Was Doom Meant to be Harder?

[Dreamskull]

There wasnt much difference in the old style ball and mouse variety, but they were just annoying to keep clean. If you didnt keep it clean your mouse would snag. It would become increasing uncooperative until you were forced to clean it and cleaning it after it got bad wouldnt guarantee a fix unless you did deep cleaning and that was something else all together and even after, maybe you didnt get it all. There were purist players who played exclusively all keyboard or all mouse without the ability to mouslook and back then there was a popular style to move around using the mouse. I hated it, but there were many around me that liked it for some reason. I used to do all keyboard. For those not in the know, you held another button to activate strafing. Circlestrafing wasnt common either. The experience was more harrowing than it is now. I dislike the horror bros, but I imagine thats where it comes from.

 

Doom 1 was somewhat spooky before everyone adapted more advanced styles to control the character better.

Edited October 6, 2023 by Dreamskull

[Amaruψ]

I haven't played DOOM on the hardware that it was meant to be played on back in 1993, but I did however, play DOOM 95 as a kid on a Pentium 3 machine with Windows XP. This was back in 2008-09. I couldn't recall the PC's exact specifications, but I do know that we used to have a ball-mouse with it (because my dad was quite adamant that it works better than a laser mouse), and an old hunk of plastic for a keyboard from HP. So, while I didn't play the game on exactly the hardware that it came out on, but I did experience it as close to being authentic as possible.

 

Comparing my experience from back then against what I've got now, I'd say that the hardware itself, more specifically the input devices make quite a lot of difference. Once I got myself a better mouse and a keyboard when we bought our first Core 2 Duo machine back in 2010-11, it just felt much more easier to grasp the game in every way possible. If I was to go back to DOOM 95 now with the hardware I've got, I'm quite sure that the differences I would notice would be down to purely being on the aesthetic levels, and nothing more.

 

Also dad, I hope you're happy for torturing me with that godforsaken mouse.

[Hellektronic]

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: It's definitely gotten easier, mainly just because of technological advancements like mouselook and better performance, better resolutions, etc. Plus CRT monitors were blurrier, not as clear as modern PC monitors. And you really have to take into account that Doom included the screen size option to lower the amount of performance hit, so computers were running on all cylinders to run Doom. Usually barely succeeding, lol. And people back then? Nobody was really good at playing fast paced PC games, so everything was kind of harder to people. Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were like aliens.

If you play the game using keyboard only, I think it's pretty well balanced on difficulties below Nightmare. Mouselook kind of feels like godmode compared to the delayed reaction time of monsters, so I'd argue the lack of reaction time that using keyboard causes makes it more "fair", and harder without using fastmonsters. Then Doom II is naturally harder than 1, like a lot harder, the enemy volume on ultraviolence is almost headache inducing even with mouselook. So you might find that to be hard enough as-is, but I'd still play it keyboard only or fastmonsters.

I'd also argue the invisibility specters have was designed for 320x200 resolution to blend into the blurred pixels, so they're definitely easier to see in, say, 640x480.

I mostly play on ultraviolence, fast monsters off, no autosaves, pistol restart on death, 320x200 resolution and keyboard only. It's moderately hard, you get hit by imp fireballs, and demons might get a few bites in on you before you stamp them out. But for very hard, I recommend fastmonsters. Creating your own personal difficulty between ultraviolence and nightmare is ideal, in my opinion.

You could also play something like Brutal Doom, which amps up the difficulty considerably on all fronts... but I prefer vanilla.

Edited October 6, 2023 by Hellektronic

[Dreamskull]

I remember being scolded by my parents for "building up static electricty" on the computer.

Edited October 6, 2023 by Dreamskull

[LoatharMDPhD]

// Has anyone tried to implement a TOKEN combat system (a la doom2916etc) in the GzDoom engine? adaptive enemy AI might make things... spicier, yet fair,,,,...,,,

[LoatharMDPhD]

53 minutes ago, Dreamskull said:

I remember being scolded by my parents for "building up static electricty" on the computer.

