Doom 1 or 2?

[Voros]

...Hmm...Now that I think of it..
Doom was A LOT more vivid with colors than Doom II.
Heck! The first level of Doom E1M1 had blue, red, and etc, without even exploring the area for colorful rooms (its right in front of me!).

Doom II's MAP01 started out with...brown...and more brown related colors. So,Doom is technically more colorful than Doom II (possibly that Doom was a fantasized shooter, unrealistic areas with ugly creatures, while Doom II seemed to approach with what places in life would be like-dull).

[Dylan Jarvis]

Doom 1 was miles better than Doom 2 in terms of texturing. Sandy Peterson really had a huge workload in Doom 2 and a lot of his maps seemed rushed, despite how fun they are.

[RUSH]

Doom 1 blows Doom 2 out of the water. In fact, it blows every official Doom release out of the water. The aesthetics of the original can never be beat. It has the perfect feeling everywhere it needs to, from mars to hell to everything in between. Doom 2 is ugly and amateurish looking by comparison.

[VGamingJunkie]

Doom 1 had more vivid colors and it's a shame they had to remove so many of Doom 1's textures for memory reasons. I imagine the levels could have had a chance to pop more if they had all Doom 1 textures to work with in addition to the newer Doom 2 ones.

[Blastfrog]

MetroidJunkie said:

Doom 1 had more vivid colors and it's a shame they had to remove so many of Doom 1's textures for memory reasons. I imagine the levels could have had a chance to pop more if they had all Doom 1 textures to work with in addition to the newer Doom 2 ones.

It was probably a deliberate choice in order to give it a different "look". Both Final Doom IWADs had Doom 1 textures in them, so they could have done the same in Doom 2. RAM isn't a concern period, since only used textures are in RAM. Distribution and storage is more of a concern.

See the beta version levels that used more Doom 1 textures, they're pretty interesting to look at.

[Inkie]

MetroidJunkie said:

Doom 1 had more vivid colors and it's a shame they had to remove so many of Doom 1's textures for memory reasons. I imagine the levels could have had a chance to pop more if they had all Doom 1 textures to work with in addition to the newer Doom 2 ones.

That big slime fall building in The Chasm could have been made of FIREBLU

[esselfortium]

I like Doom 2's textures better. A few of the omissions are missed, but all the new stuff allows for so many more themes.

But I think the main reason I'd consider Doom 2 a better-looking game is because it has more varied and complex locations, which made for more interesting and diverse scenes. A lot of Doom 1 was comparatively basic corridor-shooter stuff, and I don't think anything in the original game compares to the striking visual atmosphere of something like The Living End. The use of space and shapes and lighting... no comparison, IMO!

Also, since this common misconception has been brought up again: Sandy was most definitely not rushed when making Doom 2. On the contrary, it was actually Doom 1 where he was rushed, because he was hired roughly two months before the game was released, and needed to learn to map and complete episodes 2 and 3 in just those two months. Doom 2's schedule was positively relaxed compared to that, and that combined with the experience gained from working on the first game to allow for far more ambitious design.

[Marcaek]

The only thing Doom 1 has over 2 is REDWALL1

and i guess SKINTEK

[Voros]

MetroidJunkie said:

Doom 1 had more vivid colors and it's a shame they had to remove so many of Doom 1's textures for memory reasons. I imagine the levels could have had a chance to pop more if they had all Doom 1 textures to work with in addition to the newer Doom 2 ones.

Maybe this can be implented as a texture mod for Doom 2.

[dew]

I'll reiterate my long-standing opinion: E3 is a pile of feces. Its sole truly good map bears the most hideous of all Sandy visuals. Its sole good looking map is nearly empty and dull to play. The rest is bad, rushed filler both aesthetically and gameplay-wise.

People compare Doom's best to Doom 2's worst and then invent theories to support their personal feelings. Doom 2's best overshadows Doom's best easily.

[printz]

Doom 2 has some really nice textures for some quite diverse level types. The ashwall, zimmer, rock and stone textures let you make all manner of natural landscapes, and you can still build shiny techbases with "silver" and computers.

As for IWADs, Doom 1 may look better than Doom 2 simply because it's set in space and hell, unlike Doom 2 which is mostly set in a ruined Earth modern-day city, which is very mundane, and the Doom 2 hell is very low-key, preferring to look like old houses instead of fire/brimstone, which may not impress viewers.

[Doomkid]

Episode 1 of Doom1 looks the "best" in that the texturing is coherent and there's a fairly meticulous (for the time) attention to detail.

Anyone who thinks E2 or E3 look "better" than Doom2 are just nostalgic.

I'm using quotes cause all this shit is subjective, I think basically all the IWAD maps look fine and it brings my piss to a boil when people shit on a WAD just because the texturing is basic. It's all a stylization choice and no one opinion of what makes for "good" texturing is objectively true.

dew said:

Doom 2's best overshadows Doom's best easily.

Good lord, SO much this.

[snapshot]

I liked Doom 2 because of the SSG, and Doom 1 for e1m1 and e2m4 .

[dio]

It was more colorful and less brown. I guess Doom1 was grey for a while. Other than that both games are the same.

[scifista42]

dew said:

I'll reiterate my long-standing opinion: E3 is a pile of feces. Its sole truly good map bears the most hideous of all Sandy visuals. Its sole good looking map is nearly empty and dull to play. The rest is bad, rushed filler both aesthetically and gameplay-wise.

