Was Doom Meant to be Harder?

[Zulk RS]

So I was playing Requiem again. This is my first time playing anything Doom related since getting my new laptop. And I was doing pretty well, weaving in and out of cover, shooting arachnotrons, counting out rockets in a volley to take down a mancubus and then a thought occurred to me.

 

Because of technological and sourceport advancements, has Doom become objectively easier as a game in 2023 compared to 1993? Like I'm not talking about a skill thing. I'm wondering if actual limitations of the kind of computers and keyboards and mouses make Doom a harder game than it is now. Like if we take a modern Doom player and sit them in front of a Windows 95 Computer from the 90s, will they find Doom harder than they otherwise would with modern sourceports (Even stuff like Chocolate Doom or Crispy Doom) on modern hardware?

 

If so, what exactly about Doom on a Pentium 2 Windows 95 computer would be so different than some of the vanilla faithful sourceports that it would make the game noticeably harder? Is it because monitors were not as high quality as they are now? Did low resolution make distant enemies and specters harder to see compared to Doom being played on modern hardware? Was Doomguy harder to control due to input lag? Was it possible to change what action was mapped to what key on the keyboard?

 

I guess my real question is, due to the natural evolution and advancement of technology, did some parts of the game become easier in unintended ways?  

[Guff dotD]

7 minutes ago, Zulk RS said:

Was it possible to change what action was mapped to what key on the keyboard?

 

Yeah, in the DOS installation (and maybe config).

[Lila Feuer]

Circle strafing wasn't commonplace nor was it alluded to. You knew there was strafing, but it was Wolfenstein 3D strafing, which makes me wonder who was the first to discover that the dedicated side step keys give you a huge mobile advantage over the game's cast. Otherwise, it would've played exactly the same then as it does now. I use a low scale resolution in Nugget Doom that is essentially 320x200 and I hold a key to run. The only extra advantage I have over someone back then is disabling the Y axis of the mouse since it's annoying when mouse look wasn't a native feature of the game. Granted you could do the -novert thing back then with a fan patch I think.

 

Should also mention you can remap functions in the game's setup program, via DOS or the Doom95 launcher. The lack of hardcoded keys goes back to Wolf3D, WASD was possible, but definitely not the norm until like 1998. I say hardcoded because outside of the BStone source port you CANNOT remap movement to WASD for Blake Stone because of non-standard functions assigned to them.

 

I do think CRTs being darker back then probably made visibility harder on some levels, the brightness settings on offer were pretty basic, but you're overlooking the most lethal downside to any FPS: low frame rates. Not many had the luxury of a high-end 486, combine that with higher difficulty levels with more monsters in a level and on screen and that's total murder for playability, especially without the knowledge of advanced strats, like proper use of the BFG for example.

[Gez]

Remember how the Nightmare! skill setting was added because people were complaining Doom was too easy even on UV?

[thelamp]

[LoatharMDPhD]

// was it  meant to be harder? well one way or another it is harder after we've had our way with her... can Sandy, Romero or any of them beat sunlust in the modern day?

[LoatharMDPhD]

4 minutes ago, thelamp said:

Balls of Steel...

[Noiser]

Doom is definitely harder on keyboard-only controls and the sensibility settings for the mouse was pretty bad on vanilla. The low resolution also contributes to the difficulty, especially regarding spectres or a rocket coming from a Cyberdemon far away (like in E2M8).

Edited October 5, 2023 by Noiser

[Pottus]

Doom is meant to be as hard as you want to make it.

[LoatharMDPhD]

Maybe we finally got ... good...

[banjiepixel]

I feel like non-optical mice were more clumsy than modern mice if I remember right. Also I am pretty sure keyboard tech has changed bit from those days creating atleast some minor differences. Modern framerates and resolutions do give some reaction time and view distance advantages. Those are the main differences.

 

Rest is mostly about skill and people getting used to playing 3D games, especially playng later games with more complex controls than Doom. Back in the day, moving in 3D space was pretty new concept in games so it took some time for people to get used to it and be good at it. This is exactly why keyboard only was the default back then. There were a time when the modern dual analog stick FPS gamepad controls were technically possible but seemed a nonsensical control scheme for most people.

[Lila Feuer]

23 minutes ago, thelamp said:

I've been triggered. Used one of those for more years than I care to recount.

