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TootsyBowl

If Doom 2 was released as a PWAD

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Imagine that Doom 2 was never made, and some time after Doom 1 some people made what we call Doom 2 (maps, monsters, textures, everything), titled it simply "Hell on Earth", and released it as a pwad. How would you have liked it?

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To be perfectly honest, I would have tolerated it even less, though it would surely be credited for inventing some novel concepts and even map genres in the same way Doom II as an official release did, and I think they'd find their fans the same way. It's too distinct for anything otherwise to be the case.

 

The trajectory of both Final Doom wads would surely also have been a lot different. (Well, maybe not TNT, actually, which does feel spiritually closer to Doom 1's setting-based dungeon-crawler gameplay, but certainly Plutonia, which picks up on and refines the increasingly encounter-based design of both Doom II and episode 4, eye-em-oh; hard to say it would have come out the same without the official releases serving as a foundation.)

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TBH, I don't find Doom II maps that good, as the first Doom's. It would be a generic mod with few weapons and monsters for me, and I would just forget about it, probably.

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These days I actually feel like playing through Doom 2 is like a chore sometimes. I enjoy Ultimate Doom a lot more for the map designs. Ultimate Doom feels like I am always able to move forward but Doom 2 feels like I am constantly turning around.

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A wad by random modders has more varied gameplay elements than the one by the devs. Shame on id SHAME! They even modified the fucking engine and released patches for doom with it!

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To be honest, I have no idea, I really like DOOM II and its new monsters really stuck to me, and we got the SSG from it. But it some level designs are very questionable.
 

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I would've liked the new monsters, weapon and power up added and could see it being made separate as a resource pack that id end up endorsing down the line and feature the monsters officially in new Doom games. But the maps would've been largely disappointing and I'd never play it more than once or twice.

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This hypothetical scenario is too vague. On the one hand, Doom2 as we know it came out in late 1994 and, to speak nothing of source ports, the ability to extend the game as necessary to create this as a simple PWAD with DeHackEd elements is 100% impossible, even to this day. On the other hand, by the time this would have been possible (let's say 1998, supposing a very determined modding team with a very specific vision of Doom in mind) I'd already have moved on from Doom at the time, and in general far fewer people would have played it since it would only have been available to those interesting in modding back in '98. (Realistically it would've been far longer on the timeline, if you take into account existing mods that only add to the gameplay without modifying other aspects.) So I don't see a particularly satisfying answer either way.

 

For sure it would've been far less impactful, even in 1998, because it would've been a complete departure from the original executable not only in points of engine capability but also gameplay. Doom1's approach to 8/9-map episodic progression is something I believe people (including myself) prefer compared to Doom2, providing a far more effective compromise to the whole "pistol start vs continuous" issue occasionally discussed here. The added weapon and enemies are significant, yes, but I don't think they'd have far from universally caught on in the modding scene: there's a sense of purity from official creations, regardless of the unofficial quality. (Then again I'm not sure there's been anything that comes close to what would have been the efforts of a Doom2 PWAD in seamlessly applying to the original content.) So it'd probably have a sub-following within the community, kind of like what we have with mapping and modding based on Doom1 today.

 

It's hard to come up with interesting points here because of how much this would affect... well, everything. "How would you have liked it" is the best question you can ask here? If Doom2 doesn't exist as an id Software product, does that mean The Ultimate Doom exists earlier? What happens to 90% of the classic Doom2 PWADs? How different would the community be in a universe without an official SSG and slew of enemies that kept the gameplay exciting after all this time? What's the direction of ports when the source code is released? How are Doom 64, Doom 3, and Doom 2016 affected? You're removing an incredibly crucial piece of the puzzle, and a lot of future events become very difficult to read into without it.

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I do think most everything in the community would be less interesting if we only had Doom 1 for an IWAD. I think Doom's episodic structure and Doom II's 32-level setup both work - they both offer different ways of playing the game.

 

As a PWAD, yeah, it'd be fun...but not nearly as exciting as something toting the large DOOM II logo on the box of a brand-new game you just bought at Toys R Us (yes, that was me). Not only that, but it unlocks the seemingly endless content of the community we all enjoy to this day. I wonder how much less active Doom would be without Doom II.

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It's so hard to create a totally new monster for Doom that looks good, functions well AND isn't a derivative of one of the original Doom's monsters, so Doom II having about half a dozen of them in the one WAD would have definitely turned heads. As for the levels, I guess it depends on when the WAD was released. The levels are reasonable for 1994 standards, even if they weren't at the standard of the original Doom's. As for the SSG, as much as I love the weapon and use it predominantly when I'm Dooming (given that it's available and I have enough ammo for it), I think a modder would have come up with a similar weapon before long.

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To be honest, if things added in D2 are not used widely in other community WADs, I probably don't like modern Doom maps. The variety of D2 is so important for the game. Things like Revenants, Arch-viles and SSG add a lot of possibilities of design to it. Even Hell Knights sort of solve the problem of Barons being too much meat.

 

If you're talking about maps, I don't think D2 and UD have too much difference between them, and I like some of the their maps, and I don't like some of their maps, and some of the popular maps, aka E2M2, don't even impress me that much.

 

BTW, why no one thinks backwards? If D2 is the basic iwad, UD is the pwad, what will happen?

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I think it would be like Hell Revealed, which has not aged well but has earned its place in the Hall of Fame because it spawned a genre.

