Why do people still mod Doom?

[Necr0n0m]

Doom means a lot to me, being the first PC game I ever played through. It is remarkable that a game that's over 23 years old still resonates with gamers and users continue to create mods to this day.

 

If you yourself make mods for Doom, please let me know what your main motivation is, or what got you into modding Doom in the first place. Also, let me know how long you've been modding Doom for. I'd be particularly interested to see how many of you were modding in the 90's or early 00's and are still producing content today.

 

Feel free to showcase anything you've created or are currently working on!

 

Cheers

Edited April 13, 2017 by Necr0n0m

[UnholyShadows]

I personally Find modding doom to be fun and if people enjoy my creation's then that brings me even greater joy.  Doom modding is also great experience if you want to eventually dip your toes into the game creation waters.

[Gerardo194]

To me is a passion modding Doom, not only for myself but for the entire Doom community as well. One of my motivation is when I played Doom on Snes all day, I used to have "nightmares" about new monsters, new levels, new bosses, so I always wished to make my own Doom levels which I haven't managed well but my brothers. We are currently working on some good projects that I hope they can be finish this year.

[ranhcase]

I map for Doom 'cause it's fun, and it's something i can do and improve on.

Also because it's easy and simple, and once you get the technical part, all else you'll need it's your own ideas

[Jaxxoon R]

I just like to create weird little realms. It may start out as abstract shapes, but as I build I like to imagine what it could be, who made it, and for what reason. I must've started modding sometime in 2011. I was pretty young then and my memory isn't the best, so I can't recall the exact sequence of events that lead me here (it's odd to think there was a time when I didn't do this). But I think what spurred my interest was seeing YouTube videos of things like Doomsday model packs, SRB2 being run in a Skulltag netgame, and Chubzdoomer's mapping tutorials (and then eventually seeing all the neat Zdoom levels). I'd already modded Mario World for quite a bit prior to this, so the method of creating custom levels was somewhat easy to grasp. Somewhat. I remember the whole sector thing being really weird at first.

[LordShadowZ]

For me, modding for Doom is one of the first steps I'm taking to try to do something more with my life long passion for video games. Doom is a very simple game to learn how to create maps for and the only real limitations are what's in my imagination. The simplicity of the editor allows me to design whatever kind of level I want. I can experiment and quickly iterate and the more I tinker the more I can learn about good game design elements. Making Doom maps is the most fun I've had in all of my game design experiments because it's simple, elegant, and because Doom is still one of the best games ever made. Hopefully someday I'll be able to show this community what I've been working on, but I still have a lot more work to do.

[Combinebobnt]

rofl doom modding as a dissertation

 

doom is already good game and it is easy as hell to mod with all the tools. thats pretty much the bottom line without the fluff

[Angry Saint]

Probably already mentioned above, but:

 

1) it is a good game - it has no sense modding for a crape game.

2) even if you use only iwad resources, you can still obtain a good mod. Even in Vanilla Doom.

3) it is easy to mod - with a relatively small effort you can learn to create something completely new. And you can add a lot of new resources.

4) there is a large and nice comunity which can provide help and suggestions if you want to improve yourself.

 

On the other side I've found that sometime the community can be quite stiffen on some gameplay positions which I don't like.

 

I joined the doomworld forum in 2005, but with another account. I left for a short period and came back in 2015 as Angry Saint.

[MFG38]

To me, the biggest factor in my Doom modding has always been the ease and accessibility of modding the game, namely because of the WAD file format. Add the numerous source ports and you have practically limitless possibilities. That's why I love Doom modding.

[Marlamir]

People love Doom mostly because of community which is unstopable and still deliver stuff, many of these stuff are actualy better then paid games. So people can have tons of fun for free and with the amount of sourceports you have limitless possibilities. Doom is also easy and fun to edit. when you see how people creating their own stuff to doom, yourself going to say "hey lets make something too"

[Xegethra]

2 hours ago, Combinebobnt said:

rofl doom modding as a dissertation

 

doom is already good game and it is easy as hell to mod with all the tools. thats pretty much the bottom line without the fluff

This pretty much, the gameplay still holds up to this day, the default game is still fun, coupled with the ease of modding it to expand or alter the gameplay. It has managed to stay with us because with those tools, people can make some neat stuff for an already neat game.

Edited March 16, 2017 by Xegethra
Running on sentence...no good.

[Lila Feuer]

What others said, the relative ease of modding especially with DECORATE which is great for people like me who know jack all about code and the easy to use Doom Builder editors make it very user friendly to dabble in one's creativity and see results fast, making it a joy for newcomers to discover and play with.

As for anything when it comes to actually making truly quality stuff it still takes a lot of dedication, patience and time and willingness to learn new tricks, but the hard work pays off satisfyingly.

It's a game that a lot of us have been intimately familiar with for many years of our lives and to this day we still use Doom in numerous ways to represent our artistic sides and visions, all thanks to the engine being time-proofed solid, the addictive gameplay being there from the start, and the tools available today to make our job very convenient.

