The Dean of Doom series (companion thread)

[Endless]

On 9/7/2023 at 11:22 PM, Akagi666 said:

I don't know why people have such reverence for 90's stuff cause all of it that I've seen or played has been garbage.

The problem with this is the way you have worded it it. Garbage is a strong word to describe what is considered an important age for Doom history. While it is true that the 90s had a lot of bad WADs, a similar thing can be said about modern times. There's still WADs coming out today that look like they were made 30 years ago.

 

If you want to compare the quality of a good 1994 WAD with that of a good 2023 release, you are just being unfair and negligent of the historical context.

 

As for why people have reverence for 90s stuff, here's some stuff I can think about:

1. Nostalgia, the most simple factor to go for
2. Simplicity, most maps were done with the essentials and still work and play good
3. Innovation, people were new to mapping and even tools were quite rudimentary, you had to make due with what you had, and some people could be very creative
4. Historical interest, I find myself in this one. There's something to be said that a game manages to survive for 30 years and you can go back to its premiering date and still play its earliest works as if you were digging some ancient dinosaur. I think it is awesome
5. Vanilla, most WADs back then were created for the original .exe, and while source ports didn't took long to appear, people stuck with vanilla for years. Today, there's a lot of vanilla-lovers that find themselves attracted to old school WADs at some point because of the huge amount of vanilla maps that are from that era

And heck, I even covered this with other 90s enthusiasts out there in my blog: Why Play 90s WADs?

[LSC Lasico]

i would like to preface this by saying that I actually like 90's wads and their brands of gameplay, however I still disagree with sone things that endless said.

 

Quote

The problem with this is the way you have worded it it. Garbage is a strong word to describe what is considered an important age for Doom history.

It is an important age, yet it shouldn't be something sacred or immune from negativity. Being important and being garbage are two completely unrelated things. As such, calling it garbage is, in my opinion, is warranted if the person genuinely dislikes that period. Different people - different tastes, and it the person in question acknowledges that, it shouldnt be particularly frowned upon or considered strong.

 

Quote

If you want to compare the quality of a good 1994 WAD with that of a good 2023 release, you are just being unfair and negligent of the historical context.

Doom itself disproves this. The game came out all the way back in 1994 (or 1995? I forgot) yet it still holds up amazingly with modern releases with it's tight gameplay and a pretty unique and recognizable art style. Multiple arcade games came out before doom that are still recognized and beloved, with fanbases on par with modern releases.

If a media is good, it won't age. Doom is proof that and it alone puts the "historical context" argument into question. Bear in mind: Id had even less tools than classic mappers (although arguably more manpower)

 

I dont mind people having revernce for these wads. In fact, endless' bullet list is all good reasons for liking them, but the rest of the message is filled with holes in the argument in my opinion.

[Somniac]

Context is everything. It was a different time, much smaller scene and the tools weren't as user-friendly as they are today - even from my blurry memories of messing with WadAuthor or DCK as a kid who had no idea what any of it meant, I can safely say we're pretty spoiled by tools like UDB that really lay it all out in an accessible way, provided you know what you want to do and you have the chops to do it.

 

Sure, someone could probably knock up Requiem today inside of a week if they wanted to. That's not the point. Conversely, someone today could knock up a map in less than an hour that looks like an average 1995 idgames entry, and if the gameplay was still good then I'd enjoy it. I do happen to have a soft spot for old/old-style PWADs though, so I'm maybe a little biased.

 

That's not to say Requiem doesn't have any flaws, because it does, but so do a lot of other great things. I'd just try to hold it up against its contemporaries and judge it on that basis, instead of comparing it to something much more modern, that benefits from years of mapping refinement and changing sensibilities about gameplay. Alien Vendetta is only 4 or so years newer than Requiem, for example, and the gap between those is quite large.

 

Just my two cents, if people don't dig Requiem then that's cool. 

[Maribo]

2 hours ago, LSC Lasico said:

If a media is good, it won't age.

