What do you unironically love about those old cheesy ZDOOM wads?

[Jimmy]

I'm talking about late-90s, early-00s mapsets designed for ZDoom that saw all the new features it offered and just... went ham. I retrospectively view these sets as time capsules into a period where excess was celebrated and deliberately striven for by virtually every author who touched ZDoom.

 

Of course we now have GZDoom with its innate ability to make Doom look like a different game engine entirely, but before ZDoom was still confined to being recognisably Doom, that level of "excess" manifested in how ludicrously overstuffed with "Doom+"-style features the maps could be. Every mapper back then sought to transform the game into something more. More map interactivity! More opportunity for plotlines and character development! More... everything.

 

Below is a list of my favorite tropes of oldschool ZDoom mapping.

 

• Particles! IMHO they still look fine and I continue to use particle fountains without a shred of irony. Fight me.
  • That frickin' spark effect. The best use of it by far was in some Heretic mapset released in the last ten years or so that used it on a bookshelf. "Oh no the spellbooks are leaking magic again!"
• Stealth monsters - because why should the whole experience of playing a map be fun? (Disclaimer: Seriously don't use these things ever.)
• Long earthquake sequences after you blew up a reactor core, or raised a bunch of really big platforms. For those who wanted even more motion sickness with their FPS.
• Ghoulish colored sector lighting, just everywhere. Every computer console was bathed in a different full-saturation color. And if you blew up the reactor or set the alarm off or something, good luck navigating your way out of the base while everything went fullbright #FF0000 and the screen started quaking. Thanks game, I always wanted to simulate having an aneurysm!
• Basically no one back then could make a single working ladder. But you had to go up and down them anyway!
• Looooooots of platforming.
  • Before 3D floors, there were bridge actors. You'd place things down in the map and then configure their height and radius in the editor. Never got it quite right first time.
• Slopes! Moving on them sucks! Let's use them everywhere!
• Waterfall textures that were both animated AND scrolling. To be fair, I still see this done today. I almost hate it.
• Snazzy skyboxes. Hello, Void.
• Big elaborate sector machinery. There was always at least one spinning polyobject inside a translucent-SHAWN2 tube per level in those days. Sometimes you'd have to disable them or blow them up.
  • Also, operable weapons made out of sectors! Doom Resurrection MAP01 has you blow up a door with a laser; it's so silly. Massmouth 2 has a map with a BFG turret that you can not only use, but also very easily kill yourself with.
  • "Damn the generator's busted. I can tell because there's archvile fire spawning forever on top of it to signify that it's on fire."
• Almost no door was just a door.
  • Polyobjects, split doors, and to some degree sliding midtexture/animated doors were used wherever it was possible.
  • Adding onto that, almost every locked door would require some obscure thing - not a key, but instead you'd have to turn the power couplings on, or re-establish communications, or find a pale turquoise computer disk with a specific program on it in order to open the door. (Looking at you, RTC-3057.)
  • Turning off forcefields to progress. Hardly see any of that these days.
• An obsession with sounds from Quake 1/2, Half-Life, and Unreal - including ambient/environmental sounds, and non-diegetic sounds for when the game gave you objectives or other textual tooltips.
  • Also ambient sounds like that one fucking wind howl in 007: License to Spell Doom, which were like three-second loops and induced a desire to puncture one's own eardrums with a thumbtack.
• The use of demoscene/module music. Some absolute bangers can be found in mods like Massmouth 2, Void and Chosen.
• Big ambitious storylines featuring multiple original characters that had you visiting multiple planets or planes of existence in a relatively short play time. Some sets even came with multiple endings!
• Cheesy unskippable cutscenes. Giving Doomguy a voice for the silliest things, like "Oh no, the monsters figured out how to teleport in!". For the most part you only had to view these things once through, because even back then authors tended to recognise that cutscenes weren't everyone's cup of tea and were generous enough to autosave the game after the cutscene was done. Some of my favorite moments are in Massmouth 2 and Claustrophobia: The Walls Close In. Just... so much cheese.
  • Bonus points for voice acting. I mean it was never VOICES.WAD-level voice acting, but it always put a dumb grin on my face.
  • Sometimes the in-game messages were self-aware. Zort 3 starts you out by saying "You have to kill me, the cyberdemon, but you probably figured that out. Okay up we go." Then the elevator the player is standing on rises up and the level actually begins. Top class.

