What was the reception of Final Doom back in 1996?

[Rudolph]

16 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

Final Doom ended up on PlayStation

Oh yeah, that is another benefit of Final Doom being a commercial release: it gave Playstation owners a chance to play third-party maps that would not have been available to them otherwise - until ROM hacks became a thing, that is.

 

I mean, I suppose Williams could have always released another Doom game on Playstation using the Id maps that did not make it into Playstation Doom. However, from what I understand, an original title like Doom 64 was simply not possible on the Playstation.

Edited May 27, 2022 by Rudolph

[zokum]

4 hours ago, Rudolph said:

No. Again, you are trying too hard to find reasons to be retroactively upset about Final Doom and make it sound worse than it really is.

 

It was a map pack, nothing more, nothing less. Overpriced? Maybe. However, being stand-alone is a plus, as it means you did not have to own Doom II to play the new mapsets; I remember for the longest time being unable to play Brood War because my StarCraft CD-ROM broke.

 

Now, now, do no try to move the goalposts here: you complained that Final Doom had to compete with the likes of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, and I brought up Doom 64, which also had to compete with non-Doom titles, including Duke Nukem 64. 

 

And no, if we analyze the game using your reasoning, Doom 64 was not really more advanced or updated: in many ways, it was a regression from Doom II: no multiplayer, smaller levels, shorter campaign, missing monsters, worse control scheme, less advanced graphics than the likes of GoldenEye 007 and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, darker visuals that made it harder to see on a television screen...

 

And I am saying that as someone who loves Doom 64!

It clearly was a stand-alone game. It wasn't marketed as a map pack, it wasn't priced as a map pack. Let me quote wikipedia:

"Final Doom is a first-person shooter video game developed by TeamTNT, and Dario and Milo Casali, and was released by id Software and distributed by GT Interactive Software in 1996. It was released for MS-DOS and Macintosh computers, as well as for the PlayStation, although the latter featured a selection of levels from Final Doom and from Master Levels for Doom II."

In practice it is a glorified map pack, not much different from MM, MM2, Requiem etc. You could probably build an equally impressive map set from the free wads on the maximum doom release id did + the master levels.

To most casual buyers, Final Doom looked like the final chapter in a trilogy, and they expected something along the lines of what Doom 2 had compared to Doom. It was after all 2 years since the last Doom game and the machine requirements had gone up.

And I am not moving the goal posts here. Final Doom had to compete with Doom 2, free wads and newer and much more advanced engines, you just didn't get my point. Apart from the maps not having been released, there wasn't much interesting about it for someone who owned a copy of Doom 2. It had very poor value for money compared to just downloading free maps and TCs/PCs.

When it comes to Doom 64, there were no Doom games on the platform, nor was there downloadable wads etc. I have never been much of a Doom 64 fan, but for the machine's limitations, it wasn't that bad. Many of the limitations you mention also affect the other games on the platform. I'm no N64 fan/expert/user so I won't comment much on it.

Doom 64 was a port, more or less a remake, to a platform that had no Doom games. The closest comparison for a Nintendo user would be the SNES version of Doom, and it was a fairly decent 'sequel' to that game.

[Gez]

I hope you're not in games like King's Bounty/Heroes of Might & Magic because if so, what would you say about Heroes Chronicles?

 

Imagine if Final Doom had been split into six separate standalone games instead of just one bundle of the two IWADs. You'd have TNT: Evilution Part 1 (MAP01-MAP11), Part 2 (MAP12-MAP20+MAP31+MAP32), Part 3 (MAP21-MAP30), and same for Plutonia. No new textures or music, just a different skin for the status bar but otherwise only Doom II assets. Also, multiplayer and the ability to load custom maps (-file command) are disabled.

 

Basically: stuff like Final Doom was par for the course back then. Nowadays you don't see that anymore; instead you get to buy a lot of cosmetic packs so that your character can wear a fancy hat.

[Rudolph]

1 hour ago, zokum said:

Let me quote wikipedia

Instead of quoting an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit at any time, how about you finally acknowledge what looks like a scan of the original game box, which clearly indicates that the game contains two additional Doom II episodes?

