drygnfyre

Pro tip: To defeat the spider mastermind, shoot at it until it dies.

The more I hear it, the more "Nobody Told Me About id" does it for me. I just realized how it's so perfect as final boss music, and indeed I wish the original idea of episodes two and three being swapped was kept. It's such a great tune and works way better for the final map of the game, instead of "Facing the Spider." "Sign of Evil" mainly because it plays on the final shareware map. Also has a slightly different feel from the other themes that play on episode one. "Sinister" because it was used on the absolutely perfect map for it.

Most likely just an error. A lot of the maps have errors like things not appearing when they should, or some things only appearing in deathmatch even though they aren't supposed to. Should be noted that Romero also said that one of his "rules" for level design was if you see the outdoors, there should be a way to get there. And yet some of his maps do this with no way to get outside. So like the other poster said, most likely the focus was to just get the levels done, and if there are slight errors here and there, so be it. Theoretically, you could edit the maps yourself with a modern editor and fix them.

Doesn't Map 23 of Doom 2 kind of do this? On the first floor, I remember there is a platform that you raise, and then you use it to get to the other side of the starting hallway on the second floor.

I explained it wrong, what I meant was some elements about DoomEd were known well before it was ever released (like the way it generated linedefs,) the editors developed were able to avoid some of those issues. Even some of the earliest ones, like DeHackEd, made improvements there. (Although some of the issues with DoomEd were due to the WAD format changing during development).

As far as I know, you can put D2 assets into Doom. I remember playing some E1 "remake" WADs that added the mancubus and super shotgun. Although maybe that was only possible with source ports, I'm not sure. But it can be done. Which kind of blurs the lines between Doom and D2 in that regard. Frankly, I've always preferred the presentation of Doom. I love the episode format, and some of my favorite megawads (like "E1 the way id did it") will even create their own intermission screens. That's the kind of little touches that are missing from D2. So any set of maps that take advantage of the presentation style of Doom, I'm a fan of.

It sucks what happened, but they did give the community enough time to download it before it got C&D'd. It's their IP. And it probably didn't help they were doing their own M2 remake at the time. It would be nice if Nintendo was a bit more lenient, but basic trademark law is you have to defend your IP or you can lose it. They might be more militant than others, but Metroid is an IP they want to protect. Romero also commented in the same video it was the product of id being like 13 guys at the time. They were all hackers at heart. Once id got bought by larger companies, you're not going to see the source code of Doom 3 or anything else anytime soon. Which leads into the kind of ironic decision that Romero wanted id to get larger and more commercial, while Carmack wanted to stay small and independent. Because the former, while no doubt the key to making more profits, is also what ensures that commercial games don't get open sourced.

I can only imagine the joy he probably feels in seeing things like Ultimate Doom Builder, where you can design things in a 3D mode and then in one click, have all the textures lined up and even do things like auto-generate staircases. Compared to his own tool DoomEd. I would imagine Romero probably approaches mapping from that perspective a little bit, seeing how people took his original tool and exponentially evolved it. I mean how often do you get to make a game that is still being played and enjoyed three decades later? I mean sure, there are always ROM hacks of popular games, but it's really hard to find anything on the same level as Doom. One of the benefits of getting the source code released.

Well he was supposedly working on an unrelated FPS in the 2010s that either got canceled or never released. To get into shape for that, he first did the "Tech Gone Bad" E1M8 replacement. Then after the other FPS never got to fruition, he was in the mood to do smaller projects like Sigil and Sigil II. He mentioned using Doom Builder for Sigil, I would imagine Sigil II probably used Ultimate Doom Builder, which is a great tool for making stuff. He was also well aware of the many enhancements. In the 2013 video, they were playing on Doomsday, and he mentioned how fun Brutal Doom was. The specific comment he made was "Doom was state of the art in 1993" and that "anything I did today [in 2013] would likewise have to be state of the art." He was also referring to how vast maps have gotten, and how modern source ports even allow for legitimate 3D maps. So he recognized that he would basically have to relearn mapping all over again.

He admitted this back in 2013 when he did the E1 play-through with some IGN guy. He was asked about if he still made maps, and he said he didn't because anything he released would have paled in comparison to what the fan community had made. He even said how primitive E1 was by comparison. This was six years before Sigil appeared.

"Masters of Doom" mentioned that one of the reasons Carmack didn't like the push walls was it was "ugly" to program into the code, and he valued clean code. Carmack seemed to be against anything that would slow down the engine or the gameplay, so from a pure "run and gun" standpoint, I can see why he wouldn't be as supportive of exploration and discovery.

Time-based secrets are stupid and I hate them. Part of the appeal of classic Doom is that beyond something like par time, you can explore the map on your own terms. Sometimes I want to take things slower, I don't like having to run somewhere quickly. I also feel that using the "shoot the eye to open something" was fun once, then it became overused. They are overall good maps, but can get repetitive in their mechanics.

I generally try to review any given WAD for where it stood at the time. Something like "Trinity College" is awful and possibly unplayable today, but at the time, it was a genuine attempt to do something different with the Doom engine, and deserves credit. Even something like "nuts" was testing the limits of the Doom engine, even if the actual gameplay is silly. It's always easy to say "these WADs from the mid 90s suck!" and that's likely true compared to modern ones. But for the time, many of them were impressive or interesting.

Cacodemons used to scare me, from their noise to design. For years I would not play any maps that I knew had cacodemons on them.

Do we know if Carmack ever made a single Doom map, or contributed artistically to one? I guess some other posts here said he had opinions about "intended" gameplay and may not have liked certain exploits. Makes me wonder what he thought about the rocket jumping you need to reach the E3M6 secret (officially), or if he even tried out making a WAD.