Ultraviolence = HARD

[Dylan Omen]

Am I wrong in thinking, that Ultraviolence is supposed to be hard?

 

why are there so many people who only test/play maps on the UV skill and then complain about the difficulty, even though the mapper has taken the time to implement lower difficulties? 

 

do we really all need to believe we are godtier?

 

 

I think some of you need to understand it's literally delineated that way in editors. 

 

easy = itytd, hntr (this is probably where most of the complainers should be playing so they can feel like the doom gods they are)

medium = hmp (this is good for learning the map)

hard = uv, nm (this one here is for testing yourself)

[Super Mighty G]

 

2 hours ago, Dylan Omen said:

do we really all need to believe we are godtier?

Short answer: Yes. Original Doom's UV difficulty is much easier after 25 years and the mindset that all wads follow the same curve has never been fully discarded despite contemporary maps becoming much, much harder.  

Edited November 4, 2020 by Super Mighty G

[DooM Bear]

Yes! Absolutely it is!

 

The difficult levels translate to something like:

 

ITYTD - Very easy

HNTR - easy 

HMP - medium

UV - Hard

NM - very hard - Note: it is stupid hard and is a massive step up from UV (much more than between any of the other difficulties) and it even gives you the warning that it “isn’t even remotely fair”

 

I think the reason some people play on UV then complain it’s hard is due to the dunning kruger effect (I.e. people overestimate their capabilities - we all do it sometimes) but another reason could be that, in general, old WADs were significantly easier than new WADs so some people might expect the difficulty level of UV in a 2020 WAD to be the same as UV was in DooM 2.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Doom 1/2 UV was easy even when compared to games from that era. Try Doom on UV and Duke3D on HMP not UV. Duke will have waaaaaaaaaaay more deaths. And that's not even comparing it to shit like Blood on UV.. 

[Biodegradable]

People who play on a difficulty, then whine that it's too hard yet refuse to lower said difficulty will always be the biggest laughing stocks in the community. After all, we don't take kindly to elitism here and encourage everyone to play it their way. Nobody's going to shame you for having to bump it down a notch or two. I myself have only been playing more stuff on UV since August and still find myself having to return to HMP now and then. 

[DynamiteKaitorn]

All the more reason I stick with HMP. :D

[Lucky_Edie]

Wild! is the best difficulty.

 

I'm a masochist that loves hard stuff and I still play things on HMP/HNTR at times because they're fun. Forcing yourself to play UV and be legitimately miserable is so bizarre to me.

Edited November 4, 2020 by Lucky_Edie

[P41R47]

Not at all. For me there are only two difficulties:

-I'm too young to die = easy

-Hey, Not to rough = hard

 

And yes, i like to feel i'm a lord of destruction after killing 5 former humans with the BFG.

They are damn too hard, and trace spamming the BFG is the best way to kill them.

 

UV are the solar rays that could led you to have flesh tumors or worse if you are over expossed to it, so watch out from them!

 

Also there is a recurring joke around here about that, don't know were it originates:

"i only play on UV", translates to "I'm a complaining fleshbag".

 

Jokes!

On a serious note, much what @Biodegradable said is what i said without the overly complex metaphors.

 

:P

Edited November 4, 2020 by P41R47

[Andromeda]

If they complain about the level being too difficult while simultaneously refusing to dial down from UV, it's best to ignore such criticism like @Biodegradable said.

Edited November 4, 2020 by Andromeda

[Doomkid]

It's definitely an ego problem in many cases. Even though most of my work is only a step or two above Doom 2 in difficulty, I often rename the difficulty levels to at least try and dissuade people from letting their ego run the show and refusing to bump it down a notch so they can actually enjoy the experience.

 

I've also heard the baffling claim that they're "not getting the true experience" by playing on an easier mode, as if UV is somehow "more real" even if it's clearly beyond their skill level, a truly baffling concept in a game like Doom. Calling the map bad rather than admitting you're not great is just easier!

