Post Your Opinions About Doom (Whether Controversial or Not)

[Muusi]

Bobby Prince's music isn't all that great. Sign of Evil is the only legitimately good track from the classic games.

[BigBeanDotGov]

I think Doomguy is left handed

[Megalyth]

2 minutes ago, BigBeanDotGov said:

I think Doomguy is left handed

 

Flynn Taggart is left-handed in the novels, which are absolutely canon and anyone who disagrees is objectively wrong. 

[roadworx]

13 hours ago, Muusi said:

Bobby Prince's music isn't all that great. Sign of Evil is the only legitimately good track from the classic games.

i mean, he made some other good stuff as well. into sandy's city, suspense, opening to hell, and demons on the prey are all pretty good

 

 

but yeah most of his work in doom was pretty meh

[TheMightyHeracross]

Most of his Doom 1 songs are bangers. But Doom 2 has a lot of duds.

[Kyka]

19 hours ago, Scypek2 said:

 

It could've made it better, it could've made it worse, it could vary wildly depending on how it's implemented. One inherent downside would be adding another button to the mix... unless they just worked like they do in Strife. I can see some potential alterations to weapons that wouldn't upset the balance too much...

 

Without giving it too much thought, a few useful implementations of an alt fire might be

 

1)mega damage mode on the chainsaw, with the drawback that you might break it and render it useless for a time?

2)fast firing pistol but at much worse accuracy, (which of course the pistol already has built in terrible accuracy.)

3)fast firing chaingun but at higher ammo consumption

4)rapid fire rocket launcher with bigger blast radius, but it uses double ammo

5)a shotgun that can DONTYOUDARETOUCHMYSHOTGUNSYOUF*****GHERETIC -editor

[DisgruntledPorcupine]

Agreed that the Doom 1 soundtrack is good, it's even grown on me a bit lately for whatever reason. But most of the Doom 2 soundtrack sounds like Bobby Prince was suffering from writer's block.

[Koko Ricky]

I agree. Video game soundtracks are a regular part of my music listening repertoire, yet neither Doom nor Doom 2 ever come up. They're iconic compositions for sure...but as far as MIDI metal goes, Bobby Prince did a far better job with Duke Nukem 2. 

[omx32x]

3 hours ago, GoatLord said:

I agree. Video game soundtracks are a regular part of my music listening repertoire, yet neither Doom nor Doom 2 ever come up. They're iconic compositions for sure...but as far as MIDI metal goes, Bobby Prince did a far better job with Duke Nukem 2. 

i feel like thats because they told him to copy metal songs instead of creating his own he did some amazing work on other games but here he wasnt given a reason to shiny still i do listem to some doom songs from time to time shawn got the shotgun into dooms gate and into sandy city

[Cacofish]

I don't like Doom 64, not terrible or anything. Just never really liked it

[DollarStoreChili]

I don't like how early id games do secret walls. Running around pressing use on bits of unassuming wall is frustrating, annoying, boring, and tantamount to busy work. Maybe it's just my current playthrough of Wolf 3d driving me insane, but I think it's boring. It destroys the pacing of the game.

 

An example of a recent game that does secrets in a way I like is amid evil. Secret passages are hidden under staircases, behind decorations, within level geometry, or simply right behind you as you enter a new area. That kind of system engages the player in a way secret walls don't imo.

 

I understand this is perhaps a limitation of the early engines and could be remedied by later titles or player created content, but I still hate secret walls.

[Cacofish]

On 7/6/2021 at 4:02 PM, DisgruntledPorcupine said:

Agreed that the Doom 1 soundtrack is good, it's even grown on me a bit lately for whatever reason. But most of the Doom 2 soundtrack sounds like Bobby Prince was suffering from writer's block.

yeah defintely not as good

[The_MártonJános]

I earlier talked about TNT's Hanger having anticlimactic moments, but in hindsight, TNT actually appears to have those all over.

- MAP17 is a complex with a fairly good balance of indoor and outdoor sections, most of the latter being secrets (they definitely took a leaf out of Romero's book on this one) and a really good progression overall. And then there's a set of red bars in the middle of a corridor revealing an exit switch which is not even in a separate room. Regardless of how inventive it could feel in 1996, I still find this solution kinda rushed and/or lazy. Oh well.

- MAP21, a.k.a. "the big boi of Evilution" as Decino would put it. Large and somewhat confusing, this increasingly Hellish complex would take us somewhere else into a huge yard of semi-threatening, yet lengthy fights, which would end with... pressing a pillar with EXIT signs on. Yawn.

