Doom 1 or 2?

I've been growing to appreciate Doom II a lot more over the past year. It isn't nearly as bad as I remember. I still prefer Doom 1 overall, but all four commercial IWADS are really good honestly. I've been having a lot of fun going through them all again.

Because more monsters (however arguably redundant some may be) and a new gun to shoot them with makes modding infinitely more fun.

I can't think of a single enemy introduced in Doom 2 that's redundant, except for the Wolfenstein SS which are just easter eggs anyway. I guess the Hell Knights are pretty close, but the fact that Cacodemons fly meant that a basic mid-tier enemy that's landlocked was missing, anyway.

Ugh, great, another n00b spouting this crap.

Doom2 was better than Doom1 in every respect. Doom2 was the complete game, whereas Doom1 was just the prototype.

Not only that; Doom2 was the best of the iwads, and better than all but a very few later megawads.

Grazza said:

Ugh, great, another n00b spouting this crap.

Haven't seen that word used non ironically in quite some time. It's just his opinion, man.

HavoX said:

okay so maybe Doom II was rushed compared to Doom 1.

Actually it was the other way around. Doom 1 was rushed compared to Doom 2.

Going back to all the Doom games now, I think that in most respects Doom 2 is the superior game. The increased monster variety and additional weapons adds so much variety to the gameplay and strategies required to navigate the levels that it makes the overall experience far better, and I believe this more than makes up for the slightly weaker map design.

AlexMax said:

Visually, E3 pulled off the Hell look better than anything in Doom 2, but I simply could not help but miss the SSG and the expanded bestiary.

Personally I would say the Spirit World blows away most of E3. If only more of the D2 hell levels were more like that map...

Sick Bow said:

However, the new enemies and weapons

LordShadowZ said:

The increased monster variety and additional weapons

Not sure what Doom 2 you guys have been playing, but the regular version only has one new weapon :P.

rdwpa said:

Pinkies can play many roles:
...
- fodder for fun weapons like the SSG, berserk fist, rocket launcher, and BFG

No love for the chainsaw? :_(

NiGHTMARE said:

Not sure what Doom 2 you guys have been playing, but the regular version only has one new weapon :P.

The SSG is so good, it feels like they added more than one.

Grazza said:

Ugh, great, another n00b spouting this crap.

wow, takes me back to 2008

Grazza said:

Ugh, great, another n00b spouting this crap.

Doom2 was better than Doom1 in every respect. Doom2 was the complete game, whereas Doom1 was just the prototype.

Not only that; Doom2 was the best of the iwads, and better than all but a very few later megawads.

Pretty much.

LordShadowZ said:

The SSG is so good, it feels like they added more than one.

The additional two weapons are the megasphere and the magical extra six pellets from the SSG.

Grazza said:

Doom2 was the complete game, whereas Doom1 was just the prototype.

Actually, I kinda agree with this.

doom1.wad, while enjoyable, was hardly the epic game that doom2.wad is. It was also incredibly incomplete.

NiGHTMARE said:

Personally I would say the Spirit World blows away most of E3. If only more of the D2 hell levels were more like that map...

Not sure what Doom 2 you guys have been playing, but the regular version only has one new weapon :P.

The SSG adds the equivalent of two extra shotguns. Therefore, two new weapons.

Doom II's weird-ass levels are awesomely fun and inspiring. I like it a lot more than the original game.

NiGHTMARE said:

Personally I would say the Spirit World blows away most of E3. If only more of the D2 hell levels were more like that map...

I can't forgive Spirit World after that infamous shoot the symbol to get to the exit bullcrap. I'm sorry, I can't abide by that. It would have been bad enough if it required you to wall hump to find the exit, but shoot a symbol that looks nothing like the switches you've been pressing/shooting this entire time. Who in the Hell was supposed to know to do that without looking it up or getting frustrated and just painting the walls with bullets?

