Doom vs Half Life, which is a better FPS?

myk said:

In your initial statement it wasn't clear that you meant Half-life, it seemed like you were talking about DOOM.

Sorry for the misunderstanding but, yeah, I meant Half-Life.

rofl, halfife is repetitive but doom isn't... there's very little variance in the gameplay off Doom's maps, user made or otherwise. In fact the only variation you can make is the amount of monsters or, if you're good at it, where they pop out of. The AI ceases to exist and all the monsters are slow as shit compared to the player.

going on halflife's good points, the gameplay was a gigantic breakthrough in fps games. before halflife all we had were things like Q2 or unreal. Kill monsters and beat the map. Halflife added a story that unfolded before you without being too complex, the level design was quite excellent and the marines did things such as run for cover, flush you out with grenades, surround you and all kinds of cool stuff.

uh, and stop pretending Doom has a story, because it doesn't. That lame paragraph in the manual is NOT a story and there's no progression in the plot or anything aside from "oh you're on mars...oh now you're in hell". Of course Doom is still fun, and I really enjoy making levels (for zdoom anyway, I'm not keen on making doom2.exe or even Boom maps any more) for it, and it has some of the best pure dm (prolly the best after q3, and it beats the pants off hldm, which sucks shit), but seriously, there's no story.

If you need moe proof, when Doom came out it was cutting edge technology. Nothing like it had been seen before. When halflife came out it used a dated engine with little eye candy (it was based on quake when q2 and unreal had already been out some time) and STILL managed to be immensly popular.

Just my take anyway.

Well said, Cyb. I couldn't agree more.

I find it interesting... with the release of Newer source Ports like Zdoom 2.0, the levels are becoming more HL style driven... storys and scripted events, and the community embraces them as 'one of the greast maps ever'

Yeah, I thought that when I saw this thread... I was thinking "well, Half-life is like, zdoom..." And such maps tend to attract me about as much as Half-life... not overmuch.

nxn said:

The only thing I didn't like was that the there weren't enough monsters to keep me busy, they usually were in groups you ran into every minute or so.

I'm afraid you'll have to deal with the same issue in Doom III.

999cop said:

I'm afraid you'll have to deal with the same issue in Doom III.

It seems a little bit more busy, there's usually one monster on screen most of the time, and if there isn't that's beecause there's some cool effect iD wants to show you. Then again that cool effect will be a little more boring each time you play through it, while a monster would not. Oh well, only time will tell.

Doom. It revolutionized Deathmatch, did it not? Also, Doom is WAY easier to edit and modify compared to HalfLife. I just find it really cool on how Doom is still popular (IMO) after 9? years... All I can say is... Wow... :)

I liked HalfLife's SinglePlayer game as well, I just hate Deathmatch. Also, I hate the squillions of countless mods it spawned. Oy, my brother and his friends are OBSESSED with a realistic teamplay mod called Global Warfare. Every FUCKING day at school, all they do is talk about the damn fucking mod! "One time on Global Warfare.... blah blah blah!" "Blah blah blah, our STARS clan did this! Blah blah blah, those fucking hackers did that!" Goddammit, I'm sick of that fucking mod!!! They say I'm obsessed with Doom... At least I don't fucking talk about Doom as much as they spend their fucking time playing Global Warfare.... Sven Coop, however, is ok. Although my friends don't obsess about this game as much as GW, my brother, on the otherhand, obsesses about the mod. Oh well, at least he doesn't obsess about it as much as Global Warfare...

Well, if they'd have voted on this, they'd (obviously) pick HalfLife. After that, they'd probably start saying a bunch of stupid shit on how HalfLife is SOO much better than Doom, and then some other crap on how Doom never revolutionized FPSes. I forgot what other stuff they said about Doom being stupid, but I do remember them saying that Doom3 is gonna suck, on account that it's Doom, not HalfLife :/...

The funny thing is that my friends used the same disk my brother bought! They just downloaded a random key generator off of Kazaa!

Yeah, from what I'm seeing in Half Life SP, I don't think the weapons are that balanced for MP. Super shotgun(name?) and the spark are weak, loading rate of rocket launcher is way too slow for deathmatch, all kinds of grenades don't fit into the situation.

I agree with Cyb, except for one detail: Half Life uses the Quake2 engine, not the Quake engine.

Doom is one of the best games of all time. I derived countless hours of enjoyment from Doom. With the source ports, Doom is actually rivaling HL.

However, if you compare them as released, HL is unquestionably better. As for DM, UT beats Q3. As for HL mods, TFC is far better than CS.

Just to be clear I will repeat that, IMO, Doom is one of the best games of all times!

Empyre said:

I agree with Cyb, except for one detail: Half Life uses the Quake2 engine, not the Quake engine.

Actualy, from what I've heard, it uses the Quake engine. There were just several hacks (including some code from Quake 2) to make it more advanced, and many fatures were added.

the_Danarchist said:

Actualy, from what I've heard, it uses the Quake engine. There were just several hacks (including some code from Quake 2) to make it more advanced, and many fatures were added.

