Do you think any of the Doom games overstay their welcome?

Let's say you're trying to 100% a particular Doom game. Is there a game in the series that you think you would get completely fed up with by the time you finished? Maybe there's just not enough variety to last quite that long. Maybe the difficulty sucks the fun out of things before you can finally overcome it. Point is, when you finally put down the controller for the last time, you're less proud of yourself for beating it and more glad that it's all over. 

Do you have this experience with any particular game in the series? Just to clarify, 100% includes any expansions released later. However, for sanity's sake, let's not count the "Maximum Doom" levels or else 100%ing either of the first two games would become an endless nightmare.

HERETIC.wad, for all its awesomeness, feels a bit tedious on certain maps, and I've never liked the tanky final boss encounter. That said, I completed the main portion of Heretic like I had no tomorrow, all while I still find HEXEN.wad impenetrable. One day I'll try custom hub packs and hopefully get to enjoy Hexen better, but the main game already feels shallow and over-ripe halfway through the second hub.

TNT.wad can sometimes give me second thoughts about continuing a full playthrough. It has a bit less nostalgia factor going for it than id's WADs, generally less polish and challenge than plutonia.wad (which I've booted in response to many a dull play night), and many ideas which other, sometimes shorter PWADs of varying vintage do better. A big issue, really, is the soundtrack which either drones on with hardly any development or goes ham on the arpeggios and bizarro-world arrangement choices. (This also harms Icarus in more notable ways.) I say this knowing that Plutonia lacked a proper soundtrack up until recent years, meaning I've had the privilege to play Plutonia only once without excellent modern MIDI tracks.

I believe that, so long as you have a creative reason or two for replaying the IWADs, you'll largely avoid the desire to quit. There's always new mapping ideas to mine from the classics, plus your own personal records to best.

Doom 3. By the time am in the hell areas I just want to kill the cyber and be done with it. If I even bother playing past the first hell knights. 

I think Plutonia and TNT both would benefit from just being the 20 best maps. PSX Final Doom features cut-down versions of both, but they're a bit too cut down. There are some maps that just feel like filler in TNT and some maps that almost feel redundant in Plutonia.

Doom 2 is a great length and the worst maps in it imho tend to be the shortest. its a great template for mapmakers, really - make the tight combat maps short and interconnected, make the weird stuff longform but with skippable elements. in both cases people'll revisit the maps! Plutonia's combat is really tight but the maps don't really vary all that much, it could be much shorter and still just as satisfying. TNT is too long and slightly depressing, but I bet you could get that down to an eleven map .WAD, add new music and create a totally playable and great level set from it.

I was watching the doomspeeddemos channel and some of the most gorgeously-presented maps went on for ten minutes too long and there's no gimmick to keep you hooked, just an age of firing the super shotgun and grabbing keys in pretty static environments. was trying to imagine how great those maps would be if they were short!

I don't know how long Doom 4 is because I am really terrible at it. lol. I think I got to the first hellish area without really understanding the controls and I need to restart it and try to pay attention this time. action games with modern graphics dazzle me lol i have literally no idea what to do

TNT definitely overstays its welcome. No thanks to those O'Brien's maps which are HUGE (and confusing as in case of map21). There are so many annoying and frustrating maps in it and many filler maps too. TNT could have been much much better if it was just a 20-level wad. In fact I just got a new thread idea from this (hehe).

Plutonia slightly overstays it welcome too but not as much as TNT. I don't hate any of Plutonia's maps but it does have 3-4 filler maps.

Doom 3's techbase maps and the jumpscare gimmicks overstay their welcome, to a point where I have never beaten the game.

Doom 2016's arena over arena encounters slightly overstay their welcome. But atleast the game ends just before things start becoming tedious.

Okay, unpopular opinion (i guess). For me it'd be Doom 2. Gameplay-wise the levels are great. Maybe at times a little bit too long. But the overall mood of a game has always been important to me. In that regard Doom 2 just doesn't do it for me.

The episodes of Doom had this clear structure building up to the boss fights and a distinct style. Doom 2 after a half or two thirds became an indistinguishable mess for me.

Doom 3, feels like they just wanted to reach the 30 levels mark and decided to stop at 27 levels instead, I think it starts good and ends good but is mostly just filler techbase levels in between. the levels I remember the most are the Starting levels, Recycling Sector, Hell, Delta Labs 1 and The last 3 Cavern levels (8?) at least they give you the soul cube before you go back to techbases.

Heretic. Never thought I'd choose it over Doom 3, but at least in Doom 3, despite all its shortcomings, it managed to keep me interested and not fall into boredom until I reached the end, no such thing can be said for Heretic.

