Post Your Opinions About Doom (Whether Controversial or Not)

Only controversal opinion I have is Memento Mori is absolutely boring.

6 hours ago, Rainne said:

Perhaps, but slaughtermaps require the least amount of quality for a given amount of quantity, per my post.

I don't like slaughter maps and even I know that's nonsense. I mean have you SEEN Sunder? 

TNT: Evilution has the best soundtrack in all of Classic Doom and I wished there were more original tracks to fill the levels that used Doom 1/2 tracks.

Plutonia is the most repetitive and annoying IWAD out of the original four. While I won't deny its influence on future maps and being more consistent in map quality than TNT, I don't find many of its levels to be memorable or do much to stand out from one another. I find it visually dull and many encounters feel samey either because there are tricks and traps (no pun intended) that lose their novelty after a first playthrough, or because I just can't be bothered to keep playing. Plutonia 2 feels a lot better to play and reused the original Plutonia's gimmicks in more interesting ways.

I enjoy Sandy's Doom 2 maps the most and find them to be the most fun across all the classic IWADs. Maybe not a controversial opinion here, but I can't see maps like The Pit or The Citadel as bad levels or anything.

I wish there were an original MIDI pack for tnt.wad to deduplicate its soundtrack and avoid the reused doom2.wad’s songs, but alas, no such thing exists. The closest one is this WAD by DustedPandemonic.

As for controversial opinions, well, I strongly think plutonia.wad is not the hardest official content of the ’90s, but the Master Levels for Doom II created by @Soundblock, especially teeth.wad and mephisto.wad.

 I have the feeling that the two threads "Post your Doom picture" and "What are you working on" are used more to show off than to really inform . I like sharing screens too but to be honest , what's the point of sharing a screen of a map in preparation apart from asking for advice?   If you don't need any special help, it's better to share screens once the project is finished and ready to be released.

Also , people who use Doom 2 music in big maps should be hanged !

E1M1's music should be in more than one level.

At least Plutonia uses it for maps 17 and 29.

11 minutes ago, Roofi said:

 I have the feeling that the two threads "Post your Doom picture" and "What are you working on" are used more to show off than to really inform.

I just find it odd that people rarely even show monsters in screenshots. I'd much rather see a 15-second video of actual gameplay or at least a shot showing some of what the action might be. Maybe they don't want to spoil anything. Or maybe most people populate at the very end.

7 minutes ago, DiamondDude11 said:

E1M1's music should be in more than one level.

It's also used twice in Plutonia. I kinda like it just once in Doom 1 though; you can't associate it with anything other than the iconic first level of this thing that still has us talking a quarter century later.

On 2/2/2016 at 4:01 PM, j4rio said:

Doom1 is boring and without the addition of doom2 stuff the game wouldn't gather nowhere near as much custom content as it managed to.

Sigil...

Oh, and 2002ADO - one of my long time faves

Possibly if no Doom2, then creativity would have focused on Doom1

4 hours ago, Super Mighty G said:

I don't like slaughter maps and even I know that's nonsense. I mean have you SEEN Sunder? 

Bro, that is just Infight HELL.
So satisfying.

9 hours ago, Rainne said:

What if I told you there are gameplay ideas that can't be measured by bodycounts (or even "measured" at all), and don't even necessarily involve combat?

 

Wasting the time? Copying-and-pasting doesn't take much time. In the time it takes me to do one layout, let's say I could do 100 copy-and-pastes, so that's like 2¹⁰⁰ enemies, or 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376. Is that the number of enemies it'd take to be a substitute for one real map? (Only 99 more to go!) -- Or equivalently, that one real map has as much content as a slaughtermap with that many enemies?

 

Does it sound fun? A slaughtermap that's on the good end of the slaughtermap spectrum would involve a tiny fraction of the number of enemies, and involve more design talent and art to make it work and flow well, rather than just throwing 1.27 zillion enemies at you. -- Just keep following the logic in that direction and you wind up with normal maps.

Do you even listen to yourself? That logic makes no sense.

