Zombieman's Gun

[bLUEbYTE]

The inconsistency between weapon's graphics and everything else is hard to ignore.


Questions;
1) Was it due to id being cheap and/or not having time to release?
2) Is there a canonical fix for this in form of a minimal mod or dehacked patch?
 

[Final Verdict]

1) No idea, perhaps it was just an oversight when they were making the game. I have never read anything about it so it's actually a good question. 

 

2) There are weapon mods out there that drop the weapon as 'Zombieman Rifle' as a replacement (or secondary weapon) for the pistol slot. I'm not aware of any standalone versions of it but it wouldn't be hard to separate it and make it into a standalone mod. However, the weapon never seems to be balanced as it's always too powerful or too weak. It's not hard to alter the values though so it would be fairly easy to fix.

[NoXion]

The zombieman's weapon (carbine?) seems to be a hard to fit into the Doom arsenal as anything other than a dead simple reskin of the pistol. You can already snipe with the pistol if you take your time, which you can usually do in a sniping situation.

Maybe the zombieman's carbine could be a weapon that fires faster than the pistol (but not as fast as the chaingun) while retaining more accuracy with repeated shots? Would that be awkward or OP?

[Doomkid]

It’s just a development remnant, there weren’t going to be any pistols in Doom originally. The rifle wasn’t converted to the pistol until pretty late in development, sometime between the 0.5 alpha and the press release. Redoing all of the zombieman sprites after this decision was made would have been extra development time and cost for no big gain.

 

That all said, there are “zombie with a pistol” sprites hanging around on Realm667 and elsewhere im sure, or you can just replace the pistol sprite with either the rifle from the 0.4 or 0.5 alpha. I’ve already got ripped and aligned versions of the sprites in shovelad.wad, so feel free to rip them out and use them to replace the pistol.

Edited July 19, 2020 by Doomkid

[dmslr]

My guess why they replaced it with the pistol is that the team wasn't satisfied with the sprites of the rifle drawn by hand which stood out among other, photorealistic weapons (except RL). And they could only find a toy pistol that could replace the rifle.

[Doomkid]

You’re in the right track - I’m certain I read somewhere that it was because it looked just like the shotgun at a glance, and they wanted the players to be able to tell the weapons apart very easily.

 

This part is just my guess, but I think they decided on a beretta instead of rifle (and a chaingun rather than the machine gun) to be more familiar as a “weapon hierarchy” (for lack of a better word) for the existing fan base coming over from Wolf3D.

[bLUEbYTE]

35 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

...

Regarding the sprite 'fix', what I'm after is the opposite - sprites for the zombieman with pistol.

Thanks for sharing that bit of information, which I find quite interesting.

[Uni]

I remember seeing a pistol-wielding former human sprite in NeoDoom, you might wanna check it out if you're after something like that.

[Can't play on Nightmare]

Isn't he a pistol dude?

[Good-Old]

14 hours ago, Can't play on Nightmare said:

Isn't he a pistol dude?

He has the attack of a pistol, but in his sprites he can be seen carrying a rifle. That's why the thread was created. OP is looking for sprites where zombieman is carrying a pistol. 

Edited July 20, 2020 by Good-Old