Unpopular Doom Opinions

[Codename_Delta]

Just now, Lucius Wooding said:

Do any WADs use fireblu as a skybox?

Was about to say Gateway To Shangri-La but it doesn't have one :P

[Codename_Delta]

3 minutes ago, Arrowhead said:

It's also useful for transitioning from COMPBLU to FIRELAV/MAG/WAL in 'hell-corrupted' techbase levels.   :D

I need to do this, how tf have I not seen this at all?

[Scypek2]

One old boom map of mine has a secret that lets you briefly enter a void dimension with a FIREBLU sky on both floor and ceiling. On a related note, in the Monochrome Mapping Project I made a map with the grey ASHWALL as the sky - looks surprisingly good.

[NoOne]

I can't stand the [any] midi music in Doom games, it all sounds like an ancient Binatone being wrung to death.

[Devalaous]

 

9 minutes ago, NoOne said:

I can't stand the [any] midi music in Doom games, it all sounds like an ancient Binatone being wrung to death.

 

Burn the Heretic! ...wait, no, not my boxed game you dolt!

[NoOne]

3 minutes ago, Devalaous said:

 

 

Burn the Heretic! ...wait, no, not my boxed game you dolt!

It said 'unpopular'

 

I didn't disappoint :D

[Firedust]

IoS levels are lame. I'd rather duke it out with a horde of cyberdemons in the final map of a megawad than fight another wall texture spawning monster cubes.

[Stupid Bunny]

The reason people hate pain elementals and archviles and revenants and chaingunners is that they are interesting and challenging enemies that can’t be circlestrafed away and are likely to present a roadblock that takes more than 5 seconds to get around 

[baja blast rd.]

49 minutes ago, Stupid Bunny said:

The reason people hate pain elementals and archviles and revenants and chaingunners is that they are interesting and challenging enemies that can’t be circlestrafed away and are likely to present a roadblock that takes more than 5 seconds to get around 

 

Imo a lot of this is the ease of labeling. When people are annoyed by one of those monsters, the nuisance is very clearly identifiable as that monster. 

 

But a bullshitty and annoying fight with other monsters, which are easy to make, too gets filed under some other label, like "monster spam" or "shitty encounter design" or "the mapper is bad"; what is found annoying is more abstract and doesn't have the same label.

 

If there's a really fun revenant-vile-etc. fight that 80% of people love and 20% of people dislike, that 20% will have their rev-vile hate fueled and maybe complain about at some point. This will be asymmetric because you won't hear from the people who love it in the same way. It won't mirror the complaint. It will be like "these fights are awesome and this was super fun!" not "wow I love viles and revs, yippee!" (If there's any "the rev and vile usage here was really good," it'll be in a thread about the wad specifically, like DWMC, not some general purpose monster thread. "What is your favorite monster" threads exist but at a lower clip than all the possible venues to complain about monsters.) So all of this will create the impression that revs and viles are disliked a lot more than they are.

 

If you scraped DW comments tbh I would not be surprised if that told you that on average they are reviled (heh). But I'd bet that if you could somehow measure people's subjective experiences of fun and do that for literally every hour of Doom played by everyone, that revenants and viles would be close to the top of the heap when it comes to "fun added" (imps maybe being number one)!
 

What I think is probably true, when you adjust for the "ease of labeling" part, is that revs and viles are higher-variance monsters: they can be somewhat more fun than the typical monster more easily, and they can also be somewhat more unfun (while also being higher in average fun value than most other monsters).

 

But since complaints, and a lot of the discussion directly attributable to the monster in general, will be attached to the negative portion of the experiences, they are going to leave out the positives and be really misleading.

 

Public complaint threads are really unreliable. All that tells you is that something is responsible for more negative experiences where the source of the negativity is very easily parsed. Which is very incomplete, and also messy, info.

 

This is why all those "what are your pet peeves" threads are worse than useless for mappers trying to get better at mapping. They don't just provide bad info, they also actively mislead.

