How would you change the Doom's difficulties if you could?

First of all, 5 difficulties are too many. 4 difficulties would be enough.

First difficulty would be Hey, Not Too Rough.

Second would be Hurt Me Plenty.

Third would be Ultra Violence.

Fourth would be UV-Fast instead of Nightmare.

13 minutes ago, Can't play on Nightmare said:

First of all, 5 difficulties are too many. 4 difficulties would be enough.

 

First difficulty would be Hey, Not Too Rough.

 

Second would be Hurt Me Plenty.

 

Third would be Ultra Violence.

 

Fourth would be UV-Fast instead of Nightmare.

That's actually pretty much what I'd do as well. Nightmare even for coop is a meme difficulty that makes anything beyond Ultimate Doom unbearable. Especially in a scenario with limited lives.

1 minute ago, Andromeda said:

Nothing, they're perfect as is.

How about Nightmare? Wouldnt you make it UV-Fast?

I'd say that UV Fast is category, a choice to play a certain difficulty in a certain way, and not a difficulty itself. 

I would leave them the way they are, when I was 6 I played only in I'm too young to die, and I still died. Every difficulty has a purpose I believe. It's not easy, but I think that an age range could be assigned to doom difficulties (with all the inherent uncertainties) leaving nightmare as the ultimate challenge.

4 minutes ago, Red-XIII said:

I'd say that UV Fast is category, a choice to play a certain difficulty in a certain way, and not a difficulty itself. 

I would leave them the way they are, when I was 6 I played only in I'm too young to die, and I still died. Every difficulty has a purpose I believe. It's not easy, but I think that an age range could be assigned to doom difficulties (with all the inherent uncertainties) leaving nightmare as the ultimate challenge.

But Heretic's 5th difficulty is UV-Fast with 50 percent more ammos.

1 hour ago, Can't play on Nightmare said:

First difficulty would be Hey, Not Too Rough.

Out of curiosity, would HNTR be absorbing ITYTD's double ammo and 50% damage reduction? Or would you be removing that from the game? 

I think it would be cool to let diff 0 be 'Easy', because it actually changes the mechanics, and use diff 1-3 for variant thing sets to provide different gameplay.

I like fastmonsters for older maps, but hard modern maps generally aren't balanced for it (or maybe people are just way better than I realize).

Serious: I'd probably make a 6th difficulty in between UV and Nightmare to sorta train you for Nightmare. This 6th difficulty would basically be the diet-nightmare found in console versions (Jag, 32x, etc).

Joke: Add a 6th difficulty where you die in 1 hit and monsters can't be killed. Also no ammo, so you have to beat the whole game with 50 pistol bullets. Call it "complete bullshit".

24 minutes ago, LateNightPerson said:

Add a 6th difficulty where you die in 1 hit and monsters can't be killed. Also no ammo, so you have to beat the whole game with 50 pistol bullets. Call it "complete bullshit".

um... yes!

also, a mix between ITYTD and Nightmare, where double ammo (like both) but half damage with respawn (so regular health, but it splits into two parts) also, fast monsters. it would be called I'm Too Young to Have Nightmares.

Three difficulties that affect enemy placement: Hurt Me Plenty (lower count), Ultra-Violence (default count), and Nightmare (higher count)

Three modifiers to adjust gameplay: Ammo (how much ammo is received per pick-up, can increase or decrease), Damage (how much damage you receive per hit, can increase or decrease), and Speed (increases the speed of enemy movement/projectiles, can increase or decrease).

Three toggles to adjust gameplay: Respawning Enemies (if on, enemies will respawn after 30 seconds), Pistol Start (start each new level from scratch), and Permadeath (dying resets back to the first level)

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This implementation lets players finetune the difficulty to how they want to play incrementally, ex: a player that wants more enemies but to take reduced damage as well. I felt ITTYD and HNTR weren't very interesting difficulty names, so I shifted the other three around. Ammo, Damage, and Speed are already varied by difficulty, so those are the only modifiers needed (I think?). The toggles are more for adding another way to play but all are already possible.

4 hours ago, LiT_gam3r said:

I'm Too Young to Have Nightmares.

Brilliant name!

5 hours ago, RonnieJamesDiner said:

 

Out of curiosity, would HNTR be absorbing ITYTD's double ammo and 50% damage reduction? Or would you be removing that from the game? 