// ESD is nothing to sneeze at... not a silent killer either...

[Egg Boy]

Part of it is simply that we’ve all been playing doom for so long we forget that it actually is pretty tough at first. I had a friend who was really good at counter strike (at least way better than me) I put him in front of E1M1 on UV and he died repeatedly.

[Lila Feuer]

@Egg Boy You would think for being a simpler game it would be easier to a modern seasoned FPS veteran, but older games tend to be quirky and Doom is pretty nuanced when it comes to its quirks, they aren't going to be obvious to many who just play newer games.

[Zulk RS]

7 hours ago, No-Man Baugh said:

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

 

Something about this is really amusing to me. Like right now, we have Doom running on everything under the sun and I did not exist when Doom actually came out. So it's wild to me that Doom was once the "Crysis" of its time.

 

Imagine if in 30 years people manage to run Crysis on a pregnancy test.

[Lila Feuer]

22 minutes ago, Zulk RS said:

Imagine if in 30 years people manage to run Crysis on a pregnancy test.

That implies that pregnancy test would have about as much if not more power than a Steam Deck.

[fai1025]

I'm young enough to miss out on the chance to experience the thrill of 90s, so I'm not sure about your questions, but I did experience Doom playing on my dad's most state of the art setup of a 2000s computer with somewhat of an CRT and the worst possible state of a keyboard and mouse, and Doom is pretty damn hard on it, probably because only game I played before were Minecraft. But arguably, the hardest thing about Doom for me at the time is that...

 

I can't read English

 

 

Edited October 6, 2023 by fai1025

[Captain red pants]

9 hours 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

A lot of people here seemed to have trouble with their 486s in this thread, but my family 486 dx66 ran it perfectly. It handled Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior great to. It DID struggle a bit with Quake and even more with Quake 2 (I still played it though heh)

 

To answer the threads question: I think both Doom games where designed to be playable even on UV with keyboard only controls. Not because Doom didn't originally support the Mouse or that few people used a mouse but because for some people to even run Doom they had to free up some memory by booting without loading mouse drivers, or even sound drivers! For some, the only sound OG doom had was the clickity-clack of keys as they awkwardly drove their deaf marine down spooky dark hallways.

[Lila Feuer]

@Captain red pants You make an extremely interesting point there actually, I didn't consider that some people couldn't load the mouse driver in some circumstances so yeah, the game is very much keyboard friendly and it's smart design, and if anything you are more or less on par with the monsters without mouse aiming, but naturally you're much smarter. Reaction time would be your biggest hurdle then.

[Capellan]

12 hours ago, Lila Feuer said:

Circle strafing wasn't commonplace nor was it alluded to.

 

Circle strafing was identified pretty fast. I was seeing LMPs with circle strafing well before Doom 2 hit shelves.

 

 

[SleepyVelvet]

8 hours ago, Dreamskull said:

For those not in the know, you held another button to activate strafing. Circlestrafing wasnt common either.

 

I assume a lot of us did something like this:

 

^{edit: oops, wrong turn arrows (turn arrows should alternate from strafe arrows).  that's what i get for late night mspainting. fixed}

 

If I recall, my first control scheme playing Doom was:

    Left Hand: CTRL (fire); SHIFT (run); ALT (strafe instead of turn); and thumb to hit SPACE (use)

    Right Hand: Left-Right Arrows (turn); Forward Arrow (forward); rarely Back Arrow

    Sometimes you reach up to hit numbers for weapons.

 

P.S. I agree it was spooky.  I'd always bail and run when I encountered a Revenant or Archvile, assess the situation slowly, etc, not like today.  I completely agree.  Control scheme was at least a factor.  Edit: but yah, I also sucked ass back then and everything was less familar too.

Edited October 6, 2023 by NoisyVelvet

[Lila Feuer]

Archviles were the panic monster, and hell they're still the panic monster. Panicking means dying though.

