Thanks for Freedoom

I played commercial Doom 2, custom wads and all many years ago and recently picked up an interest in playing it again. I'm not much of a gamer and I simply refuse to download Steam and give them my personal information/ banking information. I have a crappy laptop and run Linux and Freedoom on GZdoom. I've played through phase1 and halfway through phase2 now  and some custom wads. I want to say good job on the project. I'm going to post somewhat of a critique, since it's a work in progress, .

The wall and floor textures are objectively better than those found in the commercial game. Without a doubt.

The actual levels in the episodes are objectively better than the commercial game as well. They are wonderful looking for vanilla-style doom engine wads and challenging, somewhat different game-play style you have to adapt from the commercial game. I've never played Doom and have been afraid of the shotgun-zombies until I played phase1. I've never seen so many deaf monsters, that can hide behind anything, everywhere, all the time. Very clever use of simple enemies for a campaign in the style of Doom 1. What I dislike is they are often tedious switch-hunts in huge levels... I fight through several rooms, flip a switch, now I have to run around the entire lifeless world to see what the switch changed.

The item sprites, weapons, are good. I have a personal pet peeve with the multi-barrel minigun shooting more like a submachinegun, as like the commercial game but it's okay. The wall/ floor textures are absolutely perfect. The enemy sprites are mixed. The hell royalty equivalents are absolutely great. The flying trilobite thingie is great, too. The Assault Tripod I would have done differently, but it's good.

I don't care for the style of the zombies, with the silly megaman/metriod/anime rip-off style with the huge forearms and boots on an anorexic, flailing, exaggerated moving character... but it's okay, it works and it's different from any commercial game using a doom-like engine. Don't care for worms that can squirm faster than things with legs can run, but okay. I don't like the unassuming, scrawny, short, black demon that shoots homing rockets from it's bare palms, but it's okay. I think the equivalents of the zombiemen, the imp, and pinkie, should be the best-looking enemies in any  since that's already 90% of the sprites on a map. I think the current centipede-man-alien-demon is okay. I disliked them at first, but they grew on me. They are satisfying to kill and their behavior, attacks, physics all made sense to me. Maybe they don't make sense thematically. Apparently everything is going to be lizards... lizard enemies, lizard power-ups, lizard weapons 100% through if I read old forum posts correctly? Is this still true?

Also I want to say the sound effects are much better than the commercial game. Only issue is the sound of a crusher clicking to a stop sounds more like a high-pitched gunshot than a big mass of metal reversing directions.

The 'combat slug', the red skeleton wizard with the sword, the 'techospiders' both large and small are absolutely awful. The hovering, magical fishing-net full of spooky skulls is one of the worse things i've ever seen in any game in my life,  All of those look an absolute mess.

Before you say anything, no I'm not going to go creating sprites replace them, so feel free to tell me to shove off, I wish I had the freetime but I don't. I started playing Freedoom a month ago after a 5-6 year break of having played any Doom-engine game at all, so thought my opinion might be an objective view-point.

Again, Freedom is amazing, it's decidedly better than the commercial game in a lot of ways. It looks better. The levels are way better than anything ID Software ever made for their commercial game. Thanks, if you contributed to this game.

Want to say what on my mind but afraid to be banned for that. Like, really, things that want to be freed from my mind prison are that harsh.

and yet I'll say maximally polite in this case: GIMME YOUR WEED MAN.

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EDIT: alright just to clarify, I understand you might to really like freedoom yet your words look more like salty sarcasm\trolling.

When Doom was in developement ID hadn't instruments that we have novadays. the only editors they were able to use are simple DoomEd and Paint, yet they managed to do brilliant work with making simple things fit their design of how game should look like.

You said that some game aspects freedoom deliver are way better than original ones that Doom affords you. Well, maybe. At least some textures look interesting, yet whole gfx quality much lower than it's original counterparts. I saw them all, I did some research and drawing, so I know what am I talking about.

Same goes about sprite assets you might to see in game. Weapons, monsters, obstacles, etc. Yes I agree, slug mastermind and skeleton are awful as fuck yet there are people that at least trying to fix that problem... probably by modifying those sprites which is kinda wrong way, but whatever.

Same goes about sounds. You compare things that were made in different time period with totally different instruments, while ID haven't got proper tools and resources for their creativity, people involved into freedoom developement had Internet and free asset banks (such as soundlibraries if we talk about audio), better instruments that not just allow to record and barely modify your 'piece of audio art", but give you almost limitless potential for your imagination, you just need to learn programm and some specific things about sound, graphics, etc.

