doom with a more pronounced lore and storytelling ... Which ... Now that I think about it, isn't all that great. To parrot decino on this ... Once you've went through Doom 2016/Eternal, there's really little reason to ever play it again. Though, that's probably mostly because of how it's level system is worked. As far as I'm aware, there's no way to make custom maps for it easily without snap-map. And snap-map, while a decent idea, has severe limitations and wasn't all that long lived either.

10. I actually like Doom 3. And again, for the same reasons I like Brutal Doom. Because ... I don't interpret it as doom. I released Doom 3 custom, somewhere here and on ModDB. And it basically overhauls the game to play almost exactly like System Shock. Respawning and random spawn enemies, tougher, faster, more effective weapons. Much less max ammo (and scarcer), scavenging humanoid bodies for resources, carrying medkits and adrenaline with you, night vision goggles ... It's basically a more modern System Shock 2, with the only thing missing from it to be a proper system shock game is all the levels being a hub which you return to multiple times and scavenge around.

Okay, that's all for now. I feel like I've made enough of a fool of myself for today. Please don't smack me around (too hard) for my ignorant opinions :p

Edited October 23, 2022 by CFWMagic
Fixing the many, many spelling mistakes. Being Russian sucks.

[TheHambourgeois]

15 hours ago, rzh said:

I feel like the IWADs look and play best with the original aspect ratio and resolution.

I sometimes use higher resolutions and rarely 16:9 to match my monitor but the textures and sprites lose some grit at higher resolutions and look much blander at even 640x400. I guess it's because of the way my brain works and not for any objective reason, but still to me they look more detailed, grittier and some imperfections aren't noticed as easily.

And framing a room in a 4:3 ratio also makes it look better to me, sometimes a room could look empty or there could be too much visual noise on the sides. 4:3 also makes certain proportions look more natural in some levels.

 

For custom WADs it depends, for example I can't play Sunlust in low res because so many details get mushed togheter.

I feel this way about a lot of retro shooters, when I was going through quake 1 I was playing with Engoo on the original levels and expansions, and in quake 2 I was using the qbismsuper8 software renderer that implements colored lighting. Give me chunky pixels or give me death

[peach freak]

22 hours ago, rzh said:

I feel like the IWADs look and play best with the original aspect ratio and resolution.

I sometimes use higher resolutions and rarely 16:9 to match my monitor but the textures and sprites lose some grit at higher resolutions and look much blander at even 640x400. I guess it's because of the way my brain works and not for any objective reason, but still to me they look more detailed, grittier and some imperfections aren't noticed as easily.

And framing a room in a 4:3 ratio also makes it look better to me, sometimes a room could look empty or there could be too much visual noise on the sides. 4:3 also makes certain proportions look more natural in some levels.

 

For custom WADs it depends, for example I can't play Sunlust in low res because so many details get mushed togheter.

 

Yeah, I normally use Chocolate Doom for the IWADs for this reason, definitely gives it that classic feel. I feel like the IWADs look "plastic" on higher resolutions. I tend to play PWADs, even vanilla-compatible ones on source ports as they normally have more detail put into them which IMO makes them better for higher resolutions.

[CasualScrub]

I think the Archvile is a genuinely poorly designed enemy to fight. There's nothing fun about being forced to hide from an otherwise unavoidable attack and his ability to resurrect enemies is annoying as hell. He disturbs and ruins the flow of any fight he gets put into.

 

Also I think his design is lame.

[Ravendesk]

5 hours ago, CasualScrub said:

I think the Archvile is a genuinely poorly designed enemy to fight. There's nothing fun about being forced to hide from an otherwise unavoidable attack and his ability to resurrect enemies is annoying as hell. He disturbs and ruins the flow of any fight he gets put into.

 

Also I think his design is lame.

I think we can close the thread now, the winner is decided.

[Tarnsman]

There are only two bad levels in The Master Levels, one of which is a complete shitpost, and most of the rest are actually good.

 

I hope one day Master Levels trutherism becomes as accepted as TNT apologia has been.

[Devalaous]

8 minutes ago, Tarnsman said:

There are only two bad levels in The Master Levels, one of which is a complete shitpost, and most of the rest are actually good.

 

I hope one day Master Levels trutherism becomes as accepted as TNT apologia has been.

 

Subspace and Bad Dream. (You probably actually mean Mephisto's Mausoleum, but I stand by Subspace)

 

EDIT: In fact, I would happily swap The Fury in for Subspace, quite enjoyed that one compared to Subspace.