[Jayextee]

Hot take here, but I think DOOM's popularity exploded in part because it was a bit easy; these perhaps weren't the people complaining that UV wasn't enough for them, though.

 

I have no actual data to go on here, only the supposition that the average shmuck really sucks at videogames but they like to win. It all goes hand-in-hand with that power-fantasy gameplay, too.

[Zulk RS]

From reading the replies in this thread the conclusion I've come to is: Yes. Doom WAS meant to be harder than it is right now.

 

Even Taking player skill and mindset and how accustomed to 3D games and games like Doom out of the equation, the hardware limits of the type of computers the game was built to be played on (486s with 4-8 MB RAM) did make Doom harder in 93-94 than it is in 2023. 

 

Monitors of the time were darker and did not give displays as clear as modern monitors do (even if you play on a vanilla source port with low resolution) made seeing far away monsters and incoming projectiles harder. Specters were much harder to see. Ball mouses were often less responsive than modern laser mouses and it made mouse movement more difficult. Keyboards were not as responsive as they are now. There was only 2-3 mouse buttons you could map keys to. Finally the game was expected to run at much lower FPS compared to what it can run at today and that effected how quickly you can move and dodge.

 

 

 

Edited October 6, 2023 by Zulk RS

[Klear]

I first played Doom on a 33 MHz 386 with 2 MB of RAM (though some replies in this thread make me question the accuracy of that). I was definitely playing with the smallest viewport possible if I wanted any FPS at all. Hell, I remember making the viewport smaller even in wolfenstein.

 

As for the mouse... I didn't have any mouse.

[magicsofa]

People keep saying the game was meant to be played with keyboard, even though mouse support was already present, and encouraged, in Wolfenstein 3D.  All you had to do was pay attention to the demo to figure out that they were recorded using mouse... this is literally how I discovered the advantages of mouse movement before ever playing Doom. (Are people confusing this with WASD? because that was definitely not widespread until a bit later)

 

Since some people didn't even have a mouse, or the computing power to use it in game, as well as the other disadvantages of clunkier input hardware, yes advancements have made things easier for the masses. Obviously Doom was designed to be playable without a mouse but I think that's because id was aware that doing so would increase accessibility, but the recommendation was to use mouse if possible. You know, there's always the minimum requirements for a game to function, and then recommended hardware a step up for the game to play smoothly and "as intended"

 

[banjiepixel]

Doom was designed to be pretty future proof based on knowledge at the time. Just like with many other id Software titles, only once newer hardware becomes the standard, Doom was able to reach it's true potential. Doom was also balanced for both keyboard only and KB+M play because keyboard only was both common as a technical limitation and as a limitation of many player's skillset at the time. Mouse control in FPS games wasn't exactly mainstream, it was still pretty experimental feature. 

 

I got my first computer in the year 2000 and using keyboard and mouse so heavily together to play a game was too strange to me, just like many people that were used to classic style gamepad FPS controls originally felt that modern dual stick setup was too strange and complicated. It takes time for people to get used to new control standards and them to become mainstream.

 

So Wolfenstein 3D and Doom having optional M+KB controls was technically more about future proofing the game. It was experimental bleeding edge feature, they even got the vertical mouse movement thing wrong from what it should had been because there was no standard to follow. Naturally the developers and hardcore pc players would use the bleeding edge controls, but for more casual people it wasn't that simple. If I couldn't even really understand how FPS KB+M controls were supposed work in the year 2000, I really doubt that many casual players understood them back in the year 1993.

 

It is usually playing more modern games first that actually makes KB+M controls in Doom make sense and feel more natural. Vertical mouse movement did give me the longest time the wrong impression that mouse support was for mouse only play and for me personally it wasn't until I played something more modern, having strafe left and strafe right buttons instead of turn left and turn right button became actually a thing you are able to do. Before that, I couldn't even imagine playing FPS games on PC outside of keyboard only layout, it just wasn't a thing I really knew about.

