What popular wads would improve or destroy Doom's legacy if they were released instead of Doom.wad in 1993

[Kute]

Let's say Doom.wad was actually Eviternity or Sunlust or something like that - would people have been much more impressed back then? Or do you think it would have been too much too soon? Maybe the original doom game was just perfect for what it was? 

 

Just curious

[esselfortium]

I guess it depends on whether we're ignoring what the average personal computer was actually capable of running in 1993. Doom.wad is way simpler than even the vast majority of classic-style mapsets, because computers at the time could only barely handle it.

[Doomkid]

Putting aside hardware limitations - I got way too comfortable in Doom, Doom 2 and old-era wads using stock assets to be able to appreciate this alternate timeline. Starting from a point of relative minimalism, with a reasonable chunk of basis in reality with the levels designs (despite any abstract elements), in other words the way Doom did it, just seems "right" for a game like Doom that doing its best to show a semi-convincing world in a video game back in the NES/SNES era.

 

It's kind of like how we started out with cave paintings of humans and animals before we got into cubism, heh. I guess many people probably would have worked "backwards" from Sunlust (aka the first ever Doom in this timeline) to achieve something smaller scale, easier, and "more grounded in reality" as far as the buildings and landscapes went. So perhaps something "almost just like Doom 1" would have come to be, bred from a desire for less visual abstraction and more accessible gameplay/difficulty.

[RHhe82]

14 minutes ago, esselfortium said:

I guess it depends on whether we're ignoring what the average personal computer was actually capable of running in 1993.

 

Indeed. I remember being unable to play E3M6 with my 486DX/33 with whopping 4 megs of RAM, it'd give me only a few frames per second there.

 

Doomkid beat me to the punch, but ditching hardware performance, I feel something like Sunlust would have destroyed the legacy, Doom would have been just some obscure niche title for some odd masochist out there. The rest of us had barely played FPS's back then aside from Wolfenstein 3D. We needed something to learn the ropes.

[Sena]

I reckon most of the community's most loved WADs wouldn't have gotten the same appreciation in '93, since, going by OP's examples, most of them are a lot harder than the original game, and the first person shooter genre was still in its infancy, so a game like Doom that was going to be the one title to make it mainstream would need to be accessible, accordingly. 

[xdude_gamer]

People would think a megawad that is that big and crazy to be too ambitious. Much like Gothic99, they would say it was too detailed and all that detail was worthless. And the WADs would've taken 10 years to make using such primitive mapping tools...

[cannonball]

My answer will apply the assumption that technology would be the same, as such I will consider vanilla map sets only and perhaps only from the classic era.
I guess one for the torching of the legacy would be Hell Revealed. I can almost imagine an AVGN episode where Jame rages as Post Mortem puts him on the slab for the hundredth time and has still not got the first key.
Non serious answer - Kama Sutra, I really don’t think that source material would have survived with “That map30” even in 1993/4. :p

 

Improvements - perhaps Memento Mori 2. Honestly whilst nostalgic, I actually think that the IWads hold up very well compared to the classic period of PWads. MM2 I would pick over MM and Requiem, along with the Team TNT releases.

[Tarnsman]

The original IWADs are needed for the foundation of what came after them. All art is inspired by previous art, you can't just replace part of the timeline with another.

 

Plutonia is vastly different without D1 and D2 to draw from, which makes every that drew heavily on it different, etc.

[rzh]

Hm, I kinda disagree with the point that if Doom was harder, it wouldn't have been as popular.

If it was much harder on all difficulty settings, than probably, yeah.

But if skills 1-5 were "Doom" "Doom 2/ TNT" "Plutonia" "Average modern .WAD" "Still a meme", I think it would've sold just as well.

Although, the only counterexamples I can offer don't prove my point, quite the opposite.

I was about to say "Look at Descent or Blood, those are still popular games, even though they are much, much harder (Blood, maybe not so much though)".

