Why do people hate TNT Evilution so much?

[Rudolph]

52 minutes ago, Fonze said:

Plus, heretic e1m1 easter egg in map08 metal...

What easter egg?

[Fonze]

5 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

What easter egg?

This whole red key area:

[LadyMistDragon]

3 minutes ago, Fonze said:

This whole red key area:

See, that also occurred to me....but that's also a map that was literally devoid of anything memorable, other than the arachnotrons from a million miles off toward the end.

[Rudolph]

I am not sure I see how this is a reference to Heretic. I mean, Doom's E1M1 also begins in a large area with four pillars.

Edited January 27 by Rudolph

[mrthejoshmon]

Actually contributing, if I go to make a new thread it autofills to a half finished thread where I was gushing about TNT and why I love TNT, so might as well post it here, didn't get very far:

 

TNT is routinely shit upon, this is no secret and this is no surprise.

 

There are many reasons why people don't like TNT; "amateurish", "boring", "ugly" and "confusing" are often thrown around. Valid stances I'm sure.

 

I think differently, I think TNT is great, this is no secret. I recently thought to myself "why? Why do I think TNT fucks?".

So I got a couple thoughts together and I think I figured it out.

 

Story:

Spoiler

 

From the very manual itself, TNT leaks pure 90's 'tude from everything:

 

Spoiler

Quote

Though all the top management of the UAC were dead, and so were most of their personnel down to the janitors, the corporation survived, now under strict government supervision. The UAC still sought the secret to matter apportation, and continued its experiments under vastly increased safety measures.

 

The UAC's base was set up on one of the moons of Jupiter, hoping that the increased distance would enhance Earth's safety if something went wrong. Marines were stationed at the base, ready for anything.

 

The Invasion

Soon after the UAC opened its first Gate, the minions of Hell made their first attack. Suddenly, through the Gate flowed spiked, fanged, dripping techno-terrors. Meat machines flailed their armored limbs and slavered with bloodlust, seeking soft bleeding manflesh to rend. But in their seeking, they found only death. The United States Space Marine Corps was prepared for such an event, and they poured molten death into the hordes of Hell. More demons massed, hoping to overwhelm the defenders by their endless numbers. But mass alone was no match for the marines. Set up in defensive positions around the gate, the marines were able to slaughter the monsters by the hundreds, taking few losses.

 

As suddenly as it had begun, the invasion ended. The last flaming skull screamed through, was hit by twenty simultaneous shotgun blasts, and the chamber was silent once more, except for the dripping of blood. Hell had failed.

 

The research went on, more boldly, and less cautiously. All the marines received the Silver Star from a grateful government, and the UAC made an enormous contribution to the Veterans Fund. The defensive positions were strengthened, and the marines watched closely for another attempt, all their attention drawn inward toward the Gates. They were looking in the wrong direction.

 

The Rain of Monsters

Hell knew more than one trick. Months after the Gate incident, the yearly supply ship came ahead of time. On radar, the ship looked far larger than usual. And it was coming from the wrong direction. Strange, but not inexplicable. The lax radar operators reported the ship's approach, and personnel went out to the landing field to meet it. But it never landed. Instead, it hovered over the base, miles in the air. The men and women looked up at it and saw that something was terribly wrong.

 

The ship could not have come from Earth. It was huge, kilometers long, and was built of bone, steel, flesh, corruption, and death. It was a bio-mechano-magical construct from the depths of Hell, and it had come through space for its vengeance. Enormous doors, large as football fields, irised open and hideous demons poured out, plunging to the ground and blanketing the entire base with their throbbing, pulsing bodies. They were everywhere at once. The marines' defenses, set up to prevent an attack from the direction of the Gate, were worthless. The monsters poured through the sewers, the air vents, the hallways, everywhere, rampaging, corrupting, and feasting. Once more, the surviving humans were left as zombified brain-dead monstrosities. Existing only to kill and kill and kill.

