If you had been involved in the development of Doom and Doom II

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

25 minutes ago, Fireseth said:

TRUE!!! I think I've seen a few modifications that add episodic format into DOOM II, but they were always low-effort or had poor quality intermission screens. But besides that, it definitely should've been there in the original DOOM II in the first place.

Have you checked this one out?

Edited October 25, 2023 by TheMagicMushroomMan

[Fonze]

If I were involved with the making of dooms 1/2, I would have been super inspired by maps like e2m9 and gotcha!, making every map a gimmicky ordeal like those two and subsequently driving id to certain ruin.

 

Also I would have ensured that rockets dotted every hallway like a breadcrumb trail for pacman, even on maps where the rocket launcher is unavailable, because the player needs to know what their goal should be 😋

 

Lastly, I'd place more pain elementals. Lots more pain elementals, with their adorable huggly imp arms. Maybe even just replace all zombies, imps, barons, mancubodes, tomato demons, and spiders with them too because their existence puts these precious, happy little floaty bois in danger and we just can't have that.

 

Yeah in retrospect prolly a good thing I wasn't involved lol

[Lila Feuer]

In all fairness my stamped-in IWAD changes would be subtle but align with my personal sensibilities, limiting myself up to 5 per category so as to not radically alter the game on all fronts even though I could easily change so much more but that's what mods are for:

MONSTERS

1. Zombieman doing 1-8 damage like the console versions instead of 1-5 so sometimes he actually poses a threat, bump his health from 20 to 30 in order to match Shotgun Guy.
2. Lost Soul has 60 health instead of 100 so it can be killed in one shotgun blast like the console versions, compensate by making it more aggressive like D64.
3. Cacodemon and Pain Elemental have a bite sound (think of Hexen's Chaos Serpent for a good example) or in the latter case a bite at all so its not totally defenseless up close, make the latter monster actually explode when its dying so they can punish players that again hang too close or alternatively utilize the monster as a flying explosive barrel to damage other monsters.

4. Revenant's firing frame accurately reflects its attack, that's right, Doom 3 akimbo style baby. Double your boners double your fun!

5. Fixed blood colors for Cacos and Hell nobles.

WEAPONS

1. Doom 64's chainsaw replacing the Chainsaw, hey it's Doom II, everything's doubled to be bigger and more badass, if the shotgun can get a bigger brother why not just improve this existing weapon to make it more doom-y? Double-bladed chainsaw that isn't just faster but hits twice per strike also, making it more useful against the bigger baddies you'll be facing to save ammo.
2. Acquire the Zombieman's Infantry Rifle which has a tight shot grouping and uses his 1-8 damage so it's a viable and decently powered sniping option that negates having to tap the Chaingun, fires in fixed 3-round bursts so as to not make Chaingun DPS obsolete and slots in 2 with the starting pistol to compliment your sidearm with your standard issue main arm, likely uses the unused alpha rifle sprites to save time.
3. Buff Shotgun from 7 pellets to 10 and increase the spread around half of what the SSG is so it's no longer a borderline sniper rifle and can reliably one shot Imps and two shot Pinky demons, less painful to use against meatier monsters like the Baron of Hell. I honestly kinda really fucking hate this weapon the way it already is so this is a big one for me.

4. Add a little splash damage to the Plasma Rifle projectiles to give it a noticeable bump in damage and ammo efficiency, becomes harmful at close range but no worse than the plasma gun was in Quake III, also increased speed of the plasma bolts from 25 to 50 so its travel time doesn't reduce effectiveness of long range fighting.

ITEMS

1. Health and armor bonuses net 2 each instead of 1 like the console versions.
2. A third and rarer Red Armor that is similar to Blue Armor but negates up to 75% damage instead of 50% for those extra difficult fights, save value same as Blue Armor.

3. Invulnerability Sphere has reflective properties so monsters' projectiles injure and potentially kill themselves, change that gaudy inverse map to something more pleasant, GBA Doom had the right idea with that blue tint.

[Amaruψ]

49 minutes ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Have you checked this one out?

 

They're good in their own right, but the sort of primitive shading the author has used on his 3-D models keeps reminding me of 90's FMV games with the bad 3-D rendering, where everything looks like it's made out of cake.

 

The Wolfenstein level ones are... well for the lack of a better word, a bit "edgy" and cringy.

[Amaruψ]

In all seriousness, apart from the crucial quality control, I definitely would've done a few good changes to the enemies and the weapons.

 

I've always felt that it's quite a silly idea to put a group of zombies in one singular area, because they're going to more or less end up killing each other instead. What I would've done is to make each of them dangerous in small groups of one or two. I would've turned the zombie's single shot attack into a 3 round burst instead, and upped the shotgun guy's pellet count per-shot to 8, just like the player's shotgun. 

