I Drink Lava

Duke Nukem 3D has the "Shotgun dance" where you need to continuously strafe left and right around corners to hit Pigcops and Assault Troopers without losing too much health. You could do that in Doom as well, but it becomes dominant strategy in Duke Nukem 3D due to the fact that you can't reliably stun most enemies.

Marsdoom, I guess?

Keep the enemies the same, just change the levels they're set in to actual levels. E1M8 is fondly remembered because of the long build-up. E2M8 has that small room full of dead Barons, which is okay I guess, and E3M8 just has that long hallway that only serves to sync up the music to the appearance of the Spider Mastermind. A level that's a little shorter than a normal level but much harder, sort of like E4M8, would've been an ideal design choice.

Doom's gameplay has a much higher skill ceiling than Duke Nukem 3D, even with Ultimate Doom constraints. There is a deliberate design to every mechanic in Doom, from using the Chaingun or Shotgun to take out large groups of Zombiemen at once without getting hit to using tracking Revenant fireballs to instigate infighting with Mancubi or Barons. Everything just clicks together into place and feels right, even down to the amount of hits that enemies can take. For a good example, the Spider Mastermind might seem like a cheap bulletsponge hitscanner, but it has a clear telegraph. It stands still and stops making the loud stomping sound for about 1 second before firing, unlike Duke's Battlelord that instantly attacks with no warning and high accuracy. By comparison, Duke Nukem 3D feels sloppy and thrown together in its gameplay mechanics. Most enemies lack proper pain states, have the same exact movement patterns just with different attacks, and take more damage than they really should before dying. None of the weapons feel like they were designed with unique roles in combat, either, but rather gimmicks that seemed cool at the time. Gameplay boils down to spamming rockets or shrink rays through the entire game, with occasional pipe bombs around corners that slow momentum to a halt. The Shotgun and Chaingun Cannon are basically only useful for taking out Troopers and Octabrains since everything else will trade hitscans with you. Anything involving mini-Battlelords basically requires memorization or quicksaving. The strengths of Doom lie in its combat loop and unforgettable level design. The strength of Duke Nukem 3D is solely in its level design, which is admittedly god-tier stuff for the most part. You can play any shitty 1994 Doom WAD and get some fun out of it thanks to the strength of the core gameplay, but the same cannot be said for all the trash Duke levels in the 90s.

The one universal criticism I have found from every player of every skill level is that the Dark Lord is a bad final boss. It's slow, flat, dragged-out across five nearly identical phases, and overall just underwhelming in scope compared to both the Icon of Sin and Samur. However, it's easy to just complain about a product rather than to give actual constructive feedback. That's why I'm putting my money where my mouth is and I'm going to tell this public forum exactly what I expected out the Dark Lord final boss fight before launch. The most obvious thing would be a real 1-on-1 fight between you and the Dark Lord, no wannabe Hulk Buster armor. He is, after all, "you in their world". The Dark Lord should be 1:1 in abilities with the Slayer, someone we believe could slaughter the hordes of Hell and rise up as its warrior ruler. Well, before the idiotic retcon, that is. The Dark Lord should essentially be a hybrid of the Tyrant, Doom Hunter, Marauder, and Gladiator in a small, speedy Marauder form factor. The arena shouldn't be flat, either, but a big, vertical, 1v1 Deathmatch-style arena complete with Meathook platforming to tie the DLC's themes together. The arenas could change in complexity throughout the phases, too. I don't think the fight should be set in a random building in the center of Immora away from all the action, but rather in the heart of the battlefield as both sides cease-fire and watch the fate of the universe unfold. There are ideas in the actual fight we got that I like, such as the constant grenade spam to keep you moving, the changes of scenery, and the fact that the Dark Lord has the ability to draw health from his enemies. I think it would've been more interesting if instead of hurting you for more health, he would hunt down the random zombies in the arena and glory kill them to deny you of the resources they provide. I have heard people say that a small, fast boss would be too hard for gamepad players and they needed a big, dumb suit of armor boss. I don't believe that at all. The Marauder is fairly small and he's much more mobile than any other enemy. The Dark Lord should have non-hitscan Hell equivalents of all the Slayer's weapons, and would cycle between them depending on how you approach him: In the final phase, he throws away all his useless weapons and pulls out the Demonic Crucible. Cue the Doom Eternal theme song remix. The Dark Lord would be capable of rapid combos, backflips behind the player, teleportation like Prowlers, and parrying all your weapons. Since the Dark Lord is invincible with the Demonic Crucible and you lost your own Crucible, the final phase would be one big game of keep away. You'd have to knock the Crucible out of his hands with either the Blood Punch or Hammer and then use his own Crucible against him 5 times to put him in the Stagger state and then beat the game. Maybe it's a bit gimmicky and too "green light", but I'd rather the final phase be a super-hard, skill-based green light fight instead of the entire fight being a green light fight that's slow and based entirely on RNG. Thank you for reading my glorified The Ancient Gods 2 fanfiction.