Edited July 9, 2020 by Jimmy

[Gez]

12 minutes ago, Jimmy said:

Waterfall textures that were both animated AND scrolling. To be fair, I still see this done today. I almost hate it.

I'll defend this because:

1. If the waterfall texture is only animated, the liquid looks super viscous -- the animation isn't smooth enough to make it look like the liquid is falling as fast as water does.
2. If the waterfall texture is only scrolling, then the staticness of its pattern makes it look like a scrolling wallpaper, rather than a liquid.

 

[Redneckerz]

I mean Jimmy pretty much nails everything i wanted to suggest, especially the particle and blending effects. There is something epic seeing it done in older ZDoom builds that make it worthwhile.

• Super Sonic Doom is also one of those older ZDoom works that highlights a lot of ZDoom stuff, so much so that it needs its own custom ZDoom version to function flawlessly (2.0.94f.)
• Operation Overlord introduced ducking through a custom source mod which was later included in GZDoom. But the original release was a custom ZDoom 2.0.63 based source modification called ZDuck. Got it archived with Enjay's blessing on /idgames this year.

[doomsucksass]

Sexy and nostalgic...good days

[obake]

This perfectly describes my early works :p

 

One thing I unironically love about old zdoom wads is their gusto. They were not afraid to try new, elaborate things. Even if many of those things ended up hindering gameplay.

 

Speaking of my own, I feel a sense of nostalgia for my early mapping days, when I was not afraid to experiment or just go wild. While I have definitely improved as a mapper, I do enjoy going back to my first maps and seeing the crazy stuff I did.

[plums]

Basically nothing :p

 

It's probably due in part to me not playing Doom at all during that time, but any time I come across a wad like that, all I can think is "why would you do this???" It's like some dark era of mapping to me, where anarchy reigned and nothing was safe. Bad/excessive cutscenes in particular drive me crazy and are something I find irredeemable.

 

That said, I guess there are some features that are OK when used with discretion. Sky boxes and mod music can still be cool when done tastefully, outside of the normal ZClusterFuck of everything else.

 

I also agree that animated+scrolling liquid textures can work, especially when the liquid animation doesn't move in any direction. Hexen does this even and it looks good IMO.

Edited July 9, 2020 by plums

[Megalyth]

For the most part I enjoyed the ones that I played, and I'm actually getting a powerful nostalgia just thinking about it. The defining feature that I recall was really just the open and experimental nature of so many map sets from those first few years of source port honeymoon.

 

It's much easier to nail down a particularly hated trend, because it spanned a great swathe.

 

You know it.

 

SHAWN2

[DuckReconMajor]

When I first saw the clouds moving over the mountains at the beginning of Invasion UAC, after staring at it for the longest time I had to pull it open in Doom Builder to figure out exactly what was going on.

 

Things like colored sector lighting and the on-screen text and cutscenes I still think are really cool when they're not too excessive.

With scripting I loved the fact you could lock the player in a room and not let them out until you kill all these imps etc. Something that sounds unappealing to me these days, but at the time the thought you could totally choreograph an epic scene/fight to play out how you wanted seemed so cool.

[MacGuffin]

I'll never get tired of seeing missing hexagonal floor tiles in those "hyper-detailed" map sets. It's like the demons decided to take them back home.

[Endless]

7 hours ago, Jimmy said:

An obsession with sounds from Quake 1/2, Half-Life, and Unreal - including ambient/environmental sounds, and non-diegetic sounds for when the game gave you objectives or other textual tooltips.

I always smile every time I hear one of those sounds, specially the ambient sounds. Maybe that's what I love about old WADs, that feeling of innovation, of ''this is something new'', of course, not for us, but it was new back in the day, and lives on.