With Heretic I tried to beat it once and dropped it after the first 3 maps or so. The second time I did a let's play on my channel and managed to beat it but u fortunately, I almost fell asleep on the chair a couple of times before reaching the end. I would have probably dropped it again if it wasn't for streaming. Later on, I tried to give it yet another try when I played Wayfarer, and while it was an improvement, the tedious and unsatisfactory combat became apparent immediately once I reached the most intense sections of the wad.

Too much run, not much gun, not so useful items apart from a few, and almost no fun. Heretic is a game I would probably never consider revisiting, except for maybe playing a few other wads in the future. I like Hexen much, MUCH more than it.

It's funny, I think that the classics have the best replay value of all.

The level design, enemy design / encounter are the reason that I still play Doom to this day. Everything is incredibly synergical and organic, enemies types reinforce each other with multiple possibilities on encounters and level design.

Doom 3 and Doom 2016 always felt weird too me. They never really manage to reach what the originals did, but rather focus on few aspects of the classics.

Doom 3 focuses on atmosphere and slight horror aspects. And it does it really well with exception that the gameplay feels "shackled". It's trying to be Survival Horror-ish but doesn't do anything to complement that, sure you can't just run like cheetah, but you have ammo to spare and enemies aren't really that powerful or scary.

Now Doom 2016, I wen't with big expectations, gameplay is finally unshackled, it's fast and brutal. It started great, but soon I realized that it lacked that synergical and organic design. Enemies never felt complementary to the level and the encounters were dead with the arena gameplay. Halfway through the game, I started to miss the ambushes, the tricks and traps. Everything was so predictible. The moment I saw a big room I was always like "Here we go again" and it didn't help that level design was getting more linear and linear. Welp, I just rambled a lot.

I hope that Doom Eternal has a more focus on memorable encounters and surprises.

E4 becomes a slog very quickly because E4M1 and M2 are some of the best maps ever made in my opinion, and everything that follows is... well... "And Hell Followed." Although despite the wacky gameplay of M6 I love its architecture and really forgive the pacing of the episode solely on that map.

I used to find D2 monotonous until I drank the UV pistol start no save koolaid. It really, really did increase my respect of D2 beyond what I ever thought was possible.

4 hours ago, Stocki said:

Okay, unpopular opinion (i guess). For me it'd be Doom 2. Gameplay-wise the levels are great. Maybe at times a little bit too long. But the overall mood of a game has always been important to me. In that regard Doom 2 just doesn't do it for me.

The episodes of Doom had this clear structure building up to the boss fights and a distinct style. Doom 2 after a half or two thirds became an indistinguishable mess for me.

I've beaten Doom II nearly three times (had to reset after a save in "The Chasm" fucked me up and start from scratch) and I don't blame you. The levels blur and the Hell portion doesn't feel much different than earlier, while the original three episodes of Doom had a nice transition from human, human/Hell hybrid, to full on Hell. I would love a graphic mod that helps this and makes the levels feel more distinct.

Completing the first level in Doom 2016 felt like a chore to me.

13 hours ago, Pegg said:

Doom 3. By the time am in the hell areas I just want to kill the cyber and be done with it. If I even bother playing past the first hell knights. 

This 100%. I've never been more excited to go to Hell, then after killing the Guardian 

DOOM 2. The middle section with the city stages is so goddamn dry and every time I play it I enjoy the hell out of those first few excellent levels, then begin "Downtown" and go "Ahh crap". I don't like how those city levels look, or how they play. I don't know what Sandy Petersen was thinking a lot of the time. And so much verticality in a game where you can't look up or down! Both convoluted and boring, and I rarely bother to push through them to get to the hell levels towards the end. I love almost every stage in DOOM 1 (Ultimate DOOM less so because Thy Flesh Consumed is so messy) but 2 just drags for me a lot of the time. Not that I don't like it, just yeah... Drags.

EDIT: Shoot, I just noticed several other people have said the same thing. I'm gonna scroll up and hit that like button.

I'm loving all these answers. It's nice to see a fandom that isn't completely blinded to its favorite franchise's potential flaws.

Note, however, that per what I said in the OP regarding expansions, the original game means Ultimate Doom, and Doom II includes the initial release, Master Levels, and "No Rest for the Living". So if the original release starts feeling overly long, I can only imagine how you may feel when the game's length is almost doubled.

Likewise, Final Doom is to be treated as a single 64-level package rather than separated into "Evilution" and "Plutonia Experiment", and Doom 3 includes Resurrection of Evil and "The Lost Mission".

Pretty much all of "final doom", especially plutonia. At least TNT had a new, fresh good midi beats to make you ve accompanied, while plutonia just had blunt, uninspiring, lame, nonsencical arena-like maps filled with 50 chaingunners and boring boners every square meter. The "evil traps" is a new thing, but after a while it will feel like another filler to drain even more time and cause even more annoyance. Every map is like "oh god when this fcking ends, I just want to close this game now asap". The design is just boring and repeative that you'll get bored playing them even with some fun mods like guncaster. And yet, these maps cost money.