I mean, this would really be pushing the definition of "3D games from the Doom era" but here you go: Super nostalgic game that took me years to remember the name of. I found out the entire soundtrack is actually from a stock music library called De Wolfe Music, but that doesn't stop it from sounding really good.

Every boss in Devil May Cry 2, with special mentions to the Infected Tanks and Helicopter. Watch S-rank DMD runs to see just how broken some of the bosses are.

As long as there's an active modding scene for Doom II: Hell on Earth, I am indifferent to what ID Software makes in the future. Unless it's as bad as what post-buyout Rare was making.

Roger Ritenour's various works from 1997-2000. Utterly impressive vanilla spectacles at the time of release, yet are complete slogs to play through even for their time. The constant narrow, pitch black corridors in-between the impressive set pieces do not help matters. Earth.wad is legitimately one of the worst things I've ever played. The works of Jim Flynn (RIP), particularly Enigma and his Eternal Doom maps as mentioned prior in this thread. There is something to be admired about how far Flynn could push linedef and sector-based puzzles, but it's not very digestible for modern Doomers. You can quicksave your way through the most brutal slaughtermaps, but you can't quicksave through convoluted switch hunts. Trapped on Titan from the Master Levels is the only one I feel comfortable revisiting from time to time. Hell Revealed 1. More important for the impact it had on the community rather than its actual quality. A lot of it has aged horribly compared to Plutonia, particularly the first dozen maps or so. I'd also say The Sky May Be, but I actually don't recall if I ever finished it or if I gave up halfway.

The default installation package will be set up with the intended setup that the mod was balanced around. Customizing the mod will be as simple as deleting the .ZIP files you don't want or replacing them with the optional 2016 .ZIP files. It might sound complicated on paper, but I'm sure most users will have no problem setting it up. A customizable mod launcher would be ideal for something like this, but that's beyond my area of expertise. I could bring up the subject on the modding Discord, though.

if you have the cart you can dump it, though as long as you destroy the original cart with a super shotgun IRL

It's a very hacky method. A handful of dedicated modders reverse-engineered the file format and learned how to extract and replace certain resources with patched .EXEs and an injector. So far, you can either alter the game's .decl files (for altering entitydefs), .entities files (for adding new entitydefs to previously existing maps), .blang files (the various text throughout the game) or texture files (most of the available mods are cancerous memes). You can't import anything new or alter level geometry, you just replace what's already in there. I would love for someone to figure out the sound format so I could replace some of the wimpy weapon sound effects, but it seems to be encrypted by third-party Wwise middleware that requires a commercial license. There is a skin unlocker tool, but I believe it only works client-side, not server-side. The admin of the Discord server also forbids users from unlocking the paid-for Twitch Prime skins even though you technically could unlock them with the tool. The community seems to be very insular and doesn't really spread their work far outside of a few people who upload to NexusMods. A lot of them are younger people who maybe played Brutal Doom once and maybe bought DUSK during a Steam sale, so they're not too familiar with Doomworld if they're even aware it exists. Some of the best custom Master Levels by elizabethany and FaDa aren't even up on NexusMods, just the server which has no real categorization for finding older content.

This is the correct answer. The chaingun has the same exact horizontal spread of 5.6 as the shotgun but with a higher DPS. If you got rid of the Super Shotgun, then Doom II monsters would be too tedious to fight without cells or rocket ammo. If you got rid of the pistol for shotgun starts, then you would be overpowered in early levels.

Yeah, Lost Levels is the new episode that came with the Steam release of Doom 64 and it's pretty bad. Is that an unpopular opinion around here? It's like 7 maps that are all really linear and boring. Tiny rooms full of Hell Knights and Pain Elementals, 90 degree walls everywhere, only one or two scripted sequences, and two of the maps are just ripoffs of Unholy Temple and No Escape. They didn't even bother to put in a secret exit anywhere even though they made a brand-new "Fun" level. It just feels like a series of speedmaps created at the last minute to give Doom 64 EX users a reason to buy the new port.

Hell to Pay MAP30 has the greatest ending to any vanilla-format Doom map ever made.

Shitty level geometry/texturing/detailing. Non-intuitive level progression with zero sense of pacing. Cheap enemy placements, usually with Chaingunners in large, open areas or Barons in tight spaces where you can't strafe. Unbalanced item placement with no regards to encounter design. MAP22: Habitat and MAP25: Baron's Den are basically guidelines for newbies on what not to do when making a Doom map. I'm also baffled by some of Christen Klie's level design choices, particularly in The Catwalk.

I played through Doom 64: The Lost Levels for the first time ever recently. I never realized just how bad the balance changes on the Doom 64 weapons were. Super Shotgun fires way too fast and its range is too long compared to in Doom II. It makes every weapon besides the Unmaker and BFG9000 obsolete. Faster-firing Chaingun isn't bad, but the screen-shaking recoil makes me instantly nauseous and I end up avoid using it at all times. Faster-firing Chainsaw makes my ears bleed, again causing me to never want to use it. Plasma Rifle is basically worthless with how slow it fires. I know it was due to console limitations, but the least they could've done was increase the damage per projectile. I think the 64 Chaingun might be able to kill enemies just as fast as the 64 Plasma Rifle. Also, the looping idle sound is grating. Rocket Launcher isn't that much worse than in Doom II, but the rooms in the Lost Levels are so tiny and full of Lost Souls that you can never even use it without dying in the process. I ended up with maxed-out rockets halfway through the episode and it pretty much stayed that way until the end. I know the fully-upgraded Unmaker was designed to be broken, but the autoaim seems to be unintentionally broken. All three shots just fire in a straight line if you're close enough to an enemy. What's the point of the spread effect, then?