Statements like these kind of suck. There's this weird idea that a lot of people have regarding media aging where they almost seem to universally view it as a bad thing, like having elements to its design that don't match up with whatever the current industry standard is means they're decrepit and bad. Doom has most definitely aged - you can find evidence in the most simple way of this by the people who elect to play Doom with things that were not in the original game, most commonly stuff like freelook and high quality sound/animation replacements, but also extending to extensive gameplay modifications that end up making the game play more like something that would have come out in the 2010s. Which is totally fine. Point being, Doom has definitely aged and it shows that constantly, but the way it has aged is something that lots of people find charming, or nostalgic, or just flat out preferable to the way FPSes have evolved since it was released.

[LSC Lasico]

18 minutes ago, Maribo said:

Fair stuff

Point proven

[Andromeda]

2 hours ago, LSC Lasico said:

Bear in mind: Id had even less tools than classic mappers (although arguably more manpower)

I wasn't there in the 90s to know for sure, but the impression I get from reading posts by mappers from that era is that the tools they had at their disposal were very rudimentary and crash prone. More tools != better tools.

[Knor964]

I just found out about this channel I like it his reveiws are compact and fun to watch

[Womp the Cat]

4 hours ago, LSC Lasico said:

 

 

It is an important age, yet it shouldn't be something sacred or immune from negativity. Being important and being garbage are two completely unrelated things. As such, calling it garbage is, in my opinion, is warranted if the person genuinely dislikes that period. Different people - different tastes, and it the person in question acknowledges that, it shouldnt be particularly frowned upon or considered strong.

 

 

While the word garbage might specifically refer to the quality of a wad depending on whose using it, it does also imply that something lacks importance. when was the last time you kept some garbage around because it was important?? the word garbage implicitly means to throw something away because it has no value to you. Something being important is not a synonym for quality I will grant you that, but garbage is not a synonym for quality either, you could throw something away that is of high quality and it would still be considered garbage.

 

If you had to ask any museum curator which parts of their collection are garbage, they wouldn't have an answer for you. because garbage isn't worth collecting. 

bit of a semantic tirade but still. 

 

I also think its a bit disingenuous to compare professionals with amateurs. Romero woke up every day and his job was to make maps, they could also continuously develop their own tools on a use case basis. amateurs by and large don't have that luxury.

[Celestin]

@Endless, regarding points 2) and 3), I find it interesting those describe novice mappers as well. People tend to attribute issues with 90s mapping to a lack of proper tools, but I think people were all simply inexperienced back then. Nowadays we generally know what makes a good map and what does not, but in the 90s, people didn't have this privilege and had to follow their gut instinct. 

[Xaser]

There are definitely cases where you have to factor in a wad's historical context to give it a fair shake. One example that always comes to mind is UAC_DEAD -- it's very primitive by today's standards, both in terms of visuals and gameplay, but it was head and shoulders above its peers at the time and hugely influential to the mapping scene. Judging the wad without at least partially viewing it through that lens is missing the point entirely.

 

That said, it's also totally legit to consider whether something has aged well -- sometimes the answer is "no", and most of Requiem fits the bill IMO. There's plenty of other 90's wads that hold up much better in hindsight-- if we were having this convo about, say, STRAIN, then I'd go up to bat for it cause that shit is dope. ;)

Edited September 12, 2023 by Xaser

[LSC Lasico]

1 hour ago, Womp the Cat said:

when was the last time you kept some garbage around because it was important??

My whole room is filled with it for this reason. And I am not joking,

Edited September 12, 2023 by LSC Lasico

[Akagi666]

18 hours ago, Endless said:

The problem with this is the way you have worded it it. Garbage is a strong word to describe what is considered an important age for Doom history. While it is true that the 90s had a lot of bad WADs, a similar thing can be said about modern times. There's still WADs coming out today that look like they were made 30 years ago.

 

If you want to compare the quality of a good 1994 WAD with that of a good 2023 release, you are just being unfair and negligent of the historical context.

 

As for why people have reverence for 90s stuff, here's some stuff I can think about:

1. Nostalgia, the most simple factor to go for
2. Simplicity, most maps were done with the essentials and still work and play good
3. Innovation, people were new to mapping and even tools were quite rudimentary, you had to make due with what you had, and some people could be very creative
4. Historical interest, I find myself in this one. There's something to be said that a game manages to survive for 30 years and you can go back to its premiering date and still play its earliest works as if you were digging some ancient dinosaur. I think it is awesome
5. Vanilla, most WADs back then were created for the original .exe, and while source ports didn't took long to appear, people stuck with vanilla for years. Today, there's a lot of vanilla-lovers that find themselves attracted to old school WADs at some point because of the huge amount of vanilla maps that are from that era

And heck, I even covered this with other 90s enthusiasts out there in my blog: Why Play 90s WADs?
 