 

1 hour ago, zokum said:

To most casual buyers, Final Doom looked like the final chapter in a trilogy, and they expected something along the lines of what Doom 2 had compared to Doom.

I am going to need a citation here, because it looks like you are making stuff up. In fact, the way you have been talking about Final Doom makes me wonder if you were even born in 1996, as your framing comes across as quite ahistorical.

 

And no, a GameSpot reviewer does not count, as they were not a casual buyer and, if anything, you would have expected their review of the game to have prevented the readers from mistaking Final Doom for an actual sequel.

 

1 hour ago, zokum said:

And I am not moving the goal posts here.

Yes, you do. You were complaining that Final Doom could not compete with Quake and Duke Nukem 3D - two non-Doom titles - and when I drew a similar parallel with the technically-lesser Doom 64 to illustrate the absurdity of expecting every post-Doom II release to be Doom III, you changed it to being about Doom games - even though Hexen 64 runs on the Doom Engine, making it a literal Doom clone - and the need to compete with specifically Doom II, even though in that regard, Final Doom still comes across as a more generous package.

 

At this point, I have become convinced that you will stop at nothing to retroactively feign outrage over a perfectly fine, albeit arguably overpriced map pack, even if it means actively ignoring the reality of the time as well as testimonies of players who do not support your narrative. I am not sure why you would be doing that, but in any case, it is frankly pathetic and I see no point in continuing this conversation.

Edited May 27, 2022 by Rudolph

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

36 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

At this point, I have become convinced that you will stop at nothing to retroactively feign outrage over a perfectly fine, albeit arguably overpriced map pack, even if it means actively ignoring the reality of the time as well as testimonies of players who do not support your narrative. I am not sure why you would be doing that, but in any case, it is frankly pathetic and I see no point in continuing this conversation.

If you think he is being that dramatic, maybe you should have ended the argument a couple pages back. This is yet another thread that had potential, but ended up being one page of genuine responses and three pages of you arguing with someone who doesn't share your opinion and you being unable to accept that fact. Now you're telling him that the sources he is citing (Gamespot, Wikipedia) don't count while calling him pathetic. You aren't going to change his view, move on. 

Edited May 27, 2022 by TheMagicMushroomMan

[jazzmaster9]

Well it worked out for the Casalis in the long run, since many mappers consider Plutonia to be one of the best in the classic series despite being a "sub par game"

I personally would pay more money for Plutonia than Doom 2

Edited May 27, 2022 by jazzmaster9

[Rudolph]

2 hours ago, Gez said:

Basically: stuff like Final Doom was par for the course back then. Nowadays you don't see that anymore; instead you get to buy a lot of cosmetic packs so that your character can wear a fancy hat.

Worse: you see game developers deliberately withhold content that was meant for the main game just so they can release it post-launch.

 

I mean, I get that developers sometimes have to exclude unfinished/unpolished content for the sake of meeting deadlines (Classic Doom itself being a prime example), but still, it speaks to the problems with the business model that you have to rush a product out the door... :S

Edited May 27, 2022 by Rudolph

[Alfonso]

Admit you got filtered by map 12 speed and now you are malding years later.

[Rudolph]

3 minutes ago, Alfonso said:

Admit you got filtered by map 12 speed and now you are malding years later.

In hindsight, that map is such a troll: it is called "Speed" and it features the pulse-pounding "Facing The Spider" track, yet going fast in the level is the best way to get you killed. :P

[Ricky D]

I don't remember seeing much about Final Doom in magazines back in the day. Me and my friends learned about it much later, after we had played "better" games like Heretic, Duke 3D and Descent, so we never cared about it. I think that's what many people (especially kids) though back in the day, it was more of the same. It's a different story now, though. Plutonia is my favorite classic iwad.

[Rudolph]

Out of curiosity, was Final Doom also sold as a floppy disk?

[zokum]

51 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Out of curiosity, was Final Doom also sold as a floppy disk?

