Unpopular Doom Opinions

[baja blast rd.]

With ordered, ranked lists -- the kind like "top 100 games of all time," "top 50 players of season in a particular sport," or whatever -- a common mistake readers make is interpreting the feature's underlying assessment as conforming to a linear slope. A linear slope would mean that if #1 is said to be the best, and #100 is the last one that made the cut (which is still very good), then #50 is suggested as the midpoint (the way 9.5/10 is the midpoint of 9/10 and 10/10).

 

This seems to be the most common assumption based on how discussions about those play out. It's a bad assumption.

 

If you have no other information, you should expect there to be a curve instead, which starts with a steeper slope near the very top (#1) and then flattens out as you move down. The shape might look like green here rather than red (I'm not good at drawing with a mouse lol).

 

Spoiler

 

There's no special insight you need for that. All that does is treat as a basic axiom that the better and better the quality you're considering (or "how much I loved this," or whatever feeling or measure -- it doesn't have to be quantifiable), the rarer it is for something to be at that level. And that's generally true for the types of things that it might make sense to put on a Top list. So the highest spots are likely to be more spread out since they are in more rarified air, and then the rest are closer and closer to each other. (The linear slope implies that everything is equally common, which usually is very unrealistic.)

 

The most common thing people get wrong when they don't realize this is treating "spots" as a stable measure of some kind, like "I can't believe #71 is 10 spots above #81!" (when those spots might be extremely close to a "tie" in how good they must be). 

 

People sometimes realize this intuitively, but don't immediately connect it to other implications. (As an example, the Cacowards are not ordered, but some people code Golds and Silvers as two comparably sized tiers, which is wrong because 12-15 Silvers unavoidably means a much smaller range of "combined panel opinion" than 12 Golds.)

[TheHambourgeois]

On 1/13/2024 at 3:45 PM, baja blast rd. said:

If you're doing a review format...

Gonna ruffle some feathers with this but I think community reviews should have a score out of 3:

3 - It was so good I would replay it
2 - It was good enough that I do not regret playing it, but I do not see myself replaying it
1 - I regret playing it/it was so bad I quit before I finished

I think longer form, consistent review series with the same reviewer(s) can get a bit more granular but even then I think out of 5 is more than sufficient. You're not gonna tell me there's a consistent, meaningful difference between a 4.1 and a 4.2, imo.

[bofu]

23 minutes ago, TheHambourgeois said:

Gonna ruffle some feathers with this but I think community reviews should have a score out of 3:

3 - It was so good I would replay it
2 - It was good enough that I do not regret playing it, but I do not see myself replaying it
1 - I regret playing it/it was so bad I quit before I finished

I think longer form, consistent review series with the same reviewer(s) can get a bit more granular but even then I think out of 5 is more than sufficient. You're not gonna tell me there's a consistent, meaningful difference between a 4.1 and a 4.2, imo.

 

This is a good start, IMO, though there's a larger issue. The numeric system in general feels like nothing but a feelsbad waiting to happen for a first time uploader, especially when you see some of the garbage reviews that pop up on the Doomworld forum home page. A one-axis rating scale is going to have issues where people who don't like jokewads are going to 1 star every jokewad they stumble into, people who don't like slaughter are going to 1 star every slaughtermap they see, etc. I'm not sure what can be done about that without doing away with review scores entirely.

[baja blast rd.]

Reminds me:

Community reviews would ideally have a "no rating" option for those of us who prefer not to use numbers at all. 

 

Average scores (of everyone's votes) are usually noise that doesn't convey much. Individual review scores aren't much more informative and are simply worse versions of "tl;dr: blahblahblah" and losing them wouldn't do much even for people who want to give scores because you could write them out in text. 

[TheHambourgeois]

1 hour ago, bofu said:

A one-axis rating scale is going to have issues where people who don't like jokewads are going to 1 star every jokewad they stumble into, people who don't like slaughter are going to 1 star every slaughtermap they see, etc...

Maybe a radio button that asks "Is this wad made for you/your preferred playstyle?" lol.

