Why is there so much hate for the Unity Port?

[Girzedda]

I can kind of get it. Bethesda sucks, and it can only play megawads, but standalone, for playing the original games, plus a few mappacks, it's actually pretty good. It's definitely not the best, but it has a lot of polish presentation-wise, and is overall a pretty enjoyable experience. Crispy Doom still takes the cake for source ports in my opinion though. Also free Final Doom so it's worth it.

Edited November 25, 2023 by Girzedda
added an extra point

[CacoKnight]

2 hours ago, Girzedda said:

it can only play megawads

What do you mean?

 

Is there a way to download it without Steam? I'm not really a gamer I don't know how Steam works, Doom is the only game I have right now and mostly because I can play around with source ports settings etc. and Nugget takes the cake for me.

Edited November 25, 2023 by CacoKnight

[tewgytaylor]

I think the big thing is that most doom players tend to play outside of the IWADs, and for that you're going to have to get another source port anyways. Sure, there are ways to mod the unity port (there are even a few mods made with unity port compatibility in mind) but it's not as easy as using another source port and as far as I know it doesn't really have support for formats outside of vanilla/limit removing with the exception of Harmony.

 

I do agree that the unity port is pretty over-hated, just a little limited in comparison to other source ports.

[s4f3s3x]

The Unity Port is great to be honest.

Some people take it as a source port but it's a misunderstanding of goals in my opinion. The Unity Port does what it should perfectly: introducing new, modern audiences to the world of Classic Doom. - from the small but essential QOL features, to the aesthetic side with its locked low-res look, and finally a taste of the whole core philosophy of the community itself with the decision to give periodically free WADs from the community, which is brilliant.

 

Hell, it is the way I was introduced myself to it... and I played originally on my Android smartphone with a PS4 controller! : )

Edited November 25, 2023 by s4f3s3x

[Andromeda]

5 hours ago, Girzedda said:

I can kind of get it. Bethesda sucks, and it can only play megawads, but standalone, for playing the original games, plus a few mappacks, it's actually pretty good. It's definitely not the best, but it has a lot of polish presentation-wise, and is overall a pretty enjoyable experience. Crispy Doom still takes the cake for source ports in my opinion though. Also free Final Doom so it's worth it.

The "hate" you speak of is probably in reaction to how the Unity port was when it first released, nowadays it's a very good way to play Doom.

Edited November 26, 2023 by Andromeda

[Shepardus]

It got a bad rap early on, but it's been improved since then, and now it's a fine choice especially as an introduction to Doom.

3 hours ago, CacoKnight said:

Is there a way to download it without Steam? I'm not really a gamer I don't know how Steam works, Doom is the only game I have right now and mostly because I can play around with source ports settings etc. and Nugget takes the cake for me.

GOG also distributes the Unity port nowadays, but if you're asking whether you can just download it like any old source port, I don't think so.

Edited November 26, 2023 by Shepardus

[CacoKnight]

My son has Steam and all the Doom games installed, maybe I'll check how to zip it and copy it to my computer for testing.

[Arsinikk]

3 hours ago, Shepardus said:

It got a bad rap early on, but it's been improved since then, and now it's a fine choice especially as an introduction to Doom.

7 hours ago, CacoKnight said:

Tbh it had a bad rap early on cuz it had quite a bit of issues at the beginning, including stuff like the midi playing at a slower tempo and Nightmare not having fast monsters.

 

Though I think it was the Slayers Club sign in screen that put a bad taste in people's mouth, as you couldn't even play Doom without signing in thru Bethesda originally. This was changed later on, but still wasn't a great intro.

 

It's gotten alot better since then with added 16:9 support, correct midi playback (while I find the midi player lacking personally), and Nightmare fast monsters have been added back. I seem to remember that Dehacked support was added a little later as well when addons were introduced (I'll ignore the fact that it's partial Dehacked support atm).

 

I'd say it's a quite solid port now, but it did have some rough edges when it was first released.