By 1996 I think it was CDrom only for most games. If it were to be released on floppy you'd need more than twice the amount of floppy disks that Doom 2 used. As far as I can see from googling it was CD only. Doom 2 was 5 disks on floppy. Final Doom would be 11-13 floppy disks, but could be shrunk down if they eliminated duplicate data found in both wad files and were a bit creative in the install routines. Basically install and unpack evolution and then generate plutonia as a diff of the other iwad.

In 1996, one floppy disk probably cost more than one pressed CD in bulk, so I doubt they bothered with a floppy release. A cd must surely be cheaper than 10+ floppies. With so many floppies, there is also a bigger chance for manufacturing errors, as it will break a proper install if just one disk was bad. Bad media is a problem you rarely have with CDs.

The CD format was fantastic for games. Vastly much more space, a lot more reliable. The minimum CD speed was way above the maximum floppy speed. Playing games straight off the disc was very viable, compared to the disk swapping hell we used to have on machines like the amiga where it was common not to have a hard disk. A 1 speed cdrom is 150kb/sec. You'd spend less than 10 seconds to read as much data as an entire 1.44m floppy worth of data.

Final Doom upped the minimum memory requirement to 8 megs, and there aren't many machines in 1996 that had 8 meg or more of ram, but no cdrom drive. They probably existed, but from a cost/usage perspective, not worth catering to.

Then again, there are Doom releases on 5,25 floppy disks, so who knows? I can't think there were many that had a PC that was powerful enough for Doom to be a viable game, but had only 5,25 floppy disk support, but id still made the disks.

[Rudolph]

Really? I seem to remember floppy disks having a greater storage capacity than that. Then again, I have not used one nor seen a computer with a floppy disk reader in ages. Oh well.

 

I was asking because while I mostly disagree with your characterization of Final Doom as a low-quality cash grab, I reckon the CD-ROM format would have allowed Id Software to put more than two megawads in Final Doom. As it has been established earlier, Perdition's Gate was considered for a time, so in hindsight, many more megawads could have been added to Final Doom, like Memento Mori I and II.

 

I would have also thrown in PC remakes of the Playstation-exclusive levels, i.e. Hell Gate, Playstation's Hell Keep, Twilight Descends, The Marshes, Threshold of Pain, The Mansion, Club Doom, Redemption Denied, and an amalgation of the unused maps for good measure! :P

Edited May 28, 2022 by Rudolph

[zokum]

3 hours ago, Rudolph said:

Really? I seem to remember floppy disks having a greater storage capacity than that. Then again, I have not used one nor seen a computer with a floppy disk reader in ages. Oh well.

 

I was asking because while I mostly disagree with your characterization of Final Doom as a low-quality cash grab, I reckon the CD-ROM format would have allowed Id Software to put more than two megawads in Final Doom. As it has been established earlier, Perdition's Gate was considered for a time, so in hindsight, many more megawads could have been added to Final Doom, like Memento Mori I and II.

 

I would have also thrown in PC remakes of the Playstation-exclusive levels, i.e. Hell Gate, Playstation's Hell Keep, Twilight Descends, The Marshes, Threshold of Pain, The Mansion, Club Doom, Redemption Denied, and an amalgation of the unused maps for good measure! :P

The most common floppy formats on pc were: 360kb 5,25". 1200kb 5,25" (drives reading the bigger disks were backwards compatible), 720kb and 1,44mb 3,5". 1.44mb drives read and wrote 720kb floppies. These are the formatted capacities. Other machines would format them slightly different and get a different amount of space out of the media. An amiga had a more flexible disk controller and got 880kb out of a 720kb pc media. I could be wrong about the 5,25 360 ones. All the people I knew who had 5,25 drives had 1.2 meg drives.

There are some 2,88mb drives, but this was rare. I have never seen one. By the early 90s, most software was delivered on 720kb if it could fit, for maximum backwards compatibility or 1,44 if it made more sense economically and spec wise for the app. A 1,44 meg floppy drive was an inexpensive upgrade and in most cases you could still use your old 720kb drive in the same case.

