Am i the only one who doesnt like the variety of city/building textures in doom 2?

[CyberDestroyer]

Its like the same wolfenstein looking brick textures and maybe a window texture here and there.

The rest is just big window textures and wood textures.

 

A example is downtown where it just looks weird. I understand that this was released in 1994,

but could they have at least added some more variety?

 

Sorry if i sound dumb or biased or anything of the sort.

Edited August 26, 2020 by CyberDestroyer
I sound like some fortnite kid by saying "low variety"

[DCG Retrowave]

I was thinking about the lack of color in several DOOM II maps earlier today.  All three episodes seem to use the metal textures for almost everything.  Sure, not all of the metal textures are the same and some work very well for certain things, but dark brown metal for everything isn't very appealing, at least not in my opinion.  I did a co-op playthrough of the Ultimate DOOM last night and seeing the wonderful design of the UAC base again was refreshing :D

 

I like most DOOM II maps.  I just don't think most of them look special.

[fufu]

I'm pretty sure this is actually one of the reasons the city levels in doom 2 tend to get hate.

And yes, i agree, they should have added more textures and maybe some sprites for things like lampposts.

Edited August 27, 2020 by Danzer

[Doomkid]

You’re not the only one, this opinion is common. I enjoy all of Doom 2 but if someone wanted to go back in time and spruce up the visuals just a bit I certainly wouldn’t stop them.

[Man of Doom]

Honestly, you’re far from the only one.

 

With the city textures they have, it honestly feels like we’re battling demons on 20th century Earth (closer to like the 30s/40s) rather than 21st/22nd century Earth.

[Gez]

Good things there are thousands of additional textures for Doom.

[Hunting4r2d2]

I agree, and I'm someone who has a soft spot for the city levels in Doom II

[Stabbey]

I'm starting work on my replacement for Factory ("BFG Factory"), and as I'm looking through the list of textures I can use for city buildings I see... brown brick, brown brick, brown brick, red brick, green brick, brown brick, brown brick, brown brick...

 

And there aren't really any flats to match almost all of those for the top/bottom of the bricks!

Edited August 27, 2020 by Stabbey

[printz]

Most of the Doom II textures are dirt, stone and bricks. They excel at making large underground bases and overground castles, as you get lots of variety to play with.

 

I assume that the Doom engine wasn't powerful enough to depict realistic city areas, so id were fine with just an approximate representation. They were probably happy that the computers of the time became powerful enough to render levels like MAP15 at all. Pretty sure that larger, more complex levels was one of the selling points over Doom I.

Edited August 27, 2020 by printz

[Doom_Dude]

16 hours ago, CyberDestroyer said:

Sorry if i sound dumb or biased or anything of the sort.

 

Welcome to the dumb and biased club. :D

 

I totally agree with you, like so many others have said already.

 

It isn't just the city/building textures tho... the whole issue could use more variety.

 

Like @Gez said, good things there are thousands of additional textures for Doom. :D

[Pokemanic33]

I've long loathed Doom 2's browns and greys and stone bricks, and I don't think that's an exceptionally controversial opinion. The first game's colors are much more vibrant and interesting and that does a lot to keep my interest.

[Kappes Buur]

18 hours ago, CyberDestroyer said:

Sorry if i sound dumb or biased or anything of the sort.

 

Since I do not know you, all I can say is, don't feel sorry for yourself. Instead delve into the computer history of 1994.

DOOM was released as a DOS game, when 640K of computer memory and 40 MB harddisks were the norm, which meant limited resources and, therefore, limited aesthetics . Today we are spoiled with almost unlimited computer memory and harddisk space.

 

Luckily, if you want to put in the effort, now you can rebuild the doom levels to your hearts content and design with as much detail and colour as you can envision.

 

 

[Graf Zahl]

The city textures are ugly as fuck and utterly useless for making maps in a modern looking environment.

 

The entire look and feel of Doom 2 makes it exceedingly obvious that someone made a texture collection first, gave that to the mappers and said "Work with that!" Most of Duke Nukem 3D isn't really any more detailed than Doom 2, but looks magnitudes better because more care was put into making decent looking textures.

 

 

[CyberDestroyer]

For my map i had to add custom building textures, i simply cannot stand the poo colored textures of doom 2.

