How do I encourage players to switch weapons?

[ChestedArmor]

I wanted to make a wad that plays more like Doom Eternal, where you constantly switch weapons.

 

But classic Doom is not exactly build for that, so I have to get more creative with the map design.

So far, I found 2 ways to encourage weapons switching:

Turrets and scare ammo.

 

You get instantly Berserk and not much ammo, so you have to safe it for enemies out of meele range, the "turrets"

The way is littered with spawn triggers, that spawn a monster nearby, so that you have to switch between Berserk meele for close combat and firearms for turrets.

 

The problem is I haven't found out other ways to encourage weapon switching

and my previous tactic gets stale pretty fast.

 

Are there other ways to give the player a reason to constantly switch weapons?

Edited November 26, 2021 by ChestedArmor

[Nine Inch Heels]

You don't need to make ammo particularly tight to make weapon switching attractive... often it's enough to mix up what enemies players will be up against... One area could be heavy bruisers, which makes RL nice, next area could be low-tier scanners, which makes SSG/CG more attractive...

 

Other than that you could be doing some DeHacked trickery to change the core weapons, and then have them each be more specialized than before... Less overlap means having more options matters more...

[Major Arlene]

Ordinarily if I run across an area heavy in one type of ammo, I'll go "huh, I guess that means I should use that type of gun for this fight." 

[ChestedArmor]

I thought about weapon switching from a moment to moment, not so much from arena to arena...

[Nine Inch Heels]

gonna suck in classic doom unless you make weapon switching way faster than it normally is

[Xaser]

Yeah, what NiH said -- weapon switching in classic Doom is much slower than its modern counterpart, so you'll need to whip out DEH or some other fancy port-specific editin' language and make it faster. Which is to say: try it! Gameplay modding is fun. :P

Another thing to note is that a big reason why weapon switching is such a common thing in 2016 and Eternal is that it cancels the weapon animation, so you can cycle between two powerful-but-slow weapons (i.e. Ballista/Gauss + SSG) and fire them rapidly. You'd have to do some funky trickery to make that work, and while you can definitely achieve this in GZD with its extended A_WeaponReady and the WRF_NOFIRE flag, I dunno if there's an equivalent in DEH, even in MBF21 (I didn't really consider this use case for whatever reason :P).

[Deadwing]

I would say, limit shotgun ammo, make more rockets, chaingun and plasma avaliable and focus on strategic incidental fights using different distances and heights so changing weapons are not too slow to deal with the pressure from different types of enemies. (Mixing lower ties such as hitscanners - easy to take out with chaingun - with fast meatier enemies like revenants - best to use SS and avoid rockets - and slow meatier ones like mancubus - best to use with rockets or, if its too close, plasma)

[Doomkid]

Here's how to do it in a way that will work in all ports (was used in Rowdy Rudy 2 for instance)

 

 

[thiccyosh]

I'd say limit ammo and use different monster types i.e. you get plenty of rockets and a few cells and have a Cyber as a turret with some Fatsos as a meatshield. With that you have to kill the mancubi with rockets while micro-managing the Cyber with Plasma. As for weapon switching like in Doom Eternal, you have to use either use Dehacked and break your fingers in the process or use some Zdoom shenanigans. As I'm not a Zdoom nerd I cannot help you with that. And Dehacked is a bit more difficult as it uses one of the unused values that I cannot get to work.

[slugger]

Chainguns make cacodemons helpless, and lost souls make rockets very risky. BFG is the only gun to kill a cyberdemon quickly (like in a few seconds, from full HP), and even then it's difficult to land the shots. These enemies will put strong pressure on you to change weapons.

 

Plasma gun is the least brainy weapon. It kills everything fast and unlike the BFG you don't need any special maneuvering.

 

In classic Doom at least, your enemies are also your weapons. Every projectile and hitscan attack is actually yours, because you control where it goes. Archviles, cyberdemon, and chaingunners are huge pains in the ass because their weapons are the hardest to manipulate. (They won't stop just because you shot them, they don't miss just because you took one step forward, and if the attack hits you don't get to just shake it off.)

 

There's a map in some megawad (I forget which) where berserk packs are continually conveyed to a voodoo doll every 5 seconds, replenishing your health while simultaneously switching you away from the weapons you need to stay alive for 5 seconds. That's the most inventive use of the weapon switching mechanic as an obstacle I've seen.

 

You can use DECORATE to replace each weapon and speed up their switching time, but I was never able to get it to work without unpredictable bugs (e.g. reloading animations playing when you switch weapons, the ammo check not working and letting you switch to empty guns, etc). The dehacked thing that Doomkid posted looks like the way to go.

Edited November 27, 2021 by slugger

[Nine Inch Heels]

To add some context...

 

It's definitely possible to design set-piece encounters which make the use of several weapons attractive over the course of one and the same fight, but pulling that off is going to be difficult...

 

When you look at really large fights, ie Sunder, most of the time players will spam the strongest weapon they can use (sometimes until it's run out of ammo), and then switch to something less heavy for clean up...

 

If you look at more conventional maps, you will find that the players who are the most prone to switching weapons are often speedrunners or UVmaxers, because they know which weapon is the best to use when and for what reason, and the important part here is that they know it in advance, meaning they can switch during downtimes while moving to another location in a given map...

