Unpopular Doom Opinions

[baja blast rd.]

On 3/20/2023 at 4:12 PM, Scypek2 said:

I'd like to see a mod that entirely removes damage RNG, but instead introduces item RNG. With every medikit randomly giving you between 10 and 40 health, every rocket box having between 2 and 8 rockets, and so on. You'll know how much damage you'll take, and maybe you'll also avoid obsessively micro-managing items and avoiding picking up a medikit just because you have 76% health and you don't want to waste it.

 

I try to avoid doing this because it's irritating to do and also because it's often not good play anyway. (I say "try to" because I still end up doing it sometimes in unfamiliar maps where it's hard to judge how important resources are, but ideally I wouldn't do it ever.) 

 

Why it's often not good play: 

 

It's a big impediment to playing harder wads well if a lot of your attention and mental stack is eaten up by that stuff. It'll work in the iwads and similar difficulty wads, but will fail badly elsewhere, so I just try to stay out of the habit everywhere (in easy wads, even when it's a mistake, the wad is easy overall so "mistakes" won't matter much).  

 

Also in harder wads and wads with harder resource-conservation elements, resource management through pickups is not even truly about avoiding waste as judged by pure points. It's about stuff like picking up generally the right items, and allowing the most useful, higher-leverage items to remain when they are useful.

 

For example: if you have a choice of two heath/ammo location for example, in different parts of the map, you'd want to leave the one that might be near a hectic fight for later. If you have a choice of health/ammo before a fight in the same area, you usually want to pick up what would be inconvenient to get to when the action starts. (An example would be in a two-soulsphere fight where one sphere might be for before the fight starts and the other is a recharge, you generally pick up the soulsphere in the center of an arena if you foresee it being crowded with enemies.)

 

There's also time sensitivity too. A simple example is that if you're about to go into a fight with an archie in it, and you have 80 health 0 armor without much health around, you might want to grab a berserk pack and get only 20 health out of it (going up to 100 health increases your survivability disproportionately at that time) rather than saving it for a lower-leverage moment even if you get more actual health out of it at that later time.

 

So not every bit of health/ammo has the same effective value. So for that reason there are spots where you knowingly 'waste' a big chunk of a medkit because it's a low-value medkit and if you don't do that and end up grabbing all of a high-value medkit without 'wasting' any of it, you still lost out on "effective value." 

 

Even in an FDA you can come to good educated guesses about what should be valuable and what shouldn't be, so doing this well does not require foreknowledge. 

 

Excessive perfunctory resource micro management is one of those things people sometimes do because it feels natural and because it's good play "in the iwads," but if I were teaching a beginner or something I would caution against it. It's not really that good. Just don't run over a bulk cell at 290 or something lol.

 

Avoiding catastrophe is way more important anyway, which is also easier to do if you spend mental energy on trivial stuff and are focusing more on what might really matter. If someone avoids running over medkits/shellboxes every time but ends up in 1 more catastrophic spot per megawad where they fail to anticipate a cybie or something and don't have cells for it, they're a lot, lot worse off. And those are different subskills. Resource micromanagement is something you can do robotically with a faulty picture of the map. Having a good sense for "I can use all these rockets/cells now" vs. "I should save many" is more about modeling the map/author and much more important.

[Egyptian Guardian]

Doom wads that exhibit slaughter-esque design are not good gameplay, it sometimes works with clever monster placement as long as you have ample ammo and a strategy but it's almost always lazy and uninspiring and just about any amateur dev could accomplish by simple math and spamming the same tough enemy over and over again in a doom editor. Also, these select wads that are highly praised by Doom enthusiasts for great textures and level design should not be given a pass just because of those positive aspects. Many wads like SWTW, Stardate 6 & 7, Sunlust, Sunder, the last episodes of both Scythe's, FCFF, and both Hell Revealed's action just seems mindless. Holding down the BFG spam and hoping for the best is essentially rolling the dice. Not fun at all.

[Shepardus]

18 minutes ago, Bernie said:

Doom wads that exhibit slaughter-esque design are not good gameplay, it sometimes works with clever monster placement as long as you have ample ammo and a strategy but it's almost always lazy and uninspiring and just about any amateur dev could accomplish by simple math and spamming the same tough enemy over and over again in a doom editor. Also, these select wads that are highly praised by Doom enthusiasts for great textures and level design should not be given a pass just because of those positive aspects. Many wads like SWTW, Stardate 6 & 7, Sunlust, Sunder, the last episodes of both Scythe's, FCFF, and both Hell Revealed's action just seems mindless. Holding down the BFG spam and hoping for the best is essentially rolling the dice. Not fun at all.