Edited October 25, 2022 by Devalaous

[D1m3]

E4M2 is not THAT hard, unlike E4M1
E4M4 is not that ugly(but probably should appear earlier)
E2M9 and E4M9 feels better if you swap them

[Azure_Horror]

Just now, D1m3 said:

E4M2 is not THAT hard, unlike E4M1

 

It depends IMHO.

E4m2 is longer and has tougher opposition, but it also offers quite a lot of resources. E4m1 is not particullary hard in itself, but every single item pick up counts. Which one is harder? Depends on the player skills.

[spineapple tea]

1 hour ago, D1m3 said:

E4M2 is not THAT hard, unlike E4M1

Exactly. Most Doom II maps after MAP10 are either on par with difficulty or worse. People who say it's that difficult likely have the mentality of "this is The Ultimate Doom, it can't be too hard."

[xdarkmasterx]

TNT is more frustrating than Plutonia. Map17 can go to hell >_<

[Sonikkumania]

They're going to get you is one of best Doom tracks, period.

[TheMightyWhoosh]

On 10/25/2022 at 1:52 AM, Tarnsman said:

There are only two bad levels in The Master Levels, one of which is a complete shitpost, and most of the rest are actually good.

 

I hope one day Master Levels trutherism becomes as accepted as TNT apologia has been.

This. I love the Master Levels, especially the PS1 variants - I played those religiously as a child. 

[zokum]

For me having hi-res Doom makes the game look less cohesive. It becomes painfully obvious that the HUD is in a lower resolution. Textures that look crisp and nice in the distance look extremely blocky when you're close up. Due to the way Doom renders, in high-res things tend to look super sharp and all the details are there to be seen. Quake has mip mapping, so that things far away aren't as detailed. This makes the game look more uniform and that there is more detail when moving closer, not just resizing.

Sprites in the game have a certain complexity, and they seem out of place in a world where the rest of the scenery is ultra detailed due to rendering in 2560*1440. When you approximate a circle for a wall in 320x200, it tends to look fairly convincing. At higher resolution you see that it is a bunch of straight lines that approximate a circle.

Details and scenery in the distance didn't have to be all that detailed in Doom, so it was made out of simpler geometry. In high-res it becomes painfully obvious that the scenery has a low polygon count.

This is related to why high-res sprites don't work well in high-res games. You see that they are cardboard flat so much easier. I prefer the 320x200 look, buy I can easily play the game in 640x400 or something similar. Once you start going up to an even higher res, it starts to become more noticeable that the artwork was designed for a lower resolution.

I am more tolerant of high-res screenshots done by the mapper, as it's possible to select good locations that hide any resolution problems.

320x200 on real hardware looks slightly better than many people know. The mode uses tall pixels, they are 20% taller than they are wide. In order to represent Doom scaled correctly with quadratic pixels one needs at least 1760x1200. That means fairly modern and big screens.

ENDOOM screens are even worse. If you do the math on the dos text mode and the endoom screen, that one is obviously a nightmare to scale well. Textmode art has loads of thin lines and high contrast. Any algorithm that blurs thing will look horrible. The pixels are very tall, 35% taller and in a 720x400 resolution, making it hard to integer-scale. If the original artist have circles or other interesting geometric shapes, most ports will butcher the artwork.

[Ozcar]

Talking about the graphics of doom, Ill prefer opengl than software, It make doom look more fresh, But ill understand why people prefer to use software mode. Ill use opengl because the framerate and 120 fov.

 

Also make me sad roland sc 55 is underused in doom wad, instead using the inferior version of sc 55.

Edited October 28, 2022 by Ozcar

[Sonikkumania]

Mapping in Vanilla format is boring.

[zokum]

4 hours ago, Ozcar said:

Also make me sad roland sc 55 is underused in doom wad, instead using the inferior version of sc 55.

Wouldn't that argument apply to more or less any synth, since Doom only targets General Midi? The Adlib is also underused, since all Doom does is to make it play back a general midi instrument set. It doesn't use any of the chip's more advanced features or use sounds that aren't similar to the GM set sounds.

The SC55 was a high-end piece of equipment few people had - spending time on a soundtrack version for so few people would have been a bad decision.

[omx32x]

am i the only one who thinks 32 maps is too much?

 

i usually get bored by a wad on level 12-15

[out_of_service]

On 10/26/2022 at 12:02 AM, Sonikkumania said:

They're going to get you is one of best Doom tracks, period.

It's actually one of my favourite music tracks from the original games!