 

I had no context on how early 2000's or even mid to late 90's FPS games controlled and I didn't have more experienced pc gaming friends that could had told me about KB+M FPS controls. I spend most of my time with Doom and a Gameboy emulator so the mouse pretty literally seemed to be just for Windows 95 and games like Warcraft 2.

[DaBigNerd]

Yeah that's why Nightmare! was made, to stop people from complaining that UV was too easy. Better yet, play Okuplok on Nightmare! and tell me how it goes.

[DaBigNerd]

3 hours ago, magicsofa said:

People keep saying the game was meant to be played with keyboard, even though mouse support was already present, and encouraged, in Wolfenstein 3D.  All you had to do was pay attention to the demo to figure out that they were recorded using mouse... this is literally how I discovered the advantages of mouse movement before ever playing Doom. (Are people confusing this with WASD? because that was definitely not widespread until a bit later)

 

Since some people didn't even have a mouse, or the computing power to use it in game, as well as the other disadvantages of clunkier input hardware, yes advancements have made things easier for the masses. Obviously Doom was designed to be playable without a mouse but I think that's because id was aware that doing so would increase accessibility, but the recommendation was to use mouse if possible. You know, there's always the minimum requirements for a game to function, and then recommended hardware a step up for the game to play smoothly and "as intended"

 

I remember watching a video (forgot which one), where it mentions that people in the 90s were used to playing games with a controller, so playing with a mouse was weird compared to pressing a few buttons to move around. Correct me if I'm wrong (I didn't grow up in the 90s).

[SleepyVelvet]

49 minutes ago, DaBigNerd said:

I remember watching a video (forgot which one), where it mentions that people in the 90s were used to playing games with a controller, so playing with a mouse was weird compared to pressing a few buttons to move around. Correct me if I'm wrong (I didn't grow up in the 90s).

If a person dabbled in early consoles too, then maybe...  I feel like PC was keyboard and/or mouse for most people though.  Analog Joysticks were also a thing for some people and some games...

 

For point-and-click DOS games like Lemmings and Gobliiins, mouse was intuitive.  For 2D platformers like Jetpack and original Duke Nukem, it's keyboard only of course.  For Doom, even though I'm blinded by personal experience, mouse input (or even mouse+keyboard) was supported but ass out of the box, or didn't even make sense.  I extrapolate this feeling to other normies.  And, I imagine most people weren't deathmatch bros who could figure out or even knew about Novert, key-remapping, etc.  I need to see how Romero played, because I'm curious how he handled mouse and keyboard...

 

Keep in mind that I was also like 4-5 years old (though I played again a decade later on the Doom 95 port, which had similar controls and I played it similarly), so I might have no clue what I'm talking about, but these mouse conversations make me feel like my admittedly flaky memories and experiences are being gas-lit.

 

On a humorous note, I imagine early mouse users looked like this:

 

Edited October 6, 2023 by NoisyVelvet

[Lila Feuer]

@NoisyVelvet

Romero's left-handed, so I'm guessing his WASD would be something like IJKL? There might be some older pictures from around that time but you can definitely see it during Daikatana's development.

According to my S/O growing up he saw his dad play games like Doom and Duke 3D with a Gravis gamepad, and he was a pretty hardcore computer user and PC gamer in those days, but they did own a few consoles so maybe it was a matter of peripheral preference depending on the game.

[Hellektronic]

4 hours ago, magicsofa said:

People keep saying the game was meant to be played with keyboard, even though mouse support was already present, and encouraged, in Wolfenstein 3D.

I think there's a degree of truth to it though.

Monster reaction time is typically pretty delayed, and fireballs move very slow. With enough maneuverability you can run circles around demons and never get bit once, so I've come to the conclusion that the game was largely balanced for people who don't have mouses or use clunkier control methods like joysticks. Which makes it feel almost too easy by today's standards with the sharpness of modern mice, so I play with the default DOS keybinds.

