It's wild how much better Doom was than even the later doom clones.

[Maes]

Well, back then, if you wanted to jump on this newfangled "First Person Shooter" or "Doom clone" bandwagon and cut yourself a piece of the pie, there wasn't much you could do other than developing your own engine (Descent, Duke 3D, Dark Forces) or license an already available one (pretty much everything else did so with Wolf3D, with Heretic being the exception and going straight to the source). Obviously this had the drawback of your game looking too much like Wolf3D or Doom with a new coat of paint.

 

The original engine approach usually came at the cost of performance, as it was trivial to improve on Doom's deficiencies....but can you keep it just as fast even at visuals parity? Descent and Duke 3D certainly couldn't...

Edited February 11, 2022 by Maes

[Hisymak]

Well, I think the biggest problem of many games around Doom era was the engine limited to a 2D square grid (basically the Wolf3D engine and its derivates, but also some other unique engines, like CyClones). With such limitation, it's impossible to do a good level design, all the levels feel like a labyrinth of orthogonal walls, with all levels feeling stereotypical, same-y and boring after playing just a few levels. Games with such engine limitation could not succeed, at least for me they never did.

ROTT has some interesting ideas and features, but due to the engine limitation, I never finished it due to getting extremely bored and underwhelmed.

[horselessheadsman]

2 hours ago, HrnekBezucha said:

As others pointed out, ROTT is on Wolf 3D engine. But imagine what it could've been, if they built on Doom engine, instead. Ooooh, boy! 

ROTT is an arcadey shooty bang-bang run gun fun action. That opposes well to Doom's semi-serious tone of hell invasion. It's over the top ridiculous and I respect that. 

Speaking of which, is there a ROTT resource pack for weapons and enemies, and stuff? I would LOVE that. 

Return of the Triad is probably the closest you'll get.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

4 minutes ago, horselessheadsman said:

Return of the Triad is probably the closest you'll get.

That looks damn fine at first glance! I'll check it closer when I get home. 

[Katamori]

Okay, you know what? I got an idea.

 

Take this: how about Ultima Underworld?

 

That stuff was definitely up par with Doom at the time. Way not as fast-paced and more rigid sprite usage on map, but the level geometry was next level.

 

[Graf Zahl]

3 hours ago, Maes said:

Descent and Duke 3D certainly couldn't...

 

They didn't have to. Duke came out 2.5 years after Doom which in the 90's meant an entire generation of computers had come and gone. It would have been ridiculous to do an engine with the same stringent limitations as Doom had to originally do due to the average computing specs of its time.

 

[Gez]

That era was crazy. If you used an existing engine, you ended up in the position of Blake Stone or Corridor 7 releasing a Wolf-engine game while there's Doom around. Or Strife that uses the Doom engine but was released when Duke 3D and Quake were around.

 

Inversely, if you tried to keep up by switching engine during development, you ended up with Daikatana or Duke Nukem Forever.

 

The only solution was to do build your own engine (instead of using one from a competitor because by the time you've heard of it, it was already getting obsolete) and so you needed to have some computer wizards in your team. Duke 3D, Descent, Dark Forces, are the titles that IMO managed to be released at about the right time for their technology.

[Zaxxon]

47 minutes ago, Katamori said:

Okay, you know what? I got an idea.

 

Take this: how about Ultima Underworld?

 

That stuff was definitely up par with Doom at the time. Way not as fast-paced and more rigid sprite usage on map, but the level geometry was next level.

 

 

I don't think it was. Ultima Underworld revolutionized the RPG/Dungeon Crawler genres, and it was the first true Action-RPG. For 1992 there was nothing like it, and it is one of the main reasons why Wolfenstein 3D was already outdated at release. But Doom wipes the floor with Ultima Underworld on a technical level alone, not to mention visually. Just imagine how an FPS will look like if it's made with the UU engine (whatever it's called). Can you picture it? Because i sure can't. 

[RHhe82]

1 hour ago, Katamori said:

Take this: how about Ultima Underworld?

 

Ultima Underworld indeed was a true 3D game, but to agree with Zaxxon, it wasn't ahead of (or up par with) Doom as an FPS. For an RPG it was revolutionary - but even so, Ultima Underworld didn't replace "wolfensteins of RPGs", but we'd still get Eye of the Beholders (I think EOB2 released around the same time?) and Lands of Lore, which was 90 degree angle fare.

 

UU lead to System Shock, which was mentioned earlier in the thread. I *loved* System Shock at the time, but rose-tinted glasses or not, I didn't love it for its combat. I always played it with combat (and cyberspace) setting at minimum, and plot and puzzle settings at maximum.

