HMP to UV. Tips?

[DiamondDude11]

Hello.
I am a new Doom player in process of going from Doom 1 and Doom 2 HMP to UV. Is there any tips that can easen the burden of the harder gamemode ahead?
Thanks in advance, Diamond.

[P41R47]

One things that could help is play the maps that are most difficult to you, a few times, not in a row, and learn the attack pattern and the sound they make, how fast are the enemies and their respectives projectiles. For example, if you have a mancubus at your back, and you heard the attack sound, you have to move quickly to your left, as the first pair of fireball will fly exactly to where you are, then move to the right to dodge the second volley, and then again left for the last one. I do this without sweating as today, but well i played this game for a long time.
But don't take for certain that you HAVE to play in UV to be a good Doomer. I play this game since when it was released and i played in UV in only in my chilldhood, and i didn't even know it was a difficult setting hahaha. But now, i just want to have a fun time with a mid challenge to spice things up, so i play in ''Hey, not to rough'', and sometimes in Hurt me Plenty. Right no i'm trying to move to Hurt me Plenty for old megawads and just use HNTR for more modern mapsets.
Modern mapsets like Ancient Aliens and Valiant, in UV, instead of giving me a good time, they really stress me up.
But well, maybe it will be more fun for you with more challenge, so try it out :)
Hope this little advice helps you. 

EDIT: Plutonia is a good practice field, so try to play all the maps a few times in HMP. And surely you will have a lot of experience to tackle almost anything from there. But don't get frustrated. Plutonia is way harder than Doom 2. But after playing Plutonia in HMP, Doom 2 UV will feel like a walk in the park.
If you manage to end Plutonia in UV, well, you will have attained a really high dooming skill ;) 

[Woolie Wool]

1 hour ago, P41R47 said:

For example, if you have a mancubus at your back

 

 

If the Mancubus is behind you, then the order would be reversed--right, then left. For the third volley the fireballs go to both sides so there isn't a clear direction to dodge (and in some circumstances, standing still might be the right way to "dodge" the volley).

[P41R47]

1 minute ago, Woolie Wool said:

 

 

If the Mancubus is behind you, then the order would be reversed--right, then left. For the third volley the fireballs go to both sides so there isn't a clear direction to dodge (and in some circumstances, standing still might be the right way to "dodge" the volley).

Ah yes, its true, my bad, i don't know why but i inverted it in my mind but not in words. Sorry!

[Doomkid]

Don't be afraid to use the BFG! My god, the number of YouTube playthroughs I've seen of various Doom maps where a person is wandering around with a BFG and hundreds of cells yet they're using the Super Shotgun on everything. It's like they want to take out all the enemies as slowly as possible.

 

Rockets are your friend too for the same reason - just make sure the nearest walls or objects are 4-5 meters away first!

[Nine Inch Heels]

On 2/3/2020 at 5:21 PM, DiamondDude11 said:

I am a new Doom player in process of going from Doom 1 and Doom 2 HMP to UV. Is there any tips that can easen the burden of the harder gamemode ahead?

No, there are no tips available whatsoever, because nobody knows what you have problems with, and the difference in difficulty between HMP and UV depends a lot on the map in question since there is no fixed "rule" as to how large or small the difference between those setting is supposed to be. And that's true for IWADs as much as it is true for PWADs. If you can't walk the tightropes in Doom2 24 on HMP, you're not gonna have a different experience on UV with those.

 

Just start playing the thing, and when there's problems in a map, drop a save prior to where you have problems, and play the fight until it isn't a problem any more.

[Fonze]

One of the coolest things about doom to me is that so much of its complexity comes from the compounding interactions between simple systems. These can be things such as environmental hazards/obstacles, monster attack/movement patterns, as well as their interactions among themselves, with the terrain and the player, weapon strengths/weaknesses, etc. On that note, as NiH said no single piece of advice will quite do the trick because there are so many nuanced situations and you would need a big list to cover everything. If I were to try to force out a concise bit of advice though, it would be along the lines of what she said, which is to play the game and study things that hang you up. Learn all of the simple systems and make your interactions with them muscle memory, (like the mancubus attack, straferunning, or bfg-use as examples) from there you can piece together the larger picture of what makes up encounters and learn to piece them apart, prioritizing certain goals you set in a sequence, like killing a high-threat group of enemies, fighting for a particular position, reaching supplies, etc.

