SECOND OPINION: The Flawed, Outdated, Not-Very-Fun Original Doom

[RUSH]

52 minutes ago, Linguica said:

People are allowed to disagree with you, you know.

This is very, very ironic coming from you Linguica.

[Linguica]

1 hour ago, RUSH said:

This is very, very ironic coming from you Linguica.

It's actually not, at all.

[Jaxxoon R]

I disagree with you.

[Unholypimp1n]

I actually kind of agree with this guy.  Doom2 was more fun to play over and over than doom1.  I remember playing through doom2 hundreds of times as a kid where as when I played doom 1 I really only played it once or twice then went back to playing doom 2 with my friends.  

 

Doom 1 to me felt more like a story where as doom2 felt like it was made purely for fun.  True doom 1 looks more realistic but doom2 has more fun gimmiks that I find myself playing through over and over.

[40oz]

30 minutes ago, Linguica said:

It's actually not, at all.

There he is!

[Blastfrog]

He gets a few details wrong, but the gist of it is actually pretty well thought-out. Even as one of the people who prefer Doom 1, I know it's the objectively inferior game. I just happen to like it for different reasons, I like the way it tries to tell a story with more cohesive aesthetics and atmosphere.

 

One thing nobody ever talks about is the way that the Jaguar mapset is actually more polished than the PC mapset. There are a good number of gameplay changes ranging from subtle, to big things like entire replacements of rooms. Some of these changes weren't even necessary for performance, cart space or memory (in fact may be a detriment to that in some cases, just to make it look or play better).

 

Look at the completely new ending of E3M4, for example: proper Doom gameplay instead of a frustrating switch puzzle. Sometimes they even added areas, like a new part of the maze in E1M4. They also turned some one-time platforms into repeatable lifts. Texturing was far more careful and deliberate, such as actually using step textures on the steps, or using NUKE24 on the trim of the nukage pool in E1M1. They even added geometric detail in parts: the alcoves for the candelabras in E1M1's ending, portions of the walls set in or out with some unique textures in E1M3 and E1M4, and so on.

[Crunchynut44]

I cracked up when he mentioned Slough of Destruction whilst he had the mini map on screen as it blatantly says Slough of Despair.

[Lila Feuer]

Or calling the Baron a bullet sponge and using the fucking chaingun when he has a bunch of rockets.

[DoctorGenesis]

3 minutes ago, cyan0s1s said:

Or calling the Baron a bullet sponge and using the fucking chaingun when he has a bunch of rockets.

Barons are NOT bullet sponges, they are actually pretty easy to be honest, I'd still call them a "hard" enemy, but they aren't too hard. In Doom 2 it's pretty easy to kill 'em with a couple hits with the Super Shotgun at a close range.

[Revae]

He sounds like a younger Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.

[Nine Inch Heels]

4 minutes ago, DoctorGenesis said:

Barons are NOT bullet sponges, they are actually pretty easy to be honest, I'd still call them a "hard" enemy, but they aren't too hard. In Doom 2 it's pretty easy to kill 'em with a couple hits with the Super Shotgun at a close range.

Barons are bullet spongy, they even feel spongy when you BFG them from mid-close range (not counting point-blank), since they actually have a decent chance of surviving the traces. Plus, compared to hell knights, they are bullet sponges, objectively speaking, since their damage->HP ratio leans more towards HP than pretty much any other "non-boss -monster" you could think of. Ironically, they were used as a boss monster in episode 1, but even then there was two of them, so calling them a boss-monster under these circumstances is a bit of a stretch still.

 

By the way, one key characteristic of a bullet sponge is dealing little to no damage (relatively speaking), but having pretty high HP-values. The weapon you use or not has no say about this general principle of "tanks", because HP->dmg-ratio. Rockets in doom 1 merely made their presence more sufferable by offering a way to handle them relatively quickly without using cell-based weapons. Barons in the open, or in rooms with enough space to dodge reliably, are non-threats, meaning their only purpose in these cases is eating bullets, hence they're bullet sponges, because they simply soak up ammo, and that's all they do in these cases.

 

Also, the "difficulty" of a monster has no relevance in this matter.

 

Mappers who place these things in their maps without making use of the baron's HP value in some way shape or form are doing it wrong, in my opinion. Barons work best as a threat when there's a decent chance of running out of real-estate to begin with, which makes singular barons placed for the heck of it a mere time sink at best, or an annoying game-play low at worst. In slaughter maps, packs of barons can serve as something like a mobile wall, which adds another purpose to their spongy-ness. Replacing a baron with a couple revenants, cacos, or HKs is oftentimes the better choice for "conventional maps", as far as I'm concerned.

[DoctorGenesis]

Now the Cyberdemon on the other hand is a bullet spongecake.

[Revae]

There's a lot wrong with this guys analysis.  You can't play Doom with 20 years of experience on a newer source port and complain that barons and cacos have too much health or that there isn't enough ammo (btw if you play Doom for 20 years and still run out of ammo - you suck).  Barons are literally boss monsters.  They should have more health.  And their projectiles do more damage which - if you were playing with default controls in 1992 - were harder to dodge (thereby causing more damage).

I agree that certain maps are poorly designed, but Doom 1 does remarkably well considering it literally the first time anyone had done this.  Doom 2's maps don't bother me as much as others, but they're not as consistently good as Doom 1's.  Sure, Doom 2's maps are more gimmicky, but they suffer for that reason.  Having 5 or 6 memorable maps isn't the same as having 2 solid episodes worth of levels.  Also: How a map or chapter feels or looks isn't level design, It's art direction.  So he's pretty far off base there.