I agree that gameplay ideas cant be measured by body counts; they are independent concepts. That said why are you building a strawman that demands they be related? The number of monsters doesnt on its own make a map harder and it also doesnt make a map better to have less of them. What makes a map better is to have them placed in more intelligent ways, of which a large grouping can also be intelligently placed because those concepts are also independent of one another. If the choice, however, is between tons of monsters placed carelessly and curating them down to smaller scale encounters, (which is one hell of a strawman but let's say for fun the gun is at the back of my head and I must choose something now) I would choose the less monsters simply because if it sucks it wont drag on and maps tend to allow more freedom in monster placement when you place less of them, as a poorly placed monster can still be run past anyway, allowing the player to keep it moving and noticing less the hit to gameplay that would happen if that monster was able to prevent the player from progressing, such as if it had some friends. (Not because it has friends, mind you, but because of the pressure vs time equation, which is not too far unlike what NiH described above with active encounters vs clean up of them) And by that logic it can take more skill to design consistently good slaughter encounters than low-key things, though even this I would say is a bad comparison since the two types of gameplays operate on different principles; even if sharing in many similarities they are different enough for not all approaches to work equally for both. 

9 hours ago, Rainne said:

Wasting the time? Copying-and-pasting doesn't take much time.

This assumes that a mapper is actually just copy-pasting monsters everywhere with no care for the strategies and priorities of the encounter. My whole point was to imagine spending more time on this aspect of mapping as opposed to making 100 different maps. You were speaking of quality over quantity. On top of that, directly after this you strawman up some random math you pulled out of your ass:

9 hours ago, Rainne said:

 In the time it takes me to do one layout, let's say I could do 100 copy-and-pastes, so that's like 2¹⁰⁰ enemies, or 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376. Is that the number of enemies it'd take to be a substitute for one real map? (Only 99 more to go!) -- Or equivalently, that one real map has as much content as a slaughtermap with that many enemies?

Wow you can use a calculator. This is not at all what I was talking about; how did you get this from what I said? This brazenly overt exaggeration making fun of the logic of the person you're talking to (me in this case) really makes me not want to talk to you in general, since you dont come into a conversation clear minded and looking to learn. But more importantly than my feelings: this all highlights the fundamental issue that you dont seem to understand, which is that slaughtermaps don't entirely consist of copy-pasted mobs of monsters. I know this may be hard for you to believe given you are so sold on your outlook, unwilling to listen and engage, but some people actually like these things and have specialized so much into them that they build slaughtermaps while placing every single monster as purposefully and knowingly of what it brings to the encounter and map as a whole, as mappers who use few monsters. Some mappers actually like thing placement and designing gameplay, you know.

9 hours ago, Rainne said:

Does it sound fun? A slaughtermap that's on the good end of the slaughtermap spectrum would involve a tiny fraction of the number of enemies, and involve more design talent and art to make it work and flow well, rather than just throwing 1.27 zillion enemies at you. -- Just keep following the logic in that direction and you wind up with normal maps.

Does the map you described sound fun? No it sounds like low effort trash, a meme map, that no human being would conceivably be able beat in their lifetime, even under modded circumstances, let alone with any gun in doom's unmodded arsenal. Nor is it even possible in any source port or game to have that many things active at one time, so why the vast exaggeration? It's not funny unless the goal is either to make fun of the very concept of slaughtermaps in general or to make fun of those you're engaging with here, and both of those are unnecessary and destructive for discussion.

As for your logic following that, I can see its linearity but what it fails to account for is that the quality of maps are never determined solely based on the number of monsters they have, whether slaughter or otherwise. By your stated logic: Hangar, Entryway, E2M9, Dead Simple, Tower of Babel and Dis should be the peak of doom maps. On top of that, slaughter is merely a term used to describe maps with a high density of monsters, not necessarily a high monster count. There are some situations that can only be achieved through the use of a high monster density for a given area, and this is where the birth of slaughter gameplay takes form.

On an unrelated note: E2M9 was a proto-slaughter map, but also one of the maps that stuck out most to me throughout my life as being the first real combat puzzle I had encountered, with perhaps the second being Dis on pistol start, though of course Dis is far from the density of slaughter. 