One thing that really does surprise me about Doom II is that as far as I can tell, the main intention of the release was to get a Doom game on store shelves (instead of being distributed via mail). It could have been something really simple like Spear of Destiny where they just strapped more levels and a few bosses (that really weren't much different than the old ones) into the game and put that on shelves. But they went beyond just that and added quite a few nice features to the game. Great monsters, a weapon that picks up the usual slack of the shotgun and chaingun with lots of high health enemies, and levels which may not always be the best, but many are very fun.

I certainly have a soft spot for Doom 1, in particular I love E1 and perhaps even more the idea of subverted techbases in E2 (even if it wasn't always done that well) than E1's pure techbases, but I just don't find it as fun to play.

Arctangent said:

I can't think of a single enemy introduced in Doom 2 that's redundant, except for the Wolfenstein SS which are just easter eggs anyway. I guess the Hell Knights are pretty close, but the fact that Cacodemons fly meant that a basic mid-tier enemy that's landlocked was missing, anyway.

Yeah, that's why I said arguably. I've seen pages and pages of DW users argue about it.

MetroidJunkie said:

I can't forgive Spirit World after that infamous shoot the symbol to get to the exit bullcrap. I'm sorry, I can't abide by that. It would have been bad enough if it required you to wall hump to find the exit, but shoot a symbol that looks nothing like the switches you've been pressing/shooting this entire time. Who in the Hell was supposed to know to do that without looking it up or getting frustrated and just painting the walls with bullets?

Everyone complains about that "puzzle", but it's entirely fair. You know there's *something* in that room. One glance at the automap will tell you that the shootable wall is "usable" somehow. Try humping it, nothing happens. Hmm, I've had to shoot a wall before (in Tricks and Traps), let's try that. Voila, the door opens!

By "first person maze-game puzzle" standards, that's really tame. I seriously wonder how many of the people here would have fared with Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, or Ultima Underworld...

Technically, the wall you have to shoot in Tricks and Traps is 100% optional. As a matter of fact, the good majority of the level is optional since all you're required to do is get the key from the Baron/Cyberdemon room, go into that key door, grab that key and kill the horde, then head into the platforms leading to the exit.

You described a secret that most people will probably miss outright, not to mention the fact that those symbols in Spirit World are still nothing like any switch in any of the rest of the game. Furthermore, I see no such "usable" sign in the automap. Perhaps you're mistaking it for some source port that has such functionality but Vanilla Doom 2 has no such thing. If anything, it deceptively makes the center pillar look usable.

AlexMax said:

I actually played Doom Shareware, then Doom 2, then Ultimate Doom in that order.

So did I! And I think that has a lot to do with my opinions of the games, that goes E1 > Doom 2 > E2+E3 > E4.

I think Ep 1 has the best of all the experiences, but taken as a whole Doom 2 is better than Doom 1. The added beastiery makes a huge difference, and the wider more open levels mix up the gameplay in a way Doom 1 never really did.

Each has its pros and cons - some of the later hell levels in Doom 2 you could tell they were just messing about for example - but all in all Doom 2 I think is a better experience.

I just wish id had included all the Doom 1 assets in the Doom 2 IWAD!

I think that's how it was for me, too. Not sure if I played Doom 2 or Doom 1's demo first but I do know I didn't play the full Ultimate Doom (Or Shores of Hell / Inferno) until after I played Doom 2. As a result, I'm more nostalgically drawn to Doom 2.

Sallan said:

Why so much people love DOOM II?

Y'know, this topic comes up all the freaking time and, having read all of those at some time or another, I've stopped caring in the same way I stopped making sure everyone could agree to pizza toppings and instead buy more than one pizza to handle them all. I really wouldn't know what to tell you, seeing as how very few people have actually switched their stance to "getting it" in the past.

Regarding the OP's implication that ID Software was riding on the success of the first game in making the second... yeah, they likely were. On the other hand:

• Supposedly John Carmack was working on the Doom engine as the rest of the team put together Spear of Destiny, so I would not be surprised if the Quake engine was created in parallel with Doom II. If so, it's not like we would've gotten Quake faster.
  