Not sure how FCFF fits at all in that but okay

[Lucius Wooding]

25 minutes ago, Bernie said:

Hard = Bad

Fixed that for you.

[baja blast rd.]

20x6 also does not have a BFG until the penultimate area of the final map. 

 

SWTW excludes one on 01-02 and you will run out of ammo pretty badly if you just hold down M1 with the BFG on 03. 

 

Could keep going.

 

Gonna stay out of the "slaughter = bad" elements (yawn). That post has basic credibility issues well before that. Playing a modded copy or using IDKFA (???) is not the best way to judge things.

[Egyptian Guardian]

45 minutes ago, Lucius Wooding said:

Fixed that for you.

That's such a poor generalization to what I described in detail. You don't even have an argument. It's just a spam of enemies over and over and over and over and over and over and over over and over and over and over and over and over and over over and over and over and over and over and over and over over and over and over and over and over and over and over over and over and over and over and over and over and over over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until you want to smash your nuts in between your gaming laptop.

 

When I first played Map26 "Fear" of Scythe I almost burst into laughter because of how stupid it looked with all the revenants it sent after you when you flicked the eye switch and cacodemon clouds that you had BFG to avoid getting crushed by the cyberdemons above. And the level in SWTW where your in a building with a cyberdemon right next to you and hell knights positioned in layers in the walls is so bad. 

 

[Shepardus]

27 minutes ago, Bernie said:

what I described in detail.

Where might I find this detailed description? Surely you're not referring to your previous post, where you're generalizing a bunch of different WADs as monster spam/BFG spam/dice-rolling, including a WAD where the bulk of the maps are puzzle/exploration maps with single-digit monster counts.

[DNSKILL5]

The light amplification visors are underrated. 

Edited March 29, 2023 by DNSKILL5

[Human Being]

Invis-sphere is the best power-up ever invented... evar... in the history of; Gaming.

[Lucky_Edie]

2 hours ago, Bernie said:

it sometimes works ... as long as you have ... a strategy

 

just seems mindless.

Holding down the BFG spam and hoping for the best is essentially rolling the dice.

 

Gameplay mods will affect the gameplay.

If rolling the dice is the best strategy you have then you will suffer.

A large part of the appeal of slaugther maps is finding a strategy that works which usually trivializes the encounter. 

When you start to see those strategies and the options involved you'll have more appreciation for the maps design. 

 

Or not, slaughter isn't for everyone and it sounds like it's not your thing and you've played plenty of maps. 

Not sure how FCFF fit into your list of BFG spam wads, or stardate 20x6 since it doesn't give you a BFG until the very end of the last map. 

[IncompA]

2 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

Fixed that for you.

Is this your only argument?

[Maribo]

14 minutes ago, EliDoesStuff said:

Is this your only argument?

They don't need to give an argument when the post they're replying to makes it crystal clear that they've never actually played any of the wads that they're listing as "Holding down the BFG spam and hoping for the best is essentially rolling the dice". Including FCFF in a list of "action" wads is basically trolling, but maybe you're trolling too and I'm just taking 2 layers of bait. I suppose it is an appropriate post to make in a thread titled "Unpopular Doom Opinions", but most people who post in this thread don't seem to be able to differentiate between fact and opinion most of the time. What else can you do when you give people a raw stats pages of exactly how much ammo is in the maps/wads they're talking about, and they still call it a BFG Spam Map? It's literal delusion.

 

Anti-slaughter rhetoric is tiresome. Anti-platforming rhetoric is tiresome. Anti-death pit rhetoric is tiresome. Anti-"whatever I don't like" rhetoric is tiresome. I'd really rather see a passionate defense of what people like in Doom than another boring post about how any mapper who doesn't do what you like is bad at design, lazy, incapable of making anything worth playing, etc, but I don't think anyone who writes off entire styles of gameplay wholesale is interested in making a passionate defense of what they enjoy. It's much easier to make a low effort ragepost.