But then I realized that nobody apart from me and like 3 German dudes play Descent anymore and Blood is mostly popular nowadays because of YouTubers.

As for popular wads, I really can't tell because most that I can think of are:

a) too gimmicky/ unique/ weird for the average person

b) too demanding for the available hardware (all limit-removing, Boom, MBF/21, GZDoom won't fit the bill)

c) too modern in style (I imagine BTSX wouldn't have been nearly as popular in 1993 as it is nowadays, it doesn't fit with the aesthetic zeitgeist at the time which was a lot more edgy, grungy, industrial, but maybe I'm wrong about this).

Edited February 2, 2022 by rzh

[Pirx]

47 minutes ago, cannonball said:

My answer will apply the assumption that technology would be the same, as such I will consider vanilla map sets only and perhaps only from the classic era.
I guess one for the torching of the legacy would be Hell Revealed. I can almost imagine an AVGN episode where Jame rages as Post Mortem puts him on the slab for the hundredth time and has still not got the first key.
Non serious answer - Kama Sutra, I really don’t think that source material would have survived with “That map30” even in 1993/4. :p

 

Improvements - perhaps Memento Mori 2. Honestly whilst nostalgic, I actually think that the IWads hold up very well compared to the classic period of PWads. MM2 I would pick over MM and Requiem, along with the Team TNT releases.

 

 

probably this. most gamers didn't know or use the modern wasd+mouse control scheme back then. i played doom with the default keyboard only setup, that's arrow keys + holding down alt as a strafe modifier. and no always run on iirc. that was slow as a snail and circle strafing was box strafing, at best. so i played doom much as i had played wolf3d before: peek into a room, back off, and shoot them as they came in sight. that worked for ep.1, however later, cacos were a challenge and barons outright dangerous. needless to say that something like hell revealed would have made me never touch that game again, as it was obviously something for 4-armed aliens with 10 fingers on each hand.

 

imo we can consider only vanilla-compatible map sets than could run on 1993 / 1994 hardware, as doom was already well optimized for the available computing power. so modern wads like btsx would likely slow to a crawl, if run at all. imo it would be more interesting to ask: what if doom / doom2 would have been released with the later bug fixes and optimizations of boom, prboom and mbf?

 

and yes, mm & mm2 could have been official expansions, as these were in tune with the architecture and difficulty of doom2 and final doom.

[Captain POLAND]

1 hour ago, rzh said:

I was about to say "Look at Descent or Blood, those are still popular games, even though they are much, much harder (Blood, maybe not so much though)".

But then I realized that nobody apart from me and like 3 German dudes play Descent anymore

 

You are not alone!

 

[Michael Jensen]

1 hour ago, rzh said:

But then I realized that nobody apart from me and like 3 German dudes play Descent anymore

I wishlisted all the Descent games on GOG just yesterday and plan to get them as soon as possible. 

[Denim Destroyer]

It would be a lot easier to destroy Doom's legacy if you were to replace DOOM.WAD with some low quality wad full of mappers first mistakes. Improving would be exceedingly difficult if you take into account how popular Doom was when released. You would need to find a wad known for its wide appeal, could run on hardware of the era, and could be played well with keyboard controls. So nothing with high detail or difficulty. Memento Mori might fit the bill due to its age but I imagine someone could find something more appropriate.

Edited February 2, 2022 by Denim Destroyer

[rzh]

3 hours ago, A.H. Sankhatayan said:

I wishlisted all the Descent games on GOG just yesterday and plan to get them as soon as possible. 

They're brutally hard.

Play on Hotshot first, if it gets too difficult (usually at level 6), turn it down, because it's about to get even harder.

[Ludi]

Lmao imagine if The Sky May Be was an IWAD

[ReaperAA]

In order for a Doom wad to replace the original maps that would improve popularity, it would have to be:

• able to run on the hardware of the time (typically 486 CPUs). Meaning that it would have to be vanilla compatible. No Boom/MBF or advanced source port stuff.
• accessible in terms of layout, gameplay style and difficulty. Nothing hard or avant garde. It would need to have wide appeal.