9 hours ago, Rainne said:

involve more design talent and art to make it work and flow well,

Where is your room to even talk about this? Have you made any maps before that have shown any degree of success? Have you ever played and finished a slaughtermap? Do you have demos to show that you understand how to beat them but simply dont find them fun or is this all you talking because you dont understand the strategies at play? Your logic is 100% flawed and unless you're speaking from some specific expertise I'm unaware of, at this point I'm willing to write you off as knowing nothing about map design as you literally declare a form of art practiced by many people to be objectively bad. It's possible to find a bad apple in any grouping of art but to declare a whole art style as being bad, low-effort trash (granted my choice of words, but paraphrased from your own throughout this thread, though by all means please correct me if I'm wrong on this because that would mean that I misunderstand you) takes some real commitment.

And on top of all of this why are you still at it in this thread? Post your controversial opinion and move on. Further, logically if the opinion you post belongs here then you recognize that most people dont agree with it, (that's what makes it controversial) so why are you so stubbornly defending your point and giving no concessions back to those who engage with you? This thread has become the "post your controversial opinion and/or argue with Rainne about slaughtermaps." And for the record, look at all the posters that simply say they dont like thing (even slaughtermaps) and they dont get called out on it. It's ok not to like stuff, slaughtermaps included; it's another to say they're all bad as that's not only wrong, it's insulting to people's work which they take pride in. Never mind people's feelings, it's disrespectful and it's going to result in you getting disrespectful statements sent back your way; you get out what you put in. Sometimes it's not what you say but how you say it, though in this case you've stated a lot of easily falsifiable stuff which draws people in to want to engage you and correct you. A lot of the time I see this happen, and the same reason I'm posting here talking to you, is that people who enjoy these things know that they can be an acquired taste and so want to help expand the knowledge of those who dont enjoy them but who do want to engage in talking about them, as not all of us enjoyed them from the get-go either. But when you post to engage with others about them and stick firm to the condescending armchair mapper creed that all of this type of art are trash, it's only going to lead to arguments and nobody will have spent their time wisely at all taking part in this dead discussion.

Quantity has a quality of its own.

There's something of the sorites paradox in the slaughter genre: it's hard to tell at which number it begins, but there's still a qualitative* difference between a slaughter map and a non-slaughter one. Monsters start to be treated as a mass that needs to be shaped and controlled collectively, the RNG starts to become less of a factor thanks to the sheer amounts of mobs, etc. You can't "convert" a slaughter map into a "regular" map by just shrinking its size and monster amount, just like you can't convert a regular map into a normal one just by scaling it up and multiplying each mob by some value. So "huge body count" is a gameplay idea in itself.

I think most people who dismiss slaughter maps do not enjoy slaughter gameplay, perhaps can't manage them without cheating and/or savescumming, and then look at some Youtube video where someone makes it look like it's A) not that hard and B) just a question of spamming the BFG constantly. Then they conclude that it's boring, which is unfair, but hey.

* Quality as in a trait or characteristic, not as a judgment value. Just like a heap of sand has the quality of being a heap, which isn't in itself something good or bad.

2 hours ago, HAK3180 said:

I just find it odd that people rarely even show monsters in screenshots. I'd much rather see a 15-second video of actual gameplay or at least a shot showing some of what the action might be. Maybe they don't want to spoil anything. Or maybe most people populate at the very end.

That's why I wouldn't do it.

On 2/6/2020 at 5:42 AM, ReaperAA said:

While Memento Mori is a very important wad in Doom's history (its the first Doom 2 megawad), I feel that it has aged poorly. I feel that even wads like TNT:Evilution and Icarus are better than MM1. Perdition's Gate in-turn is better than both TNT and Icarus..

 

And all of these don't even hold a candle against Plutonia.

Plutonia absolutely has a more refined and more consistent design philosophy, as well as more consistent/clean use of textures overall.

I think the main thing that gets me in Plutonia is the feeling of repetitiveness, as well as the lack of abstract/weird/"wtf" moments. I think most players dislike these little things and would describe them are relics of the 90's, but I just find experimental and imperfect stuff to be even more beautiful, for whatever god forsaken reason.

I feel like, of all the classic megawads people still talk about today, Plutonia seems to have been the main inspiration or precursor to many modern, popular wads in it's approach to level design and enemy encounters - for better or for worse!

EDIT: Basically, what Erick said

I just find it odd that people rarely even show monsters in screenshots. I'd much rather see a 15-second video of actual gameplay or at least a shot showing some of what the action might be. Maybe they don't want to spoil anything. Or maybe most people populate at the very end.