 

E: Will also say that my experience is that new mappers should post to the boards and not the idgames archive because I have gotten really good feedback that was encouraging (even when critical) on the boards. Post your refined stuff after a few test runs to the archive.

Edited January 17 by TheHambourgeois

[TheCorinthian]

On 7/19/2020 at 6:43 AM, seed said:

I certainly hope Nightmare won't completely hijack this thread this time around...

 

 

This reminds me of a song :p .

This wins it all

[Vosolokoviteh]

play vanilla its funnier than play with 50 mods

[Pepo]

My preferred version of Doom is the original 1993 DOS version as the graphics look much better with the 90's compression

[BUYXRAYS]

episode 3 of doom is terrible. You cant change my mind, it just sucks in every way. Not a single good thing to say about it

[fruity lerlups]

4 minutes ago, BUYXRAYS said:

episode 3 of doom is terrible. You cant change my mind, it just sucks in every way. Not a single good thing to say about it

definitely not an unpopular opinion

[Pepo]

16 minutes ago, BUYXRAYS said:

episode 3 of doom is terrible. You cant change my mind, it just sucks in every way. Not a single good thing to say about it

first few levels of the episode are fine, the later ones hurt me

[Jason Maguire]

Mappers should embrace mouselook as the future of doom and design their maps accordingly, even if this means breaking with tradition and pissing off people who refuse to look up and down. Having to manually aim your rockets at cacos 50 feet away from/above you brings a whole new dimension to the gameplay.

 

Jumping (and to a lesser extent, crouching) are great, as long as the map is designed such jumping/crouching don't break the map. They should also become standard parts of doom design. I've played a number of wads that either by choice or neglect allowed jumping and crouching and it added some fun aspects to the gameplay, like a number of situations in which i was completely cornered but on a slight elevation such that I could jump on top of a crowd of monsters and escape. The point isn't that making it easier is better - if the player has more options for surviving a fight, then the fight can be designed to be harder accordingly. 

 

 

[Jason Maguire]

On 1/10/2024 at 9:42 PM, realjohnmadden said:

Slaughtermaps are nothing more than a pretty level with 2000 Archviles and BFGs. "lul its a  combat puzzle you need the startegy" my ass, there's no strategy in holding down left click while running over ammo pickups because the level designer couldn't be arsed to make a proper finale and instead drowned the player in Revenants and ammo pickups to deal with said Revenants. If your map takes an hour to UV-max or has more than 250 enemies, you are not making a map, you are making a shooting gallery.

 

How many bona fide slaughtermaps have you actually played? Doesn't sound you have a good grasp on them. 

 

I also wish people wouldn't complain about entire mapping styles - it's good that there's variety. I didn't enjoy the SIGIL games, but I'm glad they exist for people who may enjoy that type of gameplay. 

[Kwisior]

55 minutes ago, Jason Maguire said:

Mappers should embrace mouselook as the future of doom and design their maps accordingly, even if this means breaking with tradition and pissing off people who refuse to look up and down. Having to manually aim your rockets at cacos 50 feet away from/above you brings a whole new dimension to the gameplay.

 

Jumping (and to a lesser extent, crouching) are great, as long as the map is designed such jumping/crouching don't break the map. They should also become standard parts of doom design. I've played a number of wads that either by choice or neglect allowed jumping and crouching and it added some fun aspects to the gameplay, like a number of situations in which i was completely cornered but on a slight elevation such that I could jump on top of a crowd of monsters and escape. The point isn't that making it easier is better - if the player has more options for surviving a fight, then the fight can be designed to be harder accordingly. 

 

 

How about YOU make maps like that and stop telling everyone what to do?

Edited January 19 by Kwisior

[zokum]

2 hours ago, Jason Maguire said:

Mappers should embrace mouselook as the future of doom and design their maps accordingly, even if this means breaking with tradition and pissing off people who refuse to look up and down. Having to manually aim your rockets at cacos 50 feet away from/above you brings a whole new dimension to the gameplay.