- MAP29. Going through a curvy, bloody Hell tunnel would eventually bring us to the initial marble facade, something to rival E4M6 in its aesthetic. Taking one path in the brick crossroads leads us to the core complex of interconnected marble rooms, which might not have aged that well, but again, were marvelous by 1996 standards. Then the red door would come at the other end of the other pathway, and the level would just become dull and unremarkable thereafter visuals-wise. The ending fights and ambushes play fairly well, but that's hardly any consolation.

There might be some more, but currently only these come to mind. Might update as the list goes on.

[baja blast rd.]

Wads like BTSX, Eviternity, and Ancient Aliens -- the sort of wad people commonly think of as "ultra polished and sleek and professional" and associate with certain specific gameplay styles (if you've followed The Doom Discourse, you know what I mean) -- aren't as commonplace or normative as many people think, and aren't "the modern trend." 

 

What's true of wads like Valiant is that they have become exceptionally visible, compared to even other great wads like Lost Civilization, Nihility, Dimension of the Boomed, Preacher, Three is a Crowd, No End in Sight, Rowdy Rudy 2 (and all of those aren't even obscure either). And that visibility can make them look more common to any individual observer: it's easy to have all the Blockbusters at the tip of one's tongue, but it takes a lot more familiarity with everything for one person to name even a quarter of the highly praised wads that are about as well known as, say, Comatose or Legacy of Heroes -- much less be able to rattle them all off easily. 

 

The thrust is that the common notion that "these days everyone is making ultra-polished run 'n' gun wads," which is often accompanied with feelings of "that isn't my thing -- modern Doom isn't for me," is generally untrue, the product of (reasonable) observation bias. 

[Doomkid]

You kiddin'?! Each and every single-map release I see on these forums would fit 100% perfectly smack-dab in the middle of Ancient Aliens! Can't throw a stone without hitting an AA, BTSX or Eviternity-like map!!

 

 

This is absolutely a joke, the vast majority of single-map, "babies first wad" or otherwise small-scale releases I see these days are much more of the "offshoot of Doom 1 or Doom 2" variety, though there's obviously some inspiration from other common wads, and Plutonia inspiration in terms of gameplay does seem to be at an all-time high compared to the rest of Doom history. (Grr...)

You do see a fair few OTEX wads these days as well, might account for some of the idea that Eviternity is "the new norm" (it isn't). Compared to the "classically Doomy" stuff though, they're still a tiny minority.

Even the nu-era UDMF maps I see from people new to the craft tend to often be grounded in tropes introduced by Doom 1 and 2.

Edited July 8, 2021 by Doomkid

[baja blast rd.]

Another one of these "meta" things...

First, two subpoints: 

 

1) These days, there are more than a dozen genres or schools of Doom, or whatever you want to call them, that are active and productive. It's really a lot. Each of them holds a minority of Doom wads. Some of these are areas of specialty that have gotten very good at appealing to the people who like them -- sometimes at the expense of appealing as much to people who don't or would be more on the fence. (I think that is fine.) 

 

2) Something I've noticed is that people are prone to lumping together multiple styles they either don't like or aren't deeply knowledgeable about based on apparent similarities (while finding the nuances and differences of styles they do like). A common one is that Sunlust and Ancient Aliens are "slaughtery things with bright colors" -- when they are very different and belong to very different mapping approaches in most ways. This one is very natural, because it takes a lot of Doom playing time to investigate stuff you don't like as deeply as what you do. 

 

When you combine these is when it gets hairy. 

 

The effect is that people with more specialized tastes -- for example, someone who likes Doom 2 / DTWID-likes a lot, as well as the principles of design they emphasize, but not most other things, which tend to emphasize other principles -- sometimes end up feeling that their preferred wads are uncommon. And at the same time, they feel the 3-4 modes they do dislike are each way more common (because they see it as a few, but it's actually a lot more than that). This can even happen in very contradictory ways. People who really like slaughter and challenge wads sometimes end up thinking that everything else has no gameplay, and people who really like chiller oldschool exploration wads sometimes end up thinking that everyone else is unnecessarily gung-ho about slaughter and challenge. But the effect is unfortunate because a lot of different people end up feeling their preferences are marginalized in favor of others. 

 

The reality is that all mapping schools are definitionally a minority, and most players who aren't somewhat omnivorous -- by which you might define as "can like multiple mapping approaches, and sometimes ones that are in direct opposition" -- are in that boat when it comes to modern releases, and no one set of preferences tends to be pushed to the side *that much* more than others. (That is an oversimplification because many wads do have cross-genre appeal / accessibility, which people who "don't normally like that kind of thing" often enjoy. But in my observation it generally holds.) 