[riderr3]

Because it's pretty abstract game. And sources are released, this makes things very different...

[Argent Agent]

10 hours ago, Combinebobnt said:

rofl doom modding as a dissertation

 

doom is already good game and it is easy as hell to mod with all the tools. thats pretty much the bottom line without the fluff

This. Why not make the game even more fun and do something different with it at the same time without needing to read a manual?

[Jon]

I've been modding Doom since the mid-to-late 90's, but I'm nowhere near as prolific as many people who have been working that long. When I try to explain the appeal of Doom to people now, particularly the appeal to Doom back in the 90's, I try to compare it to Minecraft today: it was like a 3D sandbox, you could create your own worlds, there was nothing quite like it. Honestly (like Minecraft) the weapons and monsters are largely secondary (to me) versus the ability to imagine and build architectural wonders. It (was) like Lego, in a computer.

 

The appeal of Doom *today*, versus other engines, is IMHO that it's pretty easy to create interesting things, fast. For mapping, If you look at creating content for 3D games, even Quake which is similarly old in relative terms, it takes a *lot* of effort. I sometimes look at how complex interesting Doom maps are in vertex/line terms and they don't need to be crazy. You can be quite expressive with relatively little.

 

For me personally (and perhaps no-one else), there are also avenues that are not much explored that I think doom is suited to. I work on something called WadC, which builds doom maps out of a functional language called "wad language".  It can do this because we can conceptualise 2D space in code quite easily: It's like LOGO, or CAD, etc. -- doing so in 3D is much, much harder. (though not impossible, I think there are some cool things achieved with Processing). and I think there are interesting avenues to explore with this that haven't been done yet, in any game.

[printz]

I mod Doom pretty much due to nurture. All which I do for DOOM is based on stuff I wanted to do during childhood, which I'm finally capable of.

[esselfortium]

Doom utterly captivated my interest when I was a kid, and it still hasn't let go. For me, it had the perfect combination of enticing worlds to explore and the ability to create my own, the latter of which was something I always looked for in other games, but I never found anything else that gave me as much power to create so easily. Even though I had no real ability to speak of at the time, the possibilities felt truly limitless and inspiring.

 

As a teenager I started getting more seriously involved in the Doom community, playing wads and trying to get better at making my own. In the process, I learned the ins and outs of the game, and even though I'm still far from being a great player, there's a comfortable familiarity to it that makes playing a Doom wad just feel like home.

 

Doom has been taken in so many amazing directions over the years (and there are so many more still untapped!) that playing and making stuff for Doom is just this endless playground of creative possibilities. Doom's excellent base gameplay is versatile enough, and its editing possibilities are powerful enough, to allow authors' personalities to show through in their work while also being simple in just the right ways to make it easy to quickly create cool stuff for.

 

The Doom community itself is a big part of why I've stuck around for so long, too -- this place is full of awesome people. I've made lots of wonderful friends here, to collaborate and exchange work with and just to talk and goof around with.

[pavera]

Damn essel, that post makes me want to map again.

[Job]

Doom was a compelling game when it was new. It still is, for a number of reasons that have been described.

But the number one reason why? 
 

The community.

No further clarification is necessary. Look at some of the responses in this thread for supporting material. We mod and map, because of, and for each other.

[fraggle]

I've come to believe that Doom sits in something like a "sweet spot" of technology vs. moddability. FPS games are on a treadmill of ever-improving graphics technology; the transition from Wolf3D -> Doom -> Quake was probably one of the biggest historical steps in terms of technological advancements.

 

Something like Wolf3D is very moddable - it's easy to change textures, making a new level is a matter of filling in boxes in a grid, all the enemies are sprites that can be redrawn by an amateur in MS paint if they want. But modding Wolf3D isn't a very attractive proposition. It's a good game but personally I find it has very limited replay value - the gameplay is very repetitive, it's hard to imagine making anything new with it that hasn't been done before. It's a limitation of the technology itself and the kinds of levels and gameplay you can build with it.

 

By comparison something like Quake is "true 3D" and in theory therefore adds a lot of flexibility to what you can build with it. But the flexibility comes at a cost - check out this video of a Quake level editor for example. Suddenly you need a three-perspective view of the thing you're building to be effective. You can argue that things like using 3D models instead of sprites provide a similar barrier to entry. Anyone can draw sprites in MS paint; making a 3D model is much harder. Despite this, Quake was still a very popular target for modding, but interest in modding it certainly appears to have waned over time. We've also seen interest in modding games in general dissipate as technology has improved.