[Zillah]

Completely depends on your play-style. I like to play UV 99% of the time, but if I can't get past the first few maps without dying constantly, I'll bump it down a notch. I think the mentality comes from DOOM 1/2, where UV is ridiculously easy even for a first time player, and when the base game difficulty is a breeze, plenty of people make the shallow assumption that ALL other mods and mappacks are the same, which is obviously not the case.

I find most mappacks are best played in HMP since after 25 years of experience, the map makers bolster the difficulty to match the acme of skill expected by veterans or their own bias; that being (as a mapper myself) to assume the map is easy for first-timers since you made it, and already know what to expect, rather than assume that it is hard because others don't know what to expect. I make adjustments accordingly...

Unless your decino, which in that case your just an unadultered beast.

Edited November 4, 2020 by Zillah

[seed]

Ego problem and being too damn proud of themselves, and having it crushed brutally makes the ego scream and leave echoes in its wake. I'm sure part of the reason why the subject of "What difficulty do you play on" pops up ever so often is likely to check out and avoid feeling like they're "not part of the group", a "soy boy", or similar nonsense.

 

UV was really the main difficulty the IWADs were balanced for first and foremost, sure, but it was never the end all, be all, I think that's something that followed. If id really wanted it to be that way, they would've never put other skill levels apart from it. UV should really be considered "hard" rather than "the way it's meant to be played", with HMP "medium", HNTR "easy", and ITYTD "very easy". NM is on its own, either as "very hard", or troll mode.

 

As for Doom being easy for its time, wasn't there, so I can't tell. But comparing it to the Build games is not valid. For one, these games play fundamentally different and Doom doesn't even have freelook, jumping, or non-infinite height actors. It also has RNG, which, while the Build games do not, their engine has way worse hit detection, which is why Pig Cops can either take forever to kill you, or kill you in two blasts in Duke.

 

Or a TNT bundle blowing up an entire group in Blood, while other times it blows up only one enemy from a direct hit, or none at all if it lands near them, and the list goes on. It's good they don't have Doom-style RNG, otherwise they would've been a mess of randomness - and they're random enough as they are due to Build being Build.

Edited November 4, 2020 by seed

[mxrgan]

I personally play on HMP and sometimes UV. But theres a bit of an ego problem with some people where they have their hopes waaaaaay up thinking that they can take on some kind of harder map on UV and when they die 10 times, they dont switch back to HMP or HNTR and just call the map bad for its difficulty, even though the creator of the map maybe made compatibility with other difficulties.

[GarrettChan]

If you force yourself to play UV, that's fine.

 

If you force somebody else to play UV, that's not fine.

 

BTW, most of the things are not only tested for UV.

[snapshot]

I think you just need to find better hobbies than being judgemental asshole about what or how others play their games.

Edited November 4, 2020 by sluggard

[Fonze]

4 hours ago, Biodegradable said:

People who play on a difficulty, then whine that it's too hard yet refuse to lower said difficulty will always be the biggest laughing stocks in the community. After all, we don't take kindly to elitism here and encourage everyone to play it their way. Nobody's going to shame you for having to bump it down a notch or two. I myself have only been playing more stuff on UV since August and still find myself having to return to HMP now and then. 

 

Definitely not true given how widespread that behavior is and how well-liked said elitists are. Still, hope is a good thing to keep alive tho ;p

 

To answer the question in the OP: people do it because of the way that difficulty settings in og doom (and other 90s games) were designed/balanced. In a lot of games of that time period, increasing the difficulty meant more enemies, more stuff to shoot, and a more "complete" experience, thus, to turn the difficulty down is to "miss" some of the overall experience of the game. You know, because you can't just replay the game after beating it and experiencing spoilers "as intended" are such a huge facet to enjoying games that you simply can't get the same enjoyment out of something the second time around. That's why romeo and juliet flopped so badly in history, rite? Oh also time: we don't have enough of it. People don't always think things through, heh, but there are some truths and a lot of posturing/rationalizations that go into our thoughts so I guess we shouldn't be too surprised of how dumb we are as a species.

