Things id got wrong

[Linguica]

wesleyjohnson wrote a 5000 line document about how to make Doom levels that are sufficiently "realistic" to allow "immersion in a model universe" so you need to consider context for his statements

[BaronOfStuff]

holy shit what 5000

wesleyjohnson said:

everything.txt

I can't get over this post. This is, quite simply, astounding.

[FireFish]

With a game this old being dragged out of its time and the "what-they-could-do-context" the only thing
which alwyas bothered me was the level design. which comes down to personal oppinions and preferences.

Linguica said:

wesleyjohnson wrote a 5000 line document about how to make Doom levels that are sufficiently "realistic" to allow "immersion in a model universe" so you need to consider context for his statements

i always look forward to posts by Linguica, they are strangely amusing and appealing. :)

[Yuki Senmatsu]

Another thing, on MAP03, you can get the Chaingun from the chaingunners before you get to it itself.

Meh, that's just me.

[Never_Again]

Gez said:

Removing the MF_COUNTKILL flag from lost souls because of the addition of Pain Elementals.

I believe this thread is about wrong game design decisions id made. Instead, we have a dozen of pages of ppl picking on level design, engine bugs, perceived monster shortcomings and of other irrelevant noise. It's amazing that it took nine pages and Gez to get to the point. ;)

wesleyjohnson said:

Too many of these posts give no regard to there being other styles of players and how some level maps and other id design elements were lacking.

wesleyjohnson said:

The monsters are as they needed to be. Monsters happen, you cannot design them expressly for your personal style of play. It is part of the game to adapt to the monster that must be defeated, whatever it is.

Right on the money. And that's two reasons why this thread is so long while saying so little.

wesleyjohnson said:

For many of us, strategic planning is an integral part. [...]
For those of you who do not understand strategic planning in playing games like Doom, and believe that no one else should either, I have no sympathy towards your arguments.

Neither do I. So far so good. Sound logical reasoning. But then you go on and completely ruin the post with

wesleyjohnson said:

A player cannot strategic plan in Doom II where the only places where it appears you have figured it out, it is used to set and spring a trap.

wesleyjohnson said:

9. Needs more levels of difficulty and personality selections.
Nightmare is not really a level of difficulty.

Now you've blundered into arguing about something you have no idea about. Nightmare! is the one difficulty level where strategic planning comes the fore. How do you think all those 30-level Nightmare runs through DOOM2 were done? Fast reflexes and 1337 combat skills will only get you so far. Read any of the TXT files accompanying the earlier of those demos (the later ones don't go into so much detail as they presume the reader is already familiar with the existing knowledge base) and you will see it took the speedrunners months to plan each run, and the overall planning continued to evolve over the course of years.
It is pointless to dissect most of the rest of your points as they violate the KISS principle which is the cornerstone of DOOM design. Suffice it to say that if your points 3, 5, 8 and 9

wesleyjohnson said:

3. Should never have implemented auto-aim. Other games of the era did it better with some control over what the target was. Descent manged to have free-aim and Doom should have too. [...]
5. Lack of a carry limit system. Other games limited the carry weight, and could drop things. Carrying 600 lbs of weapons and ammo is not reasonable. Carry 50 rockets is fanciful, maybe 10 if the player was not carrying anything else. Not being able to drop anything is too centric on one style of play. [...]
8. Needs 3 times as many monsters. Even small variations would have helped. Could have 5 kinds of baron of varying strength and weapons. Too many complaints about how you want to tweak the monsters to your style of play.

had been implemented we would not be having this argument now. DOOM would have been just another long-forgotten RPG from the 90s.

[T-Rex]

VGA said:

If those two had to make as many maps (and as big) as sandy, you'd see the quality drop like a brick. Doom 2 development was way too short IMO.

I don't mean they have to make as many maps as Sandy, but at least make a few more maps that could replace Sandy's worst contributions. And yes, the development time made Doom 2 seemed rather rushed out.