As I said before, good art doesn't need you to make excuses or go on about historical context, it speaks for itself. These can be important historically and not be worth playing today. If people enjoy these, then that's fine by me, but I don't find their gameplay engaging. Also, I'd just like to add that I mostly play games from the 90's, so I have no bias against the time period in general, that was the time I started playing videogames. I just don't think the Doom maps from that era are very good from what I've seen/played. LSC Lasico did a good job explaining, so I'll just leave it at that.

Edited September 12, 2023 by Akagi666

[Andrea Rovenski]

black and white films are so lame man, never understood why people make excuses like "oh the technology couldnt support color!" snoooozefest, amirite fellow zoomer doomers?
 

[Womp the Cat]

1 hour ago, Akagi666 said:

As I said before, good art doesn't need you to make excuses or go on about historical context, it speaks for itself. 

False and an excellent example for why, would be cave paintings. 

 

Just to elaborate further. sometime historical context is exactly what gives an artwork it's value. 
another example of this is the Mona Lisa, which isn't in the lourve because it's a "good" painting, but because it's the first example of perspective in art. 

Edited September 12, 2023 by Womp the Cat

[prfunky]

7 hours ago, Somniac said:

... Sure, someone could probably knock up Requiem today inside of a week if they wanted to. That's not the point. Conversely, someone today could knock up a map in less than an hour that looks like an average 1995 idgames entry, and if the gameplay was still good then I'd enjoy it. I do happen to have a soft spot for old/old-style PWADs though, so I'm maybe a little biased.

 

That's not to say Requiem doesn't have any flaws, because it does, but so do a lot of other great things. I'd just try to hold it up against its contemporaries and judge it on that basis, instead of comparing it to something much more modern, that benefits from years of mapping refinement and changing sensibilities about gameplay. Alien Vendetta is only 4 or so years newer than Requiem, for example, and the gap between those is quite large.

 

Just my two cents, if people don't dig Requiem then that's cool. 

 

I like Requiem.

 

1 hour ago, Andrea Rovenski said:

black and white films are so lame man, never understood why people make excuses like "oh the technology couldnt support color!" snoooozefest, amirite fellow zoomer doomers?
 

 

Yah, right?! I mean, wtf would I play Doom Noir? Worse yet, Sepia!

 

[erzboesewicht]

I very much agree with what Xaser wrote, old maps should not be generally evaluated on a "different scale" than modern content. There are definitely examples of good maps from the 90s/early 00s which still would be considered good today, which had fun, varied gameplay, or also good detailing. I've still not played STRAIN but in Requiem, Capellans "Rats in the walls" comes into my mind (which also was liked by MtPain27), or "The Devil's Coterie" from MM2 from the same author. Or "Resistance is Futile" from HR, AV's "Hillside Siege" or "Monster Mansion" from Eternal Doom (the latter only if you like puzzles). Only that filling a whole megawad with such good maps was a challenge in these years I think, partly to the still not-so-well-developed tool set.

 

In my case also nostalgia only plays a minor role, because my Doom journey really started only about 2015 and the wad I'm most nostalgic about is probably Sunlust ...

 

Little PS: For people interested in 90s stuff I would recommend not to start with Memento Mori (1). It's simply a wad specifically made for coop play, and while almost all maps are maxable in single player, you sometimes have to do weird stuff for that (e.g. not using a certain teleporter or cross a certain door until you clear another section ...). Memento Mori 2, Hell Revealed, Icarus and even Requiem are imo better candidates, in addition to Eternal Doom (imo the best 90s megawad) but only in the case you like adventure/puzzle gameplay.

Edited September 12, 2023 by erzboesewicht

[Ravendesk]

9 hours ago, Maribo said:

regarding media aging

I think there is bit of a mess with terminology in this discussion. I think when a lot of people say "doesn't age" they imply "aged well". Because I don't see a meaningful contextual difference between the two.