 

Additionally there is a stigma in this community that wads are not tested on lower difficulties or that they don't have lower difficulty settings. Add some pride that "if I'm gonna play what is the same as UV difficulty I'd like the game to acknowledge that I'm actually playing the hardest difficulty so mah haters don't hate." A total precursor to that elitist soulsborne git gud mentality that also plagues our community. It's not the game that's flawed it's all the people that can't play it or don't enjoy it... the pinnacle of elitism. This is one reason I personally tend to be very disappointed to see wads that don't add difficulty settings; it takes all of 2 seconds to check or uncheck some boxes, to place a couple extra medikits, a better armor, or a ss/ms to give more room for forgiveness and playing past mistakes without changing anything else, never mind that other ways of implementing difficulty settings don't take much longer to implement. This behavior, even in speedmaps, only goes to perpetuate this stigma and this situation we're in with this UV-or-bust mindset being so widespread and is quite frankly nothing short of lazy. And making our widely known problems worse on one's own laziness is kinda... well something beyond lazy. Making difficulty settings (of some sort: let's not pretend we're not in the wild west of game design in this community, so they could still wind up being anything or relatively different to other wads) should be mandatory.

 

People can disagree with me on this, say I'm being an ass, but that's just the way I see it. We should be working to solve our most obvious problems that everyone can agree on are actually problems/broken, not perpetuating it and then complaining about its existence. What's the point in discussion that literally leads nowhere other than to find comfort for our ptsd from this community in others' similar ptsd's?

[The Bug]

9 hours ago, Pegg said:

Doom 1/2 UV was easy even when compared to games from that era. Try Doom on UV and Duke3D on HMP not UV. Duke will have waaaaaaaaaaay more deaths. And that's not even comparing it to shit like Blood on UV.. 

for blood it is well broiled i think not ultra-violence

[GraphicBleeder]

3 hours ago, Doomkid said:

 

I've also heard the baffling claim that they're "not getting the true experience" by playing on an easier mode, as if UV is somehow "more real" even if it's clearly beyond their skill level, a truly baffling concept in a game like Doom. Calling the map bad rather than admitting you're not great is just easier!

Y'know that reminds me a certain guy who let two barons kill him and called it bad map design.

[thelazyqdude]

IMO:

ITYTD = Extremely easy. You even get double ammo!

HNTR = Easy, you just want to play some casual doom.

HMP = Medium, you're looking for a semi-challenge but don't wanna go full on. I recommend this for a first playthrough if you're not feeling confident in your skill.

UV = Hard, the gentlemen's way to play DooM. You already know about this one.

UV FAST = Even harder.

UV FAST PISTOL START = Even even harder.

NM = God

[Maggle]

I want every person who makes these smug "just lower the difficulty 4head" posts to actually play some hard as fuck map on HNTR or something, put themselves in the mindset of a newbie player who still struggles with dodging Rev rockets and has trouble beating Plutonia (which is a very large portion of this community. idk why people forget this all the time) then ask themselves if that person would be able to beat it.

 

The fact of the matter is a lot of hard doom maps nowadays are designed from the ground up around their hard encounters. Some use monsters effectively as map geometry where they exist mostly to box you in or act as some kind of chokepoint or turret. Most have enemies on elevated ledges or other places where it's inconvenient or outright impossible to kill certain dangerous enemies, so you just kinda have to have really good spatial awareness and dodge as much of it as possible. This is a level of difficulty inherent to the maps they're made for, and can't be mitigated by simply removing some monsters or placing extra stimpacks or whatever. Extra steps would have to be taken with some maps to be more accessible. In my experience, most mapsets that get released now have very negligible, sometimes barely noticeable, differences between skill levels. This, along with a general lack of diversity with wad difficulty speaks to what is, IMO, a severe accessibility problem in the Doom mapping community that I think needs to be addressed. New players simply can't be hooked in with the kind of maps being released now.

