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Altima

Doom 3: BFG Edition - Changes to Doom/Doom2 Nightmare

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Anyone else notice that Nightmare got a big old massive decrease in difficulty on Doom/Doom2? Fireballs are normal speed, Demons are normal speed, Demons bite at normal speed... what is this shit?

Has anyone else noticed anything else different about the Nightmare difficulty of the original 2 games through BFG Edition?

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Oh great.
I never cared for Nightmare, nor do I have the BFG edition, but that sounds like it's destroying the whole point of the skill.

Hopefully it's just a glitch, but from what I've read, it really wouldn't surprised me if this was deliberate.

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If I was in charge for the ports I would remove the respawn portion of Nightmare and keep the fast monsters. Apparently they decided to do the opposite.

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I realize not everyone is going to be able to play Nightmare difficulty, but it shouldn't be touched *at all*. That's part of the challenge of it, is just how ridiculously difficult it is.

It also seems like the enemies are a bit slower to react. Anyone else get that feeling or has any proof of it?

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Altima said:

It also seems like the enemies are a bit slower to react. Anyone else get that feeling or has any proof of it?

I just checked. No, the enemies themselves still have their fast reaction times.

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Edward850 said:

I just checked. No, the enemies themselves still have their fast reaction times.


Okay, that's good. It felt like they were slower on reaction since I just plowed through E1 Nightmare up to M6, so I wanted a second opinion. Thanks for checking that. Still, no reason why Nightmare was modified at all. No explanation, no reason, and it makes no sense.

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I checked out the BFG edition of Doom2 and I can't believe anyone actually want to play it at all. It's locked at 35 fps. That's unplayable.

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Obviously it's too hardcore for the pansy gamers of today. Those pantywaists can't handle the fact that there might be a difficulty level above their skill, which has been finely-honed from years of pure linear maps and regenerative health. This legion of cream puff gamers would make enough ruckus by mailbombing (well okay, twit'ter bombing) id who is busy with other stuff and doesn't want to deal with these mollycoddles. ;-/)

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There is the possibilty that these changes may have been a mistake as the Fireball speed and Demon speed changes in Nightmare are all handled by the same paragraph of code which was in a seperate place to the rest of the skill level stuff, in the original source.

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Vermil said:

There is the possibilty that these changes may have been a mistake as the Fireball speed and Demon speed changes in Nightmare are all handled by the same paragraph of code which was in a seperate place to the rest of the skill level stuff, in the original source.

Was it broken in the Xbox ports too? I was thinking the same thing.

Truth be told, I never would've noticed this because I don't play Nightmare.

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kristus said:

It's locked at 35 fps. That's unplayable.

Tell that to anybody that played the game before 1997.

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kristus said:

Low FPS works better at 320x200.

Resolution really doesn't make a difference in perceived motion smoothness, only detail.

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Sodaholic said:

Tell that to anybody that played the game before 1997.

As far as I know the BFG Edition is supposed to be the better verion of all Doom games (they even included achievements, NRFTL and other stuff that were not included in 1997). I don't think limiting the FPS is an inprovement.

In before "use source ports" arguments (that are not the point of the discussion).

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LkMax said:

As far as I know the BFG Edition is supposed to be the better verion of all Doom games (they even included achievements, NRFTL and other stuff that were not included in 1997). I don't think limiting the FPS is an inprovement.

But it's not a downgrade either. It's just one thing (among others) that they didn't change.

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it probably becomes a bit harder to play at capped fps when you get used to uncapped ports. As someone who works a lot with zdoom it definitely does not feel near as smooth. It's not unplayable for me by far, but it doesn't feel as "good". I'm just too used to smooth action these days, it feels a bit more immersive, even if it's something like a quickie "action-arcade" game like hexagon

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Did anyone really take Nightmare seriously to begin with? It was added as a joke, IIRC. Honestly, I find it unplayable due to all the respawning occurring so fast.

Windstryke said:

The FPS lock also sounds odd.

How is it odd? It's not like you can just change a variable to get higher FPS, it involves creating new code to actually interpolate the existing 35 frames. This is just as straight port, no engine enhancements (besides the higher resolution, anyway).

Doomwolf555 said:

What does this have to do with BFG edition? Looks like some kind of GZDoom mod.

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Sodaholic said:

What does this have to do with BFG edition? Looks like some kind of GZDoom mod.

Skulltag(ronum). The announcer is a dead giveaway. GZDoom does not have an announcer.

I'm glad that the BFG edition did not, actually, change anything to the actual monsters and items and gameplay (beyond the easter egg secret levels). That vid does not look pretty or fun to play. Just a mishmash of rips from Quake and Doom 3. The pickups are especially ugly; and the vanilla level of detail never works with high-res textures.

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kristus said:

I checked out the BFG edition of Doom2 and I can't believe anyone actually want to play it at all. It's locked at 35 fps. That's unplayable.