[Tristan]

I liked KDiZD.

Come at me bro.

 

Also shoutout to that video of It Only Gets Worse MAP06 that I saw back in 2009 or something; my first exposure to what ZDoom could do was that fucking buttsex machine (NSFW). At least I was 12 so of course I found it hilarious.

[Gothic]

I really liked Zpack, and not because of Vader's levels, but because of everything else. I wish for more zdoom projects like this in the future, which is just Doom, but fancier, with no need to create a whole new complicated universe.

8 hours ago, Jimmy said:

Cheesy unskippable cutscenes.

This I don't miss at all.

[scalliano]

I was late to the ZDoom party, so by the time I jumped in there were already mods like Titan and KDiZD with all of their snazzy scripted events and extra monsters.

 

Kind of have a thing for extra monsters, as you may be able to tell.

[xvertigox]

Oof, the translucent SHAWN2 tubes really get me going. Might have to do a KDiZD playthrough this weekend.

[Doomkid]

First thing that comes to mind when thinking about early 00's ZDoom effects are the ZDaemon CTF map packs. Slopes, animated/scrolling liquids, cool colored lighting.. Those wads seriously kicked ass. Even on the handful of maps that sucked (most of them have aged well in terms of gameplay, tbh) you could still be impressed by mapping that was done with care and used those snazzy newish ZDoom effects. 2004-2005 man, it was a different Doom era, that's for sure..

 

In terms of actual weapon modifiers, Immoral Conduct is basically the grail of "old-style ZDoom weapon mods". It's not excessive with the effects or anything, just a solidly-built pack of weapons. Other than a few shitty sprites (especially the insanely unfitting sniper rifle), it has actually withstood the test of time pretty darn well. Another one that instantly comes to mind is Bomb_x.

 

If you want to see all the shittiest aspects of early ZDoom mapping and modding, look no further than Doom: Rampage Edition! Be sure you grab the nearly 100 MB version (absolutely fucking massive for 2004/2005 standards) choc full of copyright-infringing MP3 files!

 

Also, when it comes to the liquid textures being animated and scrolling, I must say I also think it looks shit. It looks even worse if it isn't animated for the exact reason Gez stated, but the best solution is to simply play the animation frames faster using ANIMDEFS. If you cut the tic delay in half on the WFALL texture it actually ends up looking damn convincing - no "awkward scrolling downward" needed.

 

4 hours ago, plums said:

It's probably due in part to me not playing Doom at all during that time, but any time I come across a wad like that, all I can think is "why would you do this???" It's like some dark era of mapping to me, where anarchy reigned and nothing was safe. Bad/excessive cutscenes in particular drive me crazy and are something I find irredeemable.

If the mid 90's were the Stone Age of mapping and modern times are the Space Age, then yes, the early 2000's ZDoom-frenzy era was definitely the Dark Ages.. To be honest, the span of wads made from 2000-2005 are largely ignored because it was an era more of experimentation rather than actually producing playable stuff. (well, other than the small handful of 'smash hits' from that era - I'm talking about on the whole!)

 

3 hours ago, Megalyth said:

It's much easier to nail down a particularly hated trend, because it spanned a great swathe.

 

You know it.

 

SHAWN2

SHAWN2 maps are unironically peak Doom wadding, dont @ me

 

2 hours ago, DuckReconMajor said:

When I first saw the clouds moving over the mountains at the beginning of Invasion UAC, after staring at it for the longest time I had to pull it open in Doom Builder to figure out exactly what was going on.

Oh man, Invasion UAC! That along with some of those other popular/similar sets on ZDaemon are also perfect examples of early 2000's mapping, though to their credit, those wads are actually a lot of fun in multiplayer.

 

EDIT: Skulltag era deathmatchers (well, the 6 who are still around) will get salty as fuck when I say this, but Sabbat Martyr DM also has loads of shitty 2005 ZDoom effects and "what NOT to do" moments going on. There are definitely some examples of brilliance in that wad (I mean, Mechadon, need I say more) but man, the majority of those maps have shit tier gameplay coupled with moronic early ZDoom effects used pointlessly. My maps are some of the worst in the set, though a handful of true-blue stinkers even trump my entries in terms of sheer shittiness. Dwango5 has better gameplay on the whole, easily - and no, that isn't sarcasm!