[Lenswot]

I like this thread. Going back a few pages, the issue with the doom monsters being too easy to outwit was greatly improved in Doom 2. I think with the first game, the testers were not strafing, or not using it so extensively as to make most of the demons helpless when unaided. By the next year, it was obvious that players were doing a great deal of it. So what little id did for the sequel involved amending enemy problems. Each addition addresses a shortcoming.

hellknight : barons take too many hits to serve as a step up from imps

chaingun zombie : shotgun zombies allow the player to become dangerous but are not dangerous on their own

revenant, arachnotron, mancubus: fireballs are too easy to dodge or uniform in behavior

arch vile: baron is no longer apparent as the boss of the nonbosses

pain elemental: lost souls are not annoying enough

Any good difficulty tweak can be made disproportionate by bad level design, obviously.

About textures, some of us assume id had something that automatically removed textures that were not used and gave the matter very little thought. I always thought AAstinke was used in episode 3 to keep it from being automatically trimmed. Of course Doom 2 was only sold on CDs, and retained all the old monsters, so automatic texture removal seems somewhat needless. Unless there were a LOT more unused textures than we know about, which did not get into either game.

About monster rotations: when I first bought Ultimate Doom on floppy disks, I could swear the instruction book showed angle 8 of the PLAY, POSS and SPOS sequences on certain pages, before I knew they were not in the game, but I lost the book. Years later I saw another copy of the book, from the CD release, and it showed angle 2 in the same places. Most suspicious.
And meanwhile the nearly symmetrical SARG attack and pain frames get all 8. Bah.
I wish the frames had been added back when there was no reason to save space, but there was probably not an automatic way to do that.

About no waterfall: THIS is bad because when people add one on their own, they usually use slime recolored blue, which looks nothing like water. Of course a real waterfall would not be dark blue or a flat wall, but it would not be slimy globs either. But this has no bearing on the original game as a stand-alone product.

[wesleyjohnson]

This is just a wish list, which is going to be different for each person depending on what bugs them the most. Please stop bashing mine and go make your own.

I feel that some have inadequate imagination on how some of my listed problems could have been implemented. They had already been done in other games.

Some seem to think this is "what id could have done in 1995" instead of "what choices id made that limit me now". I am addressing the later.

Carry-Limit system:
A carry-limit is easy enough they could have given it some consideration. It could have been as simple as having only 4 available weapons.
Would have to drop one to pick up another.

It would not have to be as complicated as RPG games do. Why does the expression of any inventiveness always bring out the extremes in counter-examples?

Some other games that implemented such limits only enabled them for the higher difficulty levels. Easy and Med could have been unlimited, Hard could have had 6 weapons slots, and Very Hard (a new difficulty) could have had 4 weapon slots.

I know it is something that the run and shoot-em players probably would not want to bother with. I would not want it to be a burden for all players. There is this neighbor kid that always goes around with a stick, hitting everything that does not move. I suppose it can be calming in a sense to just bash things (or monsters), turn the brain off, no thinking. I play those kind of computer games too, sometimes.

But this is my bug list, not yours. Which weapon to carry is one of the few things that a strategic player can really make decisions about and I do miss that. The amount of thinking required by most of the level maps is not giving me much exercise. I recognize that thinking is something that some player styles do not want to engage in. Can you recognize that some play styles would welcome some more places to apply thinking?

The inability to drop anything and how little difference it would make if the player could drop anything is what I most notice.

It is not about realism. Every time I see "realism" used to describe what I talk about I know they have misunderstood. Our most common shared experience is ONE place for the designer and player to get understandable rules, but not the only one. You could also use D&D rules, or some movie, or some book, or something else just as well. If it is logically consistent, the thinking and planning players are not so frustrated in trying to apply their best talents.