[Edward850]

25 minutes ago, Arsinikk said:

while I find the midi player lacking personally

It uses SC-55 recorded tracks, not midi playback, and to say the SC-55 isn't authentic is quite false. Unless you're talking mods where a MIDI synthesizer has to be used, but your context talking about the slower tracks does not fit that at all.

[Arsinikk]

1 hour ago, Edward850 said:

It uses SC-55 recorded tracks, not midi playback, and to say the SC-55 isn't authentic is quite false. Unless you're talking mods where a MIDI synthesizer has to be used, but your context talking about the slower tracks does not fit that at all.

I'm specifically talking about the midi player itself that the addons use, not the SC-55 recorded tracks that are included with Doom and Doom II. Those are fine.

 

The slower tracks was back in an early release before they used SC-55 pre-recorded tracks, where it actually used midi (sorry I was smoking crack lol), but the tempo of all the midi tracks sounded wrong. I remember it well since I bought the Unity Ports when they first came out on the Bethesda Launcher and it was as it says this on the wiki: "The music originally played recordings of original songs at a noticeable reduced tempo and with inaccurate sound font voices."

Edited November 26, 2023 by Arsinikk

[Edward850]

32 minutes ago, Arsinikk said:

I'm specifically talking about the midi player itself that the addons use, not the SC-55 recorded tracks that are included with Doom and Doom II. Those are fine.

 

The slower tracks was back in an early release before they used SC-55 pre-recorded tracks, where it actually used midi, but the tempo of all the midi tracks sounded wrong. I remember it well since I bought the Unity Ports when they first came out on the Bethesda Launcher and it was as it says this on the wiki: "The music originally played recordings of original songs at a noticeable reduced tempo and with inaccurate sound font voices."

Actually I believe they were recordings on the initial release too, and the wording on the wiki page confirms my suspicion. Only BFG edition had them as midi, at least on PC. The original Xbox release had them as WMAs which had the original tempo glitch.

Edited November 26, 2023 by Edward850

[Biodegradable]

Anyone still hanging shit on the Unity port at this point clearly hasn't been paying attention to all the significant improvements that have been made on it since it first came out. It's perfectly fine now as a way for people to play Doom today right out of the gate on GOG or Steam or whatever without having to either wrestle with DOSBox or learn what the hell a source port even is.

[Individualised]

58 minutes ago, Biodegradable said:

Anyone still hanging shit on the Unity port at this point clearly hasn't been paying attention to all the significant improvements that have been made on it since it first came out. It's perfectly fine now as a way for people to play Doom today right out of the gate on GOG or Steam or whatever without having to either wrestle with DOSBox or learn what the hell a source port even is.

It still has issues that I personally think prevent it from being the definitive way to introduce people to Doom. it's so close but just not quite there

Edited November 26, 2023 by Individualised

[No-Man Baugh]

My gripe with current unity port is the mouse feel. It's still so very jittery even after some configuring and I hope it's just something about my setup that's screwy, because that's the one thing about the current version of the official port that I think could actively hurt a new player's first impressions of the game

Edited November 26, 2023 by No-Man Baugh

[Devalaous]

A lot of 'official port only' purists use it and ONLY it, and its a robust enough port for what it needs to do. Its not the best for playing mods though, as me and Arsinikk's experiments with classic megawads and miniwads have proven. I still like it for what it is, and I had a bunch of fun with it on consoles.

 

Probably the biggest problem is simply that its official; that means its a dead end for improvements as company products cant be updated forever. Community sourceports an be updated freely, forever, while official stuff needs money for the same thing. Thankfully the port is good at what its designed for, playing the original classics.

[Arsinikk]

1 hour ago, Devalaous said:

A lot of 'official port only' purists use it and ONLY it, and its a robust enough port for what it needs to do. Its not the best for playing mods though, as me and Arsinikk's experiments with classic megawads and miniwads have proven. I still like it for what it is, and I had a bunch of fun with it on consoles.

