was doom's bestiary a happy accident?

[roadworx]

so, doom 2's bestiary, while not 100% perfect, is probably one of its biggest strengths - it's kinda hard to argue against that. it's so good that people have been finding new and interesting ways to use them to murder the player for what's gonna be three decades soon. but, when you play through doom 2, you don't really see the monsters living up to their true potential other than in some exceptional cases. that's gotten me wondering, did the devs create a really really good bestiary by complete accident? or did they know exactly what they were doing, but just sucked at using it effectively?

 

what does everyone here think?

 

 

 

pls don't call me an idiot if i'm just not seeing something obvious that would nullify this entire thread

Edited April 2, 2021 by roadworx

[Azuris]

They seemingly had a Feeling of what is working and fun and whats not.

Also it was their third Ego Shooter, so they had Experience what others didn't.

The Enemies are even colourcoded to spot them easier.

 

Enemies that could break the Fun are used in a very good Way and not to much.

Look at Plutonia and how divisive it is for using them to much.

It is also a good Showcase on how much better the Level Design works, beeing more progressive and puzzling than Trial and Error.

 

They knew whats Fun and had Experience, that led into a good Bestiary.

 

[roadworx]

7 minutes ago, Azuris said:

They seemingly had a Feeling of what is working and fun and whats not.

Also it was their third Ego Shooter, so they had Experience what others didn't.

The Enemies are even colourcoded to spot them easier.

 

Enemies that could break the Fun are used in a very good Way and not to much.

Look at Plutonia and how divisive it is for using them to much.

It is also a good Showcase on how much better the Level Design works, beeing more progressive and puzzling than Trial and Error.

 

They knew whats Fun and had Experience, that led into a good Bestiary.

 

plutonia uses them much more effectively tho, and plays to each monster's strength far more than in any of the levels in either of the two main doom games

[DisgruntledPorcupine]

I've asked myself this same question quite often. Especially in regards to the Archvile. Potentially the most fearsome and interesting to use monster in the bestiary, but its few uses in Doom 2 can come off as kind of arbitrary or non-threatening. I'm thinking they at least somewhat didn't want to make it "too hard", whereas the Casali brothers were obviously out to challenge people.

 

In the end though I'm thinking it wasn't so accidental. The monsters seem carefully picked to all fill some sort of "niche" and even if they weren't overly ambitious in their using of each one, I can get their general philosophy and why it aged so well.

[DooM Bear]

LOL!!! I read the title as “Was Doom’s beastiality a happy accident” and thought “man, I must have missed that level” XD

 

Anyways, I’m not sure :-P

 

I imagine there was quite a lot of thought put into it like “we need a rapid firing guy and a high damage melee guy” but maybe there was a little luck that they all came together so perfectly?

[Gez]

2 hours ago, roadworx said:

did the devs create a really really good bestiary by complete accident?

Most definitely not.

 

If you look at the development history of Doom's monsters, you can see how the bestiary evolved. First, read the "Doom Bible", because it'll show the original design ideas were quite different from what we got in the end. Then look at the various alphas: the first monsters to be implemented were the zombies (as player sprite edits), imp, baron, and pinky. The rest came later. Some were changed drastically during that time, e.g. the lost souls who got a new set of sprites and lost their "psychic attack".

 

Finally, keep in mind that Doom II's bestiary is Doom II's bestiary. They already made a game with Doom's bestiary, so it helped them figure out what monster niches were missing. We know the arch-vile, revenant, and mancubus had been planned for Doom originally but didn't get finished in time. However, this gave them more time to refine their behavior, and come up with stuff like the manc's volley pattern or the rev's homing missiles. We know the arachnotron was Sandy's idea -- he said it as much, he found the spiderdemon was a very cool design but it was under-used, so a scaled down version as a regular enemy was something he lobbied for. The Hell knight was obviously created out of a similar reasoning, we've got a cool boss design with the baron and it'd be nice to be able to use it more often, but he's got too many hit points to really be a regular enemy. And the chaingunner was a way to round out the zombies and make one that's actually a long-range threat.

 

 

3 hours ago, roadworx said:

or did they know exactly what they were doing, but just sucked at using it effectively?

Well, obviously, they didn't have nearly three decades of experimentation and playtesting to refine their use of the bestiary. It's not really fair to compare the IWAD levels to the community output nowadays. Compare instead with 1994 PWADs exclusively to get a clearer idea.

[JXC]

I wish that the plasma zombie, a mini cyberdemon, and a third giant enemy were part of the bestiary.