 

Jumping (and to a lesser extent, crouching) are great, as long as the map is designed such jumping/crouching don't break the map. They should also become standard parts of doom design. I've played a number of wads that either by choice or neglect allowed jumping and crouching and it added some fun aspects to the gameplay, like a number of situations in which i was completely cornered but on a slight elevation such that I could jump on top of a crowd of monsters and escape. The point isn't that making it easier is better - if the player has more options for surviving a fight, then the fight can be designed to be harder accordingly.  

 

 

You can only really complain about not taking into account jumping if the map is for a port that has jumping enabled as default. Aiming rockets make it much easier to aim for the floor and ensure a good hit. It makes the rocket launcher much more powerful. It also ruins the BFG 9000 complexity, making it trivial to ensure you fire the beams very quickly and in an optimal location.

You got out of that situation by acting like a gummy bear. Well, if the map was designed to force you to have a better strategy or die in that situation, you've just made it a lot less difficult.

If you have to take jumping into account you have to make taller walls and fences everywhere for game play reasons. That could actually hurt the visuals of the map. If you add rocket jumping into the mix, you have even more trouble.

Doom doesn't have jumping, Doom for me is the game play found in doom (2) v 1.9. Source ports that add something that changes game play are mods, not regular Doom. Mods are great, but they're not the original game, they're not Doom. I love some of the source port additions people have come up with, and dislike some. Having to cater for every single feature added in a port is a gargantuan task.

Whenever you use a different executable than the one it was designed for, you shouldn't complain about compatibility or game play issues in public. And certainly not demand or require anything. I've seen examples of people demanding mappers to stop using certain tricks, since they don't work well in gl ports.

[jmac]

6 hours ago, Jason Maguire said:

Mappers should embrace mouselook as the future of doom and design their maps accordingly, even if this means breaking with tradition and pissing off people who refuse to look up and down. Having to manually aim your rockets at cacos 50 feet away from/above you brings a whole new dimension to the gameplay.

 

Jumping (and to a lesser extent, crouching) are great, as long as the map is designed such jumping/crouching don't break the map. They should also become standard parts of doom design. I've played a number of wads that either by choice or neglect allowed jumping and crouching and it added some fun aspects to the gameplay, like a number of situations in which i was completely cornered but on a slight elevation such that I could jump on top of a crowd of monsters and escape. The point isn't that making it easier is better - if the player has more options for surviving a fight, then the fight can be designed to be harder accordingly. 

 

 

Mappers should make what they want to make, not pander to the bad opinions of others.

 

One of the main reasons doom is so fun is because of the simplicity of its gameplay. As soon as jumping, crouching, and freelook are added, it no longer feels like doom and ceases to be interesting. Jumping especially feels out of place, and makes all of the monsters feel like useless lumbering idiots because they can't jump as well.

Edited January 19 by jmac

[zokum]

In all the ports I have tried, jumping feels very out of place within the physics engine in Doom. Doom has ridiculous speeds, and the jumping doesn't match this physical prowess at all. The actual jumps, length, height, trajectory feel a lot more correct in games like Quake. I haven't looked into jumping in ports lately, so things might have changed. I think the new Doom games got it fairly correct. Doom guy can pull off some insane stunts. Not a big fan of double jumps, but everything else feels good.

[Caffeine]

6 hours ago, Jason Maguire said:

Mappers should embrace mouselook as the future of doom and design their maps accordingly, even if this means breaking with tradition and pissing off people who refuse to look up and down. Having to manually aim your rockets at cacos 50 feet away from/above you brings a whole new dimension to the gameplay.

 

Jumping (and to a lesser extent, crouching) are great, as long as the map is designed such jumping/crouching don't break the map. They should also become standard parts of doom design.

 

Or - and hear me on this crazy idea - mappers should include a MAPINFO in the wad that specifies whether these features are allowed, denied, or should use the user's default setting. This feature already exists.

[NeoWorm]

Well... not having jumping in DooM wasn't a design choice but limitation of the time. Same thing for autoaim, infinitely tall actors etc. Just look at Quake which was ID's next game done with the same philosophy and it has none of those "features".

