Things id got wrong

[Maes]

I'll make a bold statement here, and say that Doom II represents exactly the type of "laziness" exhibited by an game engines company: due to the success of Doom they needed to release a sequel ASAP.

The engine was flexible enough to allow remapping and retexturing, but adding new stuff like monsters, weapons or engine features would be too much work for something that would've been phased out of the market in a few years (and Quake was already under development when Doom II was released, and probably at much higher). I am not sure if the new monsters and related hardcoded functions, codepointers, resources etc. were added at this time, or if they were there all along since the first Doom, and simply activated/used in Doom, but adding anything else in that manner would really be a load, as any source port author can testify.


No sense developing a commercially-released "better Doom" based on refinements of the same 2.5D engine, which however would not be marketable in a couple of years, what with the 3D acceleration, true 3D engines and stuff.

So what they did? They took a "least effort" approach, added the new (?) monsters in, implemented one new weapon, slapped in the new maps and hey presto, Doom II (aka: more of the same).

Final Doom was even "worse" in that respect, but that's another story.

So, for people that wonder why id didn't follow through with Doom, make an official "Boom" or "Super Doom" etc. all those years and even with the latest re-releases, the answer is that the "Development of Doom" chapter has officially been closed since 1994, as if moved to Greener Pa$ture$. Case closed (for me).

[dew]

Maes said:

Well, then brit10 must be the all-time classic here ;-) It puts much more of an emphasis on camping strategic positioning and spamming zoning, and just having low pings doesn't guarantee a win (well, you can still hunt down laggers one by one with the SSG, but that's pointless if the guy with the BFG gets 15 kills in the time you get 2 or 3).

Hmm....is that why it's so popular?

Yup, nail on the head. Too bad though, brit10 was never meant to be abused that way. It's a pretty good dueling (and dueling only) mapset where SSG isn't necessarily the only/best option. Easily accessible and usable power weapons make them a good choice for pingers, but, as history proves, also a cesspit of Chilean BFG spammers in 12-player FFAs.

Other maps like DWANGO5 MAP01 are "classics" for a rather different reason: it offers no clearly advantageous/camping positions, there's no SSG at every spawn, spawn points are hard to spam/camp, and generally getting more than one kill in a row is hard and elaborate.

Advantageous? Correct. Camping? Cmon, d5m1 is camper central, haha. SSGs aren't on all spawns - they're usually a few units away. :P The outside spawn points are notoriously easy to rape with SSG/BFG, but no RL/PG spam, that's true. Unless you fire RL at the BFG cubbyhole in FFA, heh. I'd say dweller2 map11 (or even d5m7, heh) would be a better example of what you were describing.

[jmickle66666666]

i have something to confess about doom 1

[40oz]

I thought all the people who were sick of doom left 15 years ago.

[Jonathan]

- Messy palette. You've got a limited number of colours, why waste any?

- The bullet firing sound is too weedy. Pistol mods can improve the feel of the weapon considerably just by providing a beefier sound.

- Reduced mouse accuracy optimisation in net and (particularly) demo play isn't worth it.

- Arch-vile flame attack is too pixelated when viewed in first person. It should have been done as a HUD sprite instead.

- BFG is overpowered. It should do wide area damage to a crowd of enemies or very-high damage to one enemy, but not both of these. Also, I'd have made it use all of your cells when you fired, giving damage proportional to the number you were holding, making it much more of a "last resort" weapon. And I'd have made the Spider Mastermind immune to it.

- Partial invisibility power-up hampers skilled players. Perhaps it's speedrunner bias, but I'd have preferred a speed-increase power-up instead.

- Poor allocation of art effort for Doom 2. We got a lot of new mid-range enemies, but only one new weapon, and no proper final boss? Did the world really need Pain Elementals that badly?

[Da Werecat]

Jonathan said:

It should do wide area damage to a crowd of enemies or very-high damage to one enemy, but not both of these.

Why?

[Memfis]

Tarnsman said:

Has there ever been any real meaningful discussion in Doom 1 vs Doom 2? Every single "what don't you like about Doom" thread devolves into it and it essentially just becomes "Well you're wrong and I'm right!" "Nuh Uh! You're wrong and I'M right!" rinse and repeat like 8 year olds at recess

Exactly. These discussions always start in a fun way but then the experts come to disprove other opinions.