Yay, someone approved of my "actually try to show the player what they'll be experiencing" approach!

I must say I almost always find the wide-angle monsterless set pieces to be beautiful pieces of art in their own right, but sometimes gamplay appears to be a second-class citizen in what was prioritized..

Controversial Doomworld opinion -- members who joined after Doom 4's release should be assumed to be idiots until they prove otherwise.  See Rainne for an excellent example as to why.

31 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

Yay, someone approved of my "actually try to show the player what they'll be experiencing" approach!

 

I must say I almost always find the wide-angle monsterless set pieces to be beautiful pieces of art in their own right, but sometimes gamplay appears to be a second-class citizen in what was prioritized..

It's hard to take pictures while fighting!  The corpses can show the player what to expect ;-)

34 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

I must say I almost always find the wide-angle monsterless set pieces to be beautiful pieces of art in their own right, but sometimes gamplay appears to be a second-class citizen in what was prioritized..

I can definitely see why people wouldn't want to spoil potential traps or encounters in their map(s). That was one of the reasons why I chose that route in my recent project thread, where I didn't want to reveal where and how the map escalates. Other mappers who focus more on architecture may not want "sprite clutter" to get in the way of a shot that's meant to be atmospheric. It's not a bad idea for a poll topic to gauge the opinion on the matter!

- Huge 1000+ monster maps suck.

- Plutonia is good

- Episode 4 of Ultimate Doom is great

- Eternity > gzdoom

- Romero > McGee > Petersen > Hall > Green

5 hours ago, Roofi said:

I have the feeling that the two threads "Post your Doom picture" and "What are you working on" are used more to show off than to really inform . I like sharing screens too but to be honest , what's the point of sharing a screen of a map in preparation apart from asking for advice?   If you don't need any special help, it's better to share screens once the project is finished and ready to be released.

I completely disagree with this, I love seeing what people are working on. It's inspiring and fascinating and I'll never get tired of it. 

It's the process of making maps that we enjoy as mappers, not just the end result, so why should we limit sharing what we're proud of until the very end?

Keep on posting your WIPs people!

I strongly dislike it when the floor shows sky textures.

1 hour ago, Asking4Id said:

I strongly dislike it when the floor shows sky textures.

Well I guess that leaves me out...

1 hour ago, Asking4Id said:

I strongly dislike it when the floor shows sky textures. 

Post xaserdisapproved.

I hate romero styled maps, i like being able to make my maps more creative.

I don't like infighting and I think the Doom engine should never have had it.

BFG is overrated. Plasma Gun is better.

Partial invisibility isn't as bad as everyone says.

Another somewhat controversial opinion. I really hate the Boom HUD. I vastly prefer vanilla HUD over it.

I wish PrBoom+ had a HUD similar to the "alternate HUD" present in Zdoom family because that one is less cluttered while providing all the useful info (it even shows ammo of all weapons).

On 2/7/2020 at 8:34 AM, Asking4Id said:

I don't like infighting and I think the Doom engine should never have had it.

That would take away a whole layer of depth/strategy. And pacifist runs!

Your opinion, sir, is wrong! Pistols at dawn!

(Pistol for you, SSG for me)

lol.

1 minute ago, VGA said:

That would take away a whole layer of depth/strategy. And pacifist runs!

 

Your opinion, sir, is wrong! Pistols at dawn!

 

(Pistol for you, SSG for me)

5 hours ago, Tango said:

 

positive feedback of any kind, even in the form of "likes" is a big motivator. maybe not everyone feels that way - but for me, being validated feels great, and encourages me to keep working on whatever I ou posted screenshots of. I think it's a very acceptable kind of vanity - if someone posts a map that I want to play but they post for the purpose of showing off, well, that's fine with me, because at the very least, my positive feedback might motivate them to continue working on whatever they posted, which would lead to me being able to more quickly play whatever thing they're teasing

I understand this but if depends how many likes you get.  For me , it can be a motivation factor but it also tends to frustrate me. Likes don't mean really something for me since some people use mecanically this feature , it's not a reproach. I prefer when they write comments.

However , my works are maybe not enough visually striking to get them so I don't see the interest to show my wip screens anymore. I feel better when I share screens once my map is finished so I will not be discouraged during the process by the lack of feedback