 

EDIT AGAIN: holy shitballs, how has no one mentioned skins?! Easily one of my favorite things that was introduced back then! I still use the best surviving skins on all of my multiplayer servers, it really is a great way to give your player a more unique/personalized feel... Just as long as they aren't filled to the brim with earrape sound effects replacing all the standard Doomguy grunts. Which of course, most of them were. Still though, a fantastic and frankly underrated feature of early 00's wads.

Edited July 9, 2020 by Doomkid

[Bauul]

I remember playing a few ZDoom wads in the early 2000s and always being slightly intimidated by the sheer quantity of extra special effects.  But what was particularly weird (at least to me) was that in order to play them, you had to use a software renderer, rather than the new-fangled OpenGL source ports.  It felt like this odd contrast to have maps filled with absolute cutting edge engine features, but then an old-school renderer that felt positively quaint at the time that the likes of Doomsday was pouring buckets of hyper bloom and giant lens flairs into our eyes (back when we thought that stuff was cool).

 

In terms of specific ZDoom memories, the feature that always stuck out to me was the humble Print function.  Early ZDoom mappers never seemed sure whether to settle on going humorous self-parody with the scripts they wrote, or over the top seriousness.

 

It was never as simple as Quake's "1 more to go", "sequence complete" etc. (which I still think has a gameplay-pure functionality that doesn't feel out of place even in an otherwise vanilla map).  Even the simplest information was wonderfully convoluted.  It wasn't "3 more to go", it was "The generator is at 75%!  If you find the other three switches, you can power down the generator, which will in turn open the door and allow you to exit.  Good luck!"  

 

Good times indeed.

 

On a separate note:

10 hours ago, Gez said:

If the waterfall texture is only scrolling, then the staticness of its pattern makes it look like a scrolling wallpaper, rather than a liquid.

 

A good solution to avoiding this is rather than just a single scrolling texture, have ~10 semi-transparent same-textured mid-textures.  But give each a slightly different scale, offset, vertical scrolling speed, and slight horizontal scrolling speed (alternating left and right).  The result is a natural looking waterfall with endless changing depth, and no animations needed at all.

Edited July 9, 2020 by Bauul

[Phobus]

I got in a bit late there, but the Zort and KZDoom series(es), along with the works of Enjay and @Tormentor667 were everything I wanted to make. Well, really I wanted to make a one-man ZDCMP... 

 

Anyway, my point was that I love all of that stuff, and really, Doom, but with lots of bells and whistles on top, is all I really want to play and to make. It's what I'm going back to, even if I have to bin all of my unfinished projects and never map for a community project again.

 

I miss the days when you could load up a ZDoom map and know, for a fact, a generator needed powering up and you'd hear a cricket somewhere.

[Smouths]

Minute long cutscenes with a bunch of dialogue displayed in the message font while the camera jumped back and forth between sprite characters, which would segue via screenfade into a "realistic" depiction of a city in the starting map. (Is this an actual memory?)

 

It's funny, I hated that at the time but almost miss it now.

 

Edit- Oh yeah, decent chance that a copyrighted low bitrate mp3 would be playing in the background.

Edited July 9, 2020 by Smouths

[Not Jabba]

4 hours ago, Thomas Redgrave said:

I'll never get tired of seeing missing hexagonal floor tiles in those "hyper-detailed" map sets. It's like the demons decided to take them back home.

I love it. Somebody needs to make a Hell map that has some sort of huge gothic warehouse full of hexagon tiles that demons have brought home as souvenirs.

[NuMetalManiak]

I'll enjoy any ZDoom map that does not overstay its welcome more or less. So most things that don't have stupid unskippable cutscenes are good.

[Megalyth]

4 hours ago, Eris Falling said:

I liked KDiZD.

Come at me bro.