 

Don't get me wrong there are a lot of good textures in doom 2 but the majority of them are just shit-brown (literally). Its awful.

Edited August 27, 2020 by CyberDestroyer
grammatical error

[Hellektronic]

I don't like the city textures, but generally the maps were done with enough spirit in Doom 2 to convincingly portray a city... so I guess you could argue it was a testament to Sandy Peterson's mapping ability when he wasn't trying to make a dumb map theme like "Tricks and Traps" or "Barrels O' Fun". All in all? I actually found the city maps to be some of the most creative in Doom 2, although requiring a bit of imagination to see what was intended.

 

I'm sure someone could do better with custom textures or ones ripped from another game or something, but eh, if you can make a good city map using city textures, my hat is off to you.

Edited August 28, 2020 by Hellektronic

[whirledtsar]

8 hours ago, Kappes Buur said:

 

Since I do not know you, all I can say is, don't feel sorry for yourself. Instead delve into the computer history of 1994.

DOOM was released as a DOS game, when 640K of computer memory and 40 MB harddisks were the norm, which meant limited resources and, therefore, limited aesthetics . Today we are spoiled with almost unlimited computer memory and harddisk space.

 

Luckily, if you want to put in the effort, now you can rebuild the doom levels to your hearts content and design with as much detail and colour as you can envision.

Well, constraints of the time limited them from adding even more textures, but it seems like the actual issue at hand is the art design of the textures they did add. They still had the capability to use all the colors they did in Doom 1, and it wouldve been possible to create more realistic textures a la Duke 3D.

[PasokonDeacon]

Duke 3D city textures aren't even that realistic, let alone any from Blood or Shadow Warrior. But they're more meaningfully detailed and still readable from a distance vs. Doom II's very "old tenement district" palette. I can more easily distinguish Blood's bombed-out cityscapes at DOS resolution than I can the minute brick and wood grain in places like Petersen's Downtown.

One reason I rather like Industrial Zone is how well it deviates from brown brown brown; parts of it feel more like an Ultimate Doom city map experience. Petersen was right to show off the new textures, as one would expect given the effort put into them, but it didn't take long for mappers to find more appealing color and material combinations with the IWAD assets.

[Tony_Danza_the_boss]

Doom II in general to me looks extremely bland compared to Doom 1. I replayed both Wads recently and the color palette in D1 just seems to pop so much more in that game than in II. The hellish skies in Inferno and even the outside portions of Knee Deep in the Dead feel so much more alive than just the same metal and muddied brown textures I see in every level in II before the last few set in Hell.

[Final Verdict]

24 minutes ago, Tony_Danza_the_boss said:

Doom II in general to me looks extremely bland compared to Doom 1. I replayed both Wads recently and the color palette in D1 just seems to pop so much more in that game than in II. The hellish skies in Inferno and even the outside portions of Knee Deep in the Dead feel so much more alive than just the same metal and muddied brown textures I see in every level in II before the last few set in Hell.

 

That is exactly why, whenever I think of Doom, the images in my mind are conjured up from the first game. That isn't to say Doom II is bad, it's more that all those city and brown textures tend to just mix together so it's less distinct for me.

 

Some Doom II levels really stand out, but what you mentioned above is the main reason I seem to remember Ultimate Dooms episodes more vividly.

 

14 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

The entire look and feel of Doom 2 makes it exceedingly obvious that someone made a texture collection first, gave that to the mappers and said "Work with that!" 

 

 

Let's put it this way, colour me impressed if that wasn't the case. I reached the exact same conclusion.

 

Now, I'm not going to pretend that I've looked this up as I have never had a reason too until now. But I strongly suspect that's exactly what happened during Doom II's development.

 

[seed]

No, but if anything I'm still surprised topics like this keep surfacing.

 

Do people really not know that Doom 2's maps are almost universally reviled by the community? There's only a small fraction that likes them as they are, the vast majority hates them. If Doom 2 has a better set of textures it could easily look more realistic or pleasant to the eyes, like Duke, SW and Blood did, which have maps that are more detailed, yes, but not by an awful lot, its mainly their texture set that was just much better overall, if you change that, you're left with bizarre, abstract maps just like Doom 2's city maps.

