What do you miss about Doom?

[SOSU]

Is there anything you feel has been lost during the time you've spent as a Doom fan? Maybe a sense of wonder or how the community used to be?

Edited January 10, 2022 by SOSU

[Thelokk]

I do miss buying my PC magazine of choice at the newsstand just for the bundled shovelware Doom wads (Quake later on). 

[JadingTsunami]

The rarity of good maps.

 

It used to be like finding a gemstone on a huge beach. A rare treat.

 

Sometimes you would play the same set three, four or more times just to enjoy it completely before moving on.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

The thing I miss about the DOOM is the youth I had when I first discovered the DOOM.

[Teo Slayer]

The early days when I was new at Doom

[NoOne]

The guys that made it....that HM guy is right up his own **** imho, pandering to the minority that shout the loudest. id isn't what it used to be. I don't care how fancy the new GFX are. The new Doom was sh1t. Contraversial I know, but you did ask :)

Edited January 10, 2022 by NoOne

[SOSU]

"What do you miss about the Doom"

Lmao my english skills are deteriorating xD

[horselessheadsman]

For a long time I only had the shareware version of the Doom, and I saw that end-screen promising that Shores of Hell and Inferno would be incredible so
many times. Years later when I got my hands on Ultimate Doom, reality failed to measure up to all the crammed-together hype.

[RetroAkaMe]

When I was genuinely great at mapping. Sigh.

[MFG38]

When I was able to enjoy even bad maps.

[Graf Zahl]

What I miss most is the kind of mods which were made for early ZDoom. Mods that did not go overboard with scripting but tried more to use ACS to replicate gameplay like Quake/Quake2.

For me these were a big part of "rediscovering" Doom after moving on to more recent titles after 1995.

 

[Nikku4211]

I miss the wonder I had about how the Doom engine worked, and how source ports worked.

 

I also miss the kind of TCs that simultaneously changed Doom into something completely different and did the most with what little vanilla Doom or early source ports had, the minutiae of which makes the retro aesthetic of Doom for me personally.

 

Call me a ZBoomer but I feel a lot of modern TCs or partial conversions don't have that charm old TCs like Batman Doom, Chosen (yes, it's for ZDoom, but it was back when Decorate was strictly for decorations) and Aliens had. I understand it's a lot of effort either way, but perhaps at 19 I'm already developing nostalgia.

[PsychEyeball]

I miss the time where this game used to scare me. As a kid, I'd play the game on lower difficulty with a Gravis Gamepad and by god it was terrifying. I wasn't a fighting machine or anything alike, I was just some clumsy random dude full of lead that could get ravaged at any moment because I'd overreact to any possible threat inbound.

 

The game got far less scary when I learned to play it on keyboard. 

[Xaser]

I'm gonna be that weirdo who says "nah, not really". Pretty much all the big things I'd longed for have all resurfaced: the author of my favorite wad started making maps again, there's many more mapsets coming out now that are experimenting with gameplay tweaks, the new Doom games don't suck, and outside of Doom itself there's been a huge resurgence of classic FPS gameplay in the indie scene. My oddball choice of lifelong hobby is in a pretty damn good place right now. :D

[Jimmy]

On 1/11/2022 at 2:22 PM, Graf Zahl said:

What I miss most is the kind of mods which were made for early ZDoom. Mods that did not go overboard with scripting but tried more to use ACS to replicate gameplay like Quake/Quake2.

For me these were a big part of "rediscovering" Doom after moving on to more recent titles after 1995.

 

Actually going to echo this. I still revisit things like Dark7, KZDoom and Massmouth 2 occasionally. Absolutely seminal releases.

Edited January 12, 2022 by Jimmy

[BetelgeuseSupergiant]

About Classic Doom i would like to see the plot like in Doom 3. Precisely because of this i liked Doom 3, and for me it would interesting to see Doom game with gameplay of Classic and plot like in D3

[D4NUK1]

On 1/11/2022 at 10:51 AM, Nikku4211 said:

I miss the wonder I had about how the Doom engine worked, and how source ports worked.

 

 

Second this. Watching this play in a old 98 Comptuer maybe not was a wild as DOS Doom, but it's was really something that was really special of how played and looked.

 

And now knowinh every nook and trivia tech of Doom gameplay and doom sourceport, it's hard to look for new stuff. I'm glad im mostly wrong as many new .wads and sourceports make new stuff that i never imagined to be able to play with DoomII.

[Dusty_Rhodes]

On 1/11/2022 at 8:22 AM, Graf Zahl said:

What I miss most is the kind of mods which were made for early ZDoom. Mods that did not go overboard with scripting but tried more to use ACS to replicate gameplay like Quake/Quake2.

For me these were a big part of "rediscovering" Doom after moving on to more recent titles after 1995.

 

 

On 1/11/2022 at 8:51 AM, Nikku4211 said:

I miss the wonder I had about how the Doom engine worked, and how source ports worked.

 

I also miss the kind of TCs that simultaneously changed Doom into something completely different and did the most with what little vanilla Doom or early source ports had, the minutiae of which makes the retro aesthetic of Doom for me personally.

 

Call me a ZBoomer but I feel a lot of modern TCs or partial conversions don't have that charm old TCs like Batman Doom, Chosen (yes, it's for ZDoom, but it was back when Decorate was strictly for decorations) and Aliens had. I understand it's a lot of effort either way, but perhaps at 19 I'm already developing nostalgia.