Trust me I know what I'm talking about and can assure you: freedoom can't be better than Doom.

5 hours ago, CWolf said:

EDIT: alright just to clarify, I understand you might to really like freedoom yet your words look more like salty sarcasm\trolling.

 

Hey, @Guy Montag is just admiring the game as it is. Don't assume malice just because Freedoom rarely gets praised.

Admiitingly Freedoom is still in development hell, but thanks for your post anyway @Guy Montag!

20 hours ago, CWolf said:

You compare things that were made in different time period with totally different instruments.

There's nothing wrong with doing that comparison, though.

Doing art with poor instruments might have more merit, but I don't think it's merit what he was comparing here.

The stick figures from prehistoric cave paintings for example have a lot of merit and historical relevance but nowadays you can definitely find better art.

I'm not saying that Id's art is like cave paintings, just that you cannot say that it's impossible to make it better just because it doesn't have the same merit.

And Freedoom's assets are Free and Open Source, done by the community, for free, that has a lot of merit in and of itself. Id did it by hiring paid artists.

@CWolfIf I seemed snide, sorry it's habitual and I can tone it down. I'm a grown man and nothing anyone says to me over a video game will hurt my feelings. I get what you mean about ID creating the original commercial game, but Freedoom is objectively better in many ways. They had to make a game that just differentiated from Wolfenstien 3d and it's awful shovel-ware clones, was able to run on the limited computers in use at the time, looked cool to the nerds that played computer games in the era and did it within a year. That was their design goal. There is no such motivations or limitations, (or time line!) for Freedoom and it shows. I'm not one for nostalgic sentiments, I like Doom and it's mods, it's derivatives on their own merit, not because it makes me feel like I'm a kid in the 90's again.

So when I say Freedom has objectively better qualities compared than the original commercial game, I mean it. Sounds, walls/floor textures, weapon sprites, the actual levels themselves are equivalent or better. The main outstanding flaw I see are some of the terrible place-holder sprites for enemies. I get that spriting is not easy, most mods go with ripped sprites... so no offense to any creators of the awful sprites used now.

Maybe I had low expectations when I chose Freedoom, knowing already the commercial game, but I had a positive experience with the game and it's 'campaign' and I'm glad I compiled Freedoom and waited like 2 hours for that... than having downloaded Steam and surrendered my credit card to buy the old antiqated game. Freedoom offers the ability to play all the custom wads (my main motivation) and it's campaign is honestly better than the original, too. I insist the textures, sounds, weapons, ect are either superior or just as good as the commercial wad.

I admit I haven't played Doom2 or any of it's derivatives in years but I'm not comparing Freedoom to anything besides the stock vanilla commercial game and the vanilla custom wads that sprung up in the late 90's. Compared to them, Freedoom campaign is at least as good as 'Plutonia' and 'TNT' and those other 90's vanilla wad packs, in my opinion. I greatly disliked those, I honestly enjoyed playing through Freedoom. Yeah there are things I don't like, the endless shotgun-man ambushes and how every low-light sector contained a stealth-worth, he switch-hunts, ect but I still liked them better since ID levels and the levels they purchased were just as bad, if not worse.

EDIT: For phase 1, the endless shotgun-guy ambushes and invisiworms are perfectly appropriate, since it's 'inspired' by the original game that had fewer varieties of enemies and modern players need challenges and tricks to avoid it being a boring slog like playing Doom 1 today would be.  I don't dislike it per se, but was burnt out with and too familiar with all the the tricks by the end of it. Doesn't mean I want the tricks to go away.

Apologize if this is just as off-color and rambling or apparently as subtly offensive as my first post but I'm a very bored person and typing all that is just as productive as anything else I could do with my time right now.

at some point i agree with him but not fully, yes freedoom has great levels packs, but yet there's still few bad moments, like the placeholders monsters this ruin the felling of the game sometimes, but the textures looks way better (at least on dev version) and well i agreed with you about doom2, i absolutely hate doom2 it has the worse mapping of i ever played and musics aren't good too, and it's a commercial game! (i never finished doom2 whitout using cheats btw) anyway i enjoy playing doom, plutonia, freedoom2, tnt and certain mods, i have already finished playing them and i like it.

Edit: It i have to choose to play full doom2 or freedoom2 i choose freedoom2.