[Cacodemon345]

I would say Doom 2's city texture set is what made the aesthetics far less appealing than what Doom 1 featured.

 

Heck, I would argue Petersen's Doom 1 maps are more detailed than his Doom 2 maps.

[DuckReconMajor]

I've seen city areas look really good with stock textures in modern maps. Even Plutonia MAP29 looks decent. They're not the best textures in the world but they're workable.

[Doomkid]

5 hours ago, seed said:

No, but if anything I'm still surprised topics like this keep surfacing.

 

Do people really not know that Doom 2's maps are almost universally reviled by the community? There's only a small fraction that likes them as they are, the vast majority hates them.

This is Doomworld, every day is groundhog day. I wish I had a dollar for every identical topic ever made on these forums, I'd be a rich man.

 

But for the second point, I think reviled is going a bit too far. Most people consider them inferior to Doom 1, I guess purely on an aesthetic level (shotgunning a lone baron in a hallway is not exactly riveting in 2020, I'm sorry Doom 1 fans) but the argument of gameplay usually tends to lean towards Doom 2 from my findings.

 

Maybe that's just among the slightly more "hardcore" populus at Doomworld, though. Most "Doom Redditors" or whatever probably just play through both once, find the visuals of Doom 1 more appealing (because tbf, they definitely are more colorful on the whole) and leave it at that. But, you don't even have to be a looney who replays UD/D2 over and over again like me to notice the gameplay takes a huuge leap up from D1 to D2, and it's not just because of the new monsters, but the much taller and wider spaces to fight in with more intricate layouts.

 

Most of E2 and E3 are as ugly as Doom2 at it's worst but are also a lot flatter and less interesting to explore. They are fine maps, but they're no better than Doom 2's offerings. I think the consistent and clean visuals of E1 really trick a lot of people and have wrongly sealed Doom 2's reputation as inferior in the eyes of the common Doom fan! [/rant I've had 999 times before because once again DW is Groundhog Day the website]

[seed]

2 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

E3 are as ugly as Doom2

 

Thou hast insulteth E3 of Doom.

 

Prepare to draw your weapon!

[CyberDestroyer]

6 hours ago, seed said:

No, but if anything I'm still surprised topics like this keep surfacing.

 

Do people really not know that Doom 2's maps are almost universally reviled by the community? There's only a small fraction that likes them as they are, the vast majority hates them. If Doom 2 has a better set of textures it could easily look more realistic or pleasant to the eyes, like Duke, SW and Blood did, which have maps that are more detailed, yes, but not by an awful lot, its mainly their texture set that was just much better overall, if you change that, you're left with bizarre, abstract maps just like Doom 2's city maps.

Nah, i actually didn't know. I apologize to anybody who's seen a thread or something similar/identical about this topic. It was an interesting topic. (to me, not sure about you guys lol)

Edited August 28, 2020 by CyberDestroyer
Sorry for all these edits but im sure theres IDENTICAL THREADS about this too.

[CyberDestroyer]

On 8/27/2020 at 7:32 AM, Man of Doom said:

Honestly, you’re far from the only one.

 

With the city textures they have, it honestly feels like we’re battling demons on 20th century Earth (closer to like the 30s/40s) rather than 21st/22nd century Earth.

makes me think the UAC are time travelers haha

[seed]

8 minutes ago, CyberDestroyer said:

Nah, i actually didn't know. I apologize to anybody who's seen a thread or something similar/identical about this topic. It was an interesting topic. (to me, not sure about you guys lol)

 

Hey, no problem, I'm sorry if that was rude, I was just surprised that people keep bringing this up as if it's an unpopular opinion, when it's actually the polar opposite.

[Chip]

I never really notice texturing unless it is really beautiful, like BTSX Hub map beautiful. So I'm not sure if I disagree with your statement or not.

[Samuel Slayer]

Depends what people do with those textures. I've seen many awesome city maps made for vanilla doom with stock textures.

[Denim Destroyer]

I have not seen it done much but good locales can be made with the stock Doom 2 texture set, Doom Zero and A.L.T have decent looking city levels. Now what I would like to see is someone use the Ion Fury textures in Doom but that is not likely to happen due to them being copyrighted.