 

It's Up To You

Only one man escaped death or zombification. The marine commander. You. You weren't at the base when the skies opened and devastation poured from the stars. You were miles away, enjoying a walk across the moon's rough-hewn landscape. Then you heard a snortling gurgle behind you and whirled to face one of them. The beings that still haunted your nightmares. Your reflexes weren't dulled by your experiences, and you pulled out your pistol and blew the imp to gory shreds. Hot-footing it back to the base, you saw it all and realized what had happened in a flash. The demon ship still floated above the infested base. Your boys -- the men you'd trained to fight and kill and die as no fighting man had ever been trained before -- were dead. You were not there when it happened, to die with them. Unlike the ancient Samurai, who chose to die with their men, you cocked your pistol. You were going to kill for your men. And if you died trying, well, you were going to die anyway, some day. Death at the fangs of demons might be the very worst way to die, but if they did manage to get you, Hell would know it had been in a fight.

 

I've underlined what I mean in particular in that spoiler, TNT is delightfully 90's camp but doesn't totally ham it up ironically. And I mean it, TNT is pure unironic edge, the very first level loads arming you with a berserk pack and what can only be described as fury in midi form:

 

The plot of TNT isn't about escaping Mars, it isn't about stopping portals or saving Earth, you are here to kill.

 

You are one sick bastard, the game even starts to hint at this in the chapter text:

 

However, this isn't just the over the top Doom comic exaggerated weirdo who walks around talking in chainsaw screaming dynamite, you aren't just ripping or tearing, you are a madman with a deathwish because you lost your men, when they needed you the most you weren't there to die by their side, most reflective of this is the manual with backed up with the intermission screen and music:

 

 

 

 

You've won this fight, but it isn't bringing anything back, a stark reminder that you have already lost in totality, this is a literal suicide mission, you aren't achieving anything but petty revenge (to go off the mention of samurai in the manual, you've survived the initial encounter but thrown your saya before the fight).

 

 

Gameplay:
 

Spoiler

TNT's gameplay is fast paced, every encounter in TNT is mainly running and gunning through tight and fairly linear corridors, as apposed to the open areas of Doom 2 and Ultimate Doom's labyrinths. I have always enjoyed these close quarters fights and tight enclosed swinging matches, it is guttural and brutal as you fight for survival in enclosed spaces.

It feels like you are desperate, enclosed and trapped in a fight you aren't going to win, pulse pounding.

 

When the levels open up, they're cold, set against the freezing void of space/burning mires of hell, you are alone in a wasteland as the only truly living thing left, whilst open and wide you are still very alone and desperate in your struggle.

Edited January 27 by mrthejoshmon

[hybridial]

Also no one's brought up the Master Levels.

 

Id expected money for those, and apart from a few notable exceptions, those are... much worse than TNT in every way. Trying to play through those was the one time I was genuinely miserable playing Doom, not counting banging my head off of user mapsets that were made to be more hard than I'm comfortable with, something I've decided to stop doing entirely. 

[Fonze]

10 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

I am not sure I see how this is a reference to Heretic. I mean, Doom's E1M1 also begins in a large area with four pillars.

Wym? The entire area, plus the water area outside, is almost literally a line for line recreation of:

[Rudolph]

@Fonze Oh, that room! Yeah, I can see the similarities there, but I am still not convinced that it is not just a coincidence.

Edited January 27 by Rudolph

[Ozcar]

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand TNT evilution. The levels are extremely subtle, and without a solid understanding of map design will go over a typical gamer's head.

./s

[Fonze]

20 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

@Fonze Oh, that room! Yeah, I can see the similarities there, but I am still not convinced that it is not just a coincidence.

 

The secret being in the same place suggests otherwise

[Devalaous]

5 hours ago, Individualised said:

I definitely feel that there is an unspoken bias against TNT. It's not any worse than Doom 2's worst maps. As I've become more familiar with Doom level design I've started to recognise a bit more that maps like Metal have some issues, but I could also point out similar issues in Doom 1 and Doom 2. Plutonia may overall have a more consistent quality, but I don't think the quality difference between TNT and Plutonia is as large as people make out; and that's not a criticism against the Casalis, I just like TNT. I feel like people don't criticise Doom 1 and 2 as much as they do Final Doom due to the latter not being developed in-house, and I think there are also many people who grew up with the former games and never played Final Doom til later. I always had access to all of the IWADs since I first played Doom, so I've always been familiar with them and never had that bias. In fact Doom 2 is probably my least favourite of the IWADs, so it's the one I'm least familiar with.