[Stupid Bunny]

^ This is all very true, and while I was being intentionally reductive for the hot take thread (probably a bad approach to it) your larger point is one I hadn’t given due consideration to. It actually connects to a larger theme I’ve considered recently about certain frequently quoted opinions that emerge from threads like those and get twisted into mapping dogmas that get mentioned in critiques as though they are bad in themselves, with no further context or explanation needed. Inescapable death pits is the only example coming to my mind right now but I know there are a lot of them. It’s a thought that came to me when I realized I was guilty of doing it myself.

 

Definitely true too that the archie and chaingunner are debatably the two enemies that are most susceptible to crippling a map if just a couple of them are placed wrong. The revenant is less sensitive to this but by its very usefulness to mappers can suffer from sheer ubiquity. After all, revvies are not the most numerous enemies in Plutonia but everyone talks about them as if they’re 90% of the game (I was that way years ago anyway). I know I like putting them in because of how flexible they are and how much pressure they can apply but it’s also really easy to rely too much on them or just throw a few in where they’re really not necessary. As weird as it sounds, I think some other potentially annoying enemies like arachnotrons and big spoods avoid this spammability just by being too big to fit in a lot of map areas.

[Herr Dethnout]

1 hour ago, Stupid Bunny said:

The reason people hate pain elementals and archviles and revenants and chaingunners is that they are interesting and challenging enemies that can’t be circlestrafed away and are likely to present a roadblock that takes more than 5 seconds to get around 

Personally I hate Pain Elemental just because they spit out the most annoying most annoying monsters in the entire Doom cast, also they look like a big shit with arms heh

 

I like the chaingunner because is a great infighting element, but is a pain when used as a turret.

 

I prefer Arch and Reven than a Mancubus IMO

 

[Devalaous]

7 hours ago, Firedust said:

IoS levels are lame. I'd rather duke it out with a horde of cyberdemons in the final map of a megawad than fight another wall texture spawning monster cubes.

...thats not an unpopular opinion, almost everyone despises the IoS.

[galileo31dos01]

I'm gonna write these out of boredom:

 

- Mancubi and arachnotrons are forces to be reckoned and I think they are often overlooked while putting too much blah blah on the plutonia trio who may be yeah attention whores and all but no less troublesome and dangerous and fierce in general than the two chunkies. 

 

- It is amazing to me how the success rate from pinkies is disturbingly higher when it's unintentional or a coincidence than when they actually activate a brain cell and do their job.

 

- I think my previous point is fine not being an unpopular opinion so that this one also not an the unpopular opinion and so the whole argument is pointless. Mhmm.

 

- Still think the sergeant is a worse asshole next to the chaingunner.

 

 

... go to bed dude....

[Devalaous]

Heres one that popped into my head while playing: I really really dislike it when mappers put down a giant pile of rockets, then a cyberdemon or spider mastermind that your meant to use them on. Rockets are TERRIBLE for those two monsters, as they are immune to the splash damage of them. I pretty much always ignore the rockets (aside from topping up to 100) and ssg/plasma the bosses instead. Given how common this setup is even today, it must be an unpopular opinion that I dislike these heavyhanded suggested strategies.

Edited September 21, 2022 by Devalaous

[Stupid Bunny]

15 hours ago, Herr Dethnout said:

Personally I hate Pain Elemental just because they spit out the most annoying most annoying monsters in the entire Doom cast, also they look like a big shit with arms heh

 

I guess that's just it is that I actually think swarms of lost souls are super fun to fight, although that fun is reduced in very tight or super wide-open settings and drops to 0 in any setting once infinitely tall actors come into play.  Can't dispute that PEs look like dung balls tho

 

Actually, do we know if Doom had infinitely tall actors because JC and co. didn't know how to do it any other way at the time?  Or was it within their power to not make cacos and lost souls into infinite pillars of fumbling invisibly biting blockage and they just decided not to bother for some silly reason.  Somehow I remember this coming up a while ago but I don't remember what the consensus was. To me this was always the one vanilla feature that I never found fun or charming or interesting and it's the first thing I disable in any source port.

