Alternate-timeline successor to Doom 2 - which WAD are you picking?

[Jimmy]

Let's visit a parallel universe for a sec.

 

Picture this:

• Final Doom was never released.
• Doom 3, as we know it, does not exist, even in the planning stages.
• All has gone quiet on the id Software front (for now).

 

All the same, the online Doom modding community is still thriving pretty well. People are still making myhouses, quick custom levels, and short episodes using both Doom 1 and 2. One day, they take it upon themselves to release a "successor" to Doom 2. It's not necessarily Doom 3, nor is it Final Doom.

 

Notice it's not "sequel" - that word, to me, carries certain connotations. In this hypothetical, the community is honestly pretty lax about making the story "logically" follow the events of Doom 2, and are just going for something cool and stylish that people outside the modding community wouldn't have seen from the Doom engine yet.

 

Additionally, we're not necessarily in 1994 right now. So, of the multitudes of levelsets we now have today - even considering the ones released as late as 2024 - which do you think is the most like what would've been done with this goal in mind?

 

For summary, consider the jump up in quality on this scale:

Doom 1 -> Doom 2 -> ???

 

I've compiled a list of possible candidates, but I'm keen to hear more thoughts. (Don't take my categories as being the only ones available!)

 

Truly Vanilla

Doom 2 the Way Id Did - Various - This pack is undoubtedly what folks wanting to emulate Doom 2 right down to its core would've done. You could still call it a "spiritual successor" in this theoretical trilogy of releases, even if nothing crazy-new is being done in the maps themselves.

 

The Classics

Memento Mori - Various - A 32-level set that treads old ground, with some occasional surprises.

Requiem - Various - More creative flair in this one, making it ideal for showcasing what the Doom engine could truly do, and how to put the player through their paces.

Alien Vendetta - Various - Certainly would've qualified as a "successor" if framed that way. It's got mountains of aggression and jaw-dropping scenery. The leap in quality between Doom 2 and this would've blown the socks off people.

 

Episodic Revisit

No End In Sight - naturaltvventy, Xaser & Lutz - The community could have chosen to retread the old ground of a Doom 1 episodic-format levelset.

 

The "Fifth Episode"

Doom: The Lost Episode - Xaser - A concatenation of officially-sanctioned ideas with some pretty zanily off-the-wall original ideas. Even though it's only a handful of maps versus the other megawads on this list, I still think it could count.

 

ZDoom-enriched

Doom Resurrection - Tommie Quick - Community ports would surely still be available, allowing modders more freedom to tell stories and build narratives and unusual setpieces within the engine. Doom Resurrection does this pretty well.

 

Bigger and Badder

The Ultimate Doom 2 - Gardevoir and Guardsoul - Okay, it's not finished - but the spirit is very much there. Perhaps all the community wanted to do was reimagine Doom 2's levels as more grand, sweeping adventures!

 

The Grandiose

Back to Saturn X - esselfortium, et al. - Even though E3 is still to come, I'm not ruling this out, given my scenario allows all the time in the world for projects to be developed and completed. On the whole, this trilogy's a surefire candidate.

Eviternity - Dragonfly, et al. - As "high-budget" a release as I think I'm willing to go - anything more and I'm not convinced you could call it something that logically follows on in Doom 2's spirit. But this one's a 32-level opus, burgeoning with modern creativity and artistic flair. It definitely counts.

Edited January 25 by Jimmy

[PsychEyeball]

Couldn't TNT Evilution be the hypothetical Doom 3? It was being worked on and was intended to be a free release before id swooped in and bought it for a commercial release. It would have been released for free, would have generated far less drama and likely have got a better reception from the fanbase. 

 

Otherwise, I'd say Icarus would be a worthy followup. It's got an intriguing science-fiction setting that Doom teased but never fully committed to. The structure of the WAD is also interesting, with its action split between ship maps, planet maps and the more experimental simulation maps. 

