When was the first time you played Strife?

Question for those who have played this obscure Doom engine game.

It was 2006 the time I frequently visited Doom related websites looking for WADs, patches and FAQ. On gamers.org, out of curiosity I looked at the screenshots of Strife under the "games" category. Judging by the sci-fi setting and the way the assault rifle looked, I thought the game was Dark Forces, the game my brother played in 1996 when I was 3 while having no memory it was a Star Wars game back then. Downloaded a copy and gave it a shot by running on a native Windows XP machine, without the knowledge of using DOSBox or placing the WAD -file on a source port directory. Turned out it was no Dark Forces but still kept going while being confused what to do at the beginning and getting slow downs whenever a sound was heard. Played all the way to MAP12: The Temple of the Oracle where I abandoned the playthrough. Next year, switched to ZDoom which I started a new playthrough and finished the game once. 10 years later, in 2017 bought the Veteran Edition where I reached to MAP23.

A couple of months ago I decided to purchase strife: veteran edition since I wanted the final game of the main DooM engine series.

At first Strife seems promising with voice acting, an interesting and very well detailed town to explore but quickly you realise how pathetic the combat is. I've managed to reload a save 20 times and fire 1 rocket at a turret on the ceiling with various degrees of success from the rocket blowing my face up to it flying way off course to the rocket hitting and barely damaging to the rocket instantly nuking the turret.

If you like playing Strife with no accuracy upgrades you probably love Flak and Jugger from the advance wars series. :l

I started playing it recently and i'm so lost.

People give me quests without giving clear indications on where to go.

And the enemies are so strong compared to the player i feel forced to use god mode pretty much all the time.

And some puzzles are so cryptic i prefer to just noclip and go straight to the next room.

So yeah, i'm not having much fun with it, which is a shame since the story is pretty interesting and the aesthethics are kinda unique.

I guess i played Strife for the first time back in 2009, it was on Zdoom. 

Pretty good story, visuals and enemies, lackluster music. One thing i found that was very annoying was the stealth system, what was the point of using a disguise in the fortress hub so the player can pass as a high ranking military officer of the order if robotic enemies can spot you and attack while the humanoid ones do nothing, kinda jarring. 

somewhere in 2013-2014, shortly after i first played the first doom. i remember playing it on gzdoom and getting stuck in the sewer level.

then later in 2016 i bought veteran edition and i beat the game for the first time.

Downloaded and played the demo back when it was new in the 1990s, and liked it but couldn't get (find for free* ;) the full version anywhere. I'm not sure anymore when I finally played the full version, probably around 2000-2005. I remember I had switched to a NT-based Windows by then (2k or XP) and always had to reboot to Win98 to play it with sound... This was back when it wasn't feasible to run it with acceptable performance in DOSBox, and ZDoom didn't fully support it yet. (plus I didn't like using ZDoom anyway except for some ZDoom-exclusive maps)

^{Nowadays I have the rerelease sitting my Steam library, not sure when if ever I'm going to play it again though...}

^{* was about 10 years old then, and I'm not sure if the game was very widely available at retail around these parts anyway... when I finally got to play it, IIRC the person I got the files from had imported it from eBay}

I played it like 10 years ago, I never played through all the game but I remember that I liked the fact that there were enemies with shield (like the ones in Hexen), and the concept of a super powerful weapon that is fragmented and you are able to upgrade it and get different effects through all the different phases is awesome to me.

There were some features that I found interesting, like dialogs with NPCs and maybe buy things (?) I don't remember if there was a shopping feature or not tbh

Never have before

Is it worth it to play?

i say give Strife a try. It's the weaker than the two raven software games that came before it, but for a game built on a modified DooT engine it is pretty impressive.

EDIT:

Edited my comment above. Rogue Entertainment made strife, not Raven.

12 minutes ago, DynamiteKaitorn said:

i say give Strife a try. It's the weakest of the 3 raven software games for the Doot engine but it is very much a technologically impressive game for an engine that came out in '93.

It isn't from Raven IIRC

First time I played Strife was back in 1996. I walked into a Radio Shack here in Canada with the intentions of looking at the games. I picked up Strife not knowing anything about it and absolutely loved it. Good times.

17 minutes ago, nue said:

Never have before

 

Is it worth it to play?

I'd say go for it.
It had many different details compared to the other classic Doom games and copies, and seems that it has a more interactive story, in case you like that kind of gameplay. The weapon concept of the Sigil makes it all worth it, at least for me.

Around 2000, I found it in a bargain bin for $5 and bought and started playing it (never finished).   I loved the cut scenes, the limited dialogue options, the huge maps and story.  

It was amazing!

I recently finished playing the Veteran edition. There should be more wads like it. The only other wad I can think of that's similar is Action Doom 2. The lack of mods for it is disapointing however.

12 hours ago, DynamiteKaitorn said:

A couple of months ago I decided to purchase strife: veteran edition since I wanted the final game of the main DooM engine series.

At first Strife seems promising with voice acting, an interesting and very well detailed town to explore but quickly you realise how pathetic the combat is.

^This. I too played it a few months ago and I didn't enjoy it much. It is not a terrible game but the combat is definitely the weakest aspect (even Heretic and Hexen have far better combat). The weapons are underwhelming. The bolts (especially the standard lightning bolts) are as weak as a pea shooter. The missile launcher is the weakest RL weapon I have ever come across. The grenade launcher is clunky (I would end up damaging myself many times with it). The mauler is Strife's high tier (Plasma gun tier) weapon and yet it is weaker than Doom2's SSG. Only the machine gun (when upgraded) and the Sigil are not terrible.