 

In that regard, while doom (as an engine) definitely has certain mechanics that feel very jank today, those things are all minor, and as a whole doom (as an engine) has aged very well. You mention that people play with modern features like freelook and graphical enhancements, however the fact that a significant part of the community plays doom in a way it was originally designed, with no free look, with software (or software-like) rendering, with original sprites and weapons, and only use higher resolution as QoL basically shows that "the original doom feel" aged greatly, and doom plays absolutely fine even today. Otherwise playing with freelook would be universally preferable and only speedrunners would play without it. It's not nostalgia, the formula just works.

 

However, I made a remark "as an engine", because I think it's important to distinguish between "doom as an engine" and "doom as original games themselves" in this discussion. If we ignore the mapping scene and just look at original games as they were, they aged significantly worse and without mapping scene doom would be pretty much a dead game. A few people would replay it out of nostalgia and there would be a very small speedrunning scene and that's it. And for a good reason, imo. Gameplay of iwad maps is not good enough to hold to this day, even though it was mindblowing when doom came out. (Obviously the presence of new content as is makes a difference, not just the content with gameplay that evolved far from iwads, but I think the latter is a huge part of it)

 

Rambling a bit, but what I try to lead to - if we return to 90s (and early 2000s) wads - technical achievements of some old wads are very interesting from a historical perspective, yes, and there are nostalgic elements for some people, but the thing that makes wads age well is the gameplay, and most 90s wads didn't age well for this particular reason - with few exceptions their gameplay uhhhhh let's just say doesn't hold up. And what we are left with is nostalgia, historical interest, admiring innovation, whatever else was listed, but not the actual timeless ageless thing (good gameplay).

Edited September 12, 2023 by Ravendesk

[Womp the Cat]

1 hour ago, Ravendesk said:

I think there is bit of a mess with terminology in this discussion. I think when a lot of people say "doesn't age" they imply "aged well". Because I don't see a meaningful contextual difference between the two.

 

In that regard, while doom (as an engine) definitely has certain mechanics that feel very jank today, those things are all minor, and as a whole doom (as an engine) has aged very well. You mention that people play with modern features like freelook and graphical enhancements, however the fact that a significant part of the community plays doom in a way it was originally designed, with no free look, with software (or software-like) rendering, with original sprites and weapons, and only use higher resolution as QoL basically shows that "the original doom feel" aged greatly, and doom plays absolutely fine even today. Otherwise playing with freelook would be universally preferable and only speedrunners would play without it. It's not nostalgia, the formula just works.

 

However, I made a remark "as an engine", because I think it's important to distinguish between "doom as an engine" and "doom as original games themselves" in this discussion. If we ignore the mapping scene and just look at original games as they were, they aged significantly worse and without mapping scene doom would be pretty much a dead game. A few people would replay it out of nostalgia and there would be a very small speedrunning scene and that's it. And for a good reason, imo. Gameplay of iwad maps is not good enough to hold to this day, even though it was mindblowing when doom came out. (Obviously the presence of new content as is makes a difference, not just the content with gameplay that evolved far from iwads, but I think the latter is a huge part of it)

 

Rambling a bit, but what I try to lead to - if we return to 90s (and early 2000s) wads - technical achievements of some old wads are very interesting from a historical perspective, yes, and there are nostalgic elements for some people, but the thing that makes wads age well is the gameplay, and most 90s wads didn't age well for this particular reason - with few exceptions their gameplay uhhhhh let's just say doesn't hold up. And what we are left with is nostalgia, historical interest, admiring innovation, whatever else was listed, but not the actual timeless ageless thing (good gameplay).

Do you have an objective metric for "good gameplay"? I understand good gameplay to simply mean fun and engaging, and those are not universal or objective metrics imo. 

It's just you present this last paragraph as an objective truth, the same with the comment about Iwad gameplay not holding up today. these seem like matters of taste to me. I frankly don't see how the Iwads could be fun in the 90's but not now, and that everyone playing them today is simply doing so out of fascination or nostalgia. 

[Maribo]

1 hour ago, Ravendesk said:

[snip]

Good post.