 

On the other hand, if it had been a PWAD, would it have spawned a genre, or would it have just been a lame mapset with some interesting monsters?

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Maybe if we go back to 1994, I think it would be an incredible success. (Which happened). Maybe if we talk about the design of maps, the maps of Doom II have never been my favorites, I find them somewhat slow or tedious, some are quite interesting and fun, but can become somewhat tedious in the end, although it is 1994, back then if I had come out as a PWAD I think it would have been something incredibly cool, nowadays lots of PWADS already exceed it in terms of design, however, Doom II stand out more for adding new weapons, enemies and glorious music. For those last 3 aspects I would have considered it legendary as a PWAD.

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I find the maps in Doom 2 to be more fun than those of Doom 1. Doom 1 was trying too hard to look like a real-life place, and the gameplay suffered for it. Doom 2 cast this aside (what the blazes is the in-game-universe setting for "The Pit" or "Tricks and Traps"??), and made maps that might be less immersive and atmospheric, but they are more challenging, more varied, and generally more fun.

 

Expanding on my previous post: In all probability, if Doom 2 had been a PWAD, then the "purist" crowd would never have latched on to it (because custom monsters and weapon), and not many following custom WADs would have used those resources. Doom would not have appealed to the wide audience that it does. The community would be a lot smaller (there might not even be a Doomworld), because most of the custom WADs are still requiring users to kill cacodemons with the pump-action shotgun in tech-base corridors.

 

North Korea would probably have nuclear weapons.

 

ISIS would probably rule the world.

 

People like us would be hiding in the wilderness, wondering where our families are going to get food and shelter.

 

Neo-Nazis would be rioting and engaging in paramilitary activities in every major city.

 

It would be a dark, dark world, my friends.

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1 minute ago, 42PercentHealth said:

kill cacodemons with the pump-action shotgun

Not to mention the next level meat monster is Baron.

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Interesting.....E1M8 would be O of Destruction, E2M8 would be Gotcha and E3M8 would be Icon of Sin while E2M9 would be Wolfenstein and E3M9 would be Grosse.....but what map would be E1M9? Tricks and Traps?

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7 minutes ago, GarrettChan said:

Not to mention the next level meat monster is Baron.

Yeah, but you usually get a RL for those guys, and 5-6 rockets can take one down. They're not so bad by themselves, if you're properly armed.

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18 minutes ago, 42PercentHealth said:

Yeah, but you usually get a RL for those guys, and 5-6 rockets can take one down. They're not so bad by themselves, if you're properly armed.

Well, we all know that, but SSG gives more possibilities gunning down meats rather than forcing the player shotgunning a Baron (of course this is only one factor). I'm actually curious why people think D2 is a chore because I didn't find so all the time... I have a feeling that people don't like D2 simply just because of Revenants (<-It's a joke.)...

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- I would have HATED and bashed the hell out of it because of the mostly terrible music...

- probably would have forgotten about most of the maps VERY soon after playing...

- would have hated the endling

- would have hated the fact that they moved away from the episodes and intermission screens.

 

BUT I would have LOVED it until now as one of the BEST mods ever... for the newly introduced monsters. Especially the arch-vile

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1 hour ago, Doohnibor said:

- I would have HATED and bashed the hell out of it because of the mostly terrible music...

- probably would have forgotten about most of the maps VERY soon after playing...

- would have hated the endling

- would have hated the fact that they moved away from the episodes and intermission screens.

 

BUT I would have LOVED it until now as one of the BEST mods ever... for the newly introduced monsters. Especially the arch-vile

Hold... Hold on! The music? Whats wrong with it? DONT YOU KNOW DOOT?

 

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I'll undoubtedly get some scorn for saying this, but when I played DooM 2 I almost forgot that it was a successor to DooM. There were so many changes (most of which I consider improvements), that it was almost like playing a completely new game. Not for once did I think DooM2 was simply a mod of DooM. The SSG alone was worth the price of admission. But when paired with the new bestiary, maps, graphics, and music, I felt that it was the best $45 I had spent in quite a while.

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It would be one of the most iconic PWADS ever created.  Not only would people always be using the new monsters it made for their custom wads but the ssg as well.  Doom2 felt more like a game than doom1 imo,  Doom2 had varied challenges and monster placements that inspired a whole generation of mappers.  There was just soo much that doom2 had to offer that changed the doom community forever.

Doom1 felt more like a story where as doom2 was more mindless fun than anything else.  I always had more fun playing doom2 maps with my friends then doom1 maps.

So ya even if doom2 wasnt officially made I still think it would of made a great impact on the community anyways.  This is all of course my opinion.

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I've never found Doom 2 campaign's very interesting, it feels like the maps were designed to be specifically harder and more rushed than polished, to me it feels like an unneccesary sequel to an already overrated game, of course the inclusion of the SSG and the fat fucks and more enemies is already good enough since it gives the designer more possibilites of making a map different

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Why do games always look better in pictures? It doesn't even look like software mode in those screenshots.

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My guess would be that they were originally scans which would have dithered the image somewhat, but in this case we're looking at a photo of a reprinted image of a scan (jesus, that's a triple-whammy) which would have blurred it that much more. CRT monitors had a very similar effect on older games which is why oldschool-obsessed jerkoffs such as myself prefer to have one of those clunky old tubes lying around!

 

unneccesary sequel to an already overrated game

This is the hardest I've disagreed with something in quite a while

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