Should the shotgun have been #2?

In all of Doom that I've played I've only recently got into using the number keys. But I always remembered thinking that the arms could have been arranged better; 2 is always lit up for the pistol, a gun you always had from the start in any wad you played back in the day. I can understand it now with ZDoom and such that can take away all of your weapons (even your fists), but that sort of thing (correct me if I'm wrong) just wasn't around then. If you got a SSG before the SG, 3 wouldn't even light up. Would it have been better to shift the slots down by one, having the SG at 2, pistol at 1 and fist/chainsaw on grave/tilde and numpad 0?

Platinum Shell said:

Would it have been better to shift the slots down by one, having the SG at 2, pistol at 1 and fist/chainsaw on grave/tilde and numpad 0?

It's an interesting idea. The problem I see with your suggestion is that on a normal keyboard, '0' is located to the right of '9'. So while it makes conceptual sense (0 is less than 1), in terms of the physical layout of the keyboard, it doesn't make much sense (weaker weapons to the left, more powerful ones to the right).

You propose making the tilde key also bind to the melee weapon. That seems like a worse option: it's not easily discoverable or obvious ("number keys are for weapons") and on non-US keyboards (eg. the UK layout) the grave/tilde key is located elsewhere, so any documentation would be wrong.

I think the layout is pretty sensible enough as-is, although if I was designing Doom I probably would have tried to avoid doubling up weapons to the same key. It would have made more sense to have something like:

1 - Fist
2 - Chainsaw
3 - Pistol
4 - Shotgun
5 - Chaingun
6 - Rocket Launcher
7 - Plasma Rifle
8 - BFG
9 - SSG [tacked onto the end as it was added later]

Neat idea, it seems like it would work ideally with a keyboard style play setup, but a nightmare as a mouse user. Or maybe I just need to work on my thumb fu.

And why just dont put sg on slot 2? :) Where should be pistol and sg together with sg higher priority. You rarely use pistol for killing monsters. Using RL on 6 or plasma on 7 seems be a bit odd to me. :D

Shotgun in #2, SSG in #3? Ala Quake?

I say the weapon organization is great as it is. Deal with it.

Seriously, I'm already way too used to it. And wads that change weapon order seem pretty unnatural to me, such as the recent Deadwing's DTH: The 5 Worlds, which has a plasmagun in slot 9.

Those double keys are a hinderance, most of the time I try to avoid picking up the chainsaw.
Pity because it's very satisfying weapon.

I understand how you feel. Personally its heresy for me to put a chainsaw and a berserk in the same map. One or the other. No exceptions.

I like the old DOS feel. 1.9 forever!

40oz said:

I understand how you feel. Personally its heresy for me to put a chainsaw and a berserk in the same map. One or the other. No exceptions.

really? i like to put the chainsaw and the berserk pack on top of one another and in front of a crucial switch

scifista42 said:

Shotgun in #2, SSG in #3? Ala Quake?

I say the weapon organization is great as it is. Deal with it.

Seriously, I'm already way too used to it. And wads that change weapon order seem pretty unnatural to me, such as the recent Deadwing's DTH: The 5 Worlds, which has a plasmagun in slot 9.

I didn't know that any level wad did do this, so I was kind of asking if any existed too. It still seems sloppy to press the same key twice to get to the specific weapon you want, when that's what the number keys are all about versus the scroll wheel. Honestly, I think I scroll wheel beats the numbers, but if they were set up like Fraggle's idea, I could see it working better.

In retrospect the best possible way to have gone would have been to make the weapon slots bindable.

On ports that allow this I set Q to BFG, F to plasma, and R to rocket launcher.

I prefer the fact that they just added SSG on top of SG in #3 as opposed to shuffling all the weapons over, otherwise we would get screwed up going between Doom and Doom II.