 

Imagine, if you will, a large open cliff-face map with huge fields with moderate to large diverse groups of monsters. On the cliffs above these fields are several revenants firing their rockets. They are too high up and far away to be convenient to hit without being too distracted and getting killed by the others, and, besides, you just simply don't enough ammo to kill them along with everything else. What you have to do is maintain spatial awareness and dodge their rockets while killing everything else. If you're good, this sounds like a fun, interesting challenge, and while hard, generally pretty beatable. In fact, I know there are some people reading this right now who are thinking "that sounds awesome". If you're not that good? Next to impossible. You have to remove some enemies so it's not overwhelming, right? Well, if you remove some hellknights or whatever, but don't really address the main thing that makes this map so hard, there's basically no difference for the new player who just barely managed to beat plutonia. So you have to do something a little more drastic than that. How about replacing the revenants with some other enemy. How about replacing them with chaingunners? no, hell no, that would only make it harder. Imps? Not terrible, but probably too fragile. You would actually be able to kill them, and that defeats the purpose, so how about hellknights instead? This removes the homing projectiles, but still leaves some fairly damaging straight projectiles. Still, it's substantially easier, so we use this for HMP for now. But it's still too hard for some people, because they lack the spatial awareness, multitasking, or reflexes necessary to avoid all this. So what I would do is just get rid of the ledge monsters on the easiest difficulties entirely. It's still decently tough and challenging because you have all the other monsters, and it plays like a more standard doom level. Cut down on their numbers a bit as well (depending on their difficulty) and you have yourself an easy mode. 

 

It's good to have skill levels like that, because not only does it have significant difficulty changes between skills, it also makes each playthrough feel unique, which adds replay value and is rad as hell and great game design.

 

There are of course, people who refuse to even attempt lowering the skill level, and people who get frustrated and decide to act like assholes on the forums for no reason. There are also idiots who accuse everything that's even slightly too hard for them of being a "slaughtermap" and therefore garbage, despite having no idea what that term means. This behavior is, of course, unacceptable, but I'm saying that the most common rebuttal to those people of "just play on HMP smh my head lol" doesn't address anyone's complaints, and I think the lack of skill level variance overall is a major criticism of mine for the community and actively makes things less approachable for a lot of players and condescending to them doesn't help anyone.

 

I also don't want this to be perceived as an attack on anyone's hard work or a demand. At the end of the day, doom maps are a labor of love that people develop on their own free time, and you don't have to do any of this if you don't want to. It's just constructive criticism on my end and I hope people consider having this conversation more in the future.

 

Rant End.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

39 minutes ago, The Bug said:

for blood it is well broiled i think not ultra-violence

 

It isn't called Ultra Violence in any of the build games. just meant the last non-joke difficulty. (since Shadow Warrior doesn't even have a nightmare replacement)

[seed]

32 minutes ago, Maggle said:

I want every person who makes these smug "just lower the difficulty 4head" posts to actually play some hard as fuck map on HNTR or something, put themselves in the mindset of a newbie player who still struggles with dodging Rev rockets and has trouble beating Plutonia (which is a very large portion of this community. idk why people forget this all the time) then ask themselves if that person would be able to beat it.

 

Been there done that, and I get destroyed anyway, until I make it through, eventually. And I still die in the IWAD's, last time I died on the Soul Bridge in Plutonia.

 

I play slaughter wads despite not being damn near anywhere their target audience for instance, so what is it exactly that you wanted to point out there? I mostly agree with what you said next, but I don't get this part.

 

There is nothing "smug" about telling others to lower the difficulty when it's quite clearly too much for them. And yet, some still refuse to do so, in which case whose problem is it, then?

 

If they cannot enjoy it even after lowering the setting, then they should consider playing something else that is more enjoyable to them. You don't have to play every single wad out there, and it really shouldn't be that difficult to accept that something is just not your cup of tea and you're not having a good time with it no matter what.

 

It's impossible to please everyone, and when you attempt that, you end up pleasing none. Some will struggle to matter what.

Edited November 4, 2020 by seed

[Fonze]

40 minutes ago, Maggle said:

This is a level of difficulty inherent to the maps they're made for, and can't be mitigated by simply removing some monsters or placing extra stimpacks or whatever. Extra steps would have to be taken with some maps to be more accessible.

