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Patrick

Most Innovative WAD?

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I was wondering what people's opinion of which wads are the most innovative.

My personal nominations are:
Batman DooM: best use of DeHacked I have ever seen
Immoral Conduct: first reloading weapons mod for Doom (as far as I know)
Zen Dynamics: first extremely complex weapons for ZDoom

whatever first used self-referencing sectors. (UACdead?)

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Innovation is a gradual process, but given the whole time frame I guess I'd say Aliens TC. Batman Doom made a lot of new uses with DeHackEd, but the source was available giving people a clearer view of how to do new stuff and how to tweak the game (aside from years of community experience), while Justin Fisher had already managed to import a whole new setting to the game very early on (before DOOM II arrived, if I am not mistaken).

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Depends, there's tons of wads you could call "most innovative" -

Batman Doom, because of the insane dehacked use;
Zen Dynamics for its use of at the time new ZDoom features;
Immoral Conduct for being the first real "big" weapons mod;
Assault on Tei Tenga (first Doom hub);
Aliens TC for being the first of its kind;
UAC DEAD for discovering one of the first "special effect" engine exploits;
Foreverhood for using Doom to create something entirely new and different (though you could maybe consider this not innovative since the fact its entirely different from Doom can be considered as not being innovative towards Doom itself)

Thats about all I can think of but I'm sure there are others. "Most innovative" can be a little subjective. If you ask me, overall I agree with myk because Aliens gave a taste of what people could do with games like Doom now that they were designed to be modifiable.

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Most of the important ones have already been mentioned, but surely Hell Revealed/Plutonia must be up there. With there challenging, choreographed and carefully planned fights. Another one that's pretty innovative in my opinion was RTC-3057, i was completely blown away by all the things this wad pulled off.

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Everyones gonna berate me for this, but I thought Action Doom was very innovative. It's the first wad I've ever known to mix Contra and Doom. The weapons, monsters, and textures are all excellent.

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i second Phocas Island 2. It may not be the MOST innovative, but it did manage to accomplish good, very different, gameplay.
i want to play more doom-engine adventure games.

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TheAdmantArchvile said:

Everyones gonna berate me for this, but I thought Action Doom was very innovative. It's the first wad I've ever known to mix Contra and Doom. The weapons, monsters, and textures are all excellent.

Why would anyone berate you for that? It's ACTION DOOM! :O

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Captain Red said:
I wish people would take it's lead.

Maybe they noticed lead is poisonous!

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Doom JR and The New Doom are pretty innovative too - but unfortunately they're negatively influential.
Cyberdreams and Run darn you Run are also interesting.
Hacx was kinda innovative too - it had more shootable stuff and decorations in dehacked! That elevator is pretty damn cool too

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Tei Tenga, for its historic relevance.
Void, because it's weird.

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whiteboy567 said:

Most of the important ones have already been mentioned, but surely Hell Revealed/Plutonia must be up there.

Hmm, I'm going to disagree. I don't think any megawads, that I've ever played, could really be called "most innovative". They are all variations on Doom's "shoot stuff"... but sometimes you shoot more guys in better looking maps. There are some megawads that break out a little... but I'd hardly call any of them innovative. When I hear that world I think Batman Doom, ZanZan, Phocas Island, Impossible: A New Reality, Void... things that try to do something completely different and not be Doom.

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One thing I found innovative was the use of intermission messages in every level in Perdition's Gate was pretty innovative... although the gameplay of that WAD was pretty normal or non-exceptional.

Scuba Steve said:
Hmm, I'm going to disagree. I don't think any megawads, that I've ever played, could really be called "most innovative".

I think whiteboy567's post did add something to consider (I admit I hadn't, at first thought). In certain departments Hell Revealed is certainly more innovative that Aliens TC, for example. Rather than a generic "innovation" it might be necessary to point out in what way the WAD is innovative. Perhaps some manage to be innovative in various ways, which is worth noting, and might lead to a "most innovative" in general.

They are all variations on Doom's "shoot stuff"... but sometimes you shoot more guys in better looking maps.

I would say something like that if I didn't have the ability to judge the differences between the way WADs that don't alter the behavior of the game entities or features. Saying that you're just downplaying an element that may require creativity and planning to make original and unseen before in such a light. But you can innovate in how to handle that sort of gameplay, and such innovations can be lost to a certain degree in WADs that modify the behavior, because it gets mixed up in other changes: the gameplay may be very standard except for changes that were determined by technical changes, and not thought and work put on adjusting playability.

It happens in many creative disciplines... some more subtle or smaller change may have an essential effect, leaving its mark as a true novelty. This is because the quality of the innovation and its effect on the design is more relevant than the quantity of change. Thus it's wrong to base "innovation" merely on how much something is changed.

There are other WADs that are innovative in how they deal with the "classic" DOOM gameplay, such as the Chord series by Malcolm Sailor, which go in a clearly different direction than Hell Revealed to provide challenging play using the standard elements of the game.

It's true that such WADs aren't innovative in many other ways and that comparatively the WADs that stand out as innovative among the ones that change the game less are few in relation to the amount of WADs there are of that kind (it's arguably hard to make a relevant and lasting change to something worked on "to the death"), but they certainly specialize in a certain type of innovation, and when they manage it, it sticks. Perhaps even The Darkening II can be considered innovative, in how it manages to provide a full "basically from scratch" texture set, and in the style used for that set... at least in that department.

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Captain Red said:

The Phocas Island wads. I wish people would take it's lead.


thanks for the mention of my projects. I do wish someone else would to a phocas2 themed mod. It's the reason I made it in the first place, it was to play where you solve puzzles using items. Then when I'm finished it... oh wait, I already know all the puzzles. :S


Edit: mental note: I don't understand your post completely, please post whilst sober.

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