Edited March 29, 2023 by Maribo

[Albatross]

You guys play that new slaughtershit from ribbiks yet, jumpmap or w/e it's called???

[Egyptian Guardian]

34 minutes ago, Lucky_Edie said:

 

Gameplay mods will affect the gameplay.

If rolling the dice is the best strategy you have then you will suffer.

A large part of the appeal of slaugther maps is finding a strategy that works which usually trivializes the encounter. 

When you start to see those strategies and the options involved you'll have more appreciation for the maps design. 

 

Or not, slaughter isn't for everyone and it sounds like it's not your thing and you've played plenty of maps. 

Not sure how FCFF fit into your list of BFG spam wads, or stardate 20x6 since it doesn't give you a BFG until the very end of the last map. 

It isn't just specifically BFG spam, it's anything where you have to hold the trigger on a rocket launcher or a super shotgun to clear out a cramp narrow area of overly abundant revenants or mancubi that doesn't even take skill, like the dev decided to see how many enemies he could fit in an area as much as possible. Slaughterfest 2012 is definitely the one I have the biggest problem with, as it never seems to amaze me as to how much it tries to overwhelm you even on co-op. Remember playing a lot of that back on zdaemon in like '16 and it just isn't fun. I made a mistake with labeling FCFF, I made a mistake with labeling one of the wads. But I think you know what I'm talking about. Cramp areas where the main goal is to frustrate you and is RNG I strongly dislike. Nice to know I can play beautiful looking wads like Vangaurd and Ancient Aliens that have good enemy placement that is tough but isn't made to overwhelm you.

 

Like MtPain27 said, if finding a secret is mandatory to pass a level in a megawad, it sucks.

[Lucky_Edie]

Just now, Bernie said:

It isn't just specifically BFG spam, it's anything where you have to hold the trigger on a rocket launcher or a super shotgun to clear out a cramp narrow area of overly abundant revenants or mancubi that doesn't even take skill, like the dev decided to see how many enemies he could fit in an area as much as possible.

 

Slaughterfest 2012 is definitely the one I have the biggest problem with

 

The quality in general has improved a lot over the recent years. There's good and bad maps of every genre and the maps where you sit there shooting and doing nothing are BAD. One bad ice cream doesn't mean ice creams are bad. 

 

This is mancubi spam. There is a strategy. Thoughts? 

 

 

[7Mahonin]

This thread is called unpopular doom opinions not obnoxious doom arguments. 

[Master Medi]

Unpopular Doom Opinion: RNG only matters if you're not good at the videogame

[baja blast rd.]

When I play maps I prefer to try to find approaches to fights that are consistent. (By that I mean something that would probably beat it 80%+ of attempts -- but sometimes 50%+ is cool too.) If I play a fight and end up getting through it barely or without having a clue what happened or clearly having benefit from a fluke, and I'm not recording an FDA for others (in which case I don't want to bloat the length too much), I'll reload the save and try to beat it better, unless I'm tired or something. 

This forces you to come up with really nuanced strategies that are pretty fun to find and generally forces you to have good tactics and refine your basic skills. You get better in a hurry doing this. (With "in a hurry" defined by "number of total maps played.") (

The thing is, in most fights (in most maps), you probably have an ambient very low % of beating a fight by just clicking buttons. If mindless circle-strafing wins a fight 5-10% of the time, that isn't a good strategy. The fight counters mindless circle-strafing. It's not a "circle-strafe fight" by definition. If "spraying and praying aimlessly" wins a low %, same deal. And it's not necessarily in the encounter's best interest to prevent that low % that simply doing anything wins (trying to replace it by 0%) -- because that might negatively impact other sources of fun, and because sometimes that isn't possible at all (not every fight can be a platforming fight :P). 

 

I'll just first say that a "beat it once and move on" approach is fine imo because a lot of people don't have the time and energy and willingness to do otherwise (sometimes I don't either).

 

But what I have witnessed (?) is that sometimes people pair that with thinking that beating something 1 in however-many attempts proves you're using a viable approach but also that it's an "RNG fight." Which I feel maybe explains the extremely weird contradiction that for example a fight can be a "circle-strafe fight -- just circle-strafe mindlessly to win" (yeah, once in 20 attempts*) and "an RNG fight -- you can get screwed over by RNG a ton." If you're getting screwed over by RNG on a large % of attempts, that almost certainly is not a good strategy and you're definitely not engaging with what makes the wad interesting to play.