[No-Man Baugh]

Let's not forget that you can only bind 3 actions to each of your 3 mouse buttons in OG Doom: Fire, Strafe toggle, and walk forward. (with the option to activate "Use" on a double-click) And there is 0 support for the scroll wheel

 

Not saying that any of these limitations in keybinding are big walls in skill on their own, just something to keep in how that would've influenced how people played doom back then. I do think most of why modern Doom maps make 90's one look so easy by comparison is applicable to any specific game's fandom just getting real real good at a game they like and custom maps made by that community being a reflection of that. There are still plenty of people out there who are pretty good at most any other FPS out there getting their ass handed to them on a sliver platter by Plutonia (I know I did)

[No-Man Baugh]

Also Doom ran like absolute Dog Water on '93-'94 computers, struggled on 386 and 486 CPUs and was straight up unplayable on 286. reaching a stable 35 FPS was a crack dream. So that could've been a factor

 

I wasn't there for it and I'm basing most of my hyperbole on a vid that benchmarked Doom on x86-box called something like "Was Doom and RTS?" but for the life of me I cannot find that vid at the moment. If anyone knows which vid I'm talking about or has a comprable vid on Doom played on pre-96 hardware please link it here

[MObreck]

15 minutes ago, No-Man Baugh said:

Also Doom ran like absolute Dog Water on '93-'94 computers, struggled on 386 and 486 CPUs and was straight up unplayable on 286. reaching a stable 35 FPS was a crack dream. So that could've been a factor

 

Oh yeah, my Dad's 486 Compaq with 4 megs of RAM had to be booted up in a special mode that reduced the memory used by DOS just to run DOOM. It was mostly playable, but certainly not without stuttering moments, much less at a consistent from rate.

 

Trying to run DOOM2 on that PC? Forget about it unless the detail level was turned down so low it made the SNES port look high-def. I didn't get to enjoy a truly smooth playing DOOM experience until my Dad upgraded the ram to 8 megs.

 

I don't think DOOM would even load on a 286, but I never actually tried it. The minimum listed specs was a 386 with 4 megs of RAM.

Edited October 5, 2023 by MObreck

[Lila Feuer]

You also have to take into account not even 10 months after Doom came out that its sequel demanded no less than a 486 and doubled the RAM requirement from four megs to eight. At a minimum. That's not a very long gap between the games and I'm sure there was a lot of people who weren't prepared for this upgrade.

[No-Man Baugh]

"Can it run Doom" used to have a very similar answer to "Can it run Crysis"

[KubaloBlackMT]

It goes without saying that GZDOOM is also very different in gameplay generally.

Edited October 5, 2023 by KubaloBlackMT

[No-Man Baugh]

10 minutes ago, KubaloBlackMT said:

It goes without saying that GZDOOM is also very different in gameplay generally.

Well ofcourse, but OP is talking about the differences between hardware, was there a difference between playing vanilla Doom on Dos-Box vs playing that same executable on a contemporary 90's pc that runs MS-DOS natively

[OpenRift]

1 hour ago, thelamp said:

Were ball mice really that bad?? I need to go try this at some point...

[Not Jabba]

3 hours ago, Zulk RS said:

Because of technological and sourceport advancements, has Doom become objectively easier as a game in 2023 compared to 1993? Like I'm not talking about a skill thing. I'm wondering if actual limitations of the kind of computers and keyboards and mouses make Doom a harder game than it is now. Like if we take a modern Doom player and sit them in front of a Windows 95 Computer from the 90s, will they find Doom harder than they otherwise would with modern sourceports (Even stuff like Chocolate Doom or Crispy Doom) on modern hardware?

Yes, but I also think that the current population of gamers benefits from decades of training in the medium and has a level of hand-eye coordination, reactivity, and familiarity with control schemes and tropes that we take for granted now, but that didn't exist except among the most dedicated and competitive gamers in the early '90s.

Edited October 5, 2023 by Not Jabba

[Dark Pulse]

10 minutes ago, OpenRift said:

Were ball mice really that bad?? I need to go try this at some point...

Yes. Yes they fucking were.

 

Sure, at first it'll be fine. But sooner or later, it will happen.

 

And then it's a lot less fine.

[DNSKILL5]

Doom was harder when it first released because there was nothing quite like it at the time. The competition was still trying to mimic Wolfenstein 3D when Doom released. It was a huge leap for FPS games. Most people don’t feel the sensations from back then when playing like physically dodging the fireballs as if it’ll help you, or truly being afraid of entering dark areas or areas with flickering lights. It’s mostly all taken for granted now, which makes it much easier for people who have came to Doom years after release. Plus the game is far more documented than it was back then.