[EngineerKappa]

Here are my few: 

• Anybody with any strong opinion towards the Doom 3 flashlight (pro or against) is a whiny nerd.
• I think a lot of people are unfair to Doom 1 and 2 maps because they have options designed with nearly 30 years of hindsight.
• Doomworld users that can name several ports they'd rather use aren't the target demographic for the Unity port.
• If Id were as precious about vanilla anything as some people tend to be, they wouldn't have greenlit any of the 90's ports, they wouldn't have added PWAD support, they wouldn't have added difficulty settings or cheats, and they would write it so your game self destructs if you don't have an authentic Sound Canvas to play the music exactly as Bobby Prince composed.
• I wish I preferred PrBoom+ as much as other people do, but it's in this awkward zone where it's more bloated than Crispy/Chocolate for vanilla, but the extra settings aren't as granular as GZDoom's.

[CasualScrub]

On 10/24/2022 at 4:55 PM, Ravendesk said:

I think we can close the thread now, the winner is decided.

I will wear it as a badge of honor.

[Budoka]

8 hours ago, EngineerKappa said:

Here are my few: 

• I think a lot of people are unfair to Doom 1 and 2 maps because they have options designed with nearly 30 years of hindsight.

Here's the thing with that: some levels that are almost as old as the IWADs are generally as satisfying to experience nowadays as they were back when they were fresh. Conversely, the many levels that aren't, well, aren't.

[Roofi]

Two other unpopular opinions from me :

 

- Doom 2's map 23 music is one of the best music from the game. It really fits for difficult maps with weird/obnoxious designs.

 

- I like this tune even more in Hell Revealed's map 23. It's one of the most unfair map in the wad , and the fact it takes place in a futuristic base makes me feel like completing an impossible mission while listening to the music.

 

 

 

[Wyrmwood]

On 10/23/2022 at 9:43 AM, CFWMagic said:

My least favorite weapon is the supershotgun, followed by the rocket-launcher. Much for the same reason that I dislike the revenant. The sheer amount of overuse. Supershotgun much more so than rocket launcher. The super-shotgun is the answer to 99% of problems. And unless I'm really tight on ammo ... There's no reason to ever use the shotgun ever again. 

 

Maybe it's just me but at range the single shotgun seems more effective or at least as effective as the SSG and uses half the ammount of shells. I switch all the time. Also pistol starting I've got to find one first, pretty much guaranteed a shotgun from a Sargeant at least but not every map even has a SSG.

 

On 10/23/2022 at 9:43 AM, CFWMagic said:

I actually do like Brutal Doom. 

 

So do I or more particularly Project Brutality. I'd never use it for a first playthrough but stuff like this is great to get a new experience from your favorite wads after you've beaten them on UV already.

 

[Lucius Wooding]

The shotguns are suited to different playstyles IMO. The single barrel is ideal when positioning and range are more important than pure DPS, usually on slower maps where you clear threats carefully using cover. For areas where you're expected to move more freely, or keep pressing forward, the SSG is nice since it can take down a lot of enemies reliably.

 

Although the ammo efficiency is in favor of the SSG, there are times where you're still better off using the single barrel, such as shooting through narrow windows that block half the pellets. That said, I generally don't care about SSGing a couple single imps or something unless the map is really stringent on ammo usage. I'm definitely biased towards the SSG due to most mappers leaning on it more, as well as the fact that it's one of the best weapons to keep readied. However I certainly find use for both on a lot of maps, even when the full arsenal is available.

[Shepardus]

4 hours ago, Wyrmwood said:

Maybe it's just me but at range the single shotgun seems more effective or at least as effective as the SSG and uses half the ammount of shells. I switch all the time. Also pistol starting I've got to find one first, pretty much guaranteed a shotgun from a Sargeant at least but not every map even has a SSG.

It's not just you, the shotgun has no vertical spread and also has less horizontal spread than the super shotgun. No vertical spread is particularly useful for targeting enemies on cliffs above you.

[GarrettChan]

On 10/25/2022 at 4:03 AM, D1m3 said:

E4M2 is not THAT hard, unlike E4M1

Both of them are incredibly easy.

[Codename_Delta]

On 10/23/2022 at 2:43 PM, CFWMagic said:

feels like every single WAD has at least a few maps where the revenant is spammed into oblivion.

I'm guilty of this myself, I'm trying to move away from using the skeletons so much, simply because there's better demons out there, like cybruisers!

 

With my current DeHackEd knowledge, if I want a demon, I just DeHack it in, if I can be bothered that is, I always get ideas for demons either before I work on a map, or Midway through, but back to the revenants.

 

But of course, I'm learning better designs for fights that don't spam revs, and reducing my average revenant count per map, while this does mean more Hell Knights and similar, when you've got an SSG, it all dies in around 6 shells.

[Somniac]

I unironically really enjoy "In the Dark". Moody and minimalistic. Great track.