 

 

*In these figures, I'm not counting attempts spent figuring out what to do. Some tricky/intricate fights will kill you lots as you are working out what to do but then you'll have something that works 80%+. But people who try to spam simplistic approaches often spend no attempts figuring out what to do so the counter can begin on attempt #1. 

[Lucius Wooding]

Others have made my argument pretty well for me since it's fairly obvious. I didn't think it necessary to write a wall of text rebutting everything but I got called out so here goes:

 

Saying Ribbiks doesn't know good monster placement is just an absolutely ignorant statement. Who does if not him? Also, claiming Sunlust is RNG based is insulting. Players have been able to beat episodes and even the whole WAD in a single segment demo although it takes supreme skill and grinding to do so on a 4 hour run. However a bad player wouldn't be able to beat most of the maps individually, even if they always had perfect RNG. I've UV Maxed about half the maps from pistol start myself and I can tell you it wasn't a result of grinding good RNG, it was absolutely from practicing and finding good strategies that are repeatable. My skill level isn't high enough to fully clear that WAD's harder and longer levels, but getting my ass kicked as I work out good strategies has been a good mental exercise. Ribbiks stuff is definitely more of a combat puzzle style but there are usually multiple routes to victory and someone without very high skill will be punished if they don't play cleverly. As for spamming the BFG, on the maps I've beaten (of those that actually have a BFG) every single BFG shot matters. Quite the opposite of what you claim. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the craftsmanship in that WAD is the envy of all custom mappers; not just the gameplay but the music, visuals, and addictive challenge. 

 

Complaining about Swim With the Whales only adds to its mystique. It's a challenge mapset, and the meat of it is a nearly hour long and grueling map. It was never meant to be accessible to the average player and is meant to swat the player into the dirt repeatedly. Your frustration is no doubt gratifying to the mapper on that one and it's on you for playing one of the harder sets out there.

 

As for Scythe, I'm not hearing any complaints about the first 20 maps (the easy ones). That WAD targeted a wide range of difficulties and experimented with very different styles of challenge in the last 10 maps. Yes there were a couple that got there by spamming tons of monsters, but others were much more subtle and used a restricted arsenal or fiendish placement of fewer monsters to make them hard. Map 26 is basically a typical slaughter map, but it's really intended to be a speedrun map. There are so many cells, megaspheres, and invulns that you just carve your way through. As long as you know the route it's not very difficult and it's quite fun if you don't care about maxing it. But somehow in a WAD that has something for every player you get hung up on one map you didn't like. 

 

You also praise Skillsaw which is fair enough. I'd just like to point out that, in my opinion, his maps are a lot more forgiving of a meatheaded approach than Ribbiks. In general he gives a bit more space to maneuver (no Ancient Aliens pun intended), and his stuff is usually a touch more blind friendly. I love his maps for a number of reasons but there are certainly moments where he spams monsters or cramps the arena. 

 

It's ok to hate slaughter maps but honestly it's very tedious to hear the unoriginal complaints made with so little substance behind them. Disliking them is hardly an unpopular opinion to begin with, but you're also lumping in very different styles in your examples and you're just flat out wrong about a number of facts. Your post combined half baked broad brush generalizations, projection of your poor approach onto the mapper, and provocative statements about some of the more respected map sets out there without any appreciation of any redeeming aspect. Hating popular things doesn't make you cool; at best it makes you a Doom Hipster. It seems like you're just worked up over your frustration with those maps rather than having anything novel, nuanced, or thoughtful to say about them. That's why I hit you with the "Hard = Bad" remark. 

[Azure_Horror]

Personally, I'd take mindless BFG spam over mindless (Super-)Shotgun spam any day of the week.

Similarly, I much prefer 15 minutes of running in cricles to 15 minutes of door-camping.

With running around, you at least get to see different parts of the room, you know...

 

Unpopular Opinion:

 

Weekly Slaughter arguments are over-rated!

We can have:

- weekly Tyson map arguments

- weekly Switch-Hunting arguments

- weekly Long maps arguments

- weekly unmarked secrets arguments

- weekly Plutonia-style maps arguments

- weekly Abstract map arguments

- weekly Over-detailed map arguments

Why is it always slaughter?

