Doom 1-3 on the Switch?!

10 minutes ago, WadArchive said:

Doom 2 has MAP06 moved to the end of the WAD and looks to have a few like THINGS, VERTEXES changes but looking at the map in slade it looks the same so it might just be to fix some bugs (LINEDEFS and SIDEDEFS haven't changed). MAP31 and MAP31 are also at the end of the WAD but this is likely because they remove the Nazi references. No MAP33 like in the XBLA version. I didn't bother checking all the Master Level WADs

So you're saying it's the DOOM "PC" Edition? As in Politically Correct?

Got them some days ago and tried 3. One thing no one has mentioned is that unlike the PS3/360 versions sprinting (and crouching) is toggleable now - you don't need to have the left stick held down the entire time. Anyone who's sunk a decent amount of time into Doom 3 will know sprinting is something you'll want to have enabled most of the time so this is a huge fix.

Some frame drops here and there (I have flashlight shadows on) but overall it's pretty good. I remember playing Doom 3 on my Pentium 4/Geforce 4/512MB RAM trash PC back in 2004 at sub-30 fps so seeing it on a handheld/console hybrid in 2019 makes me feel nostalgic.

A couple things the OG Xbox version of Doom 3 has over the other ports, besides coop, is you can configure the D-Pad to be whatever weapons you want and sprint is on left trigger and will also make your sensitivity higher when held down. It made doing 180s easy. It also had a button for zoom which you can't even do in the BFG edition IIRC.

It ALSO had level select instead of relying on manual saves for every level.

2 hours ago, Buckshot said:

So you're saying it's the DOOM "PC" Edition? As in Politically Correct?

It's using the BFG Edition IWADs as base, so it should be of no surprise that the censorship is still there.

When it comes to gameplay(in Doom and Doom II at least on Xbox One and Switch versions) I think there's something very important missing.

Quick access to different weapons.

Scrolling through all the weapons one at a time is way too slow for Doom games.

The d-pad does nothing. There's no reason not to assign those for different weapons.

You only need the 4 d-pad buttons. Xbox Live Arcade versions did that.

If I remember correctly one was for Fist/Chainsaw/Pistol, one for Shotgun/Super Shotgun, one for Chaingun/Rocket Launcher and one for Plasma Rifle/BFG. And it worked perfect.

I played Doom 1 yesterday and for example I kept shooting Demons and Spectres that I normally would punch or chainsaw, because it's too slow to switch.

I know this has been mentioned but I’m also wondering what is reason for No Rest For The Living episode not being included. Still happy to see the master levels in there!

Even for Beth's standards, this is a colossal fuck up.
Now I wonder, since they nuked the X360 version, and there are no longer legal ways to play No Rest for The Living, this makes the NRFTL wad shovelware?

2 hours ago, Sergeant_Mark_IV said:

Now I wonder, since they nuked the X360 version, and there are no longer legal ways to play No Rest for The Living, this makes the NRFTL wad shovelware?

It's still part of Doom 3 BFG edition.

2 hours ago, Sergeant_Mark_IV said:

Now I wonder, since they nuked the X360 version, and there are no longer legal ways to play No Rest for The Living, this makes the NRFTL wad shovelware?

Don't you mean abandonware?

42 minutes ago, Archi said:

It's still part of Doom 3 BFG edition.

Bummer

 

17 minutes ago, GamingMarine said:

Don't you mean abandonware?

Yes, my mistake.

I wonder if no NRFTL is an oversight or if there's some weird crazy legal/license thing where it would cost them more, however minimal, to pay Nerve Software to keep it in and they just dropped it?

I always wondered why NRFTL, or nerve.wad; Was so hard to get online. When you go to it's wad archive page, it still tells you that it's a commercial wad, but it doesn't appear in the commercial wads list.
https://www.wad-archive.com/iwad/buy

23 minutes ago, wheresthebeef said:

I wonder if no NRFTL is an oversight or if there's some weird crazy legal/license thing where it would cost them more, however minimal, to pay Nerve Software to keep it in and they just dropped it?

Considering how half-arsed those ports are, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the reason why NRFTL is absent is because they didn't have the time for it and its due to be added at a later time. Along with Final Doom, maybe.

But there's also a chance of some legal stuff going on which prevented them for adding NRFTL in the new ports.

41 minutes ago, seed said:

 

Considering how half-arsed those ports are, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the reason why NRFTL is absent is because they didn't have the time for it and its due to be added at a later time. Along with Final Doom, maybe.

 

But there's also a chance of some legal stuff going on which prevented them for adding NRFTL in the new ports.

I imagine it would require TheCastle's permission, and possibly paying some royalties. Too much work and money for the people that thought it would be a professional thing to pretty much reduce the already converted soundtrack's bitrate on Audacity I guess.