Don't get me wrong, I quite like the Unity port how it is now. It's definitely an improvement over what it was at launch. I wouldn't create Unity versions of all my megawads or write up a comprehensive mapping guide for the port, if I didn't have some love for it.

 

It is a little... limited in some of it's Vanilla / Dehacked support, but for the most part it's a great Vanilla/limit-removing port that also made it very easy to play classic Doom on consoles. Not to mention the official addon support just adds hours of community content.

 

I was only mentioning the problems with the port at launch, since I think that's what caused alot of the "hate" for the port. When it launched, it was in a suboptimal state.

Edited November 26, 2023 by Arsinikk

[Andrea Rovenski]

I tried playing it once a few months ago and the movement and control is so fucked up that my brain couldn't even process how to play the game. Not sure what was up with that. 

[Arsinikk]

45 minutes ago, Andrea Rovenski said:

I tried playing it once a few months ago and the movement and control is so fucked up that my brain couldn't even process how to play the game. Not sure what was up with that. 

Do you mean that is sort of has an auto SR50 when straferunning?

[OpenRift]

The Unity port is fine. I still think it's a better introduction for new players than GZDoom. It does have some issues in places and I wish it was more versatile, though. Like if it was on par with say Crispy Doom in terms of what it can do I would wholeheartedly recommend it in the same way I recommend the Doom 64 remaster.

[Devalaous]

7 hours ago, Arsinikk said:

Don't get me wrong, I quite like the Unity port how it is now. It's definitely an improvement over what it was at launch. I wouldn't create Unity versions of all my megawads or write up a comprehensive mapping guide for the port, if I didn't have some love for it.

 

It is a little... limited in some of it's Vanilla / Dehacked support, but for the most part it's a great Vanilla/limit-removing port that also made it very easy to play classic Doom on consoles. Not to mention the official addon support just adds hours of community content.

 

I was only mentioning the problems with the port at launch, since I think that's what caused alot of the "hate" for the port. When it launched, it was in a suboptimal state.

 

I was more referring to how many headaches its given us trying to get things working on it :p The previously-unknown reasons for all the crashing while trying to get so many old mods working on it natively did eventually discourage me though, but I never stopped liking the port for what it is

[Individualised]

3 hours ago, Devalaous said:

The previously-unknown reasons for all the crashing while trying to get so many old mods working on it natively did eventually discourage me though, but I never stopped liking the port for what it is

Why does it crash on old .WADs out of curiosity, given that the vanilla game obviously has no issue with them and neither does any community source port? It's something to do with the nodebuilder used in the .WADs but what change would they have made that would cause the game to get upset at that? It really shouldn't be doing that for stuff that works fine in the vanilla game.

 

It also gets upset at MAP33-MAP35 "bonus levels", even though the vanilla game somewhat supports them. There's no reason it should even reject any high level IDs at all considering the port has support for a MAPINFO standard.

Edited November 27, 2023 by Individualised

[Murdoch]

On 11/26/2023 at 11:38 PM, Biodegradable said:

Anyone still hanging shit on the Unity port at this point clearly hasn't been paying attention to all the significant improvements that have been made on it since it first came out. It's perfectly fine now as a way for people to play Doom today right out of the gate on GOG or Steam or whatever without having to either wrestle with DOSBox or learn what the hell a source port even is.

 

Exactly this. The Unity port isn't for us, nor do I doubt that id/Bethesda themselves ever intended it to be so. It's for more casual fans who just want to play the OG games and maybe some curated add-ons without too much drama on modern computers and consoles. For someone who knows about source ports etc to "hate" on the Unity port shows a rather profound lack of understanding of it's clear target market.

[Ulukai]

I don't like the sensations when playing the Unity port, especially the mouse control. Many sourceports work better than the official version.

[VoanHead]

I guess we could maybe say it doesn't have the ability to run GZDoom gameplay mods + maps + whatever other .pk3's but that's just my speculation. It also doesn't help ig that it can't run anything other than limit-removing pwads. Overall, is gud port for people getting introduced to DOOM, runs vanilla pwads.