I would argue that aside from E3M6 and E3M7 (which I suppose are the maps you're referring to), E3M2 isn't really bad either. Its concept may be simple and gameplay may be filler-ish, but it makes sense in the E3 setting, as a somewhat-cool hellish location meant to be explored, and looks OK at least for me. Contents of the finger caves are disappointing, though.

[purist]

The best looking D2 maps are better looking than the best looking UD maps. the worst from each are about even but there's more of em in D2. Overall, I'd say D2 edges it.

[Doominator2]

I found that most of DOOM's maps actually looked like an actual location where I found many of DOOM 2's maps were just walls, keys and monsters which made DOOM 2 feel like more of the same.

[SavageCorona]

I like the later episodes more than the earlier ones and Doom 2.

[Looper]

Doom 1's style resembles me of the old '3D' screen saver maze while Doom 2 actually has something else than flat floors with roof scratching your forehead.

[Maes]

Voros said:

Maybe this can be implented as a texture mod for Doom 2.

There were several "Doom 1 textures for Doom 2" packs, as early as 1994 in fact, which allowed playing Doom 1 PWADs directly on Doom 2 (provided you changed ExMy to MAPzz, ofc).

@Sodaholic: yeah, only the used textures reside in memory, but if RAM is not enough to hold them all, they have to be swapped in/out of RAM, and that resulted in horrible disk trashing, back in the day. Doom 2 was already pretty marginal on 4 MB with the extra monsters, and just about tolerable with 8 MB. I don't want to imagine how having an extra 2-3 MB of textures to contend with at any time would be like.

[SavageCorona]

Looper said:

Doom 1's style resembles me of the old '3D' screen saver maze while Doom 2 actually has something else than flat floors with roof scratching your forehead.

I actually thought that the red brick maps in Wolf 3D inspired that screensaver

[TheOrganGrinder]

I think Doom benefits from a more consistent theme and tightly defined episodes than its sequel; "how well does it represent what it claims to represent?" is a question that's going to be asked of any art that's even vaguely representational, and in general Doom 2 is less good at that. But Doom 2 tries more things, artistically, and that it doesn't always succeed doesn't undermine the worth of the attempt.

[Lila Feuer]

Doom 1's design is tighter and more claustrophobic, less outdoors, more scary. Even the music encompasses this by sounding more sinister and dreadful.

Doom II's design is notably more complex, more outdoors, but notably less scary and more ugly. The music also encompasses this by sounding too upbeat or darkly comedic. There's almost no genuine Hell levels and Earth levels look nothing like real places.

If it wasn't for the innovations Doom II brought forth via its new monsters, SSG, and the plethora of incredible megawads designed with D2, it would be a worse game than the original. But it manages to be as good as D1 because it overall improved on the formula, even if a lot of the mapping and atmosphere went downhill in the IWAD.

I personally prefer the original game though for being more safely designed and more polished.

[Koko Ricky]

Doom 1 was a bit more varied, especially when you consider all four episodes. Doom 2 was built in hindsight and thus the texturing and architecture is a bit more coherent, and yet it can still be a pretty rough looking game. A bit too much brown at times and a few samey looking areas. Doom 2's main visual advantage was that it generally looked a bit more professional and the new textures added some nice variety, although I think it was a poor choice to delete any of Doom 1's textures. Some of the most interesting textures in the game were removed, and for what?

[ant]

I always like DOOM 1 episode's 1 levels for being space base designs.

[scifista42]

GoatLord said:

Doom 2's main visual advantage was that it generally looked a bit more professional and the new textures added some nice variety, although I think it was a poor choice to delete any of Doom 1's textures. Some of the most interesting textures in the game were removed, and for what?

I think it's obvious that D1 textures were removed from D2 after all D2 maps were already completed, and they were removed precisely because none of the mappers used them in neither of the maps. It's provable that every texture in D2 is used at least once at least in one map - except the 4 switch textures, which were turned into duplicates of SW1BRCOM instead of being removed (as their names were already hardcoded to the engine, and the engine was supposed to be usable to play D1 too), but it was actually needless, considering that all their graphic patches ended up retained in D2 anyway.

[Koko Ricky]

That makes sense, although it makes me wonder why they wouldn't have wanted to use such great textures.

[Wovenloaf]

I kind of liked the kitschy tackiness of Doom 2, but then I also liked Sandy Petersen's levels and the unrealistic level design in general. I still think it's funny how the game is supposed to take place on Earth, and everything looks like it was designed by a bunch of drugged out psycho freaks. :3

That being said, no part of any game will be more aesthetically pleasing to me than the Hell levels of Doom I. Pure dark magic.

[Face23785]

I think D1 looked better. I don't have any specific gripes about D2, I just think Doom was a little more reserved and had darker, scarier atmospheres, for example E1M5.

On another note, is it me or has there been an uptick in the number of new "do you think [insert random topic]" threads being started in the last week or two?

[VGA]

I think the original doom's maps went through more iterations of gameplay/work. They are more polished, have better atmosphere and rarely feel lazy.

Many Doom 2 maps felt rushed or tried to be bigger, more expansive than what the doom engine and its strict limits allowed. Poor Sandy had to create so many maps that the quality suffered in some.

With the lack of episodic format the pacing feels off sometimes.

They did not really improve the engine for Doom 2 or raise the limits.