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unerxai

How did you play Doom in the old days?

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Younger players start with the WASD setup right away, but those who played when the game was new, how did you control it? For years I only used the arrow keys, space and ctrl. I didn't know you could run faster or strafe. Fun fact: For years I couldn't make it past Heretic's E1M5 because there's a section that requires running to progress. A friend of mine never made it past map02 of Doom 2 (I didn't have Doom 2 at the time) because of the same thing.

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I had a rollerball that worked really well with Doom back when I started.  Should look into getting another one now that I think about it.

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I remember playing on my dad's IBM Thinkpad Laptop with the old controls: Arrows for moving, Ctrl for shooting, Space for opening doors/activating switches and Shift for running. No mouse. And the left and right arrows weren't strafe left/right but turn left/right so it was kind of messy to control it.

 

Nowadays it's all just mouse and WASD with strafing instead of turning for me. Make a lot of things easier and Ultraviolence is now just a kids' game.

Back in the old days I guess UV was way harder to master.

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Arrow keys, space bar, control, shift. Holding shift was near constant. Circle-strafing was accomplished with a flurry of keystrokes that sounded continuous.

 

Early on there were debates over "keyboarders" vs. "mousers" in FPS games.

 

Discovering Mouse/WASD was a game-changer, pardon the pun. From that point forward there was no real debate; it was cars-vs.-horses.

 

 

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WASD, Shift for running, and a mouse.

 

Funny, I didn't know how to run for quite a while, so I spent some time trying to figure out a way to enter the brown building on MAP02.

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As a kid? Always with IDDQD on. I remember booting up Heretic and being afraid to leave the first room until I looked up the god mode cheat.

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6 hours ago, RadicalMacaroni said:

Same, I used to just use arrows, space, and ctrl

Same.

 

"WASD" makes no sense on a French keyboard, and "ZQSD" does not look like a cool acronym.

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When I was kid , I was playing Doom with a controller similar to the Genesis 6-button's one.

 

image.jpg

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Keyboard, default controls, but I didn't run or strafe, so levels took longer to navigate, and I took fireballs to the face unless I somehow avoided it by turning and moving away. This was on the shareware, although I eventually learned to run I still didn't strafe, until I did so and then I was restricted to horizontal only movement which locks turning. So dedicated left and right side stepping and circle strafing was learned last and late in my early Doom plays.

 

I also played on ITYTD and when I got Doom II, my first full Doom game, I had learned of cheat codes and abused them badly lol. Eventually cheating stopped, I employed the mouse, and I raised the difficulty to HMP, which is when I truly began to play Doom.

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Initially the default keyboard controls. Later found out the setup program could change keys. Don't know when I started using mouse + keyboard with Doom, even though I used mouse + keyboard in Wolf3D before Doom.

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On a typewriter.

 

Nah on a 486. I could still play it on a 386, but I didn't have a 386 until after I had a 486. Plus it didn't play well on a 386.

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I rocked a Pentium II 333 MHz with 32 megs of RAM on Win98. I also played in Doom95 for 2-3 years, with my first source port being Boom.

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Not all younger players started with WASD though due to all of the console variants that are available. As for playing the DOS/PC versions (especially within the last 15 or so years) then i definitely agree with you though.

 

So yes, since i am considered a younger Doom player i'm pretty sure i tried the PC original via ZDoom and WASD/mouse controls. I don't remember when i first tried Doom on PC, but i'm sure it was via my old laptops; an old Pentium III Dell Latitude which was old when i got it or my Pentium 4 HP/Compaq nx9600 (i still have 'em both). This must of been mid-late 00's.

 

I believe that Doom 64 was technically the first Doom game that i played, possibly in the late 90's/early 2000's as a kid. I definitely know that my first time trying the original Doom was on Xbox via Doom 3: Limited Collector's Edition around 2005'ish when that was released.

 

Something not Doom related though but "sort of" on topic: I tried Duke Nukem 3D before Doom and it was on a "vintage" PC but i was pretty young nor could i ever figure out how to change the controls (i hated how the mouse moved your character) so i never got very far. The PC was my friends which he got from his brother but we didn't use it all that much, not to mention it didn't work all that great from what i can recall.