 

BTW, I volunteer to start a Tyson map complaining thread, or a Long map complaining thread, if there is an interest in those!

[Shepardus]

19 minutes ago, Azure_Horror said:

Personally, I'd take mindless BFG spam over mindless (Super-)Shotgun spam any day of the week.

But why choose one or the other when you can have both in the same wad?

[Azure_Horror]

3 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

But why choose one or the other when you can have both in the same wad?

Ouch!

Is this particular map qualifies as a Criminal Negligence of Good Taste? It should, you know...

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

With all these "slaughter bad, actually" threads, I gotta come clean you guys. I hate hard maps but not why you think. I could beat all of them, in fact, I did beat all of them. I d2alll ribbiks anthology every morning before walking the dog. All the stargates, swimming with whales, all the sundlusts, and warm woods. But it's all just ammo starved mindless bfg spam dice rolls with no strategy involved but once I figured the strats out, it's so easy you guys wouldn't believe. And I have the demos to prove it, just give me a sec the internet is breaking up, oh no the dog ate my router and the hdd got corrupted because I had too many demos on it..

[Catpho]

29 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

But why choose one or the other when you can have both in the same wad?

Thomas Neinsteen's One Hour in Hell

[heliumlamb]

When I (Mildly, Voluntarily) Poison Myself And Play The Video's Game And The Telled Vision Goes [failure state] From My Own Fault And Inputs I Accept It And Continue With My Day, Then Continue With My Life.

eventually I will (Mildly, Voluntarily) Poison Myself And Play The Video's Game And The Telled Vision Goes [failure state] From My Own Fault And Inputs I Accept It And Continue With My Day, Then Continue With My Life, again.

[treulosetomate]

6 hours ago, Bernie said:

Doom wads that exhibit slaughter-esque design are not good gameplay, it sometimes works with clever monster placement as long as you have ample ammo and a strategy but it's almost always lazy and uninspiring and just about any amateur dev could accomplish by simple math and spamming the same tough enemy over and over again in a doom editor. Also, these select wads that are highly praised by Doom enthusiasts for great textures and level design should not be given a pass just because of those positive aspects. Many wads like SWTW, Stardate 6 & 7, Sunlust, Sunder, the last episodes of both Scythe's, FCFF, and both Hell Revealed's action just seems mindless. Holding down the BFG spam and hoping for the best is essentially rolling the dice. Not fun at all.

Here we go again. We just had a thread about this topic.

But I congratulate you for at least posting an actually unpopular opinion in this thread. :D

[Roofi]

I'm surprised not that much people complain about maps where you're stuck with few ammo and weak weaponry. Maps like the Chord Series look harder to play than many slaughter maps to me, for exemple

 

I understand extreme slaughter doesn't appeal everyone but how can't you like getting big guns and power-ups?

[ReaperAA]

44 minutes ago, Roofi said:

I'm surprised not that much people complain about maps where you're stuck with few ammo and weak weaponry. Maps like the Chord Series look harder to play than many slaughter maps to me, for exemple

 

I'll be honest. Maps like these, with massive resource restrictions for high durations (shorter maps with Tyson-ish gameplay are okay) and maps with excessive, but not necessarily threatening "meat" like high number of barons in open spaces wear me down much more quickly that tough fights.

[Stupid Bunny]

2 hours ago, Azure_Horror said:

BTW, I volunteer to start a Tyson map complaining thread, or a Long map complaining thread, if there is an interest in those!

My enduring unpopular opinion is that long maps can be the greatest most fun and spectacular adventures in Doom and that they are also why the game comes handily equipped with a nice save function

[RHhe82]

1 hour ago, Roofi said:

I'm surprised not that much people complain about maps where you're stuck with few ammo and weak weaponry. Maps like the Chord Series look harder to play than many slaughter maps to me, for exemple

 

I understand extreme slaughter doesn't appeal everyone but how can't you like getting big guns and power-ups?

I personally don’t like resource starvation levels, just as I don’t like Tyson-levels. On the other hand, I do like it when I am allowed to use berserk punch to conserve ammo, so my stance is not very clear-cut, and I guess I’m not the only one — and as such threads on such maps would be welcome (even if just to see how heated the argument would get, or would it just fizzle out when we conclude that some of us enjoy tyson as long as we don’t need to punch mancubi, arachnotrons, SMMs….)