What makes doom multiplayer good?

Doom's sp side is perfect imho, but its multiplayer side remains mixed to me. I have played dm with a friend, looked at some other modes, and i just dont find it as engaging as other fps multiplayer modes. I dunno, the only reason i remain sorta interested is the beautiful mapsets made for it, coop and the survival thing looks kinda cool.

What made you guys stick to doom's multiplayer mode for so long?

I think survival is very cool because it's like playing single without saves but less punishing. You're still doing your best trying not to die, but if you fail it's not game over as there is still a hope that others will finish. And it's fun to cheer for them or half-jokingly hope they will die soon so you can play again. In best cases you actually have to follow a certain strategy and work together in order to win, but even running all over the map without any teamwork and trying to get the highest kill count can be pretty fun. Another very nice thing about playing with others is that there is very little tedium since an army of marines can be ridiculously efficient. Going through a full megawad alone is a daunting task, but with a reliable company you can beat all levels in just a few hours. And of course there is the social aspect. Sometimes the most entertaining stuff is happening in the chat rather than the game itself. And there is something romantic about a group of marines exploring Doom maps. I remember playing Scythe 2 in coop for the first time many years ago and feeling like we are archeologists exploring ancient Egypt. No wonder Epic 2 is so popular in the multiplayer community.

Doomkid's post here is worth reading.

Personally, for me, occasionally you meet some great people you actually want to play with on a regular basis. It's just fun jamming with them. You will always find these people, despite the fact 90% of the player base consists of horrid children, pretend-drug addicts, idiots, dipshits, assholes, jajas, huehues, and trolls. Though if you enjoy being a retard, as so many of them do, you will fit in nicely, I think more time is spent trying to out-stupid each other than actually playing the game.

I enjoy mapping for multiplayer, don't know why, lord knows the players don't deserve anything made with any amount of effort. Probably only because I enjoy mapping with the same people I play with so it kinda riffs off that.

tl;dr find people you enjoy playing with and the game becomes way better.

It's gotta be the intelligent friendly community

Well it must be the well programmed ports..?

Ok, surely it's the unified server hosting and wad downloading tools??

Wait wait, I got this.... Uhhhh.....

"There are fun maps to play"

BAM knew I'd get there eventually

Don't take this too seriously, the reality is each port is pretty easy to use, there are plenty of cool people hiding amongst the randoms and there are some truly fantastic wads for deathmatch, survival and CTF out there. It's a lot of fun, way more variety in the challenge of a real thinking opponent. I've been enjoying it for a long time now and can't imagine quitting any time soon!

Enjoyment is quite subjective. A person could just easily find modern SP in Doom to be masochistic or cheap or unfair, but find Doom's MP to be fantastic.

However, both modern SP and MP in Doom are extremely well-designed. Community and/or sub-community standards are remarkably high and the best players in the specific sub-communities of Doom often end up mapping for said sub-communities. 

Consider deathmatch. Doom deathmatch maps are made by players who love the mode. They simply create maps that cater to a specific taste. It's a taste you either acquire or not. Similar things apply to slaughtermaps, GZDoom mods, and other forms of Doom SP and MP.

Almost every aspect of modern Doom has a sub-community forming around it, and these sub-communities cater to their own interests. The best part about all of this is that the high standards of Doom map-making and modding ensure that an inquisitive player can end up finding a well-realized aspect of Doom they absolutely enjoy.

It's been a long time since i played multiplayer, so i can't speak as someone who has stuck on mp, but i used to play a ton of coop with some friends back in the day. And it was one of the best multiplayer experiences that no other game can replicate, we used to play plutonia, ultimate doom and even Hexen and Heretic to completion, but the best was when we would play coop on our own terrible maps and we went as far to make multiplayer mods that changed weapons, added items and made the monster insanely hard (a lot of stuff was taken from the darkmoon mod that we were making back in the day, and we even made a mp version called darkmod). Only on doom we could have that kind of experience were we could make something and play it together with a friend, personally i didn't enjoyed deathmatch that much despite sinking a ton of hours trying to get good at it, but coop... man it was the best... i really miss those coop sessions

On 3/8/2018 at 6:35 AM, Catpho said:

What made you guys stick to doom's multiplayer mode for so long?

I have only dabbled in Doom multiplayer compared to my sp experience, but two primary strengths multiplayer has is that, as with many multiplayer games, it obviously adds a community element which can be fulfilling as a gamer, and even if you prefer sp, multiplayer can seriously strengthen your sp skills due to how advanced online opponents can be.