[Redneckerz]

3 hours ago, HrnekBezucha said:

That looks damn fine at first glance! I'll check it closer when I get home. 

Its quite literally the same mechanics except on ZDoom. Its a pretty well campaign and well worth playing.

 

1 hour ago, Katamori said:

Okay, you know what? I got an idea.

 

Take this: how about Ultima Underworld?

 

That stuff was definitely up par with Doom at the time. Way not as fast-paced and more rigid sprite usage on map, but the level geometry was next level.

 

UU was years ahead of the curve, as was System Shock and Terra Centauri. UU accomplished a true 3D engine years before quake and made it ran on contemporary hard of the time (The FM Towns Marty console supposely had this too).

 

However, all that fancy rendering had the flaw of costing computing power. For Doom, this was inexcusable as its a fast-pace game. UU and SS are far slower paced, thus enabling this kind of rendering.

[Katamori]

14 minutes ago, Zaxxon said:

 Just imagine how an FPS will look like if it's made with the UU engine (whatever it's called). Can you picture it? Because i sure can't. 

 

That engine was not meant to be for FPSs. I mostly mean the 3D capabitilies. Admittedly, because if it, it's not better than Doom but definitely on par.

 

Sorry, maybe I worded badly, I definitely didn't mean it would have surpassed Doom.

 

7 minutes ago, RHhe82 said:

UU lead to System Shock, which was mentioned earlier in the thread. I *loved* System Shock at the time, but rose-tinted glasses or not, I didn't love it for its combat. I always played it with combat (and cyberspace) setting at minimum, and plot and puzzle settings at maximum.

 

Thanks for mentioning, SS is also an interesting title for comparing it to Doom. It was on par with Doom, as well, if you ask me; then again, for the capabilities.

 

Neither UU nor SS had the combat Doom had, we all agree on that.

 

5 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

UU was years ahead of the curve, as was System Shock and Terra Centauri. UU accomplished a true 3D engine years before quake and made it ran on contemporary hard of the time (The FM Towns Marty console supposely had this too).

 

However, all that fancy rendering had the flaw of costing computing power. For Doom, this was inexcusable as its a fast-pace game. UU and SS are far slower paced, thus enabling this kind of rendering.

 

Exactly, this is what I meant.

 

Not gonna lie, it was a friend of mine who's more into the System Shock/Ultima side of 90s gaming than Doom/Quake side, who put this thought into my head; he was skeptical about the superiority of Doom, and again, in terms of 3D capabilities, I realized he was totally right.

[Gez]

15 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

Its quite literally the same mechanics except on ZDoom. Its a pretty well campaign and well worth playing.

There's a big difference in game mechanics: in normal ROTT, you can only carry one rocket launcher type at once. When you pick one up, you drop whichever one you were using before. This mechanics is absent from the ZDoom TC which plays by normal Doom rules, allowing you to pickup and carry everything you find.

 

18 minutes ago, RHhe82 said:

Ultima Underworld indeed was a true 3D game

Not entirely. Like Dark Forces, it cheated by mixing "fake 3D" texture-mapped geometry (the kind of stuff we're familiar with from Doom, Build, etc.) and a discrete use of "real 3D" untextured polygons used quite sparingly.

Edited February 11, 2022 by Gez

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

5 hours ago, horselessheadsman said:

Return of the Triad is probably the closest you'll get.

Oh yeah, this is the stuff! They even made a version for editing along with a guide. Jump pads, GADs, weapons, enemies and even the ludicrous gibs! And the level design is a bizarre blocky and flat ROTT we all know and love with angles, stairs, lighting and slopes and it's just *cheff kiss*

[Doomkid]

Graf said something to the effect of Doom’s textures in particular (but a few other assets too) feeling like a bit of a hodgepodge from different sources, rather than all being in the same art style, with the same theme, the same approach to things like baked in lighting, and generally just being “samey assets”.

 

The main difference is that I find this to be a strength rather than a weakness. Even some of the best wads ever made, both in the olden days and in modern times, suffer from “Ok I’m at map06 and it still looks like map01.. the design is great but the visuals are making me thirsty by now. CHANGE ALREADY WTF”

 

As long as an asset isn’t downright ugly or super clashing - which I find only a very small handful of Doom’s assets to be - then I prefer it infinitely to sameyness in terms of style and theme. Variety in colours helps a lot too. 

[ENEMY!!!]

I don't think Doom 2's IWAD levels made as good use of the stock textures as Doom 1/Ultimate Doom did, and rather placed more emphasis on the combat.  But plenty of Doom 2 mods have shown that the Doom 2 stock textures can be pretty versatile (Brigandine springs particularly to mind here, but there are also plenty of others).  