[Maes]

Jonathan said:

- BFG is overpowered. It should do wide area damage to a crowd of enemies or very-high damage to one enemy, but not both of these.

Then basically it would be just like a rocket with a larger blast radius (with the player made immune to it?), or like a single "armor piercing" rocket. In that case, it'd better have much, much better speed, or be able to pass through several enemies, otherwise there wouldn't be much point in wasting all of my cells in a single "sudden death" projectile, if it was too slow to move and needed to be dead-on accurate to be effective.

[Lycaon]

40oz said:

I thought all the people who were sick of doom left 15 years ago.

Who's sick of doom?

[Looper]

Memfis said:

Exactly. These discussions always start in a fun way but then the experts come to disprove other opinions.

But some people have bad opinions. Based on nothing. Opinion can change.

[Phml]

Nobody is ever convinced of the error of their ways by someone else calling them an idiot.

[Dragonsbrethren]

dew said:

And I don't get why people are so infatuated with the drawn intermission map.

They look cool. I don't particularly care if the stuff on the map doesn't match up with the levels, they gave a sense of progression anyway. I fully agree that Doom 2 has better level design overall and much better gameplay, but little touches like those intermission maps and the pics at the ends of the episodes make it look like id put more effort into the first game. The effort was put where it actually mattered in Doom 2, but those little touches in the original are nice and I can understand someone being disappointed that they're missing.

Phml said:

Nobody is ever convinced of the error of their ways by someone else calling them an idiot.

Maybe not by calling them an idiot, but people's opinions grow and change when exposed to others' opinions. I used to be in the "Doom is better than Doom 2" camp and I couldn't imagine holding that opinion today. People pointed out all of the things Doom 2 does better and I eventually realized they were right. Some of my favorite maps might still be in Doom but taken as a whole, Doom 2 is the better game.

[dew]

Dragonsbrethren said:

They look cool. I don't particularly care if the stuff on the map doesn't match up with the levels, they gave a sense of progression anyway. I fully agree that Doom 2 has better level design overall and much better gameplay, but little touches like those intermission maps and the pics at the ends of the episodes make it look like id put more effort into the first game. The effort was put where it actually mattered in Doom 2, but those little touches in the original are nice and I can understand someone being disappointed that they're missing.

I can agree with that. Doom definitely had more "pointless" polishing touches than Doom2, which was a glorified mission pack. Bigger, badder, uncut, its authors already more confident in building more complex and demanding maps... but without the cute make-believe bells and whistles. Thanks for finally wording a coherent version of this argument.

[gemini09]

dew said:

Thanks for finally wording a coherent version of this argument.

I, for one, were not waiting for someone to conclude all of our collective opinions as a whole. It doesn't make sense to me that my opinion is X, yet it has to be compromised to Y before you, dew, can accept it.

[dew]

gemini09 said:

I, for one, were not waiting for someone to conclude all of our collective opinions as a whole. It doesn't make sense to me that my opinion is X, yet it has to be compromised to Y before you, dew, can accept it.

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

[Steve D]

My issue is something that the experts can perhaps illuminate, and deals with auto-aim. Today, while playing Map15 of BTSX E2 in GZDoom, I was aiming a rocket at a Revvie on the same floor as me, but the rocket went sailing over its head towards a Caco that was 50 virtual feet above it and 150 virtual feet behind it. I've had this happen on more than one occasion recently. Now, perhaps my aim was a little off, but I know that when testing one of my own maps while playing in Risen3D, the same thing happened when I had a perfect bead on, again, a Revvie. Something about that monster, maybe? Or something about the source ports vs 'nilla?

Then there's the ultra-irritating problem of shooting rockets across gaps when there's monsters below, often leading to "Good at Doom!" suicides when the rockets get pulled down. I've suffered tremendous amounts of damage because of this.

[Salt-Man Z]

SteveD said:Then there's the ultra-irritating problem of shooting rockets across gaps when there's monsters below, often leading to "Good at Doom!" suicides when the rockets get pulled down. I've suffered tremendous amounts of damage because of this. [/B]

Ha! That never happens to me. :D





(It happens all the time.)

[VGA]

That has never happened to me.