That's pretty much right, although I never heard of them using some of the quake2 up untill now. I definatly believe it though.

Empyre said:

As for DM, UT beats Q3. As for HL mods, TFC is far better than CS.

Utter blasphemy. Q3A is the king of DM, and CS is so superior to TFC that it's beyond reckoning.

Arioch said:

Utter blasphemy. Q3A is the king of DM, and CS is so superior to TFC that it's beyond reckoning.

Fuck Quake3, Doom is the king of FPS, either SP or DM

Use3D said:

Not missing much. Basicly rip off Doom's story, add some horrible music, and short, skimpy levels that all look the same. Oh yeah, the monsters are weak and the game is way too easy.

Did we play the same half-life?...

and btw, doom get my vote, but half-life is also a great game, I have completed it about 6times... so I know what I am talking about :P

Arioch said:

Utter blasphemy.

No, utter difference of opinion.

I was sure that HL was based on Quake2 tech, and the_Danarchist was equally sure that it was based on the original Quake, so I dug around several sites until I finally found proof of which game's engine is used by HL.

I was wrong. Half-Life uses a heavily modified version of the Quake engine, but it does use a small amount of code from Quake2. A lot of the improvements that Valve introduced parallels the improvements Id made for Quake2, but were made independently.

DooM has atmosphere; Half-Life has storyline.

The "repetitiveness" subject has popped up in a number of threads already. But for DOOM and Half-Life this means different things. You could call DOOM repetitive because of its simplicity, but at the same time, that leaves a lot in the player's hands. With large amounts of relatively simple monsters you can leave open many ways of dealing with the situation... some of which go unnoticed even by the designer till discovered by a player. On the other hand, a game like Half-Life needs a more fragmented, step by step approach, coupled with additions to spice up the ongoing story (which may become boring once you know the story.) And even if the monsters are smarter, each encounter with them is more dependent on focalized tactics for that particular situation, whereas in DOOM you tend to deal with more of the map at once (unless the particular map is very linear.)

Pa3PyX said:

DooM has atmosphere; Half-Life has storyline.

What!? Half Life's storyline was basically Doom's storyline

& Half Life has its own atmosphere created with advanced technology

Half-Life was a half-decent game...

Until you dared compare it to Doom! I should really ban anyone who voted Half-Life on medical grounds, but alas there's no justice in this world...

Doom has kept me way more occupied than Half Life so Doom it is.

That and the half life spider (forgot it's name, you fight it on Xen) takes a ridicolous amount of hits to kill (more so than the cyberdemon) that really annoys me. Anyways doom it is.

Cyb said:

uh, and stop pretending Doom has a story, because it doesn't. That lame paragraph in the manual is NOT a story and there's no progression in the plot or anything aside from "oh you're on mars...oh now you're in hell".

/The fan fic mod (me) grabs his mighty warhammer and repeatedly pounds Cyb to the ground, before cutting his belly open with a chainsaw and slowly pulling out his intestines. :-P

Everyone who claims that "Doom has no storyline" needs to fucking open their eyes and actually learn to use their small tiny braincells.

So, Doom has no storyline, but Half-life has? Oh pleeeaaaze!

Lemme spell it out for ya. Doom's storyline in a nutshell: First realization is that apparently, the teleportation gateways opened a door into "some alien world". After clearing Phobos (completely forgetting that Deimos mysteriously vanished and that it also had a gateway), you enter what apparently is the gateway. Something weird happens and you think you die (what really happens is a matter of how you interpret stuff).
When you open your eyes again, you're on Deimos - but the air is thick of the stench of rot and it's (presumably) very hot. You resume the fight, and as you venture deeper into the Deimos base, you notice that things aren't right. The buildings have been warped and mutated, slowly turning into locations that could easily have come from your most twisted nightmares. Eventually, you beat the demon lord asshole and think you've done it...
...only to realize that not only are those demon-like aliens indeed demons, but Deimos itself has been teleported into Hell itself.
Taking a desperate decision to wreak as much havoc in Hell as possible, you move your ass to the surface of Hell, from where you kick more butt and finally, you beat the mastermind, which apparently guarded some portal to Earth (plenty of speculation about why there's this portal for the fans to use their imagination).

All Half life had over Doom was more detailed story events and many small (often redundant details) and story-driven puzzles. What Doom has over Half-life is that its storyline requires some brain power (which you don't seem to have displayed much of by coming with such a preposterous claim like "Doom has no storyline" :-P), which allows you to further use your imagination. Doom has provided me with countless hours of thinking the storyline over and over again.

Oh yeah, and Doom is of course far, far, FAR superiour to HL imho, conceptwise and gameplay wise - I could write a whole essay assignment on why I think this. In a nutshell, I don't like how Half-life is so heavily puzzle-based and I don't like the way combat works in it either. Another thing is that Doom's concept is infinitely more original imho. In Half life, the weapons are typical modern weapons and although there are a few original futuristic weapons and alien weapons, they are mostly uninteresting or lame imo, plus the soldiers just look like modern soldiers. And then of course, the alien designs look cartoonish for the most part.