 

Having to switch weapons mid-combat frequently, and waiting for a second or whatnot until you get another shot off can - and most likely will -  make the action feel sluggish, because what you're effectively gonna see players do is they'll duck behind cover or they'll just run another lap around the mob... It should probably be noted that any fight that offers enough legroom for frequent switching of vanilla weapons at vanilla speeds also needs to be somewhat slow-paced to make frequent switching feasible in the first place... and even if you were able to pull off "staged" fights like that in whichever format you want to use (it's possible in any, depending on how "crafty" you are), it would still help immensely if you tackled the problem at its core, and did something to reduce weapon redundancy not just by way of thing-placement, but also by way of modifying weapon behaviour...

Edited November 26, 2021 by Nine Inch Heels

[Mayomancer]

Tight spaces will discourage the use of the rocket launcher, a berserk pack will incentivize taking down a few monsters with punches to save ammo, a mob in the distance will maybe make you swap to the chaingun to swat them out... You gotta create situations that have a right tool for the job so to speak and balance ammo appropriately.

 

But that should definitely be an afterthought compared to creating fun encounters, you could allow some player freedom or make it gimmicky if you like, whatever you are most comfortable with crafting.

Edited November 26, 2021 by Mayomancer

[nrofl]

Heres an idea. Dont give the player the plasma rifle.

 

In my opinion the Plasma rifle is the most versatile weapon in the game. Fast fire rate, decent velocity and a ridiculous amount of damage. With that being said the chaingun, ssg and rl have different uses that you can make well designed encounters that focus on using the weapons strong suits.

[ApprihensivSoul]

11 minutes ago, nue said:

Heres an idea. Dont give the player the plasma rifle.

 

In my opinion the Plasma rifle is the most versatile weapon in the game. Fast fire rate, decent velocity and a ridiculous amount of damage. With that being said the chaingun, ssg and rl have different uses that you can make well designed encounters that focus on using the weapons strong suits.

 

This. As long as you keep Cell restrained you open up a ton of flexibility with the other weapons as long as your encounters take place in environments with alot of spacial variety and monsters placement according to their strengths. I had alot of fun designing around that in my recent map-pack, keeping the plasma rifle behind heavy layers of secrets and restricting its' ammunition.

[Astronomical]

Lower maximum capacity of ammo as well as the amount of ammo you get per ammo pickup. 

 

It's also important to remember that most fights tend to focus on one weapon, as much as I have heard others complain about Rudy 2's black gold, it along with fast weapon switching had me switching weapons frequently.

[DannyMan]

I think you need to make the specific type of ammunition scarce.

[ChestedArmor]

Thank you so much for your feedback guys!

 

I did some coding myself and just set switchspeed to 0 and it worked wonders.

 

@Mayomancer the ideas with the tight space gives me some needed variety.

@nuethe plasma gun actually made it more sluggish.

@Deadwing I didn't even think about limiting shotgun ammo, that's a new perspective I could use.

 

Edited November 27, 2021 by ChestedArmor

[Mayomancer]

The best way to have ideas for that kind of thing, and figure out the way you want to go, is probably playing a lot of different levels and wads from prolific mappers. The cacowards has a lot of great stuff you can check out and take notes.

[Otco]

I like the final fight in Sunlust's map 19 that encourages you to switch between the plasma and the rocket launcher. Imps come in from one side of the room, and Barons come in from another area. You quickly take out the imps with the rl, before switching to the plasma to take out the newly spawned in cacodemons. While this is happening, the teleporting in revenants start infighting with the Barons, and you run past them. To stop them from filling the room, the game wants you to switch back to the rl, and blast down all the Barons and the remaining cacos. This is a very tight and difficult encounter, but it perfectly encapsulates the need to constantly switch weapons. Tight spaces and difficult encounters in general tend to make the player need to switch between weapons a lot.

[OkDoomer174]

Here's a fun idea: are you replacing weapons? Make weapons that complement each other. Peter Lawerence's NoLagWeps_WepSwitchFaster.wad allows you to switch before reloading with the Super Shotgun and regular shotgun, so what I've found is an interesting strategy is to shoot once with the SSG, then once with the SG, then finish off with the chaingun. Of course, these are vanilla weapons, and vanilla weapons are not designed to work in tandem like that for obvious reasons, so you can try to make weapons specifically like this. Just something to try out.

[NeoWorm]

Weapon switching in Eternal is basically an exploit. It is based on Quake3 attempt to make the weapon switching more responsive but incidentally introducied way to exploit it by skipping parts of animations when switching thus raising dps in some cases. And Eternal further supported it by giving certain enemies completely artificial vulnerabilities to certain weapons and limiting ammo in other cases.

Problem is this whole fad is really artificial and DooM doesn't need it. Weapons are already situational enough that you have to strategically use weapons best for every situation. Preserving ammo whey you can, using best counter weapons agains certain enemies, using high dps weapons when you need something to kill asap and weaker weapon with plenty ammo when you have the time and comfort to do so. Trying to mimmick Eternal in old DooM is quite stupid in my opinion. Eternal sacrificed a lot of what made DooM such a good game - mainly good and open level design instead replacing it with shallow combat arenas that need something to make them interesting. Thus intoducing artificial weapon specializations and switching that works independently of good map design.

[Senor Cacodemon]

Doom eternal made it so that you spawn with only 16 shotgun shells, even though your probably not gonna do what Doom Eternal did without coding. You should make ammo scarce in different areas of the map so that players are constantly switching their arsenal.