I feels these a lot. I still love Doom and I think I prefer knowing how the engine works, but there was this amazing sense of wonder when I played the IWADs. I used to think things like teleporters and the Plutonia devices at level exits were models, in the way Source and Halo's Blam engine had models. Obviously they aren't, but I thought it was really cool back then. Still, now I get a kick out of cool technical things like Scythe 2 Map01 and Community Chest's Map29 intricate bridges and how much work went into them. It feels like an even trade off, I suppose. Beating the Bruiser Brothers and hearing D_E1M8 for the first time gave me an indescribable feeling I'll never get back. That's okay though, the IWADs, especially Ultimate Doom, are now comfort gaming for me. Growing up I find different enjoyments in the same things than I used to. I think that's a good thing. 

[xdude_gamer]

I miss the wonder of the stock levels, when you first play them and you don't know what's where and what traps you'll find. I miss when Entryway and Hangar were... different. They felt pretty complicated. Now they're simple.

[beast]

Maybe I am strange but I miss something I never experienced - multiplayer.

[msx2plus]

20 hours ago, PsychEyeball said:

I miss the time where this game used to scare me.

bingo. i've been trying to pinpoint what it was that scared me as a kid - unfamiliarity? my 386 desktop being unable to do music and sound at the same time? the low resolution and generally inscrutable graphics? everything seeming so big when i was so small? a combination of all of it? probably, but tapping into that is such a difficult thing! doom has always struck me as a horror game which is probably why i like oppressive maps so much.

[Endless]

On 1/10/2022 at 10:22 AM, Thelokk said:

I do miss buying my PC magazine of choice at the newsstand just for the bundled shovelware Doom wads (Quake later on). 

Shameless self plug: The Doom Master Wadazine has all you need in for your Doom addiction in free e-magazine format! We'll be, soon enough, also working on our own bundle ala shovelware style. It's a pretty cool magazine that you'll probably enjoy a lot of you already like old-school gaming mags :D

[Doomkid]

The only thing I actually, genuinely miss - the ubiquity of Deathmatch. Even then, I still find good DM servers here and there even today, so it's not like I'm super starved for MP Doom or anything.

 

On a related note.. This is Omega-tier gatekeepy, but I don't give a damn: I also miss the "unspoken rule" that you weren't even qualified to talk about "Doom skill", let alone your own Doom skill, unless you were actually a fucking beast in the Deathmatch arena.

 

It's not like this ever had any effect on me personally, I've never exactly been a "pro Doomer" or anything like that - but it pains me how little consideration it gets. Deathmatch is Doom's "forgotten half". Doom fuckin' invented international multiplayer - and yet newcomers are scared to try, because of how SHIT multiplayer is in 99% of games.. It's given them permanent cold feet :(

[msx2plus]

Just now, Doomkid said:

I genuinely miss the "unspoken rule" that you weren't even qualified to talk about "Doom skill", let alone your own Doom skill, unless you were actually a fucking beast in the Deathmatch arena.

this goes for a lot of things - it's one thing to respect yourself and your skills and how you develop them, and it's even good to vocalize when you're proud of your accomplishments (down with self-deprecation!!), but it's another thing entirely to boast about how FuckEN AWeSOMe you are at anything without having mastered whatever skill you're on about.

[Stupid Bunny]

I guess the only thing I miss, like others here, is the mystique the game had when it was new to me, when even pinkies were scary and when the music and gore and atmosphere had a genuine effect on me--I'll never forget the chills I felt in the crusher room of Deimos Lab, the terror at seeing the Barons in the Phobos Anomaly for the first time, the absolute exultation of experiencing The Living End, the music, the scale, the epic scope of it all.  Everything felt so multilayered, there was so much mystery and a real sense of danger in every place that felt truly visceral somehow.  It's a rare pwad that can make me feel that the same way the IWAD maps did when I was fresh to it all.

 

But there's no point lamenting that kind of thing, really.  The miracle of Doom is that the game and all the content for it manage to feel so fresh and so exciting even in spite of that loss of novelty.  There's so much that can, and is, being done with the game now, it's almost maddening how much god-tier content comes out every month.

 

Oh yeah I miss poking through post hell I guess but I can see why it doesn't exist anymore

[mrthejoshmon]

I miss that 2 shot BFG on the cyber, reliably, every time, always a miss, never hit it.

 

But for an actual response I miss 90's wad architecture styles, basic yet clean and fulfilling, orthogonal but alluring.

[ZethXM]

Most of what I miss about Doom isn't specific to Doom, more the era I grew up in when games were still a mostly solitary or minimally accompanied journey into worlds that seemed endless. 

 

The familiar shores of guides, forums, and community were so much further away from you, letting mysteries flourish in the school lunchroom. 

 

You didn't instantly know the scope and depth of whatever you were playing, and games often had swathes of "empty" level that didn't inform progression, only provided you space to wander and wonder. 

 

I guess that's as close as this gets to me having a concrete thing about Doom that I miss: when people weren't so spoiled for content that developers could afford to make things more obscure, put more "fat" in their levels, trust people to spend the time and effort unraveling mysteries that felt grander than they really were in the end.

[Bridgeburner56]

13 hours ago, Jimmy said:

 

Actually going to echo this. I still revisit things like Dark7, KZDoom and Massmouth 2 occasionally. Absolutely seminal releases.

The good thing is, you can still play these wads but if they were made now? Probably would not be well received. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug

 

[Thelokk]

7 hours ago, ZethXM said:

 

You didn't instantly know the scope and depth of whatever you were playing, and games often had swathes of "empty" level that didn't inform progression, only provided you space to wander and wonder. 

 

 

This so much. As good as some Youtubers we all know are good for getting people to play Doom, I feel their gymnastics foster a 'omg 2 empty squares, where are my 10000 revs' mentality that a lot of mappers cater to just to get some scrap of visiblity. Sometimes I feel like I'm playing more Touhou than Doom. It's like people completely forgot Plutonia existed.  

Edited January 13, 2022 by Thelokk

[Gibbon]

Floppy disks with random wads on them.