10 reasons to play Doom WADs?

Marcaek said:

Honestly, the Doom community could use more advertising to people OUTSIDE the doom Community than to those who are a part of it. A lot of the popular mods have youtube trailers, fan pages, moddb pages and so on, why not megawads? Why do mods like Xaser's Psychic not get the attention of something like freaking Doom:One? Could it be they aren't visible enough?

as someone who is involved with the indie game community (because Ribbiks mentioned them), i definitely agree with this. a lot of the indie game community tends to have a problem w/being overly incestous and obsessed with trendiness and it doesn't always tend take stuff like mods seriously (though some mods like Dear Esther or The Stanley Parable i guess get really successful, but those are very rare and both had big expanded commercial versions from their source mods).

but i also think a lot of people involved in the Doom community tend to have too much of a conservative or self-limiting view about what they do, and could use to branch much farther outside of the same formulas they're used to as far as how Doom maps are made. not that there isn't a fair deal of experimental Doom mapping, though. and obviously everyone's into making different things. but i at least think it could help people out (especially when they're trying something new) to be thinking about how to be more creative with promotional stuff and reaching outside the community bubble. obviously not everyone wants to do much promotion - and that's totally fine. but it also doesn't have to be a chore, and can also be really fun if you do it your way. and it doesn't have to be about selling a thing, just something to try to have some more people playing what you've done.

anyway, just a potential thing to try. i know that things kind of are as they are, but they're also often changing. i feel like i've seen a lot of Doom mod stuff in the past several years that is really different from what came before, and that's pretty damn exciting. and i'm not "new" to the Doom community in the sense that i've been following Doom mods since the late 90's, so i've been generally pretty aware of how things operate.

also (as an aside) i'm kind of bothered by the idea that Brutal Doom is the best or even a good way to bring people playing well-balanced, interesting and complex Doom mods - but i can also see that it has sincerely brought people into deeper stuff. so i guess it doesn't bother me that much, as long i don't have anything to do with it.

40oz said:

Opening up with brutal doom would be a good start if you want results.

Sadly Brutal Doom has spawned a frighteningly large army of Doom "fans" who mark vanilla Doom as a mere base for the birth of "Doom as it was intended to be played".