What keeps Doom modding alive?

[Artman2004]

Out of all of Id's vast catalog of games, Doom seems to be the one with the most active modding community. Meanwhile, the other Id shooters had their time in the modding spotlight, but eventually faded away. By this logic, Doom should've faded as well, but it's still going strong today. What does Doom have over them, despite being more technologically out of date? Simplicity? Historical value? Stronger fanbase? Source ports?

[Wo0p]

A fanbase demographic of a different time with different values. 

 

Spoiler

inb4 "YOU YOUNGSTERS AND YOUR RAP MUSIC!"

 

Edited September 16, 2023 by Wo0p

[volleyvalley]

From my experience, a little bit of everything.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

Popularity + flexibility + ease of use + audience = sustainability

[Jayextee]

DOOM is Eternal.

[fai1025]

Wolfenstein is too simple

Quake is too complicated

Doom is the perfect medium

[DoomGuy999]

Doom has a strong community, here we have 40000 members. Next John Carmack made doom easy to mod after he saw a wolfenstein mod which turned Hans Grosse into Barney the dinosaur. Doom was a revolutionary game as first person shooters were rising in popularity. In fact, doom was so good that people couldn't forget it and wanted to make their own levels, or more formally, wads. Many level editors have been made to make wad making as easy as possible. 

[gibfrag]

All of Id’s shooter games from Wolf 3D onward have a modding community. Doom just happened to be the first of the bunch to be accessible out of the box in comparison to Wolfenstein, and Quake onward had other competitors that could have mods and levels made too. Many of them have high and lows as far as output goes, and Doom is no exception to that either, it’s just more noticeable in other communities especially ones smaller than this.

 

to elaborate further: wolf 3d was not designed to be easy to mod. People found ways to do it anyways long before the source code came out. Id was aware of this and that’s why Doom and Quake were both made to be easy to mod. 

Edited September 16, 2023 by gibfrag

[Matthias]

Satan

[Obsidian]

It's me, I do it.

[Master O]

1 hour ago, Artman2004 said:

Out of all of Id's vast catalog of games, Doom seems to be the one with the most active modding community. Meanwhile, the other Id shooters had their time in the modding spotlight, but eventually faded away. By this logic, Doom should've faded as well, but it's still going strong today. What does Doom have over them, despite being more technologically out of date? Simplicity? Historical value? Stronger fanbase? Source ports?

 

Speaking of Wolf3D: Die Hard Wolfers Forum Thread: What Are the Best Wolfenstein 3D Mod(s) of All Time?

Edited September 16, 2023 by Master O

[Noiser]

Cocaine and antibiotics

[xScavengerWolfx]

For me i think the reason why doom modding has been surviving and thriving is because John Carmack used a crystal ball and saw the future of the game and said "give the people the power to make there own maps and mod the living hell out of our creation!" that and John Romero made a deal with the devil to make a badass game.

 

Sorry had to make a funny but really what i wanted to say was this: I am glade they decided to release the map editors and all that magick wizardry upon us because if we didn't have the tools to make wads then what's the point of playing a game if you can't make your own levels and do crazy shit with a 30+ year old engine. Over all like everyone has said before usability and dedication to something you love. 

[Seifensieder]

Very easy modding combined with very entertaining gameplay kind of i guess. Wolf3D is historically very important but the gameplay.. . I have a hard time imagine someone getting into it without nostalgia while doom.. its just fun. Not as technically advanced as Quake for instance but i dont think its less fun to play it. One of the first games who were easy to mod but also hold up with the gameplay. I guess its this combination

[RataUnderground]

Its because Doom is good. Quake its almost *not good*.

[Shepardus]

10 minutes ago, xScavengerWolfx said:

Sorry had to make a funny but really what i wanted to say was this: I am glade they decided to release the map editors and all that magick wizardry upon us because if we didn't have the tools to make wads then what's the point of playing a game if you can't make your own levels and do crazy shit with a 30+ year old engine. Over all like everyone has said before usability and dedication to something you love. 

id didn't release their map editor, though (until 2015 when John Romero released the source code).

[Z0k]

1 hour ago, fai1025 said:

Wolfenstein is too simple

Quake is too complicated

Doom is the perfect medium

 

this pretty much, i know wolfestein have a modding community and i have watched some pretty cool maps but they end being the same since can be only worked with squares but idk if they lately have found a way to make sectors other than squared shaped at this day.

 

Quake i like so much how its to do maps there in q3radiant, and did a few maps to try on my servers when i did have my r4zer server running, scuba tutorials were useful but sadly i never learnt how to do more complex shapes than squares or other forms like hexagons and all and even then was kinda hard to do them. sadly i didnt have a backup of my maps but anyways they only were like 3, 1 for tdm, 1 for ctf and 1 adventure map.

 

but doom  its like fai1025 says its the perfect medium, you can do any shape sectors without much trouble and if you work with sourceports that allow 3dfloors you can work with them with a small effort because now map editor give you the tools to make them easier as before.

[MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai]

I think in Quake´s case I think it wasn´t that less user content for it was made, but rather that the most talented users who were inspired by it went ahead and made their own games based or inspired by ID technology.

 

That´s how we eventualy got games like Sin, Half Life, King Pin and so on.

 

But that´s just my theory

[Merry Widow]

Perhaps some of us simply like the game for various reasons. That's good enough for me.

[natashanightmare]

I think part of it is quantity, but also quality.