Edited by CyberDreams : grammar, but i'm sure it's still messed up

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Arrows, Manual running via shift, space and CTRL like most people here. No strafing as well, just trying to manually dodge with side-backward running. (Didn't hold shift all day, so it was a slow pace until I really needed to dodge or jump past something). Game was way harder because of that, now with mouse and strafe on demand, most enemies are a piece of cake to handle. Yes that shitty setup was enough for Plutonia on UV, Although it took a while especially maps like Odyssey.

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Arrow keys, space bar, ctrl and shift. I was confused by how you open doors when I first started playing so that was like a big revelation when I clued in. I also tried moving a barrel by punching it... that didn't end well. lol. Not sure when I found out you could run. I didn't use strafe for ages and I recall moving forward and back on a diagonal to avoid fireballs when directly fighting imps, hellknights and such. It wasn't until Quake that I started to use the mouse.

Edited by Doom_Dude

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Default controls. Always held shift. Never strafed. I almost always did one or more of the following: (1) played on I'm Too Young to Die (2) cheated. Discovering I could customize controls was the beginning of Doom's resurrection for me. I still use only keyboard though.

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On the SNES, then Playstation.

 

I didn't have a PC until 2002, and bread and buttered in FPS via UT99, which taught me an arrow keys setup that I still use to this day.

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Default controls on the DOS version, with keyboard only.  The idea that remapping the controls was something that general players would do and not just a thing that existed as an accessibility feature for people who might be left-handed or lost a hand/finger wasn't one that crossed my mind until I started interacting with online communities later on.

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Default DOS controls. It was easier before they added the Windows key to keyboards.

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Like most others I played with the shitty default controls for years. My dad had a joystick we would occasionally use just for fun but that wasn’t often. 

 

In about 2001-2002 my brother showed me WSDA and I never looked back.

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I used arrows+ctrl/shift/enter, still had weapons bound to 1-7, switching weapons was a stretch, I vaguely remember using mouse to turn but could be wrong.  Once I played Half-Life with WASD everything changed.

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Oh shit, when i think how damn long time it took me to realize i can strafe in this game as well. Good old days when even "I'm too young to die" was just difficult for me.

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I'm still playing with the default keys that doom 95 had so you can give yourself an idea nowadays just play with keyboard

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Do people find WASD comfortable? I employ ASDC.

 

A = USE

S = STRAFE LEFT

D = BACKWARD

C = STRAFE RIGHT

 

LEFT MOUSE = FIRE

RIGHT MOUSE = MOVE FORWARD

 

I should probably find a purpose for the space bar.

 

What are the bindings for WASD?

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For me it was arrow keys + ctrl, shift and space bar. I never used alt for strafing until Doom 2. In hindsight it made it a lot more difficult.

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3 hours ago, Hellbent said:

Do people find WASD comfortable? I employ ASDC.

 

A = USE

S = STRAFE LEFT

D = BACKWARD

C = STRAFE RIGHT

 

LEFT MOUSE = FIRE

RIGHT MOUSE = MOVE FORWARD

 

I should probably find a purpose for the space bar.

 

What are the bindings for WASD?

W = Forward

S = Backward

A = Strafe Left

D = Strafe Right

SPACE = Use (in Doom, but many games use E for Use and Space for Jump)

 

 

Back in the 90s, I used a Gravis 4-button controller, with the buttons set to Fire, Use, Run, and Strafe.  It was actually less awkward than using the mouse to move forward.

 

EDIT: I just remembered that it was called a Gravis Gamepad.

Edited by Empyre

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I was born in '97 and started playing Doom around '01, keyboard only.

Not by choice either.

I only had Doom95 back then, and for some reason Doom95 has that weird problem where it doesn't take mouse input.

I still occasionally go back and play D95 for nostalgia.

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Keyboard only. Watched the demos and learned the importance of strafing from them. Got pretty good at using momentum to circle strafe with a LOT of practice.

 

Also used to load up Dead Simple (favorite dial-up deathmatch map with friends) on -nomonsters to practice other tricks, like turning quickly while maintaining velocity, sneaking a little strafe in halfway around. Used to run around and around the outside practicing stuff.

 

Didn't the DOS-based setup program have very limited capacity for changing controls? I seem to remember being limited to assigning in-game actions to  Ctrl, Alt, Space etc rather than assigning keys to actions. Am i remembering that right?

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