Edited September 21, 2022 by Stupid Bunny

[Jacek Bourne]

Lost souls are very good enemies.
 

This is because they can more easily damage the player even when they are a very high level player than most projectiles. If you put a good player in a room with a bunch of revenants then they have a good chance of taking no damage at all. If they are put into a room with a bunch of lost souls, they will almost certainly take damage at least once.

 

It’s far more difficult to master dodging lost souls than dodging any other projectile for the most part.

Edited September 21, 2022 by Jacek Bourne

[Naarok0fkor]

[Kinetic]

tiny switch secrets are overrated

[Thelokk]

4 hours ago, Jacek Bourne said:

It’s far more difficult to master dodging lost souls than dodging any other projectile for the most part.

 

Lost soul + Chasm-like walkways is a lost art. 

[Lucius Wooding]

They are a bit harder to dodge in a sense since the lost souls, unlike projectiles, are infinitely tall so you can't run under them in vanilla. They also change speeds and block movement, and can be harder to predict than most attacks. Honestly a small group of lost souls might require the most space to safely dodge compared to non hitscan enemies. Plus their tendency to infight can be very annoying and break off pairs of them from the main group.

 

Personally I dislike The Chasm but it's much more for being oversized and having a dumb layout. The actual lost souls + narrow platform stuff is a decent gimmick and it makes for a more interesting finale than the Icon of Sin at least.

[Sonikkumania]

Many seem to be into voxels in Doom now.

 

I appreciate the effort to evolve the engine, but I don't like voxels. I like sprites more. Maybe I'm an old timer :D

[CasualScrub]

The Pistol in 2016 is a decent weapon, especially upgraded. Plus I use it to pop those possessed that wander about instead of wasting ammo on them.

[Legatron17]

Lost Souls that aren't spawned by Pain Elementals should've been programmed to count towards the kill count. (Especially in Ultimate Doom!)

[baja blast rd.]

10 imps has the same HP as 1 mancubus. A fight that uses a cluster of 10 imps as a single faction is not less "economical" with monster use as similar one that uses 1 mancubus in the same role / threat level just because the monster count is 9 higher to achieve the same thing. Monster count is a pretty bad way of thinking about monster economy (to whatever extent that intrinsically matters). 

[Nefelibeta]

4 hours ago, baja blast rd. said:

10 imps has the same HP as 1 mancubus. A fight that uses a cluster of 10 imps as a single faction is not less "economical" with monster use as similar one that uses 1 mancubus in the same role / threat level just because the monster count is 9 higher to achieve the same thing. Monster count is a pretty bad way of thinking about monster economy (to whatever extent that intrinsically matters). 

To be fair, it's cool to see a map with less than 300 monsters but still hard as balls... for reasons.

[Lucius Wooding]

Monster Economy would be a pretty good name for a WAD where you kill a bunch of imp stockbrokers and robber barons.

[Daytime Waitress]

1 hour ago, Lucius Wooding said:

Monster Economy would be a pretty good name for a WAD where you kill a bunch of imp stockbrokers and robber barons.

 

Robber barons with gigantic ol' timey moustaches and tophats.

[Lucius Wooding]

Can't forget the monocled cacodemons though.

[heliumlamb]

doom(2).exe v1.9 has the best (and most dangerous) halls of mirrors

[peach freak]

I'm not a big fan of when original Doom music tracks get re-used in PWADs. I feel like the original music has its place in the IWADs and that it's hard to re-use that music elsewhere, it just never felt right for me. In Alien Vendetta for example, there are a lot of tracks from Doom and TNT from the game, and on those levels, I will switch the music to either Map01 or Map04 (and Map04's music in AV really fits in well with a lot of levels, I might add).