 

Definitely would've halved the Lost Soul's health, and increased his aggressiveness like DOOM 64's. 

 

Would've included Hell Knights in the first game. Baron has a status as a boss monster, but I feel like throwing them in every subsequent map as a bunch rather defeats that purpose. Plus, it would've saved a hefty amount of time from the slog fights in Episode 4 against a group of barons. 

 

For the baron, I seriously would've increased his moment speed, and give him a more devastating attack, and reserve the original for the Hell Knight. It would be more believable to have one Baron among a group of three or four Hell Knights. It establishes his rank as a "Baron". 

 

A change I would've done to all boss monsters; include a damn no-infight check against them. It's really, really dumb to have these towering menaces, one's a mighty warrior, one's a baron and one's someone who lead the entire invasion, and have puny pathetic demons get angry at them. I mean, it's silly that Arch-Vile has such a check but not the boss monsters. Even more silly when the Arch-Vile keeps zapping them and they don't anything about it.

 

For the weapons:

 

Increased the chainsaw's damage output. It's a tad bit too low. When the berserk fist outclasses a literal automatic blade, you know you've designed a weapon wrong.

 

Increased the pistol's rate of fire. I know it's supposed to be your starting weapon and you're supposed to feel a tad bit helpless with it, but this is a bit too much. I don't like how every weapon, even the damn fists have a purpose, but the pistol is just obsolete once you get the chaingun.

 

Added vertical spread to the shotgun. Yeah. Just that.

 

Reduced the Super Shotgun's pellet count from 20 to 16. I know it sounds like heresy, but a lot of fights in the game are made really cheap when you can just blow something to smithereens with this overpowered mess. Blood did this better.

 

Increased the chaingun's damage output, rate of fire and had a different pool of ammo for it. Heavy bullets would've been a good idea, because chaingun isn't utilized other than sniping purposes for the sake of how slow and weak it is.

 

REPLACE THE GOD DAMN PLASMA RIFLE FIRING SOUND. Jesus Christ, that ear drum rupturing sound can go to hell. Also definitely would've reduced the plasma bolt's sprite size a tiny bit, so its not blinding.

 

BFG 9000. No.

Never gonna change this.

 

Okay... maybe at least have the tracers fire in the direction you're facing, not in the direction the ball was shot in.

 

 

[Edward850]

1 hour ago, ReaperAA said:

Ensure Doom is designed with 320x240 resolution @30fps tic rate, instead of 320x200 resolution @35fps tic rate. That would mean that all in-game graphics would have 1:1 pixels. And also 30fps would interpolate better with framerates such as 60, 120 and 240 fps (since all those are perfect multiples of 30). 

You are going to have troubles doing this when this was not an avaliable VGA mode. The closest is 640x480 at 60hz which did exist, but was a 16 colour (read, 16, not 16 bit) or monochrome mode. They didn't pick 320x200 at 70hz to be arbitrary, that was literally the best available standard.

Edited October 25, 2023 by Edward850

[Blzut3]

15 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

You are going to have troubles doing this when this was not an avaliable VGA mode. The closest is 640x480 at 60hz which did exist, but was a 16 colour (read, 16, not 16 bit) or monochrome mode. They didn't pick 320x200 at 70hz to be arbitrary, that was literally the best available standard.

While not an official mode, wasn't mode X 320x240@60Hz?

[RataUnderground]

Not a fan of any of your changes guys (appart from fixing bugs). 

[Lizardcommando]

Add true 3D/room-over-room sectors.

 

Add swimmable deep water.

[fai1025]

fix the ouch face by fixing variable position

[Edward850]

18 minutes ago, Blzut3 said:

While not an official mode, wasn't mode X 320x240@60Hz?

I wondered that, but what I can't find is how common that mode was actually was. It was likely viable by Doom2 but you'd be retooling the engine and redoing all the art for it.

[Major Arlene]

9 hours ago, Amaruψ said:

Assured quality control.

no such thing.

[Amaruψ]

15 minutes ago, Major Arlene said:

no such thing.

 

Too late, Doc Brown will be here in 5 minutes.

[Tycitron]

2 hours ago, Amaruψ said:

 

They're good in their own right, but the sort of primitive shading the author has used on his 3-D models keeps reminding me of 90's FMV games with the bad 3-D rendering, where everything looks like it's made out of cake.

 

The Wolfenstein level ones are... well for the lack of a better word, a bit "edgy" and cringy.

I agree, i really want Doom 2 intermission screens in the same photo-scanned looking art style that the original intermission maps used.

[Firedust]

I'd probably stab Willits tbh

[Professor Hastig]

I would have invested more time and effort into the textures. I am fairly convinced that the lack of appropriate textures for the intended theme is the main reason why the game fails to convey any sense of place at all.