 

I feel like the bias grows yearly as more and more people are exposed to hyperpolished modern wads and then start looking at older wads more harshly, instead of how they would have been looked at back then. Every year I see threads like this pop up, and each time people get more and more 'word salad' in their scathing descriptions of TNT, to the point I imagine them trying to pull off wearing monocles while doing it. Doom 2 gets shat on, as well as Sandy's Doom 1 stuff, but they are 'automatically okay' for being inhouse. TNT gets extra scrutiny because it was snapped up and made official, its a paid product, and always comes with Plutonia which it will forever be compared to. And because its shat on yearly, that makes everyone ELSE look at with a magnifying glass and pick out the smallest tiniest flaws, like people getting irrationally bothered over a texture or one small mapping error, almost like its a 'Me too!' reaction

 

When I first played TNT, it was the small selection of levels from the PS1 version, and later, a bargain Final Doom CD at a used goods store. Back then, all I had was Final Doom on PS1, and Doom 95 from that CD. I ddint even know Final Doom wasnt an id Software-developed product; the only time they ever credited the actual developers as far as I know, was the ENDOOM screen, and that either didn't show up on Doom 95, or I never looked at it and mashed the key to exit it. Even then, wouldn't young me have simply assumed 'Dario and Milo Casali' were id software staff, and Team TNT a specific group inside said company? I had no 'This is community made!' bias, it was a 32 map campaign that was cooler than Doom 2 with places I could visualise in my imagination as real things, it even had a pyramid level! All that cool new music too. I took a poke at Plutonia and got my ass kicked on level 1, so I went right back to TNT and stayed there. I never did play Plutonia legit when I was young, poking at Go 2 It on UV with cheats was the greatest discouragement ever. 'No way can I ever beat this :(' *switches IWADS*

 

Today when I play TNT, the magic is gone, and I can recognise stinkers like Quarry, but that and Baron's Den are the only maps I ever find unenjoyable, and Quarry is only bad because its Perdition's Gate sized, in Episode 3, AFTER the two long epic journey Drake maps. Everything else I have never minded, even the infamous Metal and Habitat (back in my teen days, I actually loved Habitat for how much effort was put into its visuals. Everyone always points out one or two glaring things in it, and refuses to admit anything else about it can be 'neat'. Hate tunnelvision much?). I'm due for another playthrough with Cammy's midipack, and im sure my views will remain the same. For November 1995, it'll always be 'pretty good' to me. Not perfect, not terrible, but pretty good.

 

5 hours ago, Rudolph said:

It is not bad overall, just incredibly bland: the maps look worse than the average TNT maps and they are not as creative and experimental as Hell 2 Pay.

 

I think Perdition's Gate would have been a great third choice had Shawn Green not arbitrarily cut it off. We wouldn't have Mackey McCandlish and Jimmy Sieben shitting out crap like Hell's Park and Bloodstone Gardens of Hell. Sure, we'd lose Hell's Masterpiece and High Security Area, but I always preferred the Mustaine maps to what Wraith did to finish the megawad. Hell to Pay had the same problem; short tiny maps shat out to fill out the megawad in time. Theres even a map also named Hell's Park, almost in the same slot, thats just as small and throwaway.

 

Most importantly though, PG would give a third flavour to Final Doom. TNT is always about the exploration, the journey, a sense of adventure. Plutonia is the hard gameplay challenge, its the final test for those who have beaten the other IWADs on UV. PG would have been about speedy quick maps and deathmatch.

 

10 hours ago, NiGHTMARE said:

 

I was going to say that I prefer both NJ Doom 2 and BF_Thud! over TNT, however both have less than 32 maps (the version of NJD2 on ID Games, at least) so you're probably right :)

 

Edit: There's also Cleimos 2. I do remember preferring that over TNT as well, though it must be over a decade since I last played it.