[baja blast rd.]

Gez hit the nail on the head. Note that the monsters most commonly described as weak, barons and masterminds, are both from Doom 1. The dynamic of Doom 1, with its limited selection mid-tier monsters that both have simple attacks, doesn't get heaps of praise from most people. It has its fans and high-level practitioners (like cannonball), but Doom's modding scene wouldn't have been as vibrant if those monsters were the only tools to work with.   

 

What Doom 1 still did well was something id had lots of control over, far from a happy accident: stuff like the art, the sounds, the basic responsiveness of gameplay, and the basic dynamics of combat. (The latter can be taken for granted, but it's still a huge improvement over Wolf3D's hitscan model of shots passing through monsters, dealing damage in a huge RNG range, and well, monsters being nearly all hitscans.) 

 

Then Doom 2 went ahead and succeeded at that again with its new additions, but also turned to monster niches and consciously filled those in quite adeptly, as this Linguica longpost shows. 

 

Even if the monsters still aren't perfect, and even if id didn't envision the extent of gameplay design possible in far-off years -- how to use archviles like skillsaw, pain elementals like dannebubinga, and zombiemen like Dobu -- there is another important thing they did well, ensuring that any missteps they made wouldn't be overly limiting. 

 

Whether this thing is a happy accident could be debated -- I think luck is an inevitable factor in any successful game -- but the elegant, functional simplicity of their design, with basic AI and basic monsters, gave future modders the freedom to experiment wildly and iterate endlessly and discover all that cool gameplay design stuff. Note the complete absence of many potentially hamstringing hardcoded behaviors like "this boss always ends the map when it dies" or "this monster needs a chain of specific map points to navigate" or "this monster is entirely resistant to damage unless you bonk it on the ass." (Or since those are extreme, note the absence of anything half that specific.) 

 

Simple elements can be better at eventually becoming unexpectedly intricate, highly optimized systems. Chess might not have been as interesting if the queen's legal moves varied based on the square color she was on and how many pieces you had captured and what the players ate that day. 

[roadworx]

1 hour ago, Gez said:

Most definitely not.

 

If you look at the development history of Doom's monsters, you can see how the bestiary evolved. First, read the "Doom Bible", because it'll show the original design ideas were quite different from what we got in the end. Then look at the various alphas: the first monsters to be implemented were the zombies (as player sprite edits), imp, baron, and pinky. The rest came later. Some were changed drastically during that time, e.g. the lost souls who got a new set of sprites and lost their "psychic attack".

 

Finally, keep in mind that Doom II's bestiary is Doom II's bestiary. They already made a game with Doom's bestiary, so it helped them figure out what monster niches were missing. We know the arch-vile, revenant, and mancubus had been planned for Doom originally but didn't get finished in time. However, this gave them more time to refine their behavior, and come up with stuff like the manc's volley pattern or the rev's homing missiles. We know the arachnotron was Sandy's idea -- he said it as much, he found the spiderdemon was a very cool design but it was under-used, so a scaled down version as a regular enemy was something he lobbied for. The Hell knight was obviously created out of a similar reasoning, we've got a cool boss design with the baron and it'd be nice to be able to use it more often, but he's got too many hit points to really be a regular enemy. And the chaingunner was a way to round out the zombies and make one that's actually a long-range threat.

 

Well, obviously, they didn't have nearly three decades of experimentation and playtesting to refine their use of the bestiary. It's not really fair to compare the IWAD levels to the community output nowadays. Compare instead with 1994 PWADs exclusively to get a clearer idea.

i suppose i probably should've specified that i meant good as in the versatility of the bestiary, which, in my mind, is what makes it so great in the first place. ofc they're gonna know how to make a bestiary and how to improve upon it - they were veteran game designers after all. however, you do bring up a good point with your last statement, which kinda answers my question actually. it'd be kinda hard to know the true potential when you have such limited time to experiment with it

44 minutes ago, rd. said:

Even if the monsters still aren't perfect, and even if id didn't envision the extent of gameplay design possible in far-off years -- how to use archviles like skillsaw, pain elementals like dannebubinga, and zombiemen like Dobu -- there is another important thing they did well, ensuring that any missteps they made wouldn't be overly limiting. 

 

Whether this thing is a happy accident could be debated -- I think luck is an inevitable factor in any successful game -- but the elegant, functional simplicity of their design, with basic AI and basic monsters, gave future modders the freedom to experiment wildly and iterate endlessly and discover all that cool gameplay design stuff. Note the complete absence of many potentially hamstringing hardcoded behaviors like "this boss always ends the map when it dies" or "this monster needs a chain of specific map points to navigate" or "this monster is entirely resistant to damage unless you bonk it on the ass." (Or since those are extreme, note the absence of anything half that specific.) 

