Currently on Plutonia, pretty fun, although one question.

[Griffonki]

Is it bad I am playing with auto aim completely disabled? I myself prefer to aim on my own, I dislike aim assist systems personally, is auto aim needed for Doom?

[Murdoch]

It depends on how you're playing. Doom and Plutonia by extension were designed with auto-aiming in mind. You should only disable auto-aim if you're playing on a port with mouselook enabled. If you play on a port that lets you disable auto-aim and you don't have mouselook enabled, you'll have a bad time.

[Griffonki]

2 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

It depends on how you're playing. Doom and Plutonia by extension were designed with auto-aiming in mind. You should only disable auto-aim if you're playing on a port with mouselook enabled. If you play on a port that lets you disable auto-aim and you don't have mouselook enabled, you'll have a bad time.

I am GZdooming with freelook enabled.

[Murdoch]

1 hour ago, Griffonki said:

I am GZdooming with freelook enabled.

 

Then you will not be stymied specifically by the lack of auto aim, because you have full range of movement. That said, it could be argued it takes more time for you to move your mouse up or down and aim accurately than for the auto-aim code to do it for you. But such a minor difference is unlikely to significantly affect difficulty. 

[Dheta]

If you have more fun playing with mouselook rather than auto-aim then just play with mouselook.

 

It might break some small things here or there like shoot switches you can shoot from somewhere you shouldn't or snipe monsters than might otherwise be too hard or impossible to kill with auto aim. Whether or not that matters to you is something you're just gonna have to decide for yourself.

 

I do recommend that at some point or another you give auto-aim a chance for a WAD, if for no other reason that to try something else. I was pretty hardcore mouselook or bust early on, but at some point I decide to give auto-aim a chance and I haven't really bothered with mouselook since, outside of wads made for it. But again, if you find mouselook to be more fun just use mouselook. "Author intent" shouldn't stop you from playing doom the way you enjoy.

[Shepardus]

Freelook can sometimes lead to sequence breaking because you're able to shoot a switch from above or below where you were supposed to shoot it from, but I don't recall any examples from Plutonia. More relevant to Plutonia is that it's easier to snipe distant chaingunners when you can freely aim at them instead of having to get to the same height as them or get close enough for the autoaim to kick in. Play however you want though, don't let anyone tell you freelook is "bad."

 

By the way, this is unrelated to autoaim, but if you're using GZDoom 4.11.3 and have set the compatibility flags to the "Doom (strict)" preset, Plutonia MAP32 will break, making the blue key inaccessible. If you reach that map, make sure "Use Doom's floor motion behavior" (Compatibility Options -> Map/Action Behavior) is set to No. This only applies to GZDoom 4.11.3 (which unfortunately is the current "stable" version), the compatibility flag is bugged in that version.

Edited March 21 by Shepardus

[ObserverOfTime]

No. The only acceptable way to play with autoaim disabled is if you're using the arrow keys for freelook, and there is no point in arguing about it any further.

 

Spoiler

In all seriousness, play the game any way you want to, you don't have to justify squat to anyone about it. Be mindful of potential sequence breaks, bearing that in mind go nuts!

 

[Maximum Matt]

Just don't play TNT that way.