 

That makes me think, isn't TNT the first proper 32 map megawad for Doom 2? NJ Doom 2 is disqualified for being a retool of NJ Doom 1, and its original release only had lightly edited IWAD maps as its 31 and 32, with only four new maps, and Cleimos 2 is disqualified for having a 28 map campaign, with deathmatch maps awkwardly taking up map 27 to 30. Its also a retool of Cleimos 1, but thats only 9 maps, instead of 26. TNT was finished in November, while Memento Mori was finished in December, so MM is the first to actually release, making TNT and MM both the first full megawad in a way, unless there's another release out there im overlooking.

 

I wish the original November version of TNT was one of the things Romero posted, if he even has it still.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Whenever I replay the Iwads I make sure TNT is the last one. Not because it is bad but because the ending especially with the music is a nice send off from the Iwads.

[Skronkidonk]

I ask myself this question everyday.

I think its just a different kind of Doom that doesn't appeal to a lot of people. Plutonia appeals to a lot of people (now) because of its difficulty and simple yet clean visuals. I personally find TNT to be lots of fun because its like you are in "realistic" locations and each map is their own adventure. In Plutonia the first map is named "Congo" and then map three is named "Aztec" (not saying that makes plutonia bad) 

Also I enjoy mowing down lots of hitscan similar to Doom's E1 which early TNT has a lot of.

[Skronkidonk]

15 hours ago, Li'l devil said:

I don't understand why people hate Habitat specifically either. It's a good map. It has everything you need: a variety of environments, outdoor section, underground section, unconventional progression, barons and pain elementals, mazes, cleverly hidden secrets and especially one of the keys, and it has a real sense of place, you really feel like you're in a habitat.

I also agree with this. Habitat is NOT the best map in TNT. But its not the worst... I personally find the sewage section to be kinda neat, and the little silver/shawn area is pretty cool too. Now yes, the outside area with the blue key behind a mid texture is ugly and stupid, but.... I still think its a neat map.

Also the secrets in that map are pretty fun to find :) 

[fishy]

because it's popular to hate it

[Rudolph]

1 hour ago, Devalaous said:

I think Perdition's Gate would have been a great third choice had Shawn Green not arbitrarily cut it off. We wouldn't have Mackey McCandlish and Jimmy Sieben shitting out crap like Hell's Park and Bloodstone Gardens of Hell. Sure, we'd lose Hell's Masterpiece and High Security Area, but I always preferred the Mustaine maps to what Wraith did to finish the megawad. Hell to Pay had the same problem; short tiny maps shat out to fill out the megawad in time. Theres even a map also named Hell's Park, almost in the same slot, thats just as small and throwaway.

 

Most importantly though, PG would give a third flavour to Final Doom. TNT is always about the exploration, the journey, a sense of adventure. Plutonia is the hard gameplay challenge, its the final test for those who have beaten the other IWADs on UV. PG would have been about speedy quick maps and deathmatch.

Yeah, both Perdition's Gate and Hell to Pay would have been enough material for a Final Doom 2.

[valkiriforce]

1 hour ago, Cruduxy Pegg said:

Whenever I replay the Iwads I make sure TNT is the last one. Not because it is bad but because the ending especially with the music is a nice send off from the Iwads.

I do the same thing - it's actually my preference to play Plutonia before TNT, because Doom95 would have ordered it that way and I've been used to it ever since.

[LadyMistDragon]

1 hour ago, Devalaous said:

 

I feel like the bias grows yearly as more and more people are exposed to hyperpolished modern wads and then start looking at older wads more harshly, instead of how they would have been looked at back then. Every year I see threads like this pop up, and each time people get more and more 'word salad' in their scathing descriptions of TNT, to the point I imagine them trying to pull off wearing monocles while doing it. Doom 2 gets shat on, as well as Sandy's Doom 1 stuff, but they are 'automatically okay' for being inhouse. TNT gets extra scrutiny because it was snapped up and made official, its a paid product, and always comes with Plutonia which it will forever be compared to. And because its shat on yearly, that makes everyone ELSE look at with a magnifying glass and pick out the smallest tiniest flaws, like people getting irrationally bothered over a texture or one small mapping error, almost like its a 'Me too!' reaction

 

 

I mean....that probably has something to do with it. TNT definitely has its share of dull and poorly-aged maps but it's no worst than Doom II or Memento Mori. I think part of the reason it's easy to hate TNT (besides Habitat which does have 1 or 2 cool things if nothing else) is the amount of fun factor in proportion to the size of the maps. People these days want both more concise and more active maps and TNT fails on both counts.