 

I agree with most of your post but I think it does bear mentioning that not all maps can be accessible to players of low skill levels, and even more-so without accounting for itytd's 1/2 dmg taken. I think your example would hold more weight considering a low skilled player's experience with a hard map on itytd rather than hntr, but even then when map geometry and how monsters play with that aspect of encounter design comes into play in a big way, you're dealing with as you said something that cannot be drastically changed with a few minor adjustments. Still, in your post you point out a great example, in that replacing those revs with hk's would make a huge impact for getting rid of the homing rockets, though honestly cg's in such a situation just sound like infighters more than harassers. Changing those hk's in that example is actually the correct approach to take though I think, at least from a general perspective as a mapper thinking of how I make my own maps and how I think other gameplay-oriented mappers think. You analyze what makes your encounter work, which you really have to do regardless when it gets to designing encounters of harder difficulties, and then address the key points of the encounter. What among those must stay and what can be tweaked/changed or added/removed is the question I ask myself and I think others do so similarly, but of course there are so many shades of skill in the doom community that at some point you cannot account for everybody to have the same relative challenge. Also there was a great post a while back about making encounters that basically added a bunch of monsters, removed most of them, then found a middle area and I think this process also both helps to stress test an encounter to see what actually makes a difference and fosters a good attitude towards mapping in that being curious and trying/testing new things is a good thing.

 

I do also think that your point about spatial awareness as a gatekeeper from one level of skill to another is a great point and one that should be kept in mind when designing lower difficulties. It's actually something I've put some thought into as well on the rare occasions I con somebody I know irl into trying out a map I've made; there is a large thing to be said about the sort-of 6th sense we develop as doomers towards knowing when a monster behind us is actually throwing their projectile, which of course comes down to muscle memory and conditioning ourselves that, for example, hk attack sound plays and a set moment later we dodge. Also the spatial awareness itself of remembering exactly where the monster is relative to oneself and where one is looking while running about and shooting things. If a map author wants their wad to appeal to lower-skilled doomers then this would be a good thing to use as a means of perhaps balancing an itytd difficulty. It can also help for this to test using suboptimal control schemes, like keyboard only, controller, or touchscreen. But of course not every map can appeal to every doomer and the range of skills a mapper can cover is limited, so at some point there will always be a cut-off for players or areas of the skill spectrum where a map just cannot appeal to.

 

Also I should mention that my previous post was thinking about maps with no difficulty settings rather than saying that is the only way to balance a map (it's just the least effort-requiring way to balance a map and obviously shouldn't be relied upon).

 

40 minutes ago, Maggle said:

also don't want this to be perceived as an attack on anyone's hard work or a demand. At the end of the day, doom maps are a labor of love that people develop on their own free time, and you don't have to do any of this if you don't want to. It's just constructive criticism on my end and I hope people consider having this conversation more in the future.

 

+1 Well said

Edited November 4, 2020 by Fonze

[Sir Hattington]

4 hours ago, seed said:

As for Doom being easy for its time, wasn't there, so I can't tell. But comparing it to the Build games is not valid. For one, these games play fundamentally different and Doom doesn't even have freelook, jumping, or non-infinite height actors. It also has RNG, which, while the Build games do not, their engine has way worse hit detection, which is why Pig Cops can either take forever to kill you, or kill you in two blasts in Duke. 

Doom is a good bit easier than Wolfenstein 3D.

[seed]

16 hours ago, Sir Hattington said:

Doom is a good bit easier than Wolfenstein 3D.

 

Indeed.

 

Wolf3D is hitscan hell, the enemies have much faster reactions, they're silent, making it easy for them to sneak up on the player, and the player dies far easier there too. These are just a few ways in which Wolf3D can be a bitch more often than Doom tends to ever be.

