Things that bother you about Doom

Imagine I re-listed everything from https://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/70248-things-id-got-wrong/

I hate WR lifts. As soon as you step off of them they go back down and then up again. Just an annoyance to me. *I never use these in my maps for that reason. I'd rather take the time to make all my lifts switch activated on both floors.

*My recent Gantlet remake for my Doom 2 Redux project was a collaborative effort and contains a lift that does this, as it was added by my partner, NxGangrel.

But WR lifts are the only type of lifts friendly to roaming monsters :(

Imp said:

Icon of Sin
The Pistol
Doom II's Map Layout

You pretty much summed up most of my issues too. Doom 64's Motherdemon was a proper showdown battle compared to the Icon, which while a cool concept didn't translate as well in-game. Plutonia 2 has a pretty sick version of the Icon though.

The pistol is essentially rendered obsolete once the chaingun is acquired, maybe if it did slightly more damage and was more accurate it would've been useful to hang onto.

Doom 1's levels were structured thanks to the episode format, whereas D2 feels haphazard at best and lazy at worst.

I also think the Lost Soul is needlessly strong (how is a flying skull on fire tougher than a Imp and almost as tough as a Pinky?) and preferred when its HP was cut in half like in Doom 64.

The Zombieman and Spider Mastermind are also pushovers compared to the other zombies and boss monsters. Make the Zombieman shoot more frequently (like a much slower chaingunner) aim better and hit harder with his rifle over the player's pistol and the Mastermind with double the Cyberdemon's health and a better weapon/attack or two and they'd be more formidable opponents.

Partial invisibility is also not terribly useful even if hitscanners miss more, it's a wasted slot for a more potent power-up.

Thankfully, a few of these issues I've remedied in a personal mod I've worked on this month.

Yeah there's a noticeable gap between zombieman and shotgunner and the imp and the next strongest ranged monster. I'd like Valiant's imp, one with a slightly slower fireball, but of course it'd be cool to keep the regular imp fireball too because those are quite fun when spammed.

-How often camping is preferable to run and gun and using maneuverability as defense.

-Romero didn't design more levels.

-How some of the original monster sprites were based on Adrian models and others not.

-Weapon replacements for the SSG and BFG.

-Master Levels

-The "retreat" function or whatever it is that makes caco's shimmy backwards.

-65% of impassable decorative sprites.

fraggle said:

Monsters jog on the spot before they wake up, for no real reason

They're exercising. How do you think the Baron has such big muscles, or how is the Revenant's punch so strong, or how is the AV so fast? All of that due to regularly working out. :]

Aquanet said:

How often camping is preferable to run and gun and using maneuverability as defense.

Still better than most shooters in this regard.

OTOH, it depends on how encounters were designed in a given level, so YMMV.

Da Werecat said:

Still better than most shooters in this regard.

OTOH, it depends on how encounters were designed in a given level, so YMMV.

Stop quoting people just to say "Doom is still better than other shooters at [x]" already. I don't understand your brand of contrarianism at all (and it's not something I've seen from you in only this thread). The point of the thread is to complain about Doom's nuisances; it's completely irrelevant when Inferior Shooters #000-#999 are worse at that particular thing.

Please calm down. I don't want you to have a heart attack because of me.

This community has a bit too many people who have the privilege of having a ton of free time and few of them are using it to master the art of making good doom levels.

As Fonze said, of the people who do make maps, a few too many of them work too independently, when they'd be better off pairing with someone who is better at a particular part of level design that they have a lot to learn from. Working with other people is one of the most powerful learning experiences in mapping I've ever had.

Doom itself has some pretty negligible minutiae of things I don't like that it seems hair splitting and annoying to go through the effort of posting it. Doom has a lot going for it that rarely bothers me outside of what map authors do in their maps.

-The Super Shotgun's reloading animation

-Doomguy has eyeballs in his chest apparently

-No rifle (I think Smooth Doom's rifle is a good representation of what that weapon would be like.)

-Plasma Gun's sound

-Doom 2's story (I know it's the future, and most of the Earth's population was either killed or zombified, but how do you put at least 50 million people on a couple of ships?)

Aquanet said:

-The "retreat" function or whatever it is that makes caco's shimmy backwards.

It's just the lack of friction in the air.

Damage push a monster in the direction opposite to the source of damage. This is represented by changing the monster's momentum variables.

Momentum is processed every tic and used to adjust the mobj's position on the map. Momentum is how missiles and other projectiles move. Player movement is also translated into momentum changes. Normal monster movement, however, however, doesn't use momentum -- instead monsters perform small instantaneous steps whenever they call A_Chase. So when a cacodemon is pushed backward and at the same time tries to move forward, its A_Chase-based move forward behavior has no impact on its momentum-based moving backward behavior.

Now when a mobj is walking on the ground, there's a certain friction coefficient (which Heretic, Hexen, Boom or ZDoom lets you change on a sector-by-sector basis) that reduces the momentum. If there's nothing to keep it constant (like a player continually pressing a movement key) then the momentum quickly decreases to 0. But flying monsters are treated essentially like projectiles: there is no friction in the air, so they keep their momentum until they collide with an obstacle. A collision will reset their momentum to zero, putting an end to their drifting.

TraceOfSpades said:

I hate WR lifts. As soon as you step off of them they go back down and then up again. Just an annoyance to me. *I never use these in my maps for that reason. I'd rather take the time to make all my lifts switch activated on both floors.