 

Though on another note, I almost would take Icarus over this, with the trouble being that there are several maps that are both insubstantial and short. I don't think it quite averages out to be honest and the excess of SHAWN probably hurts Icarus quite a bit in the first two thirds. Point being, I don't think Icarus is significantly better if it's better at all. 

 

Then Memento Mori which actually has many of TNT's problems wasn't an official product so while its still not well-liked, it kind of gets a pass (though in some ways, it feels less monotonous than TNT, but i've digressed enough

[Gibbitudinous]

It's honestly kind of interesting how it feels like the meh vibes of Evilution carried through to Revilution and Devilution.

Like I made it a good way through both of those wads only for them to lose me towards the end, but when I tried again with them later, I found the maps which I had previously played to be utterly unreplayable* because they just didn't grab me on their own merits and I knew what was coming so the intrigue was completely gone.

With Devilution, it's not too hard to see why this is when there's a solid chunk of it where each map is just one massive blue techbase after another, but Revilution is a bit more perplexing as to why I find it so eyelid-weightening upon revisit.

*The first few maps of Revilution and map01 of Devilution aside.

[elborbahquarama]

i did enjoy several of the other famous megawads from 96 and 97 more (memento mori 1 & 2, requiem, eternal doom, strain) but i still thought it was pretty interesting, i love mill it's my favorite tnt level and my favorite dario casali level <3 i also really liked storage facility, steel works and dead zone (imagine being rich and having that level built in real life and then you just live in it . . .)

[roadworx]

3 hours ago, Devalaous said:

 

I feel like the bias grows yearly as more and more people are exposed to hyperpolished modern wads and then start looking at older wads more harshly, instead of how they would have been looked at back then. Every year I see threads like this pop up, and each time people get more and more 'word salad' in their scathing descriptions of TNT, to the point I imagine them trying to pull off wearing monocles while doing it. Doom 2 gets shat on, as well as Sandy's Doom 1 stuff, but they are 'automatically okay' for being inhouse. TNT gets extra scrutiny because it was snapped up and made official, its a paid product, and always comes with Plutonia which it will forever be compared to. And because its shat on yearly, that makes everyone ELSE look at with a magnifying glass and pick out the smallest tiniest flaws, like people getting irrationally bothered over a texture or one small mapping error, almost like its a 'Me too!' reaction

even though i'm not a particularly huge fan of tnt, i will say that i do think that this has quite a bit of truth to it. part of the hate is definitely bandwagoning, while another part is likely because a lot of the newer members of the community are very, very biased against older mapsets because of how high the bar has been set for quality with newer wads. people do make it out like the worst thing in the world - i'm also guilty of this because i did kinda jump on the hatetrain on the first page of the thread, which honestly i regret doing - when despite it not being the best, it's not horrible either.

 

the more i think about it, the more i start to think that i should replay it. it's been quite a while, so maybe i'll have a change of heart about it.

[Devalaous]

I think its only really fair if you compare TNT to the other 95 megawads or large map collections.

 

Off the top of my head, the competition would be

• Memento Mori
• H2H Xmas
• Obituary
• The Abyss
• NJ Doom 2
• Cleimos 2
• Master Levels (The rejected levels werent available back then, so you've just got the 21, not 28)
• BF Thud
• Maximum Doom's lazy Doom 2 conversions

These days I actually prefer Master Levels as an all in one package to TNT, since all but one of the designers are amongst my favourites from that era.

Edited January 28 by Devalaous

[Faceman2000]

And like everything on the internet, the backlash and bandwagoning births more extreme responses. I had a genuinely unpleasant time playing Evilution that I didn't have with Icarus or PG, and that was that. I liked some maps, including some people love to hate like Metal and Baron's Den, and despised others, but overall didn't enjoy the package. However, Civvie hating on it definitely made it the cool thing to do among younger Doom fans. That lead to a lot of undeserved vitriol (not undeserved because TNT is good, but undeserved because these people complaining about it had never given it a chance), which lead to what seemed to be a TNT resurgence in other parts of the community as people who had fond feelings towards it became more vocal in defending it. But then the pro-TNT camp's praise of TNT's unsung virtues - which, as a TNT hater, I'm happy to admit there are plenty of - has at least for me made it feel like TNT was suddenly the most popular IWAD, which just doesn't make any sense to me, so I - and presumably by extension the others who didn't enjoy it - feel the need to point out that we don't like, causing the people who did like it to comment, causing people who didn't to comment, and so on.