I use freelook.

[Doomkid]

Maes said:

(Brit10 in a nutshell)

Hmm....is that why it's so popular?

Yeah. Brit10 is fun, there's no doubt about that, but it's so... damn... overplayed...

Maes said:

Other maps like DWANGO5 MAP01 are "classics" for a rather different reason: it offers no clearly advantageous/camping positions, there's no SSG at every spawn, spawn points are hard to spam/camp, and generally getting more than one kill in a row is hard and elaborate.

You know, this is an excellent point. D5M1 stands out from the other typical tournament maps in a good way - The gameplay it features has been my main inspiration for deathmatch mapping.

dew said:

as history proves, [Brit10 is usually] a cesspit of Chilean BFG spammers in 12-player FFAs.

I don't know why, but I do find this fun occasionally. 90% of the time though, I prefer the maps as a duel, or a MAX of 4 players. Any more and it's a total fuckfest.

I find it really odd that brit10 map01 has almost never been used in duel tournaments. (recently, anyway)

[Koko Ricky]

Okay, here's something legit that I don't think has been brought up: There really was no reason to take out some of Doom 1's best textures in Doom 2. I was mapping for Doom 2 with a texture set that added the missing textures back in, and it's really amazing how much character they add.

[Doomkid]

I never understood that either. Perhaps it was a sort of excuse to get mappers to still buy Doom1? A longshot, but possible.

[Linguica]

I assume they just didn't use certain textures and decided to remove them to save space or something.

Which makes me wonder, are there any textures in the Doom / Doom 2 IWADs that are never used?

[plums]

LITERED from Doom1 is only used once, in Inferno in some barely-noticeable spot I think. (edit: E3M4, two sidedefs.)

I assume the process for removing textures was automated somehow.

[Da Werecat]

Linguica said:

Which makes me wonder, are there any textures in the Doom / Doom 2 IWADs that are never used?

XWE says about Doom 1 (both regular and Ultimate):

SLADRIP1 (part of an animation)
SW1STARG/SW2STARG (that switch that was removed from E1M3)
BLODGR1/BLODGR2/BLODGR3 (4 frames in this animation)
BLODRIP2/BLODRIP3/BLODRIP4 (same as above)

So, technically, only one switch is unused, and it was actually used at some point.

XWE says about Doom 2:

SW1BRN1/SW2BRN1
SW1STARG/SW2STARG
SW1STON2/SW2STON2
SW1STONE/SW2STONE

These are dummy switches from Doom 1 that are defined as copies of SW1BRCOM/SW2BRCOM for the game to actually work.

[edit]

By the way, I've excluded the skies and AASHITTY, for obvious reasons, but AASTINKY wasn't present to begin with. Apparently, it was accidentally used somewhere in Doom 1.

[Steve D]

plums said:

LITERED from Doom1 is only used once, in Inferno in some barely-noticeable spot I think. (edit: E3M4, two sidedefs.)/B]

But Litered is a cool texture they should have used more. I use it a lot, especially in dark, atmospheric tech rooms.

And let's not forget the crime of removing Redwall1, Skintek, Lite4, Liteblu3, Lite2, Lite96, Litemet, Skullwall, Stonegarg, Tekwall2, 3 and 5, Comp2, Comptile, Compohso, Compute1, Compute2, Planet1 -- in essence, they shoulda kept everything and just added the cool new Doom 2 textures. ;)

[Steve D]

Salt-Man Z said:

Ha! That never happens to me. :D





(It happens all the time.)

Yes, we all suffer, except for those infernal freelookers like VGA. ;D

[Vs1991]

Doom 3

[Steve D]

Vs1991 said:

Doom 3

There's a lot I liked about Doom 3. Really nice horror ambience.

IMO, the epic fail is Rage.

[Da Werecat]

I dunno, there's a lot I liked about Rage. :)

Although it was hardly a perfect release with nothing wrong with it.

[Koko Ricky]

Jonathan mentioned the messy palette and I definitely have to agree. There is an almost absurd number of anglo flesh and blood red/skin red tones, probably too many. This leaves very little room for the brilliant burnt orange and mustard colors used for stuff like the archvile fire. There's also only a handful of blues, and only in one hue. It just seems like it could have been better organized.