 

I think one solution is more "specialty" recommendation lists: 

 

A big OP in a forum thread where someone says, "Hey, I love cryptic Doom, so here are 20-30 great wads over the years that have an emphasis on tricky navigation and secret hunting, with my brief reviews about why," or "I tend to prefer easy mapsets, and don't care as much about when they came out or what they look like, so here are a bunch I've played that I thought were especially fun," or "Hi all I like my wads with horniness so--"

 

...is sure going to be more useful to people with specialty tastes than a big, more assorted list, even if that big assorted list is good at explaining where every wad on it is situated. They would be useful also to omnivores who can refer to them to try out specific styles they are in the mood for. 

[Doomkid]

As someone who's a big fan of lists and charts, it would be interesting to break down all the different elements that maps are made of, and see exactly which wads feature what elements or "ingredients". The problem with this idea is that there's just so many things you could break down any map by..

 

What kind of texturing does this map use? Only vanilla textures? Or custom textures that are "muted" like Doom's, but still "mostly fit in"? Or does it feature a lot of fancy and/or bright textures, well beyond the themes present in stock Doom/Doom2?

 

What kind of challenge does this map present in terms of layout? Is it a high exploratory map? Is there a lot of back tracking, switch hunting, secrets? Is the progression more basic/straightforward? Is it long, short or "medium" length?

 

How about in terms of combat? Is it a slaughter map? A map that's not slaughter, but still quite hard due to resource deprivation? Or could the difficulty be described as "never harder than Doom 2 at it's hardest"? Or maybe it's downright easy, on part with KDITD?

 

What features does this map use, and what ports does it target? Is this a vanilla map that uses no extra features? A boom map that has some use of special stuff like deep water? Or is it a UDMF/Doom-in-Hexen map targeting GZDoom, LZDoom and/or Zandronum? Or perhaps Eternity? Even if so, how prominent is usage of "non vanilla" features?

 

Does this wad/map feature modified guns or enemies? If so, are they modified in a vanilla compatible way (DeHacked), Boom and/or MBF compatible way (BEX) or in a way that requires a ZDoom-based port, like DECORATE? Are the changes very subtle, trying to stay closely in like with the original assets, or are they stark alterations?

 

 

...Considering all the different potential answers to these "key" questions one might have about a map, it's really no surprise that the concept of "uniformity in Doom modding" is an idea that would make that vast majority of mappers and modders chuckle due to how foreign of a concept it is.

 

I do think, however, that if answers are provided to all 5 of those questions when someone asks "what kind of wad is X", they'll very likely know whether or not it's something that may potentially appeal to their tastes.

 

(Forgive me if the wording or intent is unclear with any of this, I literally just started blabbing these thoughts as they came to me after reading rd's post..) Edit: Added another qualifier.

Edited July 8, 2021 by Doomkid

[Omniarch]

12 hours ago, rd. said:

1) These days, there are more than a dozen genres or schools of Doom, or whatever you want to call them, that are active and productive. It's really a lot. Each of them holds a minority of Doom wads. Some of these are areas of specialty that have gotten very good at appealing to the people who like them -- sometimes at the expense of appealing as much to people who don't or would be more on the fence. (I think that is fine.) 

I would be very interested in knowing what those 12+ genres are. Would you mind elaborating on this? If not here (for fear of derail) then via DM or something to that effect?

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Most maps can be improved by feedback on what segments players loved and what segments they really hated. This is generally not a problem in bigger projects with more testers but smaller ones need more love as well.

[Doomkid]

6 minutes ago, Omniarch said:

I would be very interested in knowing what those 12+ genres are. Would you mind elaborating on this? If not here (for fear of derail) then via DM or something to that effect?

 

Not to speak on rd's behalf, I look forward to her own answer, but I think the "12+ genres" thing is a reference to just how many combinations of "elements" a map/wad can have.

 

Based on my little ramble above, even within the realm of a vanilla-compatible wad, you could have a level with:

• super snazzy decked-out fancy new textures

• a straigthforward layout

• slaughter gameplay

• modified DeHacked guns out the wazoo

 

...and, despite both being vanilla-compat slaughermaps, it would be wrong to say it's the same genre as a map that has:

• plain vanilla doom textures

• a super-cryptic layout and progression the likes of which puts Memento Mori 1 to shame

• plain vanilla weapons and monsters

 

..Basically, given all the combos possible, there would have to be upwards of a dozen "genres" (imo genre is as good a word as any to describe flavors of Doom maps)

[Omniarch]

12 hours ago, Doomkid said:

good point

I think this is the root of our little difinitional issue:

 

There are many vectors along which one can distinguish wads from eachother, and all of these things have a nasty habit of overlapping in complex ways, resulting in a 'depth issue', so to speak, where, order to categorize maps by genre, you almost have to 'flatten' the overlap onto a two dimensional plane, for lack of a better metaphor, resulting in the loss of crucial distinctions.

