What's something about Doom you absolutely love?

On 8/11/2021 at 11:57 PM, Gore said:

I love the Super shotgun in Doom II. What about you?

no backstory needed, here's a gun, now beat the crap out of every demon in hell. 

I love how the game goes. 

Its modability.

Its simplicity, both in gameplay, coding, and compilling.

I think the thing that stands out to me about the gameplay really is the speed of it. So many later shooters rewarded slower, more cautious play or even cover-shooting, but Doom really rewards you for running into the thick of things. Whenever I go back to halo now I feel like an elderly dinosaur in a suit of space armor

That the core set of mechanics and enemies is fairly limited, meaning you can develop and maintain a skillset and knowledge base about it all without much trouble. This in conjunction with the endless variations of these core mechanics you can elicit through creative mapping.

Many games confuse themselves (and me, the player) by having way too many different mechanics, monsters, and whatnot, which makes me feel as if I can never just explore their worlds with my skill and wit, because there's always a new feature or a new game mode or a new weapon that distracts me from, you know, just playing the game.

It is a bit difficult for me to describe, but I hope you understand what I'm referring to. It's probably the whole "easy to learn, hard to master" thing all over again.

My favorite thing about Doom...all of it. The game, the community, the idea itself...just pure gaming gold.

It's difficult for me to narrow it down to what I love MOST about Doom. It's how everything coalesces into one uniform experience that has had me hooked for the past twenty five years. You've got awesome run 'n gun action set against a horror backdrop. You've got demons and satanic imagery. You've got rock 'n roll. Etc, etc, etc. I could go on forever. There are only a few other game series that has had the same effect on me.

It's funny how growing up NONE of my friends liked Doom. In fact, they outright hated it and straight up criticized me for it. I'll never understand it. That's just the way it was, I guess.

The large variety of custom content.  Would have long since moved on if IWADs were the only thing available.

Close behind and the first thing I thought to respond with is monster infighting.  It's something that hasn't been imitated that much in the genre so it feels unique and it allows for placing much larger crowds of monsters and not have it feel like a slog to defeat them all.

I love how unprofessional the development of doom was. They werent a big triple a company making a huge game, they were a bunch of nerds taking inspiration from the movies they watched and the music they listened to. It makes doom such a charming and wonderful game.

Gameplay, visuals, music, custom stuff, Doom's community, how ID developed Doom, etc...

The simple yet deep gameplay, the great amount of custom maps and the very easy to learn mapmaking.

The speed of it all. There's no better feeling then running around a huge battlefield with hundreds of monsters at the speed of sound.

First of all, I think it represents the epitome of what a good FPS is. It was very advanced for its time, but also held up for years to come. Along with Duke Nukem 3D, Quake 2, and to a lesser extent Quake and Half-Life, I feel its the exact amount of action, nonlinearity, and immersiveness you need in a first person action game. After Half-Life, first person games got too bogged down with story to really be enjoyable. There was just too much waiting around and being lead on rails to have fun.

Secondly, after getting into it I was soon introduced to stuff such as D!Zone and thus the concept of custom levels which I downloaded hungrily when I first got on the Internet. Soon after I came across an old Doom editor (called DoomE2 I believe) where I experimented around with level editing and I was kind of amazed at the power of creation at my hands. I never really got good at editing and I've lost most of the ability I had, but it was fun while it lasted and it lead me here twenty years ago.

And lastly, the community introduced me to some of the best friends I ever had, better than my real life friends, it turns out, because they've stuck with me longer. So thanks to this game for changing my life, I guess.

The movement, the music, the weapons, the enemies, basically everything (except e4m1)!

DOOM retains the elemental (complex) simplicity that id Software achieved with Wolfenstein 3d. A very excellent blend of arcade immediacy and the virtual dimension added by the simulated 3d graphics. DOOM adds polish and some more variety to the experience, especially DOOM 2. Also, for kids of the 90s, Sci Fi and Satan were more timely than, let's go beat the nazis. All this alone could have made DOOM well nigh timeless. But look at what so many fans have been able to do with it. So DOOM is a franchise, but it is also a whole continuum of genres unto itself, populated by fan projects which fall into various styles and types. Few computer games, even in our culture achieve this level of success. It is a good feeling to have been playing this game basically non stop since its initial release as shareware.

Everything

The moddability and the later source release.

The entire arsenal.

I like its ability to be worth playing even if you have played it for a hundred times.

If I had to choose a single characteristic, it would probably be the way the maps invite both combat and exploration while having engaging aesthetic choices. The way all three of those things frequently come together is something no other shooter from the period could touch.

The combination of fast-paced gameplay and immersive (for its time) aesthetic.

The gameplay which feels just really good when you get a handle of it, especially when improving and stomping a map or challenge you otherwise struggled with before or for me as I get better at this, playing maps I've seen played by others and thinking "damn that looks way more difficulty than I can handle" and then eventually myself being able to beat those maps.

The sandbox.

Also archviles, revenants, and cyberdemons.

Infights, sector-based maps, tactics

Gameplay...

John Romero's hair.

The SSG and monster infinght.

Archviles

The movement, and the atmosphere. Together they just make a really satisfying game. Nothing like it.

Mods, music, weapons, demons, artstyle, barrels, cacodemons, multiplayer, john romero, john carmack, barrels, source ports, maps, doomguy, community, double barrels.

Big hollywood fights. Don't even see modern games doing smth on the scale of giant Sunder-style caco clouds or skeleton gangs.