 

One of the big appeals of the Doom series (I think this also applies to Doom 3/2016/Eternal) is the emphasis on the abstract, but in ways that can be used imaginatively to closely approximate something realistic (if you get what I mean) and to produce a variety of styles and themes, some of which can transition well from one to another.  As well as the stock textures, the popularity of OTEX and cc4-tex/32in24-15.tex for example probably also owes a lot to this, as those texture sets also pull this off very well.

[Katamori]

5 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Graf said something to the effect of Doom’s textures in particular (but a few other assets too) feeling like a bit of a hodgepodge from different sources, rather than all being in the same art style, with the same theme, the same approach to things like baked in lighting, and generally just being “samey assets”.

 

The main difference is that I find this to be a strength rather than a weakness. Even some of the best wads ever made, both in the olden days and in modern times, suffer from “Ok I’m at map06 and it still looks like map01.. the design is great but the visuals are making me thirsty by now. CHANGE ALREADY WTF”

 

As long as an asset isn’t downright ugly or super clashing - which I find only a very small handful of Doom’s assets to be - then I prefer it infinitely to sameyness in terms of style and theme. Variety in colours helps a lot too. 

 

Doom's texturing is a phenomena itself, a whole new level of art. I can't even describe, it's a breathtaking fusion of jank, junk, and genuine ingenuity.

 

It especially holds up if you examine alpha resources. So much can be possible if you add everyhting people even tried or wanted to near any original Doom capacity. I love it.

 

It also worth noting how the entire game turned out to be more abstract because of the decision of leaving out story, and how it helped so much with the atmosphere, especially in Doom E3. Abstract hell beats detailed scary Hell.

[Kute]

Know what helps Doom stay timeless? Your silent protagonist is a big help. Give your stand-in a lot of dialogue, like 3Drealms did, and suddenly you've got a one-note character spouting dated lines, and worse, maybe people actually dislike him.

 

A similar angle occurs when you compare Doom's environments to its peers. Where long ago the build engine was lauded for its ability to generate city levels that actually look like city levels, now Doom's abstract environments are a strength. Doom feels bigger than shitty old 2.5D cityscapes, IDtech1 is great for putting you in these giant beautiful alien structures, you really feel like you're somewhere you shouldn't be - instead of in a poorly rendered 90's city level. Now every game can generate passable realistic levels. My least favorite Doom Eternal levels are the city levels. I want imaginative, wild, beautiful, weirdly colored dreamscapes. That's literally the reason I'm interested in Doom wads. To see what kind of backdrops and environments people can come up with.

 

Doom's perfect gun selection is another timeless strength. Being the "first", Doom was allowed to choose the optimum fun and balance weaponry. Later games had to attempt to be "original" by giving us quirky, clunky, and overpowered weapons. Or worse, they had to attempt to be "realistic". Which again, always fails at the intended goal, while inhibiting fun and dating the game.

 

Lastly, the bestiary. I'm not sure how to formulate into words what goes on here. I will say that having never been exposed to FreeDoom, I watched Decino recently play a level of it - and despite it literally being Doom with different sprites, I could never play it. Because instead of our iconic Demons, the enemies were... IDK, big proto-worms and flower looking things. It just didn't work for me. I don't know if Doom's monsters are really a product of inspired creativity, or if they are held in such regard because the game around them is so good, but they are just perfect. Threatening, but predictable and fun to blow up en masse 

 

[Chezza]

I think the ID team had a big part to play to Doom's success. Well that's obvious, so I'll explain further.

 

Lightning struck when a small team of seriously ambitious, talented and passionate individuals worked well together (for the most part) who all in their own right was constantly pushing for innovation in their respective fields. The two most renown is John Carmack as the driven genius that made a powerful and flexible engine, and John Romero who is argued to be the first real level designer in the industry that put lots of thought into the player experience and play tested his own levels to obsession.

 

From my understanding, there wasn't any real formal training / education for effective level design nor any to build engines as sophisticated as Doom's engine. It was these handful of people who dedicated most of their time in their office, building a dream that can't be replicated today especially with large teams with far more sophisticated tech and red tape in game development. It was the right people, in the right time obsessively working on their dream project. Lightning never strikes the same place twice. Look at Quake development and you will see how a larger team, far more complicated tech and more stringent business objectives has significantly impacted the original dream team.

 

For all the other small developers who wanted to follow the success of Doom, it's likely they lacked the experience, talent, intense drive and passion ID had, furthermore it's not like ID shared all of their secrets to the greater industry (understandably so).