 

Basically, the way we define genre (in general, beyond Doom) is reductive and fails to take into account the many axes of interaction.

[yakfak]

would like to see doomwads get metatagged instead of rated tbh (need to find which of the wads are the horny ones giggle)

 

metatags like puzzle, arcade, challenge etc

plus metametatags like "recommended to all new doomers whether or not it's a good idea"

[Kyka]

On 7/1/2021 at 4:46 AM, BedrockCastle said:

The Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind are really underwhelming in every instance of their existence in both Ultimate Doom and Doom 2. They're all ridiculously easy to dispose of.

 

The enemies are hard to fight in theory, but their placement in all the levels is just not a challenge, even on UV.

 

The cyberdemon massacred me on sight, with its first salvo, when we first met back in 1994. For me as a young man, it was one of the most terrifying and vivid memories of this game. 

 

Strafing?  In 1994? lol. It sure wasn't universal back then. Try fighting the cyberdemon without it.

 

See, everyone who plays Doom now is by definition, elite. Not necessarily in terms of sheer physical skill, but they surely are in terms of knowledge about the game and its mechanics and monsters. We are literally elite compared to the average doomer back then. Of course the Cyberdemon is easy now. But it wasn't then. And then is when it was designed for.

 

The cyberdemon is like a german tiger tank from world war 2. Terrifying and tough, it outclassed other tanks and dominated the battlefields of its day. But now it is a slow, useless antique, effortlessly outclassed by our infra red sensors and our missiles and our modern tanks, guns and mobile infantry. Both the tiger and the cyberdemon had this in common. Interestingly enough, neither of them fire while moving.

 

[edit] @BedrockCastle Forgive me if this post came off as a little lecture-ish to you. Not intended. I was just using your post to make a couple of points that occurred to me in response. Cheers. :)

Edited July 8, 2021 by bLOCKbOYgAMES

[roadworx]

16 hours ago, bLOCKbOYgAMES said:

 

The cyberdemon massacred me on sight, with its first salvo, when we first met back in 1994. For me as a young man, it was one of the most terrifying and vivid memories of this game. 

 

Strafing?  In 1994? lol. It sure wasn't universal back then. Try fighting the cyberdemon without it.

 

See, everyone who plays Doom now is by definition, elite. Not necessarily in terms of sheer physical skill, but they surely are in terms of knowledge about the game and its mechanics and monsters. We are literally elite compared to the average doomer back then. Of course the Cyberdemon is easy now. But it wasn't then. And then is when it was designed for.

 

The cyberdemon is like a german tiger tank from world war 2. Terrifying and tough, it outclassed other tanks and dominated the battlefields of its day. But now it is a slow, useless antique, effortlessly outclassed by our infra red sensors and our missiles and our modern tanks, guns and mobile infantry. Both the tiger and the cyberdemon had this in common. Interestingly enough, neither of them fire while moving.

 

[edit] @BedrockCastle Forgive me if this post came off as a little lecture-ish to you. Not intended. I was just using your post to make a couple of points that occurred to me in response. Cheers. :)

strafing was absolutely universal back then, keyboard users just used the alt key (unless they didn't know strafing was a thing ofc). if you mean circlestrafing then that's true; however, circlestrafing isn't actually required to dodge cyber rockets. you just need to sidestep is all, though i will admit that that's a bit harder to learn the timing of than it is to learn simple circlestrafing.

 

also, if you're gonna compare any of doom's enemies to the tiger tank, i think the smm would work better: a slow, bulky hunk of metal that people quickly learned to easily kill and is pretty much never used well, even if it seemed intimidating at first ;)

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Keyboard setup definitely makes it easier though. The original strafing buttons were way out of reach and you had the horrible turn buttons in their place.

[Kyka]

I agree that strafing was absolutely universal, I mean it was coded into the original game. But its usage wasn't universal. I know a couple of friends from back in the early days, whose method of strafing was to turn sideways and then move forwards. 

 

I mean lol, hardly a strategy that Zero Master is gonna start using as he rips and tears his way through Doom Eternal, but hey, we worked with what we had.

 

On another note, I, somehow was the first to start using a mouse among all my friends. Guess who started winning every deathmatch ever, for a while there at least.