 

And why not, let's follow Rise of the Triad's lead. They made Extreme ROTT in order to challenge the hardcore? Boom, Hell Revealed is Doom 3. Let's include a few friendlier levels at the beginning in case people buy it and are not as familiar with the core game, then let's ratchet the challenge up super quick after that. People out there like Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels and Extreme ROTT, people could have liked Hell Revealed as a paid product.

[Foxstiel]

Doom 64 For Doom 2?

[yakfak]

i think the thing that Doom 2 failed at, which stands out to a lot of people, was representing places... people are so mad about the texture usage and the picturesque identity of the maps they appear in, so I can imagine a community Doom 3 focusing harder on realism (and difficulty) and ending up looking a lot like Hellbound! (psychEyeball's nod to Icarus would make sense here too but I think Hellbound stomps that set, lol)

 

edit: or D2INO! or if you're looking for something a little earlier, maybe Perdition's Gate with its broad attempts to represent the places where the storyline unfolds? anyway I do think an attempt at story/place coherence would define what community Doom 3 would've been

 

from your list, NEIS and EP5 stand out as my faves - both believable as continuations of the originals into weirder spaces

Edited January 25 by yakfak

[WorldMachine]

17 minutes ago, Foxstiel said:

Doom 64 For Doom 2?

What he said! It's poifect!

[MoiraHeart]

Valiant and Eviternity feel like they could easily be separate games.
 

[Andrea Rovenski]

memento mori makes the most sense in a logical continuation after doom 2, with the others on the list following after it

[roadworx]

you included mm1 and requiem but not mm2? smh jimmy, smh...so ashamed.

 

anyways, i'm gonna go with something a lot of people likely aren't gonna think of: strain. strain straight up touted itself as a successor to doom 2. from its description:

Quote

This is the product of our painstaking effort at a true successor to DOOM II. We hope you'll agree that it is much better than 90% of all those $50 shovelware first person shooters that wish they were DOOM!

it was also a pretty massive project that had shitloads of people working on it and playtesting it, bigger than anyone had seen up to that point afaik. it includes all sorts of neat things like custom enemies, loads of custom textures, new music...stuff that would've wowed people back in 1997. it, alongside requiem, was a sort of culmination of all the prior years of doom modding, with several big names of the 90s having worked on it.

 

now, whether it still holds up, ehhhhh. but that's besides the point - it very much was something that nobody had seen before, and for its time it was pretty damn impressive.

Edited January 25 by roadworx

[Walter confetti]

From the list, some good candidates are:

• Doom 2 the way ID did
• Doom: The Lost Episode

Not sure if this can count as sucessor but more on a "missing link", what about "Doom 2: shareware version"?

 

What about 25 years on Earth by Phobus as potential sucessor?

Edited January 25 by Walter confetti

[Andromeda]

Eternal Doom, with stuff like breakable glass/walls, six key levels, controllable environment, loads of new (and not so new, heh) textures, cool light effects, a fantastic OST, death exits, multi floor buildings, more grandiose and realistic settings, devilish puzzles, a snazzy looking dark imp (!) and much, much more!

Edited January 26 by Andromeda

[Horizon]

either Eternal Doom — like @Andromeda said — or Perdition's Gate

[valkiriforce]

While I haven't played the wad all the way through, DOOM Zero seems like it could be a good candidate.

 

I think so far Eternal Doom has been my favorite suggestion - definitely a huge step up from the first two DOOM games in terms of content changes and certainly in map scale. It also gets a lot of hate which convinces me it's a worthy addition to the series.

[ReaperAA]

I am gonna go with Valiant. Simply because it actually felt like that to me back when I first played it.

 

For context, I started my journey of playing Doom wads in 2015 and Valiant, being the hot new thing at that time, was the first big pwad I played. Its big maps (compared to iwads that is), custom textures and especially the custom enemies felt like I was playing a whole new Doom game at that point.