Ahhhhhhiiiidunno.  I think Doom 2 does a great job at integrating the new monsters, and the new monsters are fantastic, but Doom 1 was far from bad.  Even when compared to Doom games that came out four (tnt/plutonia) to twelve (doom 3) years later.

Whole video sounds like he just wanted to bitch about something that didn't need to be bitched about.  Lazy controversy (which seems like the point of the video series, really).  I mean, there is a lot that is wrong with many older games - Duke Nukem for example (doors that kill you, awkward enemy encounters, some later maps) but to bitch about it 20 years later is like complaining that the horse and carriage is a shitty form of transportation.  Cars are faster, safer probably, cheaper, less poop - sure - but people still ride carriages through central park every day.  Because it's fun.

 

1 hour ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

By the way, one key characteristic of a bullet sponge is dealing little to no damage (relatively speaking), but having pretty high HP-values.

Barons then can't be bullet sponges in Doom 1, because nothing else short of a Cyberdemon in doom 1 does more damage (per attack).

[Da Werecat]

10 hours ago, ShotgunDemolition said:

Sure, Doom 3 is easily the scariest game in the franchise, but being scary is not the main point of Doom.

A lot of people would disagree with you 20 years ago.

 

10 hours ago, ShotgunDemolition said:

And it was very slow as a game, trading the huge arena areas with tight corridors and the metal-atmospheric soundtrack with nothing at all, IIRC.

Metal or nothing, huh?

 

Where exactly did you find a lot of huge arenas in D1? Sure, the level design was generally more open (there are practical reasons for that), but the game was still mostly a corridor crawl.

 

1 hour ago, DoctorGenesis said:

Now the Cyberdemon on the other hand is a bullet spongecake.

I think you missed the "dealing little to no damage" part.

[Revae]

3 minutes ago, Da Werecat said:

A lot of people would disagree with you 20 years ago.

This is something that a lot of people seem to forget about Doom.  When it first came out, it was scary.  Monster closests opening, dumping enemies out, not knowing what was around the next corner.  The original doom only had 11 (I think?) monsters, counting the spectre, but you never knew if you were going to see something new.  You didn't know if you were going to get a new gun, or more health.  Hell, it's still one of the only games that can make me physically move in my chair to "dodge" a fireball.

Doom 3 was like what Doom 1 was for everyone just starting out.  Tense, and unsure.  Doom 4 is like what Doom was by the end of E3, or maybe by Doom 2.  You were running and gunning to see what came next.

[baja blast rd.]

11 minutes ago, Revae said:

Barons then can't be bullet sponges in Doom 1, because nothing else short of a Cyberdemon in doom 1 does more damage (per attack).

You can't just look at the amount of damage the projectile does. You also have to consider how likely it is to actually connect. For the baron in most conceivable scenarios that is pretty low. A monster with a very easily avoidable attack will do 'little or no damage', in a practical sense. This also means bullet-sponginess is a contextual quality. Every mid-tier+ monster can be a bullet sponge if they are non-threatening enough in their environment and the player's potential DPS is low enough. Again, for the baron, this is very likely to be the case, unless the mapper goes out of their way to construct a dangerous scenario.

 

13 minutes ago, Da Werecat said:

I think you missed the "dealing little to no damage" part.

Cyberdemons that aren't particularly dangerous definitely are bullet sponges in the absence of a BFG or other quick means of disposal. e2m8's cyberdemon is definitely this by modern standards. 

 

 

[Da Werecat]

8 minutes ago, Revae said:

I mean, there is a lot that is wrong with many older games - Duke Nukem for example (doors that kill you, awkward enemy encounters, some later maps) but to bitch about it 20 years later is like complaining that the horse and carriage is a shitty form of transportation.  Cars are faster, safer probably, cheaper, less poop - sure - but people still ride carriages through central park every day.  Because it's fun.

Ouch. I think you did a much better job than whoever made the video.

[ShoDemo]

2 hours ago, Da Werecat said:

A lot of people would disagree with you 20 years ago.

Doom 1 was indeed scarier 20 years ago. But I was mostly talking about nowadays, after Doom 3 got released. Before that, I guess Doom 64 took the crown and the originals were scary at the time of their release, because people had never seen something similar.

2 hours ago, Da Werecat said:

Metal or nothing, huh?

 

Where exactly did you find a lot of huge arenas in D1? Sure, the level design was generally more open (there are practical reasons for that), but the game was still mostly a corridor crawl.

Well, instead of <<nothing>>, they had those ambient sounds most of the time, but Doom 64 got these a lot earlier as an OST and I find them more memorable (Doom 3's theme was great though and I would love it if something like that appeared, while playing the actual game).

 

As for the arenas, the boss fights were in arenas, but for the rest of the game, I exaggerated a little. Though there were always many open areas and I disagree on the <<mostly a corridor crawl>> argument. It wasn't even remotely close to a 50-50, with more open areas than corridors, as I see it. Basically, it had many open areas (starting from E1M1 and it goes on until the end) connected with some corridors and staircases here and there, which is a good balance between the two. And trust me, if you want me to start talking about examples of open areas in Doom 1, I can surely do that with ease.