Edited July 9, 2021 by bLOCKbOYgAMES

[P41R47]

On 7/8/2021 at 3:53 AM, rd. said:

Wads like BTSX, Eviternity, and Ancient Aliens -- the sort of wad people commonly think of as "ultra polished and sleek and professional" and associate with certain specific gameplay styles (if you've followed The Doom Discourse, you know what I mean) -- aren't as commonplace or normative as many people think, and aren't "the modern trend." 

 

What's true of wads like Valiant is that they have become exceptionally visible, compared to even other great wads like Lost Civilization, Nihility, Dimension of the Boomed, Preacher, Three is a Crowd, No End in Sight, Rowdy Rudy 2 (and all of those aren't even obscure either). And that visibility can make them look more common to any individual observer: it's easy to have all the Blockbusters at the tip of one's tongue, but it takes a lot more familiarity with everything for one person to name even a quarter of the highly praised wads that are about as well known as, say, Comatose or Legacy of Heroes -- much less be able to rattle them all off easily. 

 

The thrust is that the common notion that "these days everyone is making ultra-polished run 'n' gun wads," which is often accompanied with feelings of "that isn't my thing -- modern Doom isn't for me," is generally untrue, the product of (reasonable) observation bias. 

 

On 7/8/2021 at 5:03 AM, rd. said:

Another one of these "meta" things...

First, two subpoints: 

 

1) These days, there are more than a dozen genres or schools of Doom, or whatever you want to call them, that are active and productive. It's really a lot. Each of them holds a minority of Doom wads. Some of these are areas of specialty that have gotten very good at appealing to the people who like them -- sometimes at the expense of appealing as much to people who don't or would be more on the fence. (I think that is fine.) 

 

2) Something I've noticed is that people are prone to lumping together multiple styles they either don't like or aren't deeply knowledgeable about based on apparent similarities (while finding the nuances and differences of styles they do like). A common one is that Sunlust and Ancient Aliens are "slaughtery things with bright colors" -- when they are very different and belong to very different mapping approaches in most ways. This one is very natural, because it takes a lot of Doom playing time to investigate stuff you don't like as deeply as what you do. 

 

When you combine these is when it gets hairy. 

 

The effect is that people with more specialized tastes -- for example, someone who likes Doom 2 / DTWID-likes a lot, as well as the principles of design they emphasize, but not most other things, which tend to emphasize other principles -- sometimes end up feeling that their preferred wads are uncommon. And at the same time, they feel the 3-4 modes they do dislike are each way more common (because they see it as a few, but it's actually a lot more than that). This can even happen in very contradictory ways. People who really like slaughter and challenge wads sometimes end up thinking that everything else has no gameplay, and people who really like chiller oldschool exploration wads sometimes end up thinking that everyone else is unnecessarily gung-ho about slaughter and challenge. But the effect is unfortunate because a lot of different people end up feeling their preferences are marginalized in favor of others. 

 

The reality is that all mapping schools are definitionally a minority, and most players who aren't somewhat omnivorous -- by which you might define as "can like multiple mapping approaches, and sometimes ones that are in direct opposition" -- are in that boat when it comes to modern releases, and no one set of preferences tends to be pushed to the side *that much* more than others. (That is an oversimplification because many wads do have cross-genre appeal / accessibility, which people who "don't normally like that kind of thing" often enjoy. But in my observation it generally holds.) 

 

I think one solution is more "specialty" recommendation lists: 

 

A big OP in a forum thread where someone says, "Hey, I love cryptic Doom, so here are 20-30 great wads over the years that have an emphasis on tricky navigation and secret hunting, with my brief reviews about why," or "I tend to prefer easy mapsets, and don't care as much about when they came out or what they look like, so here are a bunch I've played that I thought were especially fun," or "Hi all I like my wads with horniness so--"

 

...is sure going to be more useful to people with specialty tastes than a big, more assorted list, even if that big assorted list is good at explaining where every wad on it is situated. They would be useful also to omnivores who can refer to them to try out specific styles they are in the mood for. 

can you please continue with this?

One of the few post i found that i totally want to continue reading about :)

 

would you put CPD, mapping and gameplay style, along AA, Valiant and Eviternity?

[Maximum Matt]

The best Icon Of Sin level is Viper from Memento Mori.  

[DollarStoreChili]

Weapon and view bob is distracting

[BedrockCastle]

On 7/8/2021 at 6:44 AM, bLOCKbOYgAMES said:

Strafing?  In 1994? lol. It sure wasn't universal back then. Try fighting the cyberdemon without it.

As roadworx said, strafing was certainly a very common practice even back in '94. I mean, sure, if it's your first time facing the Cyberdemon I suppose it makes sense to get decimated once or twice, but after that, you learn to just press Alt.