[Jello]

 

2 hours ago, MObreck said:

 

Oh yeah, my Dad's 486 Compaq with 4 megs of RAM had to be booted up in a special mode that reduced the memory used by DOS just to run DOOM. It was mostly playable, but certainly not without stuttering moments, much less at a consistent from rate.

 

Trying to run DOOM2 on that PC? Forget about it unless the detail level was turned down so low it made the SNES port look high-def. I didn't get to enjoy a truly smooth playing DOOM experience until my Dad upgraded the ram to 8 megs.

 

I don't think DOOM would even load on a 286, but I never actually tried it. The minimum listed specs was a 386 with 4 megs of RAM.

Yeah, my Mom had bought a 486 Tandy with 4MB RAM, and it had to be booted directly to DOS to play Doom. If you loaded Windows 3.1 and exited to DOS, it didn't have enough available RAM to run Doom. And even after that, there were times where you had to press F5 to lower the resolution, because it would chug. After she bought another 4 megs of RAM, for around $200, the game played pretty damn well.

 

However even at that point, most people were still using the arrow keys for movement, although I used the mouse for left and right movement and shooting, but it was designed to be played with only the keyboard, and strafing at that point wasn't anything that I exposed to. In fact I never used strafing until Quake 2, Turok, and GoldenEye, even in Quake 1 I was using the arrow keys for forwards and backwards, and the mouse for looking left and right, without mouselook, because it had never really come up before that.

 

So yeah, from my personal experience, just using a modern control scheme makes Doom and Doom 2 far easier, because you can dodge enemies. Completing Doom 2 without using strafe keys was hard, but doable. Imagine doing Doom with Resident Evil tank controls. If you had to get out of the way, you would back up, and turn to avoid the shot, and then move forward and turn again to face the enemy. It's like parking a car.

 

Edit: Oh and yeah, you could configure the controls through the setup.exe. So I believe you could assign keys to left and right strafe, but I was around nine years old when I first played Doom, and computers were relatively new to me, and I'm sure I didn't know what "strafe" meant.

Edited October 6, 2023 by Jello

[LadyMistDragon]

Yeah.....it was totally meant to be as hard as a shumup like Gradius. Not sure it worked out too well though.

 

To be more serious.....kind of?? Mice were definitely not as responsive on average as they are now, otherwise, the game would be barely harder than a cakewalk.

Edited October 6, 2023 by LadyMistDragon

[OpenRift]

2 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Yes. Yes they fucking were.

  

Sure, at first it'll be fine. But sooner or later, it will happen.

  

And then it's a lot less fine.

Oh, you mean like maintaining them sucks, right?

[DavidN]

3 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Yes. Yes they fucking were.

 

Sure, at first it'll be fine. But sooner or later, it will happen.

 

And then it's a lot less fine.

It’s so nice not to have thought about how rubbish they were for so many years! I can’t believe we put up with them for that long - scraping the stripes of wrapped-around fluff off the rollers and still having little dead zones that the cursor rolled over when the ball didn’t quite contact them correctly

[LoatharMDPhD]

3 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Yes. Yes they fucking were.

 

Sure, at first it'll be fine. But sooner or later, it will happen.

 

And then it's a lot less fine.

// That was my MO in the 90's and 00's... I'd sit down at a workstation, and immediately pull apart the HID entrails and clear the lint off the rollers...

[EPICALLL]

3 minutes ago, DavidN said:

It’s so nice not to have thought about how rubbish they were for so many years! I can’t believe we put up with them for that long - scraping the stripes of wrapped-around fluff off the rollers and still having little dead zones that the cursor rolled over when the ball didn’t quite contact them correctly

As someone who was born in the year 2007, I've had a similarly awful experience with mice. I won't pretend like I know how mice balls work, because I'm not very sure... However, if there is one thing I can say, it's that old and/or cheap mice are no good. They have a ridiculous amount of friction with everything, half the time when you click, nothing happens... As well as the fact that they are the most flimsy things you will ever encounter in your entire life, yuck. I hardly ever used mice up until a couple of years ago because of that fact, and instead resorted to using the object at the front of laptops instead. Both are awful, so I'd say... While yes, doom is indeed easier with more modern tech, I feel like that innovation was relatively recent, and before then, the game was hardly any easier than it was back in the 90s. In summary, it is easier today, however given specific circumstances, it might not be.

[Dark Pulse]

4 minutes ago, EPICALLL said:

I hardly ever used mice up until a couple of years ago because of that fact, and instead resorted to using the object at the front of laptops instead.

So... the clit mouse?

 

Edited October 6, 2023 by Dark Pulse