 

Simple elements can be better at eventually becoming unexpectedly intricate, highly optimized systems. Chess might not have been as interesting if the queen's legal moves varied based on the square color she was on and how many pieces you had captured and what the players ate that day. 

this is what i'm trying to ask in my own weird, obfuscated manner. did they specifically design the bestiary with that in mind? or did it just end up that way due to a variety of other factors

Edited April 2, 2021 by roadworx

[seed]

Doubt it, they just knew what they wanted from it, and then what gaps required filling in Doom 2, so the result is just developers knowing their stuff very well.

[Final Verdict]

 

Gez more less covered anything I would have said (and then some more) with the Doom Bible and so on.

 

However, the Arch-vile is worth touching on here. I think they knew how to use it but didn't want to ramp up the difficulty too highly. Whenever you encounter it in Doom II it's never placed to maximise its strengths, always seemingly slapped in as an after thought. This was understandable as back in the 90's most people played it with keyboard only (not as precise). 

 

They also removed the Arch-vile entirely from some ports like the PSX, so they clearly knew how dangerous it could be if used in conjunction with cunning placement etc.

 

Regardless, I think they knew how to use it but obviously didn't have decades to see its true potential. Even if they did, I doubt they would have made use of it as they were trying to keep it balanced for the audience at the time.

 

Edited April 2, 2021 by Final Verdict

[Stabbey]

5 hours ago, rd. said:

Then Doom 2 went ahead and succeeded at that again with its new additions, but also turned to monster niches and consciously filled those in quite adeptly, as this Linguica longpost shows. 

 

THANK YOU. I've been looking for that thread for ages, I read it once but didn't bookmark it, and I couldn't find it again with searches.

[Not Jabba]

Gez and rd said it best. The one thing I think is worth adding is that the Doom 2 monsters *were used effectively* in the IWADs. If the level designers at id had placed monsters like Aurelius, or skillsaw, or Erik Alm, or even the Casalis, everyone would have hated the game. The placement is tooled to be interesting for the level of skill that most FPS players would have had at the time -- playing essentially the second significant FPS game that had ever been made. Dodging the attack of a single Mancubus or figuring out how not to be killed by a single Arch-Vile in a simple room were skills that people would legitimately have had to develop while playing Doom 2.

[Helm]

It's worth unpacking what intentionality means and what a happy accident is when you are breaking new ground technologically and genre-wise.

What I mean to say is that in a parallel reality where the first FPS games were made by a completely different group of people (let's say if it were a historical necessity to mature technology to the point where 3d immersive run and gun were a thing) they may have ended up with more or less the same bestiary, if not in flavor and dressing, in gameplay function. My caveat is this only makes sense if that parallel reality made their version of the doomguy run so fast as well.

This isn't to mean that these hypothetical people would have thought about it the same way id did, or that every design decision is 100% premeditated. If you follow what feels good you come up with stuff that feels good for humans. We're all humans, we have a lot in common.

To put it a different way, when someone made the first goomba (Miyamoto, presumably) how much premeditation do you think goes into designing an enemy that goes left and right and you're supposed to jump up on it, in this new genre of sidescrolling run and jumping? Yet nearly everything else in that game's bestiary is an elaboration on a goomba. 

The Doom 1 enemy essentials are what feel like intuitive first takes. By Doom II you have more conscious filling in to enrich the gameplay that id themselves were finding in their engine. I believe the most important element id considered in this maturation process between the two games is just how fucking fast you can glide around in Doom. They got better at their own game. The expanded bestiary is meant to problematize your super fast movement. If Doom came out a much, much slower FPS, then it would have quite different monster additions by part II, I theorize.

tldr creative process more complex than total premeditation or total improvisation, especially when chasing new technology that by itself is a wellspring for new experiences like immersive 3d

[Fairen]

12 hours ago, roadworx said:

plutonia uses them much more effectively tho, and plays to each monster's strength far more than in any of the levels in either of the two main doom games

Revenant strengths: Having twenty of them spamming fireballs while you're in a small space with no cover.

 

Chaingunner strengths: Sniping from a position that overlooks most of the map while being out of auto-aim range.

 

Cyberdemon strengths: Being placed in locations where the player can kill them with virtually zero threat to themselves.