[jmac]

59 minutes ago, NeoWorm said:

Well... not having jumping in DooM wasn't a design choice but limitation of the time. Same thing for autoaim, infinitely tall actors etc. Just look at Quake which was ID's next game done with the same philosophy and it has none of those "features".

That doesn't detract from the fact that those limitations resulted in a style of gameplay that continues to resonate with a lot of people. I prefer the feel of doom over quake by a longshot.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

I don't know if it's "unpopular" in general (certainly unpopular with certain port authors and users) but since it's on-topic; the "correct" way to have added jumping and crouching would have been to have them available as mod features that a modder could enable mod-side at their convenience if it matched what they were going for, and otherwise be turned off.  I think people who are around in the main Doom circuit underestimate how many people only ever use (G)ZDoom and think that those features were always valid parts of the game because they're on the menu.  But it's around 2 decades too late to correct that and people are set in their ways now.

 

2 hours ago, Caffeine said:

Or - and hear me on this crazy idea - mappers should include a MAPINFO in the wad that specifies whether these features are allowed, denied, or should use the user's default setting. This feature already exists.

The MAPINFO settings exist, yeah, but in my experience they're halfassed and a lot of people seem to have them overridden anyway (and the powers that be are vocal about not changing this).

[Ravendesk]

Following the conversation above, the way mouselook is being rendered just looks extremely ugly to me, all the geometry stretching and especially sprites - instead of nicely done sprite rotations you now get to see absolutely flat cardboard cutout cacos. Everything just suddenly looks so much cheaper and more jank, it's a very similar feel to enabling texture filtering, it's like playing a bad doom clone.

 

I guess some people don't mind that and sure, go ahead, but I disagree that it's a "future doom". This is just a post-doom technology being glued to a doom engine and it's just one of the branches of classic doom evolution, but to me this particular branch makes doom look worse in every way.

 

3 hours ago, zokum said:

In all the ports I have tried, jumping feels very out of place within the physics engine in Doom. Doom has ridiculous speeds, and the jumping doesn't match this physical prowess at all. The actual jumps, length, height, trajectory feel a lot more correct in games like Quake. I haven't looked into jumping in ports lately, so things might have changed. I think the new Doom games got it fairly correct. Doom guy can pull off some insane stunts. Not a big fan of double jumps, but everything else feels good.

Fully agree, advanced ports jumping feels extremely off and is not even getting close to a nice feel of quake games. The only jumping that felt good to me was the way it is done in Jumpwad (which is an MBF wad, but the jumping technology itself can work in vanilla), which is essentially a self-avj that you do on will. The jump is high and powerful and is very satisfying to do. And it feels good to do without mouselook, too, the lack of mouselook doesn't prevent level design with high verticality with these jumps at all.

[Koko Ricky]

11 minutes ago, Ravendesk said:

Following the conversation above, the way mouselook is being rendered just looks extremely ugly to me, all the geometry stretching and especially sprites - instead of nicely done sprite rotations you now get to see absolutely flat cardboard cutout cacos. Everything just suddenly looks so much cheaper and more jank, it's a very similar feel to enabling texture filtering, it's like playing a bad doom clone.

This is exactly why Voxel Doom is so important. It's a 1:1 representation of Doom's assets that works beautifully with mouselook. 

[Ravendesk]

1 minute ago, Koko Ricky said:

This is exactly why Voxel Doom is so important. It's a 1:1 representation of Doom's assets that works beautifully with mouselook. 

Uh I will drop another unpopular opinion, but I think voxel doom looks extremely cursed. I appreciate all the effort put into it and it's definitely an impressive work, but it just looks so wrong and out of place in actual maps. Original sprites win this for me without any competition.

[Koko Ricky]

14 minutes ago, Ravendesk said:

Uh I will drop another unpopular opinion, but I think voxel doom looks extremely cursed. I appreciate all the effort put into it and it's definitely an impressive work, but it just looks so wrong and out of place in actual maps. Original sprites win this for me without any competition.