 

Regarding Doom aging the context of the engine: over time I've come to think that it has a handful of major mechanics that have aged (arguably) poorly - the functionality of the blockmap, infinite monster heights, and elastic collision. Blockmap is something that I've talked about before in how it does make Doom unique, and being mindful of it is something that I think adds unintentional depth to the game, but I also find it infuriating in many instances... Maybe it's not as huge of a deal under casual play but from my perspective as a speedrunner, it happens so often and once you become attuned to seeing it, you can't really stop noticing it. Infinite height monsters are something that are mostly a universal pain, albeit it is somewhat interesting in regards to macroslaughter that makes you BFG your way through caco clouds. Under most other circumstances I can think of, they're largely just an annoyance in that they'll just block you when you're attempting platforming, or melee you when you're on a lift and waiting for it to rise. Elastic collision is kind of a borderline conclusion to my list, but I thought I would bring it up anyway because while it was definitely not intended, it is a pretty infuriating quirk of the engine... Anything that requires you to rub up against walls becomes a potential bounce-back (where you might die, or just restart because of no wrongdoing on your own part).

 

I say all this with love and the mention that I do primarily play Doom as mentioned above: no freelook, software rendering, original sprites/weapons (unless included as part of the WAD), with modern resolution and uncapped framerate to save me from literal headaches. You're right that the core of Doom's gameplay is rock solid, and I think if I were to get more into discourse about media aging it would probably have to be in a wider context than just Doom, like Andrea already brought up a cheeky reference to the way people talk about aging in film, and there's also a lot of noise people make in regards to music aging.

[Ravendesk]

15 minutes ago, Womp the Cat said:

I frankly don't see how the Iwads could be fun in the 90's but not now

It's pretty simple, when doom 1 came out, nothing like that existed, it was a completely new experience for a lot of people and immersion level was unmatched for an fps game. You won't be able to get the same feeling out of people who played modern fps games and impress them the same way. I personally got back into doom partially out of nostalgia, too, I remembered the days I played doom 1 as a kid together with my dad (he was controlling the movement, and I was aiming (with keyboard) and shooting) and decided to replay doom 1 and doom 2. However, the reason I still play it is not because of nostalgia (I would have moved on if I didn't discover certain pwads), but because it has so much content that's exceptionally good to play.

 

18 minutes ago, Womp the Cat said:

Do you have an objective metric for "good gameplay"? I understand good gameplay to simply mean fun and engaging, and those are not universal or objective metrics imo. 

Are you trying to get into "all art is actually subjective therefore no criteria for good vs bad exists in games" thing or are you genuinely clueless? There are many factors that combined, result in great gameplay, some of them depend on engine (how movement feels, weapon feedback, monster feedback, controls, etc), some of them depend on how the engine is used in a level (pacing, monster dynamics, space constructed to make it feel good to move though and to fight in, "flow", balancing of "danger" time vs cleanup time, etc). Combined, these factors make many modern doom maps match or surpass modern fps games in how fun and engaging it is to play them. So, yes, "fun and engagement" is subjective, but all the small things that result in fun and engagement are not. Of course, we cannot measure the quality of gameplay by measuring these small things because the whole is greater than sum of its parts in this case. So the criteria I propose here is if the people who "have seen it all" in modern games (including modern "boomer shooters") can still get engaged and get absorbed in doom for a prolonged period of time due to how well the maps play. And I'm sure that if all doom had to offer was iwads and 90s wads, said people wouldn't be (even though there are some gems there, too). But with the mapping scene we have today, they absolutely are.

 

And just in case, before discussion derails into objectivity vs subjectivity in art - yeah, "objective is just a collective subjective" blah blah and all that, sure, we all know that, but let's use words to convey the meaning, not to argue about definitions.