It is a shame because there are other things that Strife does really well. It had a lot of the things that I wish Hexen had. The open-world feel in Strife is much superior to that of Hexen. It has a dialogue system that adds to the lore and the player can go visit any map at any time is also nice.

6 hours ago, MassiveEdgelord said:

It was amazing!

 

I recently finished playing the Veteran edition. There should be more wads like it. The only other wad I can think of that's similar is Action Doom 2. The lack of mods for it is disapointing however.

It's because the source code of the original game is long known to have lost, and Fraggle, Kaiser, and the team took a long time reverse engineering it (which later became Veteran Edition).

I believe a very few mods for Strife exist, though.

40 minutes ago, InDOOMnesia said:

I believe a very few mods for Strife exist, though.

Strife is what happens when DOOM takes itself seriously and actually cares about it's own story, which is pretty cool IMO. 

I don't quite recall when I played Strife for the first time, but it was quite a while back... I played it for a bit and then stopped, like I did with everything back then.

Late last year I actually played through and finished the game for realsies, and ended up liking it a lot.

The weapons are kinda meh overall, but the power of the grenade launcher should not be underestimated. I wish the titular sigil could be a bit more useful though, cause it's rare for you to actually get in a terrible enough ammo situation for it to be useful. What doesn't help is the ability to buy ammo with gold, lessening the chance that you could get into such a situation.

Speaking of the modding situation, I've been thinking of making a vanilla-ish Strife mapset that just changes the maps and maybe does some minor modifications through sehacked, while still keeping the story intact. I kinda want to wait before I really start working on that though.

I only played Strife once, briefly, and never finished it or anything. I was like 16-17 at the time, and I thought it was OK. I just enjoyed Ultimate Doom and Doom II and all the fan made campaigns/levels so much I just played those and kinda forgot about Strife. I've been thinking about going back to it so maybe some day soon I'll play through it for real. 

I bought and played Strife immediately after it first was released (I'm old), even before the patch that let you use more than one save slot per game.  Though @ReaperAA and others are definitely correct about the underwhelming combat (thought the grenade launcher -- in sufficient open space -- is a joy to beheld), I cannot stress just how ahead of the times the level environments were.  While Duke3D had "realistic" levels, they were so humorous/satirical that it undid most of the realism, whereas Strife really nailed the feeling of exploring a "real world" (albeit one limited by the technology and visplane limits of the time).  The notion that the Programmer's keep you were attacking becomes your home base was clever, but both the original level layout and the subsequent changes to the later version as a result of both the assault and occupation took Doom-era technology level design to new heights (IMO).

For the young whippersnappers just discovering the game I can see why it is an underwhelming slog, but I given my history I still appreciate just how much atmosphere Rogue was able to wring from the engine.  Also, major props to Night Dive for the Veteran's Edition.

My first time was with ZDoom, must have been 2014? I had come across a site that had a bunch of wads and Strife was there, I quickly noticed that it was an IWAD so I tried it first. First thing I did was steal the chalice and apparently you're not supposed to do that, so I couldn't progress and the game confused me a lot, I have the game in my computer but never got around to seriously playing it again. Perhaps someday, I do want to but I'm planning on buying veteran edition before playing, since you know, I just downloaded the wad.

Played the demo and really liked it back in the 90s, in particular how there were choices to make that actually affected the world.  Reasonably common in RPGs by then I suspect, but I'd always played action games up until that point. Didn't go through the whole thing until much later though.

In the end, I don't think it's a very good game. The dialogue stinks, the story is not too great and the gameplay is as someone said, the worst of the Doom engine games. But as a 3d game, I think it had an ambition that it realised uniquely well right up until the release of Deus Ex. Which had some of the same problems.

Tried it several years ago after learning about all the games on the Doom engine. Gave up shortly because I was confused by the level design. Tried again a couple years ago and ended up beating it, but that time I learned the real problem is the combat, not the level design. The crossbow is near-useless, the assault rifle feels like an automatic stapler, the rocket launcher doesnt fire straight, and the grenades literally bounce off of enemies (what the fuck?). The only decent weapon is the hitscan plasma thing, but there's not enough ammo for it. And on top of that there's an overload of frustrating hitscan enemies. So I pretty much hate-played the game until completion, stewing in anger. Then last year I tried the "Strife Uncut" mod and had a much better time. It adds some more satisfying weapons to the arsenal that make the combat at least tolerable.

The same company made the "Dissolution of Eternity" expansion for Quake which was very good.

8 hours ago, Senor500 said:

My first time was with ZDoom, must have been 2014? I had come across a site that had a bunch of wads and Strife was there, I quickly noticed that it was an IWAD so I tried it first. First thing I did was steal the chalice and apparently you're not supposed to do that, so I couldn't progress and the game confused me a lot, I have the game in my computer but never got around to seriously playing it again. Perhaps someday, I do want to but I'm planning on buying veteran edition before playing, since you know, I just downloaded the wad.

Same thing pretty much. Around that time i downloaded Strife and a separate voices WAD for it and i tried it with Zdoom or GZDoom (don't remember). I didn't get very far though but it was interesting. The cutscenes and voices were actually pretty neat. Also not being attacked by certain people was a nice change in the Doom engine lol. I do have Veteran Edition now though but i just haven't gotten around to playing it. I bought it on sale around christmas i believe it was on Steam.

On 3/24/2020 at 5:56 PM, Danzer said:

I started playing it recently and i'm so lost.

People give me quests without giving clear indications on where to go.

And the enemies are so strong compared to the player i feel forced to use god mode pretty much all the time.

And some puzzles are so cryptic i prefer to just noclip and go straight to the next room.

 

So yeah, i'm not having much fun with it, which is a shame since the story is pretty interesting and the aesthethics are kinda unique.

Why would you want hand holding in Strife?