If that's sarcasm, it went over my head. If not...I can't possibly imagine what's wrong with that framerate.

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Doomwolf555 said:


SSG looks like an iron horse dick. Also, anything running in a 13-year-old engine can't exemplify how a modern port "should look."




(why is it that amateurs just CAN'T seem to make a beefy shotgun in their mods? they always come out looking like tiny rod)

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agh, rips. It seems a bit debatable that replacing the resources in Doom with resources from another game is an actual improvement

(amusingly enough, I once did something similar, a LONG time ago, back when I was in middle school, where I replaced all the doom resources with their nearest Duke Nukem 3D counterpart because somehow my eleven-year-old self thought that mods were cooler when they featured "new" content. Really sad to look back upon all that stuff sometimes.)

Honestly, I'd like to see an attempt at a real "Doom HD" sometimes, a bit like the new ROTT game, something that tries to add flashiness and detail to a world that feels like an abstract representation of the environment that was being made (techbases, cities, whatever) built up from identifiable elements, like tall buildings for the cities with cut-out windows, computer consoles for the tech bases, and so on, but I don't think there's enough interest in that to get all the needed work done. and at the same time, I don't think draping new, higher-res textures over the old ones works. You couldn't put 4096x4096 tiles over the ROTT levels without it looking ridiculous, at least in my eyes.

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Its funny you mentioned this bug but I was just gonna make a thread about how it sucks that many of the doom 1 monsters got a nice steroid boost in -fast and nightmare but all the doom 2 monsters are pretty much the same but faster reaction time.

Its a little ridiculous to say that they intentionally nerfed the difficulty level, I mean if they were gonna do that, it would have been faster and easier to just omit the skill level from their new menu interface. While they're at it, they may as well have just boarded up all the optional areas with broken doors, switches, random piles of crates or fire to make the level design less confusing like every other shooter in the world.

And yes I do take nightmare seriously.

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Having truly unlocked FPS isn't trivial to implement. They could do it in a half-assed way by allowing player view freedom but still keeping the rest of the engine (including monster visuals) in lockstep, unlike the motion interpolation performed in ZDoom and prBoom+.

And for some reason they didn't consider just bundling/licensing prBoom+ or ZDoom (or even just ripping their code) for these rehashes: no wonder, if you sit down and consider how fast they have just kept pumping out those "new" Dooms using a closed-source "source port" of unknown specs (most likely just limit removing, not even high resolution modes are supported), you will realize that implemention of a full motion interpolation subsystem that would justify unlocked FPS was not really a priority or even considered.

The "source port" they are using is there just to justify the inclusion of the IWADs. They could just as well bundle it with DOSBOX and doom.exe. It would be interesting to see whether the authors of those "source ports" were given exclusive access to code not accessible/replicated by the community....the very least they don't have known Linuxdoom mistakes...

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Sodaholic said:

Tell that to anybody that played the game before 1997.

Times are changing. Back when Quake ran at 4 fps on my 486 I thought the 8 fps on a friends PC were fast. That doesn't mean that I want to play at 8 fps ever again ;)

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boris said:

Times are changing. Back when Quake ran at 4 fps on my 486 I thought the 8 fps on a friends PC were fast. That doesn't mean that I want to play at 8 fps ever again ;)


But 8 fps are below the minimum physiologically acceptable standard of 15 fps, in order to perceive image sequences as animations, rather than slideshows, so the perceived differences is on different grounds, entirely.

It's like debating e.g. traditional cinematographic "24p" film vs 50/60 Hz video formats (the "video look" etc.).

In any case, it's not simply a matter of letting Doom run as fast as it can: it must do so while constraining visuals in a very specific way, which adds a whole other level of complexity to the renderer. Not really the kind of feature you'll see real time & cash invested in, a least not in the "let's milk the Doom ca$h cow once more" kind of "official" ports.

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Gez said:

I'm glad that the BFG edition did not, actually, change anything to the actual monsters and items and gameplay (beyond the easter egg secret levels).


Actually I heard on a previous thread that they changed the berserk pack as well...instead of a cross on the pack its now a pill. Just a stupid aesthetic change that should never have happened.

Edit:
Honestly even if I got doom 3 bfg edition, i'd stick with my original iwads, you just cant beat them with zdoom. Nothing id will actually pump out will surpass it, mostly cuz they just dont care. I think for them including the original iwads, it was just a bonus they put in the package to add to the "bfg" edition.

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GoatLord said:

Can someone explain this 35 FPS issue to me, please?


In ports like Skulltag or ZDoom or GZDoom or PrBoom+, there's an option to "uncap frame rate" which is usually set to yes by default. This makes the game look a lot smoother. By default, the original Doom games made it so the frame rate never exceeded 35 FPS for some reason. This capped frame rate is preserved in ports such as chocolate doom and odamex.

The issue they are talking about is that even though this BFG edition has some unnecessary new stuff such as a new menu interface random sound pitch variations, the capped frame rate is still there.

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