Back in December, I offered a beta test of the Super Gore Nest level to the few hundred people who watched my progress videos. Not a single person signed up, not even the two people who were interested. I may host a private beta test here if anyone is interested. I kind of want to keep it away from the actual modding Discord server because I fear people there might copy my files.

DOWNLOAD LAVAMOD NOW ON NEXUSMODS! ------------------------------------------------ Mega Mirror ------------ What is LavaMod? LavaMod is an upcoming gameplay overhaul mod for Doom Eternal from the creator of the worst Let's Play on the internet. The goal of LavaMod is to tear down Hugo Martin's "Fun Zone" and let players rebuild it for themselves in order to create their own ideal Doom Eternal experiences. Anybody of any skill level, no matter how much they liked or disliked ID Software's vision for Doom Eternal, will be able to enjoy LavaMod in some way. Features: And the best part? The installation will be completely modular, meaning you can pick and choose exactly how you want to play Doom Eternal! Want to try out the new weapons without disrupting the "Fun Zone"? Just keep the weapon .ZIP files and delete everything else! Ever wondered how the Quakecon 2018 build felt to play? Delete the weapon .ZIP files and use the 2016 ruleset .ZIP files with the rebalanced levels! Like certain weapon mods but not others? Mix and match any combination of weapons you want! You could take the LavaMod Combat Shotgun and give it the Eternal Sticky Bombs and 2016 Charged Burst! Anything is possible! What makes the LavaMod weapon set so special? The LavaMod weapons have been rebuilt from the ground-up to restore the gamefeel of classic Doom or (in the Rocket Launcher and Plasma Rifle's cases) Quake while still staying balanced within NuDoom's design. Every aspect of the weapons will feel familiar to long-time players, from the amount of shots the shotguns take to kill enemies to approximately the same ranges to kill them from. Combat as a whole has been restructured in order to make every single weapon in the arsenal useful in combat even into the endgame stages. Whereas DPS weapons (Heavy Cannon, Plasma Rifle, Chaingun) were basically useless in vanilla while Combo weapons (Super Shotgun, Ballista, Rocket Launcher) dominated the meta, the balanced has been shifted so both types of weapons come in handy. DPS weapons now have mild stunlocking properties to make up for their slower TTK, while Combo weapons use much more ammo to push the less-skilled players with poor aim away from spamming them. Did I mention the Unmaykr is hitscan now? Not true. The rebalanced LavaMod levels have been designed with Hugo Martin's vision of constant weapon switching in mind. You will never be able to just Super Shotgun your way out of any one arena in LavaMod with just the ammo pickups given to you. At some point, you will run out of shells and need to switch to either bullets, cells, or rockets in order to complete an arena. Because LavaMod is designed around a Famine Mode+ playstyle by default, you can't just weasel your way out of an encounter by chainsawing for more shells every 20 seconds, either. Proper inventory management is the key to victory--with healthy doses of ammo found in secrets to help you along the way, of course. See full playlist of features from newest to oldest here. When will LavaMod be released? Soon™. Currently, I am finishing up the last of the first passes on the levels where I add more item pickups. From there, I'll move on to the second passes where I'll add in the new enemy encounters, secrets, and fix any visual bugs with my item placements. After that, it will just be a matter of finishing any gameplay modifiers I haven't been able to figure out yet and then packaging the mod for release. The 1.0 release will feature the whole stock campaign and should hopefully be released by the summer of 2021. The DLC campaigns and Master Levels will unfortunately have to wait for later releases. Someday, I'd even like to go back and make LavaMod for Doom 2016, but it would take a lot of work. Will this mod help me win in Battlemode?

Shame Nathan's follow-up MegaWAD will never get finished. It contains one of the most...interesting characters in the Marswar mythos.

The original Doom 3 machine gun firing sound that Trent Reznor made was pretty cool, even if it was a pretty stock sound effect.

I have a weird fondness for Marswar, the ultimate Linux user's MegaWAD from 1995-1998. I know it's bad on a technical level and most people don't play past the first four Wolfenstein-esque levels, but there's just something about it that inspires me to replay my favorite levels from it every few years. It's one of the few mapsets I could call "Tom Hall-style". I even made my own remastered MAP24 many years ago with better lighting, texture usage, and a logical level progression that ends at the bloodfalls room, but I never published it and now it's lost forever. Dude who made the WAD is still going, too. His Web 1.0 website still publishes anti-Microsoft rants as recently as 2020 last time I checked.

I would swap E2M9 and E3M9's music tracks so that Fortress of Mystery plays the standard secret level music while Warrens plays the E3M1 track again.