 

I would remove I am too young to die as 4 difficulties are ideal in games.

Been there, done that. https://github.com/drfrag666/RUDE/releases/download/3.1.0pre6b/RUDE-3.1.0pre6b-win32.zip

The only sort of difficulty setting I'd add to the game would be something akin to Blood:Fresh supply's "made to order", in which you can customize the difficulty to your liking. It'd be able to set Fast monsters, respawning monsters, which version of the map you play(easy, medium, hard), ammo doubled or halved, etc.

I mean, you can technically set most of these by yourself (if you know how to do command lines), but having it just be a menu you can enter when you start the game is nice and convenient!

I think the default difficulties should stay as well, their names are too good to just be thrown away!

Why would I consider messing with difficulty settings of the game that raised several generations of gamers, and created several unique speedrunning categories, just because some guy on a forum is upset that his skills are insufficient to play the game on the hardest settings?

I wouldn't, honestly I think the way they currently work is perfectly fine and each skill setting has its purpose when properly implemented into the wads.

Even the way ITYTD works has a very good purpose, specifically for uber difficult wads with no skill settings implemented.

It's 10 years ago so I dare to refresh the old topic

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/52393-skill-level-6-speculation/

9 hours ago, LateNightPerson said:

Serious: I'd probably make a 6th difficulty in between UV and Nightmare to sorta train you for Nightmare. This 6th difficulty would basically be the diet-nightmare found in console versions (Jag, 32x, etc).

 

Joke: Add a 6th difficulty where you die in 1 hit and monsters can't be killed. Also no ammo, so you have to beat the whole game with 50 pistol bullets. Call it "complete bullshit".

All the console Doom's "diet-nightmare" (Apart from the ones on GBA, as Nightmare on GBA is just Ultra-Violence) is just UV-fast.

14 minutes ago, vdgg said:

It's 10 years ago so I dare to refresh the old topic

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/52393-skill-level-6-speculation/

Reading through that thread shows a remarkable number of ideas that were actually implemented in Doom (2016).

But it's still missing the ultimate set of features that were agreed upon in an even older incarnation of this discussion (can't find the thread now; perhaps it's been removed at one point):

Quote

No player weapons

Players are unable to move

23 hours ago, Can't play on Nightmare said:

First of all, 5 difficulties are too many. 4 difficulties would be enough.

 

First difficulty would be Hey, Not Too Rough.

 

Second would be Hurt Me Plenty.

 

Third would be Ultra Violence.

 

Fourth would be UV-Fast instead of Nightmare.

Three words: ultra mega nightmare.

This was discussed in some other thread but I mentioned that I've never been the biggest fan of changing the monster/thing layout for each difficulty.

Many mappers go above and beyond in making sure every difficulty is balanced but it shouldn't be required.

Why not have the game adjust other factors the way it does in skill 1 and 5?

2 hours ago, elmo972 said:

Three words: ultra mega nightmare.

It would be like nightmare, except that when you die, it deletes everything on your hard drive.

Add a custom difficulty setting like the Blood remaster did. Let us use the easy-normal-hard monster layouts with fast monsters, no monster grace periods, double ammo, reduced damage, etc.

8 hours ago, Pseudonaut said:

It would be like nightmare, except that when you die, it deletes everything on your hard drive.

And then it deletes your family.

UV and NM : Revenants shoot both a homing and non-homing projectile. get hit by both for nice gameover. 

2 hours ago, elmo972 said:

And then it deletes your family.

No, that's Schwarzenegger.

On 5/31/2020 at 2:17 AM, elmo972 said:

Three words: ultra mega nightmare.

Nightmare itself is not more than enough?

UV Fast is good in my opinion. Nightmare is just nightmare!

Me personally, I would change Nightmare so it scales the monster's respawn time based on its health. An imp respawning after 8 seconds is fine. A Cyberdemon doing the same is just bullshit.

It won't make every single map possible but it would make a lot of them more bearable.

Nightmare's fast monsters are not the same as -fast monsters. The wiki is down right now but Nightmare removes their "reaction time" iirc. I think I would remedy that. This could go either way but I lean toward removing reaction time for -fast as opposed to enabling it for Nightmare.