Edited February 13, 2022 by Chezza

[nightdiveistrash]

Were you absent the day they taught fact vs opinion? 

[Andromeda]

15 minutes ago, Zerodelta said:

Were you absent the day they taught fact vs opinion? 

This is a fact however.

[Maes]

On 2/11/2022 at 8:05 PM, Graf Zahl said:

 

They didn't have to. Duke came out 2.5 years after Doom which in the 90's meant an entire generation of computers had come and gone. It would have been ridiculous to do an engine with the same stringent limitations as Doom had to originally do due to the average computing specs of its time.

 

 

This was indeed a painful fact of life back then. Still, by looking at an average Doom screenshot and then a Duke 3D one, it was hard to see what the latter had to offer over the former. Even by getting a glimpse of the gameplay (say the first level) it was hard to justify why Duke ran like crap on a system that would otherwise rock Doom.

 

OK, so there were slopes, scripting, and Duke's one-limers... at the time, none of these things seemed out of reach of a slightly souped-up Doom engine, and at least in my eyes didn't justify the performance hit. In fact, Duke didn't run particularly faster than Quake on my system... and yes, there is an old post I made on the subject.

[Graf Zahl]

I never had problems with Duke. At the time I has a Pentiom 90 MHz and it ran great at 640x480.

Quake on the other hand ran like crap even on 320x200 with the same system.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

1 hour ago, Zerodelta said:

Were you absent the day they taught fact vs opinion? 

From now on, I order everyone on Doomworld to preface their posts with "THIS IS AN OPINION!" to avoid any possible confusion.

Edited February 13, 2022 by TheMagicMushroomMan
This measure has been put in place to assist those who were absent on the day they taught "differentiating fact from opinion".

[nightdiveistrash]

2 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

From now on, I order everyone on Doomworld to preface their posts with "THIS IS AN OPINION!" to avoid any possible confusion.

Very classy

[Aaron Blain]

I got the shareware version of Depth Dwellers and played it eagerly, but I remember being slightly mystified at how primitive it was.

 

PC Gamer devoted an issue to a rundown of Doom clones, including good ones like Heretic and Dark Forces, but also Dr Radiaki and CyClones. And of course there's Island Peril.

 

I agree that Doom's visual design is weak. Heretic is more cohesive but the assets are rudimentary overall. Hexen is beautiful.

 

And as for gameplay, forget about it. Most of that era is bandwagon junk not worth revisiting.

[Maes]

10 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

I never had problems with Duke. At the time I has a Pentiom 90 MHz and it ran great at 640x480.

Quake on the other hand ran like crap even on 320x200 with the same system.

 

Well, there was indeed an abyss between my 486DX/40 (overclocked to 50 MHz) with VLB and 30-pin SIMMs and your Pentium 90, which would the very least have used 72-pin (EDO, even) SIMMs, a PCI graphics card etc. My system was -in retrospect- only passably able to run Doom (the main bottleneck probably being that Cirrus Logic all-in-one video card...). But at least FPS were consistently in the two-digit territory. With Duke 3D they often dropped to single-digits unless I played at minimal screen res & detail settings. Surprisingly, Quake was not significantly worse. Not that I'd consider either "playable" for any amount of time.

 

OTOH, you reporting that your "Pentiom" was dismal in Quake sounds odd, as if it had a really crappy FPU or something. Maybe it was one of those "Pentium overdrive" chips that could be installed on a 486-class mobo? Those could indeed be all over the place, performance-wise.

But still, I think my original point still holds. Duke 3D: a clearly "traditional-looking" Doom-esque engine with a limited mapping geometry and 2D sprites vs Quake, a fully 3D game. How could the former be nearly as crappy as the latter?

 

And I wouldn't stick so much to this latter point if there wasn't already better competition out there: Dark Forces with its Jedi engine, which seemed to have all of the Duke's engine's strengths but also all of the performance you'd expect out of the Doom engine (if not smoother, at times).

Edited February 14, 2022 by Maes

[Koff3Katt]

On 2/11/2022 at 9:16 AM, msx2plus said:

the reason many "clones" (not something like ROTT, think more like Mars3D) fail is because they're trying to be something they're not. doom clones wanted to be doom. but doom wanted to be whatever it wanted to be. it was a hodgepodge of influences, not just "oh shit i'm also gonna do that!"

 

if the clones followed suit in that regard, many would be more fondly remembered.

I mean to be fair, most FPS' at that time were going to be similar, I feel that's more of system constraints than a lack of drive.