 

37 minutes ago, Maribo said:

I've come to think that it has a handful of major mechanics that have aged (arguably) poorly

Yeah, I agree with all three, I more or less had the same in mind when I said "certain mechanics that feel very jank today". I would also personally add "the way game registers switch presses" to the mix xd

[Cutman 999]

On 9/7/2023 at 4:01 AM, Akagi666 said:

I strongly believe that good art doesn't require its audience to make excuses for it. You don't listen to the Beatles and start making excuses about how recording techniques weren't as advanced in the 60s, you just listen to the music. You don't look at a Picasso painting and start making excuses about the kinds of paintbrushes they had back then. As soon as you have to start making excuses about historical context, tools at the time etc. it should be a red flag that the subject isn't actually good. Plutonia came out in 1996 and it's just...good. Not good if you play it a particular way, save or don't save. No excuses are needed about the development tools they used or any thing like that. It stands on its own.

One of the best things i ever read in doomworld, damn this goes hard

[Cutman 999]

11 hours ago, Maribo said:

Statements like these kind of suck.

Statements like that are actually good and extend to absolutely any other kind of media, not only doom.

[Maribo]

2 minutes ago, Cutman 999 said:

Statements like that are actually good and extend to absolutely any other kind of media, not only doom.

Cool that you think so, maybe you'd like to elaborate? Blanket belief that "good media doesn't age" is a painfully narrow way to look at things.

[Cutman 999]

2 minutes ago, Maribo said:

Cool that you think so, maybe you'd like to elaborate? Blanket belief that "good media doesn't age" is a painfully narrow way to look at things.

Like for example, look into movies and literature. People still are encouraged to read things like hamlet centuries after its release, things like don Quixote basically defining how modern literature is still structured today and being no different from things you can find. Citizen Kane, vertigo, etc, still being worth a watch after the medium modernized itself over a century of advancements and standardizations. 

 

It is cool to see media from a "historical perspective", but keep in mind that the people that consume that media the most, just doesn't care if something was made with absolutely shit films and cameras recording at 12 fps or being edited with absolutely primitive editors in the case of doom mapping. That is secondary in order to appreciate media, what truly matters for it to be "good" is what still has to offer for its artistic purpose. Even the iwads fall into that, even if some parts are clearly dated, of course that would never disappear from any form of media after all, still plays like you would expect and can stand up from a lot of 90's maps you find on the internet or weird shovelware cds from that era.

[dasho]

18 minutes ago, Maribo said:

 Blanket belief that "good media doesn't age" is a painfully narrow way to look at things.

 

This is painful in its own right.

[Womp the Cat]

37 minutes ago, Ravendesk said:

Bad faith response

I asked about objective metrics for gameplay and said nothing to you of the subjectivity of art, in fact earlier in the thread I give examples of how subjectively bad art can have objective value in the world around us. how movement feels from map to map is also subjective. in the contemporary context a mapper can give you the freedom of movement, there is also a school of gameplay, where the player is forced to fight for their space, there is also the contentious platforming in doom, some people love it, some people hate it. despite your attempt to put words in my mouth, I do actually believe there can be "bad" design in gameplay, to return to platforming, platforms that are spaced too far apart for the jumps to be made. basically my definition of bad gameplay boils down to whether something is objectively beatable or not.

Generally I think "good" and "bad" are largely reductive terms used by people who struggle to define why they actually do or don't enjoy things. I don't necessarily think you fall into that category either as you quite eloquently explained the metrics by which you define "good" gameplay. but you're still asserting a qualitive assessment of something, that whether you like it or not, will differ from person to person, especially with the examples you gave as "objective" metrics. 

I won't "derail" the discussion any more. 

[Ravendesk]

 

Quote

despite your attempt to put words in my mouth, I do actually believe there can be "bad" design in gameplay, to return to platforming, platforms that are spaced too far apart for the jumps to be made. basically my definition of bad gameplay boils down to whether something is objectively beatable or not. ...

Lmao, this is an absolutely useless definition, because it does not allow us to say anything about 99.9% of released maps. At this point you could have said that there is no good or bad with the same result tbh. What is even the value in defining "bad" platforming as theoretically unbeatable platforming if I can just say impossible platforming and convey the meaning much better and people will also understand me better if I say "impossible" instead of "bad"? Word "bad" can mean so much more than that, and you are just trying to make a perfectly fine word completely useless. Which, I guess, aligns with your view of "good" and "bad" as reductive terms, but that's only because you try to give each word exact meaning instead of trying to interpret what people mean when they say these words in a certain context.