 

Apart from that the biggest thing is to have fun, because if you have fun doing something and like to do it, you'll eventually get better at it naturally :)

[SirJuicyLemon]

You should try UV head on. Practice, practice and practice. This game doesn't penalize you thaaaat much when you die (well, to start the level again with a pistol surely sucks... but you can practice with saving at the start of each level!) so you can try to do your best in UV and you can always try again a level.

If you really feel stuck after a few tries, try on a lower difficulty!

 

If you are new to Doom, you gotta learn that there may be some differences between source ports that may make things easier/harder.

For example, some modern source ports offer autosaving features so, if you die on a level, you will restart it on the autosave of the beginning of the level (as it does for each level) and you will not start with your pistol only, but with all the arsenal you had when you entered the level for the first time.

 

Others settings in modern sourceports, like always mouselook, let you use your mouse to aim at any direction (quite as if Doom was totally 3D) instead of restraining your mouse movement to the horizontal axis. This doesn't bring any particular advantage in terms of actually firing (is not like you can shoot a monster way up high on a platform with that setting on and that you weren't able to shoot him with that setting off), but I feel it gives a sort of subjective "advantage" because of the freedom of your field of view as a player (you will notice, or you could have noticed already, that there are some times when a monster is really up high and you can't quite see him well, and it feels weird because most of the times monsters are at (somewhat) your same height level and you shoot them directly, so it kinda feels that you shoot totally straight forward, but you can actually shoot to enemies that are above you (as you could probably tell with those Imps in E1M1); always mouselook wasn't available in the original Doom because of the engine's limitations, and you can use it to look around freely as any other modern FPS).

 

You can also sometimes add a crosshair in your HUD to help.

 

Those are things that may help as you are starting! But I don't recommend to stick to them forever as it's not quite a "realistic Doom experience" (this topic is highly subjective and debatable; please, don't feel pushed to play in some way just because you are told you to do so, not even by old Doomers or hardcore fans; in my case, this is just a recommendation).

 

Some other folks prefer to play an experience near to what the original Doom games were. So they use modern sourceports that try to make the game similar to what it was vanilla Doom (I mean modern sourceports in this case because of OS compatibility; you can always try to be even more close to vanilla and use a DOSBox, but that's, for some people (like me), just really annoying and/or innecesary).

Some great examples!: Chocolate Doom and Crispy Doom.

 

This "vanilla-like experience" preference is not (exactly) what I mean with a "realistic Doom experience".

For me, at least talking about using always mouselook and crosshair (which can be really good, and give you some sensation of comfort and ease to play a game so old and that may feel a little strange/difficult to play) can stray you in some sense of how Doom actually works: how you move, how you aim, how you shoot, how the hitscan works. Someone who has played modern FPS before but is new to Doom (not saying it's necessarily your case) shouldn't understand how Doom works right away. So that's why my advice is practice, practice and practice. You will eventually get used to the engine, to how things work in the strange world of Doom (is not that strange actually) and it's just a matter of time.

 

Other things that you may not know:

There are monsters that appear in UV that didn't appear on HMP. For example, the first 2 shotgun guys at E1M1. So be cautious with that.

 

If you haven't already, get used to strafe. When I was kid (I don't know how you are playing, or what are your settings) I played Doom with keyboard only, and it was awful to use the left/right keys to turn. I assume that you are using keyboard and mouse so you have the comfort to just use strafe. But try to use it a lot in case there are several enemies that are about to shoot you. It helps a lot.

 

As some folks said before, you can try to learn the pattern of the monsters. I don't "know" them perse (like, I didn't knew what they were talking about the Mancubus projectile sequence; I can imagine it, but I don't recall it perfectly nor know it precisely) yet I have played so much Doom that I "know" it in some other way (I may not know the scientifically proven sequence of Mancubus projectiles, but I know it kind of subconsciously thanks to experience). Then again, knowing it beforehand should probably help you to understand how to move better in a difficult situation where you have to evade Mancubus fireballs.

 

Hope you play, learn and improve a lot!

 

Edit: forgot to mention that those features of modern sourceports are totally optional, you can enable/disable them at will!