Why didn't PSX Doom include the PC Levels?

[Dark Pulse]

6 hours ago, Individualised said:

I suspect that at the time, id considered Master Levels for Doom 2 to be a higher quality product than Final Doom, and pushed for its levels to be included. Therefore there was less time to work on the Final Doom portion of the game.

I mean, there were plenty of levels from the Master Levels cut too, so I wouldn't be so sure about that.

[Midway64]

44 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

I mean, there were plenty of levels from the Master Levels cut too, so I wouldn't be so sure about that.

 

Well, I mean:

 

There's 13 levels from Master Levels, only 7 missing.

TNT has 11 levels, with 21 missing.

And Plutonia has been butchered to 6 levels, with 26 missing.

 

So Master Levels really didn't get butchered by a lot compared to the other campaigns, which brings us to Individualised's point.

[Individualised]

6 hours ago, ValveMercenary said:

 

Well, I mean:

 

There's 13 levels from Master Levels, only 7 missing.

TNT has 11 levels, with 21 missing.

And Plutonia has been butchered to 6 levels, with 26 missing.

 

So Master Levels really didn't get butchered by a lot compared to the other campaigns, which brings us to Individualised's point.

That's more than half of Master Levels represented, and only a bit over a quarter of Final Doom represented.

Edited July 5, 2023 by Individualised

[Edward850]

In my professional opinion I don't think it's favoritism, there's no evidence that they liked one more than the other. It seems more likely that they looked at all the maps available, compared it with the cost of production and time and found that the Final Doom levels would have required the most amount of work to port. They had more textures and enemies, and thus required the most work to cull back, and decided to just pick a handful of maps that either jumped out at them or were otherwise less complicated to do with the time allotted.

 

This was after all a pretty small production turnover time. They already had a ported codebase, the only addition they made was the playstation mouse support. Any publisher would look at that and go "you have 3 months to make a Final Doom mappack".

[Dark Pulse]

Well, having done some conversions for the PS1, I can definitely say that the cut Master Levels would've been huge pains to do.

 

One of Jim Flynn's contributions, for example (Trapped on Titan), would've been murder to do. The man loved to have rooms above 256 high. That's a no-no in PSX Doom for multiple reasons: One, the engine can only tile vertically once (until GEC fixed this), and two, tall rooms also really kill the performance. Others, like Bloodsea Keep (which I converted), were huge levels with tons of texture and monster variety - I did my best there, but it got HEAVILY reduced in both varieties.

 

There is also potentially a bit of a financial factor in play here: PSX Final Doom also only released about nine months after the PC Master Levels and a little over three(!) months after PC Final Doom, so to some extent, id may have been trying to protect sales of those. Considering the Williams Team was also working on Doom 64 at the time, basically priorities had to be made, and spending a lot of time cutting down and retooling levels to fit on the hardware was basically not there - with the lead time to press CDs and the like, it probably was done some 4-6 weeks before the actual street date.

 

It might mean that Tim had as little as six weeks to do the Final Doom conversions, whereas with Master Levels he had a bit more lead time. And even then, his full focus wasn't on doing the conversions, thanks to Doom 64.

Edited July 5, 2023 by Dark Pulse

[Individualised]

5 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

One, the engine can only tile vertically once (until GEC fixed this), and two, tall rooms also really kill the performance.

That's interesting. I thought the vertical height limitations in PSX Doom were a limitation of the Jaguar engine in general, since it was based on Doom 1 which couldn't allow rooms as tall as Doom 2 allows (not a lot of people know this because no one really plays "original" Doom 1, but rather patches released after the release of Doom 2). I guess GEC fixing this confused me (thought that was a PsyDoom thing)

Edited July 5, 2023 by Individualised

[aboyes1989]

Would there be less controversy over this release if it had been called something else, instead of Final Doom? I get the criticism, for sure. The box implies you are getting Final Doom, a port of the PC maps. Instead, it's mostly the Master Levels.

 

Would it have been a wiser move to actually release it as The Master Levels? Or to come up with a new subtitle altogether, something generic, like 'Annihilation'?