I mean that's fair. It could look potentially jarring, especially if you've spent years or decades with those sprites. I welcomed it instantly because I had been wanting to see voxel models for everything for a very long time.

["JL" was too short]

2 hours ago, jmac said:

That doesn't detract from the fact that those limitations resulted in a style of gameplay that continues to resonate with a lot of people. I prefer the feel of doom over quake by a longshot.

Not attempting to escalate the debate over whose vibes are valid, just stating my emotional reaction here...

It feels so bizarre to me that "cannot jump" is a selling point of the Doom "style of gameplay" to somebody. 

As someone who played all these games in the 90s relatively close to their release (so I'm not a shooter zoomer or anything), I obviously noticed that you could jump in Dark Forces, Quake, etc. and not in Doom—but it never would have occurred to me to mentally categorize the lack of jumping as a feature rather than a bug (so to speak; obviously I realize it was not a bug in the strict software sense).  Ditto with looking up and down.
 

 

1 hour ago, Koko Ricky said:

I mean that's fair. It could look potentially jarring, especially if you've spent years or decades with those sprites. I welcomed it instantly because I had been wanting to see voxel models for everything for a very long time.

For me the big barrier with voxel models is that, while I love the idea for similar reasons as you, I'm a fan of a lot of the variant enemies that have come out over the years and those are obviously less likely to get voxel versions than the vanilla enemies.  Suppose you're playing through Scythe 2 or Valiant with a voxel model pack and all of a sudden you run into the Afrit or Cybruiser and you have a mix of voxels and sprites, which seems like it would just seem cursed all over again.  That's even without getting into ports that support ZScript enemies.  Obviously one can turn off the voxel mod for playing specific mapsets but if I'm turning it off for so much of the best Doom content, was it worth having on in the first place?

I'm happy for you if you're enjoying voxel doom, don't mean to yuck your yum or anything, but for myself I've pretty much settled on sticking with sprites and taking the bad that occasionally comes with it.  (Which isn't that much even as a habitual freelook user—most Doom maps just aren't going to have you dealing with enough verticality to where you have to spend a ton of time looking at cursed sprite billboarding.)
 

Edited January 19 by jerrysheppy

[Jason Maguire]

11 hours ago, Kwisior said:

How about YOU make maps like that and stop telling everyone what to do?

 

I'm not telling anyone what to do - this is a thread for sharing opinions that others don't like. I don't expect anyone to listen to what I have to say and I understand entirely why this change hasn't happened and is unlikely to happen any time soon if ever.  

 

And my point is entirely that I wish this were a categorical change in doom mapping such that it becomes the norm. Some random guy mapping maps that nobody else will ever play will not make this a reality. I would like the people actually good at mapping to make this change, then the A) best maps and B) the maps everyone else plays will have this style of gameplay. 

[Jason Maguire]

7 hours ago, jmac said:

Mappers should make what they want to make, not pander to the bad opinions of others.

 

You understand what "unpopular opinions" means, right? You want me to come in here and talk about archviles being too hard or slaughtermpas being boring or some other anodyne take? 

 

And I don't expect "pandering" - I think this would be a positive change and want other people to have the same mindset, resulting in the change in mapping for that reason, not because some jerk on a forum wanted it

 

Quote

One of the main reasons doom is so fun is because of the simplicity of its gameplay. As soon as jumping, crouching, and freelook are added, it no longer feels like doom and ceases to be interesting.

 

I disagree, I think especially without mouselook, doom becomes repetitive and uninteresting and you have a much more one dimensional style of gameplay. Mouselook also opens up the possibility of a whole host of different custom monster types with novel attack and movement styles. If you enjoy shotgunning imps at eye-level in a hallway for the 500th wad in a row, good for you, but I think there are possibilities for far more creative types of combat. 

 

And I mean, if you could go back and show a doom head from the mid-90s Sunder or some other modern megawad full of dehacked monsters, I'm sure they say that this is ruining the simplicity that makes doom great yadda yadda yadda. The difference between the average modern wad, and what the average modern wad designed for mouselook would be, is smaller than the difference between doom 1 and the average modern wad. Few people think that this is some terrible thing. 

