Is there anything in Doom you find truly archaic?

Not "old fashioned but still fun". More "old fashioned and would get rid of it if I had the choice"

For me, the chainsaw's drag effect. Playing FlakesDoom has shown me it is completely unnecessary.

Pain elemental

Dying

Most of these are vanilla-isms that are addressed in various ports, but off the top of my head, I've no nostalgia for:

• The original keyboard-only control scheme
• Infinite-height actors
• Y-shearing when looking up-down -- okay, so this isn't a doom.exe thing, but it cheekily counts because Heretic is vanilla Doom
• The Baron of Hell -- they seemed hella threatening back when nobody knew how to play FPS games, but nowadays, they're too low-threat to justify such a high health pool. Their only useful role is "meat wall."

Probably more stuff too, but there you go.

running by holding down shift. Autorun and walking by holding shift makes much more sense gameplay wise. (And saves hands)

definitely keyboard controls

2 minutes ago, Pegg said:

running by holding down shift.

don't most games do that?

Mostly the games where you have no\very low strafing while running. 

Not exactly Doom, but one-button strafing, especially if it's ALT. Wolfenstein had it, Doom almost had it evidently in the alpha versions.

No double jumps.

1 hour ago, Xaser said:

• Infinite-height actors

Yeah I never really cared for this; I'd also pair it with the lack of freelook as well.
Also:
 -Archvile ignoring Z-Height.

 -Archviles resurrecting Barons of Hell.

 -Items getting crushed by doors.
 -"Old Weapon Switch" (automatically switching weapons upon pickup between ANY weapon - problem solved by most source ports, though some people apparently think this feature is necessary)
-Both the limit of 256 colors and Doom/Doom II's original palette - It's pretty tiring seeing the same awful colors in the palette.
-Generic Projectile Monsters (Imp/Cacodemon/Hell Knight/Baron of Hell/Revenant (when firing non-homing missiles)) that could use more interesting behavior
-Wide Damage Ranges over Small Damage Ranges (10 to 80 instead of 20/30 to 60)
-Slow Projectiles

38 minutes ago, Argent Agent said:

-Generic Projectile Monsters (Imp/Cacodemon/Hell Knight/Baron of Hell/Revenant (when firing non-homing missiles)) that could use more interesting behavior

Serious Sam threw tons of generic projectile monsters at you and yet the combat always felt interesting. Wonder whar the special ingredient was.

Definitely infinitely tall actors feel really out of place and annoying for both newcomers and veterans. Also the not-too-great autoaim

Infinite height, which is why I'm grateful for the ability to turn it off in GZDoom.

The sprites still being used,why dont someone implement animation with skeletons already?

3 hours ago, Xaser said:

Y-shearing when looking up-down

In a game with map objects rendered as sprites, I prefer Y-shearing over true freelook, because it prevents perspective problems. Map objects rendered as sprites probably also qualify as archaic themselves. But I like them, and that's why I also appreciate Y-shearing. Similarly, the engine as a whole qualifies as archaic, with so many limitations and things it can't do, often even with advanced port specific features. But some of its unique hardcoded quirks are also what makes its charm, in my view, like sector based light levels, colormap based light diminishing, the aforementioned sprites, voodoo dolls, demo recording, and more such things that were born due to limitations or bugs and became integrated and exploited in the game - and for these, I appreciate the engine as well.

4 hours ago, roadworx said:

definitely keyboard controls

I still only play doom with keyboard controls, thats how it was designed. sure, sourceports today have way to force the player to not only rely on it, but I enjoy it none the less.

32 minutes ago, Phade102 said:

thats how it was designed.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Controls#Mouse_and_keyboard

Ignorant players.

2 hours ago, CaptainManiac said:

The sprites still being used,why dont someone implement animation with skeletons already?

i mean, i think the sprites look pretty decent. its kinda stylized.

3 hours ago, TootsyBowl said:

Serious Sam threw tons of generic projectile monsters at you and yet the combat always felt interesting. Wonder whar the special ingredient was.

Aside of your seemingly sassy response, you're missing the fact that movement in serious sam is a lot slower compared to doom, which overall impacted what they could do with projectile based enemies, because movement dictates the flow of combat. In doom you can outrun pretty much any projectile you can think of, even rockets aren't much faster than the player, which means that things like Mancubi and revenants, which are "non-generic" projectile enemies (for the purpose of this discussion) are the only means to reliably stop players from outrunning or mindlessly dodging all the things.

So the "secret ingredient" you were looking for is making players move more slowly, so you can get away with cheaper enemy/encounter design.

45 minutes ago, 38_ViTa_38 said:

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Controls#Mouse_and_keyboard

Have you tried playing with the vanillia mouse controls? They were no different than wolfenstein 3ds, and dear god that was a nightmare.

Just now, Phade102 said:

Have you tried playing with the vanillia mouse controls? They were no different than wolfenstein 3ds, and dear god that was a nightmare.

I played with "vanilla mousing" and a ball-mouse (now we're talking archaic) way back when with no particular issues whatsoever. Of course it's better these days, but the point ViTa made is still relevant, as doom has been designed with mouse controls in mind regardless of how well these may or may not have been implemented.

Having to press an additional button to strafe. Being unable to look up or down.

If I'm looking at straight Vanilla Doom (and its commercial engine variants), I'd say:

• First thing I'd do is add a "--help" command line argument
• Remove the pistol and make the shotgun default instead
• Real mouselook, not that y-shearing crap
• Remove the software renderer, and replace it with a nice OpenGL one
• Remove infinitely tall actors (Heretic/Hexen fixed this at least)
• Make some of the random damage amounts more predictable, at least for the player's weapons
• Make capslock act as "always run"

14 minutes ago, Phade102 said:

Have you tried playing with the vanillia mouse controls?

Yes, I only had to change the mouse sensitivity to 30.

the reload animation for the SSG. 

y-shearing is something that definitely strikes me as "archaic", a limitation of the relatively simple renderer used. There's no reason for anything really to have it any more. Much of the technical side of things is pretty archaic (of course, technology progressing renders this true of any game), honestly, and definitely could have been done better back in the day. (would that have delayed Doom or caused other trouble? I dunno)

On the gameplay front, really the only thing I find archaic are certain control elements. Vertical mouse motion, no true autorun (I will never understand why games of the era decided to have a "walk" mode, and then a "move at 2x speed for no mechanical cost" mode, and then stick the fast mode on a key press. It should be inverse, moving fast most of the times and slowing when needed. I am aware of the autorun config trick, but then you can't walk), weird defaults (not a big deal since they can be reconfigured), and keybinds restricted by certain hardcoded keys come to mind. Thankfully there aren't really any interferences with a modern WASD setup, though. The mouse input seems fine, aside from the vertical motion. Yeah, infinite tall actors is pretty archaic, but its something I can live with. The rest of the game is pretty mechanically solid in my eyes.

I, for one, actually like the old mouse control scheme. It's nice to be able to play the game with just one hand. especially when playing hdoom

I wish moden FPSes could be controlled like that.

Health bottles / armor helmets