[ReaperAA]

I totally get the hate towards TNT because it is used in explosives :p

Spoiler

Suddenly this bad Trinitrotoluene joke came in my head

 

Edited January 28 by ReaperAA

[RoastDoom]

As someone who generally likes larger more expansive maps, I can't help but love this megawad. It's truly greater than the sum of its parts(because there are plenty of forgettable/bad levels), and maps like Wormhole, Mt Pain, Storage Facility(Arch Vile jump babyyy!) and Stronghold(hitscanner hell!) show how dynamic and creative it was for its time.

[The Royal We]

On 1/26/2024 at 11:42 PM, Rudolph said:

I think it got a bad reputation from the fact that it was originally supposed to be a free download, only for the mapset to be turned into a commercial map map published by Id Software.

I understand the anger people must have felt at the time. Here in Brazil, however, where I believe Doom was practically only available on pirated media, The Child Royal We had no idea of the magnitude of the scam. So I just played the game with great pleasure.
 

Today, as an adult, I find TNT very similar to Doom 2. Both are full of ups and downs, with excellent maps and forgettable maps, and a certain lack of visual identity (unlike Doom 1 and Plutonia).

 

And for those who paid for TNT at the time, remember: you could have spent that money buying TekWar. Yikes.

[valkiriforce]

My first exposure to TNT was through DOOM95, and since the Final Doom IWADs are ordered alphabetically through its pull-down menu, I actually played through Plutonia first before getting to TNT itself. I had the advantage of only playing the original DOOM IWADs at the time, so I wasn't looking at everything through that lens of quality that people might take it for (or the lack of it). I thought Plutonia was brilliant, but TNT was a very different experience with much bigger levels and it felt like more of a space adventure full of love for the hitscan enemies. I thought it was cool, but more within the realm of "okay" cool compared to Plutonia.

 

Over time I came to appreciate it more with the benefit of hindsight and knowing how to approach each level, but my admiration for it went up the most when I began to speedrun the maps. I feel like that brought it up to a point where I honestly would put it next to Plutonia in terms of how much I enjoy it now. I'd say it's one of the easier megawads to run through, and I felt like a powerhouse motoring my way through the maps. Mind you, I tend to play continuously as well, and occasionally I've chosen to play on lower difficulties just to make things flow more quickly (I'm looking at MAP02 and MAP08 being the harder ones to get through quickly without dying).

 

The thing I admire most about TNT though is its boldness to be weird and make really unorthodox decisions for better or worse - part of that inspires my own creation process in either trying to capture the good parts of those ideas or the ones I enjoyed seeing and making it into my own thing. A lot of the fun is tucked away in the strange map layouts and designs they've put together, and I like to try and make something that feels otherworldly and hopefully less rusty than what most people experience with these older wads. I think there's something unique to be found in its weirdness that helps me to discover my own identity when making my own maps.

[TheMightyWhoosh]

I absolutely love TNT. It was my first Doom, so I have a massive soft spot for it. Perhaps the nostalgic wool over the eyes hide all its flaws from me. 

Edited January 29 by TheMightyWhoosh

[janiform]

I didn't have Final Doom as a kid, and just played Plutonia and TNT for the first time in 2023. I liked both but found TNT more interesting and memorable, perhaps because I most enjoy maps centered on exploration rather than combat. I think if the best maps from each wad were combined into a single 32 map megawad it would be a masterpiece.

[bofu]

Some people hate it because of groupthink (their favorite YouTuber hates it, therefore they must as well). Others have legitimate grievances with it (or just hate hitscanners, perhaps not realizing that dealing with them is a skill set of its own). And for others, it's because it was packaged with Plutonia, and thus, it must always be compared to it.