The auto-aim is more of a problem. It could have been fixed.
As it was implemented, the player has only a vague idea of where a missile is going, and can have a game wasted by an errant missile hitting a nearby ledge or wall.
It could have had an indicator (little box on the target, or such) so the player can see which monster is targeted. I don't care for that kind of indicator on all the time, so I would want it to be toggled on and off.
It could have had a switch-target key.
An indicator and/or switch target key could have only applied to missiles, where the auto-aim screw-ups are the most disruptive.
It could have had vertical aiming keys.
I played a game (1979-1980) (mainframe) that had 3d, free-look and used keyboard aiming. It worked well. Keyboard aiming with freelook could be done. It was possible for id to have done better.

Tried Nightmare once. As advertised, it is not fair. Lost interest, so of course I don't read up on it. I would not take it out. I would not describe it as a difficulty level like EASY and HARD, but as added difficulty for the bored.

KISS is a goal for any design. But KISS will also lead to inadequate.
There is a wide gray area around where to stop adding features to any project. It does not matter where you actually stop. For some there will be unused undesirable features, and for some others it will be a few features short. I don't even want to venture into where ZDoom is on that scale, but it proves my point somehow.... That is another reason why I say this is my bug list, make your own.

If every posting in this topic is going to be bashed by someone else, there is little point to it all. None of this is likely to have anything done about it, unless like me you have a Doom engine to modify. Is is really necessary in this Doom world view to attack other peoples ideas so much.
(Some deleted to shorten this thing)

[Lenswot]

I will not say "realism," but significantly increasing the plausibility quotient in Doom would require a ground-up restructuring, I believe. It is totally fake and cartoony as it is, and I like it that way. For 1993 it was probably as plausible as possible, of course, and I was just lucky on that occasion. But whenever somebody tries to alter that in Doom (like with "falling damage" or making me press switches to open doors directly beside them) it just means irritating, irrelevant hassles.
The only remotely recent computer game I have played is skyrim, and in that I am constantly managing my inventory and it gets really boring.

It is not a new concept; I had Adventure on Atari 2600, and that protagonist could only carry one thing at a time. But that protagonist was a square, and it was impressive that the square could carry anything.

[Phml]

Carry-Limit system:
A carry-limit is easy enough they could have given it some consideration. It could have been as simple as having only 4 available weapons.
Would have to drop one to pick up another.

It would not have to be as complicated as RPG games do. Why does the expression of any inventiveness always bring out the extremes in counter-examples?

I understand you don't play modern video games (correct me if I'm wrong?), but this is ridiculous. :) FYI, weapon limit is industry standard in FPS at this point, and it has been so for a good decade. Many of us dislike the trend because we've had ample experience with it and with the associated drawbacks. I think some of the backlash you perceive as opposition to new ideas is actually because these ideas are so widespread in modern shooters people are tired of it.

[Lenswot]

Also worth considering: Doom followed Wolfenstein 3D, which only had 4 weapons. The priority was probably on giving players more weapons than they had before, leaving limiting to future developers, like Raven did in 1995 with Hexen.

[Da Werecat]

wesleyjohnson said:

brain decisions thinking

Complex does not always equals smart. Simple does not always equals dumb.

Food for thought.

[Memfis]

wesleyjohnson said:

If every posting in this topic is going to be bashed by someone else, there is little point to it all. None of this is likely to have anything done about it, unless like me you have a Doom engine to modify. Is is really necessary in this Doom world view to attack other peoples ideas so much.

I feel like that's the problem with this forum as a whole (and I guess with most forums on the internet that grow large enough to not feel like "one big family" anymore). People seem to be mainly interested in "proving" their points of view and making themselves look smarter than other posters, not in simply exchanging thoughts and ideas in a friendly way. So it's a lot more enjoyable to discuss your hobbies with small circles of friends where you know you won't be called a retard over something silly...

[dew]

wesleyjohnson said:

crap

My only comfort is that no one ever is going to listen to your insane advice. You're utterly out of the loop, but do enjoy your solitude.