 

Quote

Generally I think "good" and "bad" are largely reductive terms used by people who struggle to define why they actually do or don't enjoy things. 

Ok, I think you are trying to do something quite detrimental to the doom discussions as a whole here, so I have to elaborate. Language is meant to convey meaning and it's context-dependent. When people say "this is a good map" what they really usually mean is "I enjoyed this map and I think more people would enjoy it if they played it", but what the hell is the point in saying all this lengthy stuff if you can just say "this is a good map" and literally everyone (well, almost, I guess) will understand what you mean by it. This is why languages have words that don't have a strictly defined meaning - it's convenient to use them. Does that mean that people struggle to define why they think the map is good? Maybe in rare cases yes, but most of the time they either have said "this map is good" in addition to other comments, or they are lazy, or they don't think it's necessary to elaborate because it's quite clear why to everyone in the context of the ongoing discussion.

 

And omg, I was actually replying in a good faith before that, but at this point it appears that you actually want to commit crimes against doom conversations so I have to stop you right there. Terms "good" and "bad" are not reductive, they are very rich words that can convey a lot depending on the context. Please stop trying to shame people who use them and please stop trying to make these words useless by only allowing them to define trivial things.

[Mr. Alexander]

7 hours ago, Womp the Cat said:

another example of this is the Mona Lisa, which isn't in the lourve because it's a "good" painting, but because it's the first example of perspective in art. 

Even if you restrict your scope to the Early Modern period, this is plainly untrue.

[Lucius Wooding]

Criticism ages way harder than media as a rule, and when it's out of touch it's less tolerable. If a WAD can give the same experience as intended when it was made, then it has aged perfectly fine IMO. Or at least if it's still enjoyable on some level then it offers something. Often the author may give zero shits about whether it will stand the test of time. 

 

Criticisms and reviews are generally subjective and are the same kind of time capsule as the media itself. The reviewer may pull their head out of their ass or shove it back in over time but their review is set in stone once they put it out there. And IMO there isn't much point arguing with someone telling you about their experience except to counter it with your own. At that point whatever the WAD did well may not line up with one's preferences or expectations in the same way as another player. Experiences aren't universal like that. 

 

What can be discussed in more of an objective manner are things like game design philosophy and various techniques and decisions used by the mapper to achieve a certain end. These concepts and how they work can be valuable to current mappers who explore various existing WADs. There are usually certain assumptions in terms of what the author was trying to do; avoiding frustrating or repetitive gameplay being a common one. You can't use "good" and "bad" as all encompassing terms to describe maps or mapping practices, but you can certainly use them in a discussion focusing on specific subjects and context. If people aren't willing to share the same focus as a starting point then the discussion goes nowhere. 

 

 

Spoiler

If you place barons in a narrow hallway then you'll certainly bog down any map. But barons back in the 90s had more of a shock and awe factor and hadn't worn out their welcome like today. Bitching about them nonstop became fashionable somewhat later. If you think barons have too much health, then play coop. It was also far more likely for a person to play something like Requiem as their first custom WAD back in the day than in 2023. The target audience simply does not exist anymore due to how people approach the game with 30 years of hindsight these days. 

 

 

[T-Rex]

I think what many people defending the wads of the 90s were trying to get at here, which I believe is a good point, is that, if something of that time pales in comparison with something made today, wouldn't Doom fall into obscurity in favour of more advanced FPS games now? I mean, that's what many thought when Quake came out, which was the result of megawads like Requiem and The Talosian Incident, but thankfully, that wasn't the case, and to this day, games like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and heck even Wolfenstein 3D are still played, and while Doom is capable of more mapping aesthetics, there are still a niche of players that don't mind playing wads that feel like Wolfenstein. Heck, even Tom Hall's maps, despite being spruced up by Sandy Petersen, still betrays the original author's design sensibilities, and they were among some of the best maps of the original Doom, with many being even better than the maps that were completely done by Sandy. Some mappers at that time even applied Tom Hall-isms to their maps, take Milo Casali of Plutonia, for example. He may not have known who designed the maps of Doom and Doom 2, but looking at his style, they were very much in the vein of a lot of Tom Hall's maps.

Edited September 13, 2023 by T-Rex