 

By comparison Doom sits neatly between the two - you have an engine that's advanced enough for you to build interesting architectures and experiment with alternative/new types of gameplay, but at the same time it's primitive enough that any idiot with a bit of spare time can learn to mod it. Simple things are simple; hard things are still possible. Making levels is a simple matter of drawing lines on a 2D plane. Every texture, sprite, weapon, UI graphic, etc. is an image that can be trivially changed or replaced by someone with no specialized artistic abilities. Even stuff like replacing sound effects and music is trivial, and modern source ports have made it orders of magnitude simpler than it once was: just download some stuff off the Internet and put it in your WAD.

[GooberMan]

I might be biased considering my career, but making Prime Directive was frustrating from an architectural perspective since I could not just lay out my levels in true 3D. Of course, that's ZDoom specific.

 

Having said that, I find that going back to Doom every now and then to be a natural vent, where I try and do something interesting with severe limitations. I also find it rather odd that a community once dedicated to pushing the envelope has become increasingly conservative over the years.

[esselfortium]

13 minutes ago, GooberMan said:

I might be biased considering my career, but making Prime Directive was frustrating from an architectural perspective since I could not just lay out my levels in true 3D. Of course, that's ZDoom specific.

 

Having said that, I find that going back to Doom every now and then to be a natural vent, where I try and do something interesting with severe limitations. I also find it rather odd that a community once dedicated to pushing the envelope has become increasingly conservative over the years.

I think it depends partially on how you define "pushing the envelope". Speaking purely on mapping (because I'm not very familiar with other sorts of mods) there seems to be much less fascination with shiny new features as compared with the mid-2000s, but designers have been pushing the envelope in a lot of other ways in recent years with their architecture, theming, and gameplay directions. Wads like Sunlust or Ancient Aliens (just to pick two easy recent examples) might not be using new ZDoomy features to create their vision, but they're still a progression from the works that came before them.

[Quagsire]

Classic DOOM is like that one game where everyone wants to start out with. It teaches you all the ropes of most FPS games, and it teaches you how to create great content for the community easier than most other games.

[Bauul]

For me personally, Doom has always appealed because unlike many modern games it presents a kind of organic system of play.  I've seen it described as like watching an ant hill, and I can see the comparison.  

 

As a mapper, I just love the purity of the setup.  A physical space of genuine presence, into which you release a player and a hundred (thousand) monsters, and let nature take its course.  No overly-controlling set pieces, no specially scripted encounters, there's a purity to it that really resonates with me.  

 

It's why Doom levels can work everything from tiny, intense encounters to giant, sprawling, non-linear marathons. There's a joy to the physical space of a Doom level lost in modern games where the physical geometry is simple and invisible and everything you can see is just window-dressing.  

 

The only modern game I've played that really gave the same sense of the world being this physical presence you're navigating through is Dark Souls.  

[Decay]

Active solicitation of responses from subjects for research = research ethics time

 

What exactly is your project and what are you hoping to gain in (what seems to be) a very short time?

What do you intend to do with information posted here?

Can users contact you or your supervisor if they have questions?

Does posting here automatically assume authorization for data collection?

Can users retract their statements if you quote them?

Are you going to change any names of users you quote?

For those you do quote, do you have an ethics form for them to sign?

Do you have REB clearance to actively solicit subjects?

 

In before "public domain"

 

Public domain only stands if you don't actively solicit subjects.

[mrthejoshmon]

I find it to be the best mix of easy to do + in depth enough.

[LexiMax]

You can crank out a map in minutes and have it detailed and playtested in a matter of days, compared to weeks or months in modern games.

 

Also, I find the actual moment to moment combat in the game to be incredibly fun, especially against other players.

[Reisal]

For fun and because of how easy it is to mod it.

[Doomkid]

I first played Doom when I was maybe 3-4 years old. It was love at first sight. By age 6 I was downloading wads off the interwebs, by age 8 I was tinkering with wad editing, by age 10 I was pretty much able to map.

 

I don't produce maps nearly as often as I used to, mainly because of full time work, but I'm in my mid 20's and my Doom love hasn't wavered even partially in all this time.

 

When you start doing something at such a young age, particularly something you love, it almost becomes a part of you. I know that sounds kinda stupid and cheesy, but it's simply the truth!

 

This is all not to mention the over-2-decades-old community that has always been there to help with mapping, modding, playing, etc etc. There's not only new maps, but new weapons, enemies and source ports out the wazoo. Multiplayer in Doom is still a big thing, massive staying power compared to other games this old.

 

There's about a million reasons I started mapping and still do years later, but hopefully between what others have posted and my little shpeel above you can glean the most important contributing factors :)

 

(oh also modern wad editing tools are 999x better than the shit we had to use in the early 00s! The thing is though, even those crummy old programs were useful in their heyday and were arguably the biggest thing that laued down a foundation for a community to be built on - that and the growing popularity of the internets in the mid 90s)

[DooM_RO]

Not sure about myself. I poured a lot of time and dedication into my latest WAD and no one seems to care. Not sure why I should bother anymore.

 

This is my WAD

 

 

Edited March 17, 2017 by DooM_RO