18 minutes ago, Sergeant_Mark_IV said:

reduce the already converted soundtrack's bitrate

Speaking of which, would there be a good reason to back this choice?

Great to see how much of a dumpster fire these ports are. Reminds me of the GTA San Andreas "Remastered" port back in 2014. 

To fix all of these issues they'd more than likely have to recreate the whole port from scratch I'm assuming? (Swapping engines?) I still can't believe they used Unity. Seriously? I genuinely don't understand the point of using Unity for these ports. 

The Doom 3 port on the other hand, as others have said as well, is very good. Even though it's the BFG Edition, it works smoothly and also has a nice FOV option as well as toggle sprinting which was already mentioned. 

These ports need some serious work. 

Got it on PS4, both of them. Not a bad port perse but still no 60 fps gameplay... And some audio glitches especially with the chaingun. And the soundtrack is being played twice as slow too.

3 hours ago, seed said:

 

Speaking of which, would there be a good reason to back this choice?

The only thing I could speculate is the engine having issues to play the files on the previous sample rate (glitching, not playing, or slowing down the load times), since a 48khz song consumes more ram to be played than one at 44.1khz.

This is just speculation of course, but I think they may have converted the songs early in development, and noticed way too late that 48khz wouldn't work well with the new engine, they probably miscalculated that it would consume hundreds of times more ram than the original game which was made to run with 8mb. But here is the funny thing, professional audio tools can easily convert songs without audible issues, and they probably used some old free program instead. Or they had very little time to do quality control and not enough time to record everything again.

The reason behind this could be:

A) It`s not their fault because Bethesda was already putting them under inhuman working conditions, and taking one more day to redo the soundtrack was actually impossible, they probably had like 30 minutes to figure out a solution, and the person who performed the task was not even part of the sound design team.
B) They have just set a new record of incompetence and literally did not bother to play the game before uploading it, or maybe never played the original games and don`t even know what the songs are supposed to sound like, or just played Doom in the SNES 20 years ago and everything looks and sounds good enough for them.

One thing i'm surprised, is that the slow music has been a thing ever since the first XBLA port, and only now it's a widespread issue

29 minutes ago, DMPhobos said:

One thing i'm surprised, is that the slow music has been a thing ever since the first XBLA port, and only now it's a widespread issue

I think that's because the old port was superior to this one overall, and showed that at least some effort was put into it as opposed to being lazily rushed.

But here's another thing, one of the first flaws I noticed was that the lightning is broken in the Unity port, but apparently this was an issue present in the original version as well, take a look (skip to 6:33 for a good example):

Additionally, after listening to the randomized sound pitches in this version I think it's not just me imagining things. The sound processing seems to be much better here, whereas everything sounds muffled to me in Unity.

Someone mentioned that everything is slower in this version, and although something does look a bit different, could that just be different/lack of monster movement interpolation? Or actual difference in game speed?

Well, they could have ported the 3do version. I bet that would have chapped some asses. 

It's still significantly better than *most* of the prior console ports. Let's be grateful for that at least.

47 minutes ago, Buckshot said:

Well, they could have ported the 3do version. I bet that would have chapped some asses. 

 

It's still significantly better than *most* of the prior console ports. Let's be grateful for that at least.

 

 

 

 

We should be getting perfect ports by this point now though. Theres no excuse!

I was pretty excited about the news today, till I heard it lacks final Doom and NRFTL, and now that ive come to Doomworld, found out its just a shitty low effort lack-of-care cashgrab by Zenimax, in the same vein as all of Square Enix's ports are these days. Doesnt bode well for the Doom 64 pegi rating.

1 hour ago, Devalaous said:

 

We should be getting perfect ports by this point now though. Theres no excuse!

I was pretty excited about the news today, till I heard it lacks final Doom and NRFTL, and now that ive come to Doomworld, found out its just a shitty low effort lack-of-care cashgrab by Zenimax, in the same vein as all of Square Enix's ports are these days. Doesnt bode well for the Doom 64 pegi rating.

Thing is, even if they had made the "perfect" port... Someone would still find something to nitpick about.

In some way/shape/form, *something* wouldn't be to someone's liking and they'd still criticize. Whether it would be something as simple as missing a customization, a drop in frame rate, a missing texture, or resembling too many "free" ports that do it better... Someone somewhere would still complain it's not perfect.

The devs also seem to be listening to community feedback and already taking action in future updates to address some of the complaints and issues that are being noted.

I'm not saying this port is flawless... it's not. It obviously does have its issues. They may have not put as much effort into it as much as we would have, but it's on the table as a option for portable doom or doom to a majority generation of consoles lacking it until now. And to be fair, it's one of the better console ports. Still very close to the source material. They took it into consideration and it's something, which despite it's flaws, is better than nothing. And there's probably a majority of players who will buy it, play it again for the first time in years (or the first time ever) and are totally satisfied and having fun with a trip down memory lane and not worry about the concerns that we, the doom purists, have here.