Fuck, I should've stayed far away from this thread like I originally intended to.

dsm said:

DSM's quote

Now that's a fine verbal ass-whoopin'!

I am with dsm's view actually and I can't tell how people grade the quality of stories and I'm sure dsm has his points there. If Doom's story wasn't as good as you may think, then I wonder how Half-Life's story has been claimed as one of the best game stories around...authors (Tom Hall?) of Doom's story should have deserved all credits, not the guy who wrote on Half Life

Half life's storyline, while obviously quite intriguing has some problems.

Backstory and overall concept seems remarkably Doom-like. You work at this top secret facility (with lots of security guards), some experiment went wrong (duh, WHERE, oh where have I heard that before, hmmm) and opens a link to another world, wherupon monsters warp in to wreak havoc to kill and infect humans to [/b]turn them into zombies[/b].

Later on in Half Life or one of its mission packs, it is revealed that the aliens mutate some of the surroundings in the base (now wheeeere have I seen this before, hmmm?).

But Half life also has some of its own stuff, like a stupid government sending in a bunch a marines to kill anyone inside the base. This act is something that only a fool of a President, like a certain US President currently playing around with the US government, would do - it'd be much smarter to send in some marines, tricking the scientists and guards into believing that they're there to clean out the base of aliens and secure the place (which isn't too far from the truth), while really just dropping a load of nuclear explosives and then leave the base again and blowing it to atoms.

Instead they go through all the trouble of wasting lots of marines' lives and expensive military hardware to try and fully clear the base of both humans and aliens.

But I guess it's an attempt at making a game out of it - although personally, I'm sure the author could have come up with a better reason why the government would send military personnel in like that.

hmmm out of the box:
Half life >>>>> Doom

with source ports & Usermaps/mods:
Half Life = Doom

I loved half life, all of it. It was the games I have been waiting for ever since I first played doom. it had almost everything I had wished for in a FPS. you know when you used to sit around and think, "wouldn't it be cool if you could do this this and this in a game?" that exactly what half life did. the only game that beats it is system shock II. I love it, and I will not hear a word agenst it.

I just wish the single player games was drowns out by the redicouly over rated "counter strike". Its not a bad mod, but I'd take quake III DM over it any day.

999cop said:
Fuck Quake3, Doom is the king of FPS, either SP or DM

sorry, quake 3 is the king of DM. dooms DM is not fit to clean it's sandels.

Ct_red_pants said:

the only game that beats it is system shock II. I love it, and I will not hear a word agenst it.

Sorry, I just got a bit aggressive from Cyb's not-so-well-thought out claim that Doom has no storyline, that I got all eager to point out the flaws in his comment and before I knew it, I started dissing HL.

My opinion is still that Doom is a better fps - this opinion is based solely on the fact that I eventually got so fed up with HL that I'm hoping to get rid of it to someone who would appreciate it more than I. Sorry, I respect your opinion and I agree that HL is indeed something special, but it just isn't my type of game.

It is an issue of difference of opinion obviously. Quake III is a cool game, but for myself I can screw any Quake for Doom any days, including Quake III, of course.

Doom, the supreme FPS game both SP and DM are in favor, contains the most speedy, great movements in case if you havn't discovered, as long as you're mastered at strafing, however it's ironic that most newbies nowadays never notice that. Instead, they would whine about jump option is not implemented in the game which makes it boring or it is not as visually pleasing as they wanted. Weapons mostly seem to be equally enjoyable except sometimes BFG can spoil for certain people in FFA. Personally it does not bother me at all since the rage of BFG can be stopped any time with a shot or two of shotgun. Of course, the balance of weapons is interchangable depending on the level design.

Quake III contains speedy and jumpy movements as well. Besides visuals and varieties of editing features, game tricks are also one of the good points about the game. Rocket launcher always seems to be the most controlling weapon throughout the entire game, and still in my book Doom is a whole lot more fun and skillful game than Quake III. Well, if you were a quaker to begin with who is a jump deathmatcher fan, you definitely have no idea what I am talking about.

Half Life's storyline was basically Doom's storyline

Pretty much so, both involve bad creatures out of control - a standard storyline for an action game, standard being set by DooM, most likely. What I meant was the fact that the storyline in HL is incorporated into the game very tightly - everywhere, in every map (in the beginning at least). Not like in doom where you'd just go blasting the bad guys around, pretty much on your own and without any clue of what the storyline is if you haven't read the manual (save for occasional intermission screens).

& Half Life has its own atmosphere created with advanced technology

True, but the atmosphere in Half-Life just isn't as gripping and immersive as it is in DooM, despite the fact that HL uses a much more up-to-date engine. So much so that the fiction books induced by DooM (Knee Deep in the Dead, ...) still have no rival from the HL side (wrong?), even though HL makes a much more detailed and elaborate plot. And given that, these DooM inspired books are about as immersive to read, which can very rarely be said about books induced by action games/movies (Rainbow Six etc) - in the sense that pure action is fun to watch and play, but extremely boring to read.

Thus DooM gets my vote.