Edited November 5, 2020 by seed

[HAK3180]

I do invoke the "complete experience" argument for many maps/mappers. Call me cynical, but my starting point is to assume that you did not put as much work/effort/thought into easy and medium balancing as you did hard. There are exceptions, of course, but keeping a map interesting at three different skill levels is quite a challenge. You've made the space for this precise encounter, and now you start changing it. That's not as simple as "Two revenants is easier than three, so I'll delete one." Also, in my experience if a map is broken only on certain skill levels, 10 times out of 10 it's not broken on hard.     

 

Personally, I think a more efficient approach (especially in more conventional maps) would be to mess a lot less with monster placement and do a lot more with health. Tough, interesting fight? Good. Keep it. Add a megasphere on easy. Two if you must. Still too hard? Then remove a monster or two, not 20+% of them. Changing monsters changes so much about the experience. Changing health has a much better chance of only changing the difficulty, and that is (usually) the entire point.

[spd7693]

At first I did it because I was thinking I was too good. Then came that infamous post that made me change my ways and I started doing it as a challenge. People simply smash the vanilla game and think they're pro on it. And it's not just Doom. I have seen such things about Age Of Empires players - destroyed the campaigns and the Hard AI, though when playing online, they get easily destroyed. (And a heads up, you don't want your first game against an AOE pro to be against DauT.) 

 

It simply is the mindset. Doom is as old as me and for this time it makes so much sense people to get better and try to make things way harder than the original iwads. Starting from Yonatan Donner, going past Eric Alm and then coming to Anders Johnsen - three of the most well known speedrunners of the late 90s and early 00s. But people who don't play at that level want to beat stuff made for players at that level. Logic? 

 

I was a part of that as I said. I can only thank some specific users in this forum for making me open my eyes. I don't think I would have ever done it if it wasn't for them. I still play on UV, because... I can lol. I've tried and found out that I can. Not as fast as them, but I can. The only wad I don't play on Ultra-Violence is Scythe, because I don't feel comfortable on its UV difficulty. I tried others on lower difficulty, especially Hell Revealed. I found it so boring on HMP, yet on UV I said it was the greatest ever.

 

In that case HAK is right - balancing stuff for all difficulties is tough. What I do is simply changing like some chaingunners to zombiemen or shotgunners or changing some pain elementals to cacodemons, etc. Still I made three maps with keys that appeared on Hard only. Well, now I know how Dario Casali felt when he found out he had flagged that yellow key in Pharaoh as co-op only. 

 

And I said something stupid, didn't I? I shouldn't have posted this. 

[baja blast rd.]

I don't think UV is supposed to be anything in particular. There is plenty of room for wads even today to be as hard on UV as the iwads, or, like, early Scythe (which is easier than Doom 2 at times). Not everything needs to stake its identity on being even remotely difficult or intense on UV.

 

I'd rather mappers who have their heart in making leisurely stuff do that and not be pressured to match "community norms" (which I've directly observed happen many times). 

 

 

Edited November 4, 2020 by ‹rd›

[Biodegradable]

6 hours ago, Fonze said:

Definitely not true given how widespread that behavior is and how well-liked said elitists are. Still, hope is a good thing to keep alive tho ;p

 

Hehe well, I'll give you some credence there, Fonze, since you've been here a lot longer than I have and can probably list some examples. But if there are people here on DW lording elitist attitudes over their fellow members, then they must all be hiding in a few of the subforums that I never browse because I haven't seen them anywhere. In the time I've been here, I've only seen people reassuring others that you can play however you please and not to be concerned with what others think. Perhaps I'm indeed being a little naive, but there's been a distinct lack of jackasses here which is just terrific in my book. :^)

Edited November 5, 2020 by Biodegradable

[HQDefault]

It's a bit of a mess. The generally accepted belief is that Doom 1 & 2 are best played on Ultra Violence, because the base games aren't that hard, and as a result the maps tend to be more fun when uou have more enemies to mow down.

 

Unfortunately that's created this really nasty disconnect when downloading custom maps where you never really know if HMP is the intended difficulty or UV is. That's why I recommend mentioning which difficulty you built the map around in your post, just like rules on jumping or crouching.