For example, my little nephews who only ever watched me play classic doom but are now old enough to play it themselves and love their switch? They are loving it. Having an absolute blast. My brother-in-law, who is into DOOM (but maybe not quite as much as myself), is really enjoying this new re-release. We sat down in my living room and played coop and he was having the best time ever, not a single complaint from him as a casual doom player. Another buddy of mine who never got into classic doom but is obessed with DOOM 2016? He picked this up last week went it went on sale and is going nuts on why he didn't play classic Doom and Doom 3 all those years ago. If anything, it serves as a gateway drug to the DOOM of yore for the casual players who hadn't touched it in years or the newcomers and this generation of young gamers. Of course, when they come here to start looking for more or other ways to experience it (and some do), we can share our knowledge and encourage or guide them to enjoy Doom in numerous other ways.

My point is that when it comes to rereleases, remasters, remakes, reboots... it will never be perfect because it's not the original material. That seems to be even more true the longer time goes on: rereleases end up lacking or changing too much, at least for us classic purists.

But for all else it's a hit and probably who it's geared towards to anyway. They probably assumed it wouldn't sway everyone here from our beloved ports, mods and pure vanilla origins... but rather intended for the majority crowd who needs that little nudge to get (back) into it.

The biggest slap in the face is that they removed the older versions from older consoles, as if aware that these new versions were inferior. This isnt like the rebranding of Doom on XBLA for legal reasons. The PS3 version, while flawed, had EVERYTHING, Doom 1 and 2, Master Levels, NRFTL, and Final Doom, all in one package. Should have been at least the standard for these to be built from.

1 minute ago, Devalaous said:

The biggest slap in the face is that they removed the older versions from older consoles, as if aware that these new versions were inferior. This isnt like the rebranding of Doom on XBLA for legal reasons. The PS3 version, while flawed, had EVERYTHING, Doom 1 and 2, Master Levels, NRFTL, and Final Doom, all in one package. Should have been at least the standard for these to be built from.

That was a very strange move, but I assume they did it to "simplify" the doom release across platforms and reduce confusion for Xbox players.

Will agree with you, wished if anything, they had used the Xbox 360/arcade classic doom as base for the new re-release as opposed to the BFG edition wads.

2 hours ago, seed said:

But here's another thing, one of the first flaws I noticed was that the lightning is broken in the Unity port, but apparently this was an issue present in the original version as well

Apparently the Unity port uses the same diskfile format as the original Xbox port too.

I wouldn't be surprised if they actually used the same code for a big chunk of the logic, since both support C#

If this is the case then that would mean they explicitly removed NRFTL, which supports the theory of the reason being royalties and legal issues.

Now that I am back from QuakeCon, time to reread this tweet.

I am operating from the assumption that this tweet says exactly what they meant it to say. So in that spirit:

• The BethesdaNet login requirement was included. (Objectively true)
• It was included for the Slayers Club user-data-extraction operation. (Statement of fact, which I will accept)
• It should be optional. (Subjective opinion which many people agree with)
• They are working to remove the login requirement (statement of fact, which I will accept)

So put together, they knowingly implemented a mandatory signup / login, are now saying it should not be mandatory, and are in the process of patching it out. Nothing in here claims it was a mistake. You might *think* they said that, because they worded it very carefully to make it sound that way, but they did not say it.

6 minutes ago, Linguica said:

Nothing in here suggests it was a mistake.

Exactly. That was my impression too.

Some news sites interpreted it as a mistake, but I feel the only mistake they had was not realizing that so many people would complain.

I find it hard to believe that it's something they missed/forgot when there's explicit wording in the game saying that "a Bethesda.net account is required to play this title". And they did it in all versions of the ports.

I've been told the wording is also on one of the store pages for the game in the small print.

11 minutes ago, Linguica said:

(highlights)

Makes me wonder if they have intent to keep adding updates to these releases (fixes, additions, modes, etc), or if this was a one time thing.

While the forced bnet login was likely retracted due to backlash, would still be cool to have them adding or improving various things.

It was optional in Doom 3 from the get go though, right?

It popped up for me but I closed it and it never brought it back up ever again.

13 minutes ago, Ferk said:

I've been told the wording is also on one of the store pages for the game in the small print.

Yes, the Switch store pages specifically claim that there is a mandatory login.

Which means that if the mandatory login was a mistake, then they somehow unintentionally described the game as requiring a mandatory login, when they supposedly believed it did not require a mandatory login.

The whole thing smells like they are purposefully trying to make people believe something that is not true (otherwise known as "lying").