*My recent Gantlet remake for my Doom 2 Redux project was a collaborative effort and contains a lift that does this, as it was added by my partner, NxGangrel.

I find it kinda convenient actually when done properly.

I've probably said this before in other threads of this type, but I'm too lazy to look for it.

-Icon of sin, while the idea of the fight is awesome, it's execution left a lot to be desired.

-Revenants missiles and Baron of Hell's projectile damages should be switched around. Since the Revenant missile already has the advantage of homing in, it seems like a fair trade that it should do less(but still decent) damage, and the Baron's ball should be buffed because he is, technically speaking, a boss.

-Lack of vertical spread for the shotgun. I know it was due to the limitations, autoaim and lack of freelook, but still, firing it and seeing the blood splats all aligned perfectly is just odd. What really sucks is that, even if you fix it on modern source ports, it becomes less accurate, because of the new spread direction, so it's better to suck it up and leave it as it is.

-Doom 2's OST in general pales in comparison to the original Doom's and Final Doom.

-Fuck lost souls

scifista42 said:

Few modern mapsets are made for ZDoom and using its advanced features to their potential.

On that note, I'd like to add that there's a lack of Zdoom mapsets that don't use custom monsters. I think it's great that people can put custom enemies in their maps at all, but at the same time Zdoom is a port with such a HUGE abundance of gameplay mods that often can't be properly played on actual ZDoom mapsets because of the custom enemies.

Lost Souls are the bane of my existence.

The fact that you can't make monsters blind other than by utilizing some node building tricks that seem to be beyond my understanding. I've seen some interesting setups using this, would be nice if it was a simple flag that could be set.

On a similar note, I wish all source ports had the FHSHH (blind enemies) and FHHALL (kill all monsters) cheats present in Doom95, they're very convenient for testing and are just nifty codes all around.

Piper Maru said:

Lost Souls are the bane of my existence.

they're like zerglings but with a crapton of health

a.k.a the worst enemy in any game ever

How E4M8 turned out. It would have been better if the end was a larger arena, but it just HAD to be cramped. Not to mention the BFG9000 was right behind it, which is cliche positioning to me.

Da Werecat said:

Please calm down. I don't want you to have a heart attack because of me.

He's still better than most heart-owners in this regard.

The idea that people can mod the game to harass vulnerable autistic individuals such as Connor Bible is my biggest bother about the game. Just look at this trite by Nirxsachit, this definitely proves that autistic people don't care about their own kind. It's been over a year since he made this and he has the audacity to post more of this shit to laugh at Connor while his level design skills are subpar at best. And how has he not been copyrighted on Youtube for using Family Guy music yet?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdPCKE6uvpE

This is an absolutely sickening excuse for a Doom WAD and I would have him sued if I had any information about him.

Vordrak, that's really more about being bothered by the fans than the game itself, since literally any art form could potentially be the vehicle for someone else's negativity.

The only thing that really bugs me about Doom--besides the lack of more "realistic" assets like you would see in Duke 3D or Blood--is something that has been mentioned several times on this forum, which is that id clearly added the linedef actions on an as-needed basis. If they had been implemented in a general way, we might see just a handful of actions that can have a large number of variables that can be altered. There would be far more variety in the transformational possibilities, and likely new exploits could be found that could serve as additional examples of painstakingly faked 3D stuff.

Jaxxoon R said:

He's still better than most heart-owners in this regard.

Then maybe you shouldn't upset him with your contrarian bullshit, you inconsiderate individual.

Why are you so mad.

Still better than most users in this regard.

Nuh-uh, not as good as yur mum

rileymartin said:

RNG damage with massive swings like the BFG ball doing 100-800 or Revenant missiles hitting from 10-80. There's no place for that kind of crap outside turn-based RPG's, and even then it's annoying. If there's a mod that just averages out the damage values I'd autoload it with everything I play.

Yeah if you have 80 hp left, the damn Rev ball will do 80 damage :p

RNG pisses me off worst with berserk though. You can kill a pinky in 1 punch, and then some Kung fu imp takes 4 and even scratches back.

Da Werecat said:

Still better than most users in this regard.

Come on dont get all hung up on this. You made a dumb and unwanted post. Move on.


Edit
Can't believe so many people hate lost souls. They're my faves. Is having to kill them with a super shotgun rather than your regular shotgun so irritating?

scifista42 said:

Few modern mapsets are made for ZDoom and using its advanced features to their potential. I understand that talented mappers want attention of speedrunners and demo-recorders and so they avoid ZDoom for its lack of good demo compatibility (which is another thing that bothers me), but still...

Agreed. I've played many ZDoom WADs that were specifically designed for ZDoom (according to the author), typically in the "Doom in Hexen format", and yet they design it to be as vanilla Doom as possible. I completely understand why somebody would want to design vanilla maps, but why not just design it with vanilla or Chocolate Doom in mind? Or even Boom if it's limit-removing that they want.

How long have 3D floors been a thing now in ZDoom? Yet every modern ZDoom WAD I play still uses those terrible looking mid-texture grates for simulating things like chairs. Under-utilizing the source-port like that just feels like a wasted opportunity to me.

The SSG is probably the most fun weapon against them, but when they have 50 HP the cluster kills become pretty delightful. As is, vertical pellet spread and the high HP will often keep you from getting more than one at once. Also, chaingun combat is best suited to monsters with very low HP; I'd rather mow down 20 50-HP souls than 10 regular ones. And single SG combat becomes a lot more satisfying when one explodes with every shot.