And hire some community mappers - a lot of the early user content for Doom 1 was already quite a bit better than most of Doom 2.

 

 

[Lila Feuer]

10 minutes ago, Firedust said:

I'd probably stab Willits tbh

You would have to wait until 1995. That said I don't think he deserves to die, even with his crimes against id when he was the last person they needed while they were falling apart with the Quake series but he definitely deserves a good hard slap across the face. I'd be more than happy to administer such one myself.

[Firedust]

1 minute ago, Lila Feuer said:

You would have to wait until 1995. That said I don't think he deserves to die, even with his crimes against id when he was the last person they needed while they were falling apart with the Quake series but he definitely deserves a good hard slap across the face. I'd be more than happy to administer such one myself.

Who said anything about killing anyone? I just said stab :3

[Amaruψ]

Who said he'll kill Willits, just a little stab of a reality check would do the trick.

 

Actually why stab... when you can just 

 

[Lila Feuer]

1 minute ago, Firedust said:

Who said anything about killing anyone? I just said stab :3

A big ol' nail stickin' outta his seat that he doesn't see, like a whoopee cushion from hell. Bet the other guys throughout the office would wonder when did a woman join the team when they hear his scream.

[Stupid Bunny]

Add more pain elementals and ensure that BROWNWEL made it into Doom II

[Amaruψ]

5 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

 Bet the other guys throughout the office would wonder when did a woman join the team when they hear his scream.

 

Donna Jackson :')

[Chainie]

I would burn the office or destroy all materials of the game for lulz and go to jail

[Finnisher]

Gonna repeat what was said already but when Romero pitched pain elemental for Doom 2 would have slapped him in the face

 

"What the hell man" :D

[MathsDevil]

I actually like that Lost Souls require more than one shotgun shell to die, so it takes skill to deal with them. They can be stunned with a single pistol bullet, which I enjoy doing frequently. Obviously the Doom engine was developed for the computers of the early 90s, otherwise there should be two blockmaps, offset by 64 pixels from each other, so that if you are firing along a boundary in one blockmap, you are firing across the middle of a block in the other blockmap, which would all but eliminate the blockmap bug.

One change would be to make the revenant's height as tall as it looks. I also agree that the plasma rifle sound is too obnoxious. As a No Damage obsessive, the leaky radiation suit is annoyingly random, especially near the end of Doom 2's Map 29 'The Living End'.

[Maximum Matt]

1 hour ago, Amaruψ said:

 

Donna Jackson :')

I would've allowed some of her mind-bending slaughtermaps into the game

[Amaruψ]

44 minutes ago, Finnisher said:

Gonna repeat what was said already but when Romero pitched pain elemental for Doom 2 would have slapped him in the face

 

"What the hell man" :D

 

I think it was Sandy who thought up of Elemental, no?

[Amaruψ]

1 hour ago, Chainie said:

I would burn the office or destroy all materials of the game for lulz and go to jail

 

"Jail" if Carmack doesn't hunt you down the street with his battle axe.

[Gez]

Back then I was kinda fascinated by how Clouds of Xeen and Darkside of Xeen were separate, stand-alone games, but if you installed both they'd merge into a single greater game. I remember messing around with DEUTEX and trying to merge Doom and Doom II... Like copy-pasting E1M1 into MAP01 and adding tunnels connecting both, this kind of things.

 

Eventually I lost interest in this as I came to find the idea pointless, and only a while after that point was reached did WadSmoosh appear.

 

Anyway basically I think that if I had been involved into Doom and Doom II's development, I'd have pulled a World of Xeen maneuver and made it so if you have Doom and Doom II together, they'd both be loaded. No texture conflicts between them! And a rework of the texture loading mechanism similar to what ZDoom did to allow cumulative loading.

Edited October 25, 2023 by Gez

[Kyka]

11 hours ago, Murdoch said:

I would have bought the team together and said...

 

"OK, what the hell am I doing here? I don't know jack shit about game design. I'm 12 years old for God's sake."

Then left while they all looked on bewildered wondering who the hell I was and how I got into the office.

 

I wish this had happened. And that I had been there to see it.

 

And while I was there seeing this extraordinary scene play out, I would have removed the Hell Knight, which is and always was a cheap shitty recolor, and replaced it with an actual original baddie that filled a similar mid-tier-but-not-too-tanky-beastie role in the game.

 

And then I would have been asked to leave the office, because I also don't work there, and hopefully no one would have noticed that I had deleted the hell knight sprites and replaced them with something infinitely cooler but still recognisably Doomy.

 

And after that eventful day of us two random strangers invading the Doom offices, id software would have hired a security guard.