[june gloom]

Unfortunately the "one big family" thing is a myth. Most anyone who still uses forums in this age of social media tends to be a certain kind of person (almost always male) who has an interest in something that only that forum caters specifically to (in our case, Doom) but is so invested in their vision of it that they become extremely hostile to differing views and that tends to extend to everything else too. Add to this the usual tendency for dudes to assume they're smarter than they really are and assume their beliefs are "common sense", multiply the number of people like this by 20-30, and you've got a recipe for a very toxic forum.

[Da Werecat]

Memfis said:

Yes. Instead of just carrying as much of every type of ammo as possible, you would have to decide whether you want to carry more rockets or, perhaps, shells. That would add some choices.

The downside is that once you're done making these choices and feeling strategic (most of the time without actually knowing what the next encounter is gonna be like), you'll rush into the battle with a limited arsenal that won't allow you to make as many tactical choices.

[scifista42]

dethtoll said:

Unfortunately the "one big family" thing is a myth. Most anyone who still uses forums in this age of social media tends to be a certain kind of person (almost always male) who has an interest in something that only that forum caters specifically to (in our case, Doom) but is so invested in their vision of it that they become extremely hostile to differing views and that tends to extend to everything else too. Add to this the usual tendency for dudes to assume they're smarter than they really are and assume their beliefs are "common sense", multiply the number of people like this by 20-30, and you've got a recipe for a very toxic forum.

I really don't believe that this is true.

[june gloom]

That's fine, you don't have to believe it.

[Xegethra]

It is true...it's lots true.

Take a look at the APB: Reloaded forums....hostile.

I haven't been there in a few months as my interest in the game comes and goes, but it's so easy to piss people off over there. But I can't imagine the hostility has gone away.

It's nothing new I know, internet is internet...but damn, they just need to relax a little.

[purist]

Da Werecat said:

The downside is that once you're done making these choices and feeling strategic (most of the time without actually knowing what the next encounter is gonna be like), you'll rush into the battle with a limited arsenal that won't allow you to make as many tactical choices.

This is my experience of games with a limited inventory. You know you have to drop something with little for-knowledge of what tools are going to be suitable for the next task and you often get the next point of progression poorly equipped causing you to either fail and try again or need to back track to the item you dropped earlier. Not a lot of fun in any case and the strategy involved is not much better than trial and error.

[Lenswot]

In fact, by 1993 we already had old Sierra games to make us regret parting with an item too late to do anything about it.

[Xegethra]

I wouldn't have minded an inventory system for special weapons.

Like if the BFG was a special weapon, and if they made another strong weapon that functions differently, but you can only have the one at a time....I could live with that. But not for normal weapons, it would break up the run and gun ethos too much that Doom was trying to achieve.

[Krazov]

Also, I don't agree that having all weapons was not tactical. Sparing BFG for special occasion is a great example of a tactique.

[scifista42]

Da Werecat said:

The downside is that once you're done making these choices and feeling strategic (most of the time without actually knowing what the next encounter is gonna be like), you'll rush into the battle with a limited arsenal that won't allow you to make as many tactical choices.[/B]

Xegethra said:
[B]...for normal weapons, it would break up the run and gun ethos too much that Doom was trying to achieve.

This, hundred times. "Realistic-like" limiting player's weapons (and therefore limiting his tactical choices) doesn't do well to the gameplay, at all.

[FireFish]

Never_Again said:
I believe this thread is about wrong game design decisions id made. Instead, we have a dozen of pages of ppl picking on level design, engine bugs, perceived monster shortcomings and of other irrelevant noise. It's amazing that it took nine pages and Gez to get to the point. ;)

Game design is not just writing code to shoot at things...
You also need to design the actual levels or world, graphics, monster behavior, graphical style, rules, and more.

[billbuckner]

wesleyjohnson said:

I know it is something that the run and shoot-em players probably would not want to bother with. I would not want it to be a burden for all players. There is this neighbor kid that always goes around with a stick, hitting everything that does not move. I suppose it can be calming in a sense to just bash things (or monsters), turn the brain off, no thinking. I play those kind of computer games too, sometimes.