[LadyMistDragon]

Doom gameplay has an immediacy to it that not even Quake can really match, and Quake was more influential in the long term.

[RileyXY1]

Doom editing is very easy to get into and most Doom editors are very accessible to newcomers. 

[Amarande]

Laid back community thanks to its age, combined with being primarily a singleplayer experience and normally (barring map bugs) no hard failure state in co-op (modern co-op games suffer especially hard from "one person can make everyone fail" design, kind of ironic since co-op had initially moved away from that after evilness like Battletoads, which tends to lead to people being extremely shy about welcoming new blood to co-op runs unless it's literally right when the game came out).

 

Versatile enough design to make epic maps while being simple enough to work with: its 2.5D implementation feels close enough to 3D during gameplay and all you need to be able to do is draw a blueprint (the Quakes and other newer games suffered badly because they depended heavily on using actual 3D modeling tools to create for, and most of those tools were absolutely insanely expensive. Your choice was $3500 for 3DS Max or $2000 for Maya - and yet for some reason Max was actually preferred. Probably good luck buying  either of them in those days even if you had the money, between credit limits, daily debit card limits, and the chance of your bank denying the transaction outright because it looks too out-there!)

[prfunky]

It's all in the name:

D o o M !

Spoiler

 

 

[roadworx]

as people have stated before me, the editing tools are incredibly easy to use and the base gameplay loop is not only fantastic, but also versatile to an astonishing degree. however, there's one other big factor that a lot of people forget: source ports. the source code being released meant that people were able to both port to every system imaginable but also considerably upgrade the engine. there's the obvious upgrades like how many ports have added 3d floors, actual lighting, meshes, etc, but one of the biggest and most overlooked nowadays is how much easier it became to play multiplayer.

 

doom's multiplayer scene used to be way, waaay bigger than it is today, and that's thanks to source ports like skulltag and zdaemon. while singleplayer has always been popular because of the reasons mentioned above, the fact that doom is an easy to run fps game that has amazing multiplayer with seemingly endless content drew in shitloads of people in the 2000s and played a huge part in keeping the community alive. the community is a shell of its former self these days, but the modding community has remained just as active because by the time it died, stuff like brutal doom, ancient aliens, doom 2016, and sunder brought in enough people to fill in the void.

 

simply put, the constant innovation, pushing doom to its limits in terms of technology, accessibility, and game design, has meant that the modding community has always managed to avoid stagnation. whenever people leave, there's always something to draw new people in.

Edited September 17, 2023 by roadworx

[SealSpace]

Brutal Doom? (even though I think it's cool and more gritty and badass spin on Doom, I don't care that much for it otherwise)

 

Samsara Reincarnation? (crossover mods between boomer shooters is definitely one thing that'd potentially keep this mod alive indefinitely, even though I want absolutely nothing to do with half the current dev team themselves and its discord server and a huge chunk of its community at this point, the latter two of which is pretty much dying if not already dead since I left there)  

 

QC:DE? (same as above, but to a lesser extent, though it has the better server and community than the above with thousands more members keeping it more active t boot) 

 

The fact that there has been a potentially endless pool of creative and imaginative takes and spins on the game's weapons, enemies, and environments and even gameplay mechanics over the past decade at least and the TC's based on other existing FPS games, whether retro boomer shooters or even moderns, and even a ton of other non-FPS games (like Super Mario, Zelda, Castlevania, Pokemon, Zombies Ate my Neighbor, etc.)?

 

That's my personal answer and definitive take on this particular question, topic, and subject. 

Edited September 17, 2023 by SealSpace

[Major Arlene]

us.

[Bridgeburner56]

- Ease of access to the tools and resources
- Actively developed/improved editing software and ports
- Modern games using the ip brings fresh people to the classics
- Archviles

[DerBlanca]

It's hands down the easiest game to mod. 

[QuaketallicA]

Like everyone else has said, it is a fantastic platform for the creativity to just run wild with. The mapping tools and level editors are so easy to pickup and use, so that obviously is a plus, the low barrier to entry; yet they're so comprehensive and packed with enough features to effectively craft whatever your imagination can conjure.

 

But that only evades a deeper answer, because as the atheist who ponders, "Well then who made God?" the logical next question is, "Why are Doom source ports and map editors still worked on and developed? Why is it popular to keep developing the tools modders and mappers use?"

 

I think part of that is there is just some ineffable quality about Doom that is irresistible, above and beyond the other similar 90s shooters.

 

Let alone mods and maps, just the vanilla Doom IWADS I come back to time and again, and they're just as fresh and fun as ever. Okay, for certain, they were made at the dawn of FPS design, and certainly they feel very 90s by modern Doom mapping standards, but Doom's core gameplay is just so satisfying, and the "realistic" (for 90s) looking engine and graphics is appealing. Shooting demons with BFG's, chainsawing them, in an action/horror/sci-fi setting where each and every level has a totally unique flow and feel to gameplay--that's so much more inviting and endlessly replayable in a way many games since may not be.

 

Even legends like Half-Life, I found myself thinking the other day, are excellent shooters when you really get into them, but Half-Life is the kind of experience that when I'm playing it, I got to stick with it from start to end and I have to really be into it. It's not as easy to just pick up from anywhere in the game and play a level or two and get an awesome experience. But Doom is like that. It's very easy to get into and to play.

 

One could argue that Doom has the greatest FPS legacy of any shooter, and its immense popularity attracts the would-be modders in the first place, and then the wealth of creative tools available makes the community possible.