 

Quote

Jumping especially feels out of place, and makes all of the monsters feel like useless lumbering idiots because they can't jump as well.

 

Monsters also can't sprint full speed in every direction, turn on a dime, run off ledges etc., and this difference (between player and monsters) is FAR more striking than a difference in jumping would be, so I don't think that criticism makes any sense. You can literally run rings around any vanilla monster and it has no chance of ever hitting you unless you let it - jumping doesn't make this meaningfully worse. 

Edited January 19 by Jason Maguire

[DankMetal]

The mother demon is actually a good bossfight, she's better than all of  doom 1 and 2's bosses (maybe except for the cyberdemon), and i'm tired of pretending it's not.

The only reason for people to think that she's another lackluster final boss is because they already have the upgraded unmaker when they get to map 28 after looking for guides in youtube. Take in consideration that this game came out in the nineties, when it was hard to pay for an Internet service, and that the game sold out poorly. You had to guess were the secret exit was AND solve a riddle to get the demon keys on said secret levels.

Good luck trying to kill hundreds of high tier enemies, and then a boss who basically has the archvile and the revenant's attacks, without the upgraded unmaker.

[Jason Maguire]

10 hours ago, zokum said:

You can only really complain about not taking into account jumping if the map is for a port that has jumping enabled as default. Aiming rockets make it much easier to aim for the floor and ensure a good hit. It makes the rocket launcher much more powerful. It also ruins the BFG 9000 complexity, making it trivial to ensure you fire the beams very quickly and in an optimal location.

 

 

I wasn't complaining - my point was that these features don't really work well unless the maps are designed with these features in mind. It's not simply a matter of "if you like mouselook, then just use it" - obviously there's ways in which mouselook makes things a lot easier and so it often can't properly be enjoyed without the mapper taking this into account. And so what I would like is for this to become the standard way forward for mapping. 

 

And yet again - this is an unpopular opinion thread. If I thought this change was likely or imminent, I wouldn't feel the need to post it here. 

 

Quote

You got out of that situation by acting like a gummy bear. Well, if the map was designed to force you to have a better strategy or die in that situation, you've just made it a lot less difficult.

 

Did you miss the part where I specifically anticipated this point? I literally said the point is not that maps become easier, it's that it offers more complex gameplay and that maps could and should be designed to be harder (in other ways) accordingly. 

 

Quote

If you have to take jumping into account you have to make taller walls and fences everywhere for game play reasons. That could actually hurt the visuals of the map. If you add rocket jumping into the mix, you have even more trouble.

 

Not true at all. You can simply put an invisible wall. There's countless cases in modern doom wads where the existence of an elevated ledge would otherwise allow you to "jump" over a fence (without actually jumping)....but it simply blocks you from crossing it. But by your logic, we can't have ledges above fences because the aesthetics or something???

 

Vertical rocketjumping is rarely a viable strategy even for maps not designed to account for it, but in any case.....you can simply disable vertical damage thrust. 

 

Quote

Doom doesn't have jumping, Doom for me is the game play found in doom (2) v 1.9. Source ports that add something that changes game play are mods, not regular Doom. Mods are great, but they're not the original game, they're not Doom. I love some of the source port additions people have come up with, and dislike some. Having to cater for every single feature added in a port is a gargantuan task.

 

Then go play Doom 2 v1.9 ??

 

And nobody, literally nobody, mentioned anything about catering to "every single feature". I am talking exclusively about mouselook and jumping. 

 

Quote

Whenever you use a different executable than the one it was designed for, you shouldn't complain about compatibility or game play issues in public. And certainly not demand or require anything. I've seen examples of people demanding mappers to stop using certain tricks, since they don't work well in gl ports.

 

Again, literally nobody here is complaining except for you. I'm describing a change I would like but don't expect to get. 

 

If this upsets you, then I don't know what you voluntarily enter threads where you'll be exposed to opinions you're likely to disagree with. 

Edited January 19 by Jason Maguire