I had more fun in hell revealed 2, at least it tried ti be original and fresh with every map, not every map is just a "arena: evil trap, the map".

I still haven't played TNT yet, but I had a surprisingly good time with Plutonia (though I did have to drop the difficulty halfway through).

For me it was definitely Doom 3, despite some of the later levels being some of my favorites (like Site 3 and the Caverns maps). I think the game just takes way too long before it starts throwing high-tier enemies at you frequently. Personally, it’s the Alpha Labs maps, the Communications levels, and some of the Delta Labs maps that feel kind of tedious and uninspired compared to a lot of the other ones, which just drags the campaign on (almost unnecessarily). 

Heretic really starts dragging in Episode 4. Episode 5 was just torture.

Ultimate DooM's second episode really isn't the greatest but for me, episode 4 is a real bore to play through. By the time I reach map E5M6 I just want the episode to be done.

TNT and Plutonia's last thirds can be fairly monotonous as well, since by this point I've seen all the wads can offer.

Heretic's 4th episode was like getting my nails ripped out. It is a REALLY poorly designed episode. I've yet to finish episode 5 but from what I can tell it's really needless. Personally Heretic is at its peak by episodes 2 and 3.

Hexen's castle of grief. Oh hey! 200 switches you need to press to find 4 cogs to place inside a specific room in a really large castle themed map with a bum load of enemies and to crown it all off a hub layout that makes little sense compared to the rest of Hexen.

Strife personally becomes a chore and a half once you reach the sewer section. My biggest complaint is A: Strife is WAY TOO HARD for beginners, B: The inaccuracy wank is unnecessary and C: You're meant to have a shop system but I rarely found enough gold to take advantage of it. (even after finding a few secrets, nearly all of them was just ammo, health or armour).

And then there's DooM 4.

I've never finished Doom 3, never started its expansion set, and never got the desire to return to it, so I guess yes.

Doom 4 is beyond my computer's reach, so I haven't bothered getting the game, let alone tried to test it. But from the videos I've seen, I'm not sure I'd like it; too many arena fights, and some stupidity like demons speaking in English.

On the other hand, I like the exploration and hardcore dungeon-crawling in Hexen and Strife.

8 minutes ago, Gez said:

I like the exploration and hardcore dungeon-crawling in Hexen and Strife.

I see you're a man of culture as well.

Doom 64. Played through it once and didn't find it too interesting. I can't recall a single level (they kinda just blend together) and they were accompanied by a music that mostly seemed like random noises. Only finished it to be able to say I did it. No plans of ever coming back to it.

Dropping back in to also talk a bit about DOOM 3. I love that game (especially the BFG edition, as much as I like the creepy part, the flashlight-or-gun mechanic doesn’t do it for me at all, I prefer the action), but oh man, that middle section... I love the beginning, I love the end, but the middle drags out so bad. Everything between the initial demon invasion and the visit to hell all blurs into one grey science lab, with slow-moving gimmicks like monorails and garbage disposal broken up by corridor after corridor.  Once you reach the Delta Labs it gets more interesting, then it really peaks with the hell stage, and the Delta+Hell merger stuff afterwards is very cool. It’s just that middle section is such a slog to get to it.

Doom 3 bored the hell out of me. It got half of Doom really good, and then virtually ignored the other half. I think Delta Labs is about where I quit it all those years ago, and I've never really felt an urge to go back and do it again.

If you could slap some other name on it and it doesn't feel out of place, it's not doing Doom right. Period.

Doom 3. I tried playing it until... Eh i don't even remember, it was not long before the first Hell Knights though.

TNT having certain overly long maps around the last third of it, it just drags on too long with the gigantic maps and sometimes confusing layouts. I never played through all of Plutonia but what i played is quite good.

Doom 2's city levels are very tedious except for MAP15 and 16. I love playing through those two. Never played Master Levels or NRFTL so i can't say anything about them.

Doom 1's episode 3 and 4 are quite boring, but there's a handful of levels that are good.

But Doom 64 is good, and it's quite hard to say that when you are playing with a broken Nunchuck and crappy batteries on the Wiimote which goes to show how good it is. Never felt tedious except for a couple parts where the next thing to do isn't very obvious, like that one time where you had to press a lamp to get a yellow key.

Maximum Doom could use an edit

10 hours ago, Maximum Matt said:

Maximum Doom could use an edit

...from Maximum Matt?

10 hours ago, Maximum Matt said:

Maximum Doom could use an edit

If there's anyone here who's actually 100%'d all of "Maximum Doom" (or as close to 100% as the subpar level design will allow), I'd love to hear about how soul-crushing the experience was.