Best uses of difficulty selection?

[DoomGappy]

I was in the bus today thinking about doom difficulties. What are the best uses of it? I was thinking if someone has ever designed a wad with two different play styles in mind based on difficulty choice. For example, designing a megawad for continuous play in Hurt me Plenty, and for pistol starting as Ultra Violence, or vice versa. What wacky things have you seen involving difficulty?

[Lucius Wooding]

I'd have to give it to NERF. Try playing it on anything but nightmare and see what happens.

[tornado potato]

I have also think about this. I don't about about existing wads, but an idea I thought about one day is what about giving the player weapon A or weapon B to clear certain area depending on the difficulty

[DoomGappy]

11 minutes ago, tornado potato said:

I have also think about this. I don't about about existing wads, but an idea I thought about one day is what about giving the player weapon A or weapon B to clear certain area depending on the difficulty

 

That would be cool as well!

[Shepardus]

3 hours ago, jo2ukegappy said:

I was thinking if someone has ever designed a wad with two different play styles in mind based on difficulty choice.

See Mutabor and Green Goddess. Also Junkfood, Junkfood 2, GOODWAD, and Dance on the Water.

Edited September 18, 2023 by Shepardus

[Buhseo_]

I've recently found in Doom Launcher a project named Devious Deviance, which is a wad that changes the entire flow of the map depending in the difficulty settings

I've only played the first map, but it seems good

[Fonze]

I made a few maps with wildly different experiences on different difficulties; juries still out on if any are worth a play or not lol, but I think that it can be a very fun route to take as a mapper to allow you to see how your level functions practically with different styles of encounters... or for the memes 😋 It also breaks up the monotony of the creative process and that has always helped me with my mappers block, though admittedly doing so can risk shutting out more players from playing your maps as you have other goals in mind for the various difficulties than accessibility.

 

One map that I remember fondly that did fun stuff with its difficulty settings is Spidersilk by yakfak, so I'll recommend that for the OP

[Not Jabba]

Serpent's Wake has completely separate monster/item placement for each of the three main difficulty settings, and sometimes layout changes as well. It's not really designed as easy/medium/hard, it's just three separate games set on the same set of maps.