As some have said around here, using a mouse almost feels like cheating, so they don't do it. Obviously it's not cheating, but it feels too easy for some. Especially Doom 1, where there's not revenants and mancubus being a total pain in the ass, so it's almost effortless on ultraviolence short of the map navigation and key hunting. Once I adopted playing with a keyboard only, which I'd never done even as a child in the 90's, I kind of realized that it feels more balanced that way.

[Lila Feuer]

3 minutes ago, Hellektronic said:

As some have said around here, using a mouse almost feels like cheating, so they don't do it. Obviously it's not cheating, but it feels too easy for some.

Well you mentioned mouselook, which was never possible in the original game to which I'd agree is cheating, especially when you can harmlessly pelt down at monsters trapping you up somewhere high if infinite height is on, and it destroys most Icons of Sin in seconds.

[Hellektronic]

6 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

Well you mentioned mouselook, which was never possible in the original game to which I'd agree is cheating, especially when you can harmlessly pelt down at monsters trapping you up somewhere high if infinite height is on, and it destroys most Icons of Sin in seconds.

I mean mouselook in both ways, vertical and horizontal... basically, just using a mouse to look, lol. With a modern mouse, especially one that's like a gaming mouse, aiming is sharp, very responsive, and the same goes of keyboards for that matter. Sourceports also have pretty smooth performance and responsiveness as well. Back in the day you'd get beeped at for having too many keys pressed at once, get dirt in your ball mouse, have performance slowdown, and they were trying to balance to all of these factors.

Now though? It's pretty safe to say most people running Doom face none of these classic problems, hah.

[Lila Feuer]

6 minutes ago, Hellektronic said:

I mean mouselook in both ways, vertical and horizontal... basically, just using a mouse to look, lol. With a modern mouse, especially one that's like a gaming mouse, aiming is sharp, very responsive, and the same goes of keyboards for that matter. Sourceports also have pretty smooth performance and responsiveness as well. Back in the day you'd get beeped at for having too many keys pressed at once, get dirt in your ball mouse, have performance slowdown, and they were trying to balance to all of these factors.

Now though? It's pretty safe to say most people running Doom face none of these classic problems, hah.

 

I think the correct terminology was freelook then? Someone more versed in that will correct me. Sure my Razor is certainly tipping the scales in my favor but I'm also running at the original locked 35FPS, granted I don't know how if at all that hinders playability besides fucking with some people's eyes, combine that with the 320x200 resolution scaling and I think it's safe to assume distant enemies and spectres still have an advantage over me even on modern map sets I've played like Eviternity lol.

I really wanted to forget about that terrible beep.

But sure, the only thing most people face now is skill issue.

[Hellektronic]

3 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

Sure my Razor is certainly tipping the scales in my favor but I'm also running at the original locked 35FPS, granted I don't know how if at all that hinders playability besides fucking with some people's eyes, combine that with the 320x200 resolution scaling and I think it's safe to assume distant enemies and spectres still have an advantage over me even on modern map sets I've played like Eviternity lol.

I like you, hah. These are all things I do even on more advanced sourceports.

FPS does have an effect on playability in my opinion, your reaction time will naturally be slower if the frame updates are slower. This is why people who are like online gamers always get expensive monitors and mice to reduce input lag and gain an advantage through it. A higher FPS tends to make things more responsive visually, but as usual, I'd say that's kind of like an advantage that never existed in ye olden days, hah. Stuff back then was sluggish, computers and peripherals in general were sluggish. Nowadays people are playing Doom at like 1920x1080 (or higher) resolution with added effects and no slowdown whatsoever, it's pretty close to flawless. You could see a shotgun zombie on a high perch like 5 miles away in perfect detail... then snipe it with perfect accuracy mouselook using a crosshair, lol. Me, I'm auto-aim sniping at pixels using a keyboard appreciating that delightful distance blur 320x200 has, haha.