• If you wanted new content with the Doom engine ("spin-offs", so to speak), there were Heretic and Hexen and Strife, all of which John Romero was involved with at some level. I personally enjoyed the heck out of Heretic and Hexen back in the day.
  
• At the time Doom was mail-order only and, with the industry gearing up for mass supply, maybe they decided to go with something more than adding an episode to the original and selling that in stores. Ultimately they DID do that, but only after building a standalone, which I appreciate.
  

If you see a lot of people talking about megawads and other content created for Doom II, that is almost entirely because, when you take away the textures and the maps and the music (historically the easiest things to modify), the designer simply has more to work with in Doom II than in Doom. This makes it the preferred choice by far when it comes to WADs & mods.

Cynical said:

Everyone complains about that "puzzle", but it's entirely fair. You know there's *something* in that room. One glance at the automap will tell you that the shootable wall is "usable" somehow. Try humping it, nothing happens. Hmm, I've had to shoot a wall before (in Tricks and Traps), let's try that. Voila, the door opens!

This is merely anecdotal, but when I first came across The Courtyard (probably was younger than 10) I must've spent two minutes in that initial room before realizing you opened the door by shooting it. I'm still incredibly thick-handed when it comes to deceptive shoot switches, as it doesn't come across as an expected feature of Doom maps (perhaps because it's used so rarely to progress).

Cynical said:

Everyone complains about that "puzzle", but it's entirely fair. You know there's *something* in that room. One glance at the automap will tell you that the shootable wall is "usable" somehow. Try humping it, nothing happens. Hmm, I've had to shoot a wall before (in Tricks and Traps), let's try that. Voila, the door opens!

Nah, I remember getting stuck on that map as a kid, as I found myself looped around to an earlier area without explanation. Even worse, Doom 2 changed the noclip cheat from Doom 1, so even though I could cheat and see that there was a room there and was probably where I needed to go, I couldn't actually figure out how to get in there. I was under the impression there was a switch I was missing somewhere else in the level.

I actually agree that The Spirit World is the best hell level in Doom 2, but the exit gimmick was complete bull.

I exited The Spirit World first time because I honestly thought the symbol was obvious myself.

That and The Citadel reminded me walls being shot are the last resort you should go to.

i agree, i much prefer Doom I over Doom II, the levels look much better, i don't really care about the monsters and the super shotgun is fun for a few levels, than it becomes boring to use, the entire game gets boring after a little while to be honest. But i can understand why so many prefer the second game.

And the music is much better too.

Doom 2 is the better game on paper, but it doesn't strike the right chords with me in the way that Doom 1 does. Yes, Doom 1 is duller, rougher, and simpler, but I think it struck a better overall balance with pacing and such. I find myself far more willing to give up in the middle of a Doom 2 playthrough out of boredom in some of the larger maps, whereas only a few Doom 1 levels do that to me (E3M6 comes to mind).

That, and the atmosphere, level texturing, and even the tone of the story and presentation is better than Doom 2 in my opinion. The stupid Wolfenstein easter-egg maps are a perfect example of this. I don't expect Doom to be super-serious like Doom 3 was, but I prefer that it not go balls-to-the-walls silly.

I don't like the Wolf3D maps much either, but complaining that they ruin your immersion is a bit silly, considering they're optional bonus maps. You can always go straight to Suburbs from Industrial Zone for proper continuity.

Doom one's biggest issue is that the gameplay is just extremely dull and one-dimensional due to complete lack of interesting monsters.

That's like complaining about those oddly pixelated Classic Doom secret areas in Doom 2016 that "totally ruin the immersion, bro!", it's meant as a cameo parked to the side not meant to be taken seriously as part of the main game. If you notice, the SS Guards aren't even among the cast of monsters after you kill the Icon of Sin.