[Individualised]

10 hours ago, aboyes1989 said:

Would there be less controversy over this release if it had been called something else, instead of Final Doom? I get the criticism, for sure. The box implies you are getting Final Doom, a port of the PC maps. Instead, it's mostly the Master Levels.

 

Would it have been a wiser move to actually release it as The Master Levels? Or to come up with a new subtitle altogether, something generic, like 'Annihilation'?

"Doom: The Master Levels" with a subtitle like "featuring the best levels from Master Levels for Doom II and Final Doom" or something like that. Wouldn't have been as marketable though. Final Doom had a cool branding thing going on.

 

Technically there are more Final Doom levels than Master Levels in the package, but it's just only over half.

Edited July 7, 2023 by Individualised

[Liberation]

On 7/7/2023 at 8:44 AM, aboyes1989 said:

Would it have been a wiser move to actually release it as The Master Levels? Or to come up with a new subtitle altogether, something generic, like 'Annihilation'?

 

I don't think anyone really cared at the time.

 

Alot of console gamers didn't really have access to decent computers, or had a shared family PC or simply weren't interested in PC gaming. So PSX Final Doom was simply more Doom for the PSX and that was all that mattered back then.

I remember the mouse support being a massive selling point in the reviews lol.

[Rudolph]

They should have called it Final Master Levels for Doom II for the Sony Playstation! :P

[Herr Dethnout]

On 6/30/2023 at 11:58 PM, Dark Pulse said:

 

That said, to say it was "made for 2D" is also a bit of a lie. Naturally it had some stuff that tended very well to 2D, but it was obviously a machine made with 3D in mind, and indeed, 3D as the main selling point

I wasn't a complete lie, the PSX was made with 2D in mind, but after the release of Virtua Fighter, they decided to focus in 3D support 

 

Kind of ironic how SEGA and Nintendo inspired his major rival (In the case of Sega, his killer).

 

On 6/30/2023 at 11:58 PM, Dark Pulse said:

The Saturn, on the other hand, was built to be more of a 2D powerhouse. But that's also why it lost the war of that generation - not only was it tricky to do 3D on (quads instead of triangles), it also had some extremely powerful processors, but to maximize power and framerate you essentially had to multithread your program in a way it liked - and this was an era where relatively few programmers had experience doing that sort of stuff.

Yup, and was a major drawback, since SEGA during the Mega Drive era were known for being developer friendly. In fact, they were the first to give Devkits for third parties iirc.

[Rudolph]

On 7/9/2023 at 4:57 PM, Herr Dethnout said:

Kind of ironic how SEGA and Nintendo inspired his major rival (In the case of Sega, his killer).

In Nintendo's case, they actively made an enemy out of Sony by trying to screw them over at the very last minute.

 

Imagine how things would have been had the Nintendo Playstation been a thing...

[Herr Dethnout]

2 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Imagine how things would have been had the Nintendo Playstation been a thing...

They will have a Monopoly in the Home console market...

Or a least, Xbox (as a Console) will be stronger than is today.

[Rudolph]

Imagine if, in response, SEGA and Microsoft had decided to team up against Sony and Nintendo. :P

[Quasar]

On 7/5/2023 at 2:38 AM, Edward850 said:

In my professional opinion I don't think it's favoritism, there's no evidence that they liked one more than the other. It seems more likely that they looked at all the maps available, compared it with the cost of production and time and found that the Final Doom levels would have required the most amount of work to port. They had more textures and enemies, and thus required the most work to cull back, and decided to just pick a handful of maps that either jumped out at them or were otherwise less complicated to do with the time allotted.

 

This was after all a pretty small production turnover time. They already had a ported codebase, the only addition they made was the playstation mouse support. Any publisher would look at that and go "you have 3 months to make a Final Doom mappack".

This. Also, they only had ONE guy doing the mapping on this game. Everybody else was already working on Doom 64 at the time.

[Dark Pulse]

On 7/19/2023 at 9:14 PM, Quasar said:

This. Also, they only had ONE guy doing the mapping on this game. Everybody else was already working on Doom 64 at the time.

And that one guy was also working on Doom 64. :P