 

I enjoyed the hell out of KDiZD, despite some questionable design and progression. It was very atmospheric and challenging. It's been years, I think I'm due for another play-through.

[Woolie Wool]

Thanks for reminding me to do a review of RTC-3057.

 

Serious: The ZDoom community is more of its own "thing" and benefits very little from the collective expertise of the mainstream mapping community, plus there doesn't really seem to be much of a "mapping culture" to retain and spread what knowledge they do acquire so everyone reinvents basic mapping techniques constantly instead of drawing from a broad knowledge of pwad levels, what they look like, and how they work as well as the feedback of others who do. While the rest of ZDoom modding continuously advances, mapping, with some exceptions (who mostly also do maps for vanilla or Boomlikes), is stuck in a sort of perpetual 1994.

 

That said, MassMouth 2 was absolutely hilarious for me when I was a teenager, even though now it's 110% cringe and I can't bear the thought of replaying it and ruining my memories forever by experiencing "You f-g! I'll kill you for killing me!" as an adult and having to confront how sublimely awful my sense of humor used to be.

Edited July 10, 2020 by Woolie Wool

[Test Tickle]

The thing i love about most old ZDoom mods is how primitive they are compared to more modern mods. They show how far modding has come since the innovation of faster and better editing tools and extended knowledge of how scripts work. The MassMouth series and Void are both big examples in my eyes.

[Xaser]

I think my favorite old-ZDoomism from back in the days of Massmouth 2 and company was when wads would introduce new guns by reskinning a Heretic or Hexen weapon. I played a bunch of these mods before I ever played Hexen, even, so at the time it was some insane magic "holy shit how did they do this?" wizardry... though nowadays I'd just look at it and go "haha that's the Wraithverge" :P

[DOEL]

Are there any map packs that could serve as an example of this? Or are we talking about gameplay mods?

[Uni]

I don't really play ZDoom mods because it's not my cup of tea but there's one that I really really like and I still revisit from time to time and that's NeoDoom by Daniel. There's something about the abundance of new monsters and weapons and the way they were designed combined along with a full all new 32-map set that really makes me love it in a special kind of way. I especially like the urban and city levels and with an original soundtrack, I always get a nostalgic feel whenever I play it. What's really stand out for me is how some of the monsters were designed like the Vixen for example which is absolutely ridiculous, the super secret level theme and the sound effects.

 

I find it a mystery that I like it so much especially because I don't usually get attracted by ZDoom mods and some of the maps are rather generic design-wise but NeoDoom managed to get me hooked and play the entire thing multiple times over the years. It has a special place in my heart and if I ever get stranded alone on an island and had to pick a limited numbers of WADs to take with me, NeoDoom would definitely be one of them.

 

 

Edited July 10, 2020 by Uni

[D4NUK1]

Im shocked nobody still bring up Action Doom 1, that was a Wad that i don't really know how i get it at  11 years olds, and i just used it with Zdoom (i jumped from Doom95 to Zdoom, because i don't know other .exe that can play doom at the time.)

And man, that was a whole new game experence. For my going the same as Quake 3 in power (i called things like explotions and models like that in that age).

[ReFracture]

Do these old ZDoom mods behave properly on modern GZDoom? I've had mixed impressions over the years on newer versions of ZDoom and it's derivatives breaking compatibility with some old mods. I'm feeling nostalgic enough to play some of these old maps.. If it's safer to use the build they were tested on to avoid breaks I might do that.

[Hitboi]

Ohh Mann- I love those and i can't describe how nostalgic they are...

They Also remind me of...

Spoiler

 ^{Joke Wads.}

 

[Doomkid]

9 hours ago, ReFracture said:

Do these old ZDoom mods behave properly on modern GZDoom? I've had mixed impressions over the years on newer versions of ZDoom and it's derivatives breaking compatibility with some old mods. I'm feeling nostalgic enough to play some of these old maps.. If it's safer to use the build they were tested on to avoid breaks I might do that.

I've only tested a small handful, but most of them seemed to work perfectly - or at least, if the version incompatibility was causing flaws, I wasn't noticing them.