Boom/MBF stuff like Eviternity, Ancient Aliens or Sunlust have zero chance of running on old 486 or even Pentium CPUs so those are out of the picture. On paper, BTSX seems like a possible candidate because it is vanilla compatible (thus with minor adjustments, it may run on a 486) and it is considered to be not too hard. However, the difficulty while not hard for today's standards, would be soul crushing for 90's players. BTSX is on par or harder than Plutonia after all. So stuff like BTSX is also out of the picture.

I am surprised no one mentioned Doom Zero. If there is any new wad that I actually could see work AND improve Doom's legacy in the 90's, it would be this. Doom Zero is both vanilla compatible and "easy enough" that it would appeal to most folks even in the 90's. Other wads I could see working would be Jimmy's wad Deathless (and perhaps Earthless too once it is completed). Jimmy's stuff isn't too hard, the layouts/visuals are simple and afaik they are also vanilla compatible (at least I think Deathless is). Jenesis is another Jimmy wad that could have worked if it wasn't a Boom wad.

 

The original 1000 lines CP wad is also a good candidate as it is vanilla compatible and has mostly not too hard maps, except for maps 32 and 30 (those would have to be adjusted for 90's players). 1000 lines 2 and 3 CP, while being vanilla compatible, are harder and I don't think they would work well either.

 

Classic wads like MM, MM2, Requiem, Icarus etc. could work as iwad maps, but I don't think they would improve Doom's legacy. Their level design isn't really much better than the current iwads.

[DoomBoomer]

Doom the Way id Did might have been a mind blowing experience in 1993. I'm not fully sure if it's vanilla compatible though.

[Tompig]

Out of curiosity, are we saying these hypothetical alternatives to doom.wad were still developed by the team at Id?

I'm just thinking that the personality contributions of the members of the team also influenced the legacy of the game to a degree, even if the 'work' was a 1 to 1 recreation to a user wad. 

[Kute]

4 hours ago, Tompig said:

Out of curiosity, are we saying these hypothetical alternatives to doom.wad were still developed by the team at Id?

I'm just thinking that the personality contributions of the members of the team also influenced the legacy of the game to a degree, even if the 'work' was a 1 to 1 recreation to a user wad. 

 

Yea, I'm just saying like if the work they produced happened to be one of the popular modern wads.

 

And let's say computers can handle it as if it's Doom 2

[Quill]

Imagine WOW.WAD as the stock level.

 

Serious answer: Disregarding the limitations of past hardware, Knee-Deep in ZDoom. Playing that on a 1993 PC would blow your socks off, and the PC up! Alternatively, I think Requiem, No End in Sight, or Syringe would be great alternatives to the IWADS.

[Shikamaze]

I would say Scythe is a pretty good replacement for either Plutonia or TNT. It has a good difficulty curve, starting easy and going really hard on the last 10 maps, and i don't think it's that demanding for a older computer. Map 30 would probably make a list of hardest final levels somewhere though.

 

 

 

 

[Katamori]

While many answers are more grounded than what OP was thinking for, I understand where's he coming from.

 

Civvie recently reviewed a real authentic Doom era trash with proper examination: 

 

 

One of his critics were how level design is abhorrent to the point of nonexistent, even in Wolf3D perspective standards.

By the same rule, should Doom came out with nonsensical, garbage, or even just visually unappealing levels, it would have caught the ground pretty easily. We love criticising how E1 levels where nowhere like their title - hell, even I do! E1M1 barely qualifies as a hangar. But take a look at this video and tell me it wasn't better than most stuff at the time.

 

And from this perspective, the answer is pretty easy - though vague at the same time: take any if not most '94 WADs, or really almost anything from '95 and arguably '96. Almost none would set the bar to a proper level.