Since both cdrom, zip drive and other optical media were on the horizon, there wasn't a big need for anything beyond the 1,44mb floppy drive for the average user and there wasn't much research put into the field. Modems made floppies less interesting as well for supplying software and updates. Faster modem speeds and cheaper networking made floppies as a sharing media fall out of fashion. Floppies are about 10 times faster than 28,8 modems at xfering data. The speed is usually from 100 to 250kbps at writing and slightly higher at reading. It all depended on the hardware, there was no set standard for the transfer speed that had to be adhered to. A null modem serial cable is on par with a floppy drive at transferring data since it reads and write to the receiver in the same operation. An inexpensive parallell transfer cable would blow that out of the water, easily offering ~1mbps with decent hardware (standard on mid 90s pentium, ecp/epp ports).

Under good conditions a 28.8 modem transferred at about 12,5 megabyte per hour. Doom only needed a 9600 baud modem to play decent two player games.

I still own two modems and I have 3 serial cables and 3 parallell cables :) Plan to use them in the near future!

[Quasar]

I am not aware of any floppy disk releases of either Final Doom or Master Levels. I firmly believe both were CD-ROM only.

[zokum]

Id had already released Maximum Doom, a shovel ware cd filled with free wads and doom stuff. I agree that they could have supplied some of the best community map sets for free as well. With a simple launcher this would have been a much cooler product. Would have saved people a fortune in dialup costs if nothing else.

Memento Mori comes with a cool info pack executable, and presented itself as a very high quality free release:

[Rudolph]

@zokum I will never forgive Id Software for not finding a better use for a title as cool as "Maximum Doom". :P

 

I guess someone could parody this by making "Minimum Doom", which would be a carefully-curated compilation of the best WADs ever made.

 

That or a Gameboy port of Doom, I guess...

[Gez]

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

I guess someone could parody this by making "Minimum Doom", which would be a carefully-curated compilation of the best WADs ever made. 

Or an IWAD with just E1M1: Hangar and the resources it needs (everything that doesn't appear in this level is removed from the resources).

 

Alternatively there's @fraggle's miniwad.

[Redneckerz]

1 hour ago, zokum said:

Id had already released Maximum Doom, a shovel ware cd filled with free wads and doom stuff. I agree that they could have supplied some of the best community map sets for free as well. With a simple launcher this would have been a much cooler product. Would have saved people a fortune in dialup costs if nothing else.

Memento Mori comes with a cool info pack executable, and presented itself as a very high quality free release:

It should be noted that Memento Mori's additional stuff is an exception and not a rule. Sure, you had Requiem's alternative executable, and the stuff by TNT went even further beyond (Eternal Doom has its own shell program and could even be a standalone game, if you sacrificed a Doom IWAD for it - There is literally an option to do this) but the inclusion of a dedicated infopack program is typically very 90s DOS cool.

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

That or a Gameboy port of Doom, I guess...

A Gameboy wouldn't run Doom on its own, what with its Sharp 8 bit processor. Its already a small miracle GBADoom exists using a modified PrBoom renderer.

25 minutes ago, Gez said:

Or an IWAD with just E1M1: Hangar and the resources it needs (everything that doesn't appear in this level is removed from the resources).

 

Alternatively there's @fraggle's miniwad.

Criminally underutilized work of art, aswell. There are a ton of good use cases or potential use cases for miniwad, esp in making wad sets standalone.

[Rudolph]

1 hour ago, Redneckerz said:

A Gameboy wouldn't run Doom on its own, what with its Sharp 8 bit processor. Its already a small miracle GBADoom exists using a modified PrBoom renderer.

I know, I was trying to think of something that could live up to the title of "Minimum Doom". :P

 

I guess you can hardly do more "Minimum" than miniwad indeed!

Edited May 28, 2022 by Rudolph

[princetontiger]

I didn't hear about Final Doom until playing Doom 3! So... there was very little coverage. Maybe there was some mention in game magazines like pcgamer, but I don't recall.

 

The Doom II launch was HUGE. I remember buying a physical copy at my local ebgames (now gamestop).

Edited June 9, 2022 by princetontiger