But this is my bug list, not yours. Which weapon to carry is one of the few things that a strategic player can really make decisions about and I do miss that. The amount of thinking required by most of the level maps is not giving me much exercise. I recognize that thinking is something that some player styles do not want to engage in. Can you recognize that some play styles would welcome some more places to apply thinking?

That's your problem. You're equating the extra decisions a player would have to make with a carry-limit with "thinking", and you're going on to say that any player who isn't using a carry-limit system (which seems to include every Doom player, ever), isn't "thinking". Ask someone who does slaughtermaps which emphasize positioning, choreography, and crowd-control if they aren't "thinking". Shit, ask anyone who plays .wads more difficult than the IWADs if they aren't "thinking". There are absolutely decisions you have to make in Doom on a split-second, nearly constant-basis, and making the wrong one can frequently have instant negative feedback. Doom already has "thinking". The game would require more thinking with a carry-limit, but "more thinking" isn't necessarily a positive in game design- and thinking that it is leads to feature creep. Any game feature can be justified by saying that it makes the game more complex- the challenge in good design is knowing exactly when to stop.

[Gez]

Just because a game has very simple rules doesn't mean that it cannot be extremely complex. Look at go. The rules are extremely simple: on your turn, you place a stone of your color anywhere you want. If a stone or group of stones of one color is entirely encircled by the other color, they are removed from the board. That's it. Everything else emerges from that. Go is not, however, a game devoid of strategic and tactical planning.

You could have a more complicated go where stones have different properties depending on their shape and their position on the grid and on how long they've stayed there or whatever. It certainly would make the game more complex; but would it make it more thoughtful?

[MajorRawne]

Krazov said:

Also, I don't agree that having all weapons was not tactical. Sparing BFG for special occasion is a great example of a tactique.

Hanging onto your biggest gun for when you really need it is hardly a masterpiece of tactical planning.

I don't think id got this wrong, it just seems strange at first glance: they left out some "advanced" features of Wolfenstein like the replay cam and the sliding walls, or anything that might have given the gameplay an rpg or stroyline element. It may be that this was the best thing to do. Doom is you against them, anything else might have complicated gameplay and broken the immersion. Doom grabs hold of you and never lets go, not even when you're finished playing and you've got a mortgage and a family of your own and you think you've moved on.

Regardless of whatever else they might have buggered up, they got Doom right. Few other games have been so focused, so committed, and I guess that's why no-one will be playing Halo 3 or Modern Warfare 2 in twenty years, but people will hopefully still be playing Doom.

[Lenswot]

The sliding walls looked messed up if seen from angles other than the one you pushed them from, so including them possibly would have messed with the multiplayer mode, in addition to the controlled environments necessary for them to work properly perhaps seeming too obvious in the more open, less rigid doom world.
Apart from the icon of sin, there is no interactive object in doom that you can walk behind and see to be a sham, and even that requires cheating.

[Xegethra]

billbuckner said:

That's your problem. You're equating the extra decisions a player would have to make with a carry-limit with "thinking", and you're going on to say that any player who isn't using a carry-limit system (which seems to include every Doom player, ever), isn't "thinking". Ask someone who does slaughtermaps which emphasize positioning, choreography, and crowd-control if they aren't "thinking". Shit, ask anyone who plays .wads more difficult than the IWADs if they aren't "thinking". There are absolutely decisions you have to make in Doom on a split-second, nearly constant-basis, and making the wrong one can frequently have instant negative feedback. Doom already has "thinking". The game would require more thinking with a carry-limit, but "more thinking" isn't necessarily a positive in game design- and thinking that it is leads to feature creep. Any game feature can be justified by saying that it makes the game more complex- the challenge in good design is knowing exactly when to stop.

Yeah really, there is already thinking and planning in Doom, it is just a different type of thinking and planning than what he wants.