How Much Would Doom Mapping Have Changed Had We Gotten The Beta BFG Instead?

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Seeing videos of the old beta BFG, it didn't seen very potent. It made an hell of a lightshow, but in terms of actually damaging enemies it felt vastly inferior compared to the one from the final release. But that got me thinking... The BFG is such an integral part of modern day high difficulty wads in general, so how would a lesser replacement hypothetically have impacted mapping in general? It's hard to say, but I'm genuinely very curious to try and think about how things would have gone differently. Would we still end up developing slaughtermaps and combat-puzzles, just adapted to a different arsenal? Or would the focus of the community change completely? And if so, in what directions could it have went? Honestly a pretty fascinating topic IMO... What are your thoughts?

[7Mahonin]

I think at the very least it would’ve had a lot of impact on deathmatch maps because the BFG would not have been as significant for deathmatch the way it was in the press release beta.

 

It likely would’ve made the rocket launcher more of the super weapon, more like Wolf 3D (SNES, Mac, Jaguar, 3DO Wolf 3D I mean) where the plasma and BFG would be more like flamethrower equivalents, had they kept it the way it was, for singleplayer.
 

For Doom, it may not have been much of an issue since there’s less enemy types, but Doom 2 it would’ve made things far harder without the BFG as it was in the final game.

Edited August 5, 2023 by 7Mahonin

[Lucius Wooding]

Well the beta BFG was a hell of a lot better at stunlocking, and was very good at making it impossible to see. The lack of auto aim somewhat cripples it, it'd need auto aim (per projectile, not just for the spread) to compete with the revised version. It's still around 2/3 the damage output on paper, but the regular BFG is a lot more likely to deal close to expected damage per shot. As is it's fairly piss poor in terms of actually dealing damage.

 

The one advantage it might have would be in its penetrating power in somewhat narrow corridors. The revised BFG is a true AOE weapon with a much wider cone but you might have better luck pushing directly through large groups of fodder with the beta BFG I suppose. That said it got such a major buff that the new version is overall a lot better. I also think it'd detract from the plasma's usage too much since it fires 2 projectiles per cell. The plasma would strictly be a long range weapon or useful when the BFG is unavailable. But I think long range fighting would be taken over by rockets since cells are better utilized through the BFG.

[Maximum Matt]

We would've got a lot more levels with lower ceilings, to show off the bouncyness of the projectiles.  

[Stupid Bunny]

^and accordingly at least a few puzzle wads where you have to bounce the BFG balls over/under things to accomplish a task of some kind 
 

I think the weapon would’ve ended up being a lot more niche in its use, still effective at close range against tanky enemies, also in close quarters against groups of monsters, and for stunlocking as Lucius points out; but rather impotent in the kinds of vast spaces popular in a lot of custom maps, where the Christmas stars just scatter and mostly hit nothing. Could also see it being an absolute delight if the game had had Quad Damage.

[G19Doom]

Somehow I think the BFG wouldn’t have been at all iconic with its prerelease design, but I also think maybe it was changed because it would’ve choked up a lot of weak computers of the era. 

[ChopBlock223]

Yeah, jizzing out 40 moving projectiles in a real quick sequence like that was kind of a tall order for machines at the time, that'd slow down even 486s in places, I can only imagine someone's game grinding to an absolute halt for a half a minute because he's playing on a 386 which is already struggling to reach 15fps on average in low detail mode. It really doesn't seem like it's that good of a weapon compared to the much more novel and esoteric functionality they settled for. The finished BFG works weird, and when you get a hang of its quirky behavior it's extremely fun and useful, not just for the boosted damage output but because of how you can apply that.

 

We might have seen some fun puzzle maps which require you to get the bounce just right, as well as mean level geometry designed to cockblock your projectile spray (imagine a bunch of tiers and stairs for deflection), but the loss of the former was worth it, and I'm glad we all avoided the latter. Plutonia would probably have looked very different.

[aRottenKomquat]

If I recall correctly, Heretic's firemace was mostly just a reskinned beta BFG. So maybe Doom levels would have been more Heretic-y: less slaughter sections, less focus on high-tier enemies, and players/mappers mostly forgetting that the weapon even exists because it's rarely a good choice for the situation.

[baja blast rd.]

Kind of like what we have now except much worse and less flexible. 

 

Slaughter is still possible, like almost all of Stardate 20x6 has no BFG. The techniques for doing big (and not grindy) macroslaughter setups without the (regular) BFG would eventually be more widely known out of necessity. 

Regular BFG spam maps would be gone obviously, which is a huge hit. Beta BFG spam is possible but would require mostly lower-tier, more fragile enemies to be as fun, so maybe .deh mods would start emphasizing those a lot sooner. Maybe .deh mods also play around with overpowered weapons to fill that now open niche, and well balanced RM2-like sets become more of a thing. 

 

Current mapping meta happily uses the RL as an early game weapon because the RL has a really useful property of having its power level depend a great deal on your arsenal as a whole. (If RL is your only weapon, that can be awkward, which makes it weaker than if you had a complementary arsenal -- which means that handing out the RL first is not overpowered.) But maybe with no regular BFG to escalate to, that becomes way less of a thing, since many authors might want to save the RL as a power spike.

 

Early source ports would almost certainly have QoL improvements for the beta BFG, like visibility and auto-aim, and maps that use the weapon might come to pretty much require them, so maybe true vanilla and Dosbox-type nostalgia would be weaker. Purists would not play BTSX on 486s and maybe with less need to cater to pure vanilla, BTSX e3 comes out in 2019, but since some of its contributors are involved in both, that delays TNT 2 even more.

[Ravendesk]

All slaughter copypastas would actually become true.