My opinion on Brutal Doom

[RedDash16]

Brutal Doom will always be good, but I will always prefer playing DooM vanilla.

I use brutal Doom as a way to get my non doomer friends into the classic DooM games. 

 

SmoothDoom is better.

[nelguy]

2 hours ago, TonicBH said:

To me, the "way to play Doom," especially for first-timers, is vanilla. Or close to it. No jumping, crouching, mouselook, that sort of thing. You break out the mods for the second time through.

Sorry, but I kinda broke that rule...

[DOEL]

13 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

To a degree. It introduces a lot of mechanics i would enjoy, but its not like its a holy grail mod.

 

Something like Jimmy's Jukebox comes to my mind because that's a great novel idea. Kinsie's work, Samsara, Russian Overkill and Hideous Destructor are also good crack.

 

At the very least BD brought more attention to regular Doom aswell, which is always a plus.

 

< Brutal Doom's/Project Brutality's modern gaming features

< are a great gateway into oldschool Doom

 

 

One of these things does not correlate with the other.

 

 

Uh, yea, that's why I said for me. Did you even read the rest of my post? I gave a lot of context for this.

[HorrorMovieRei]

I will say when it came out, the first impression I had was great. But my opinion kinda lowered on it over time and nowadays I don't like playing it really. It's far from being a bad mod, but it's kinda overrated imo. First and foremost I can summarize my favorite part of the mod in a few sentences: I love gore and violence, and Brutal Doom ofc delivers well on that. It's grotesque, brutal and cathartic. I love how many ways you can go about ripping monsters apart, and putting the downed ones out of their misery is pretty satisfying.

But with that, I have to get to my gripes:

• The weapons are powerful and feel all satisfying to use except for the BFG. But I absolutely HATE that they have reloading. A mod like Brutal Doom should not have that. I feel like it should bank on it's absurdity, but it seems like it wants to compromise between being realistic but also ridiculously over the top at the same time but ends up delivering only on the latter, while offering a frustrating experience on the former. I could use the Classic mode for the weapons, but they're a buggy after thought.
• The new particle effects are alright I guess. I don't like when Doom mods go way overboard with High def eye candy because it contrasts badly with the often simplistic geometry of most maps, and the simplicity of the engine itself, but it's there and for what it is it looks good. And if anything it keeps things consistent with the gore and blood at least so that's good.
• The new enemy behavior is also alright, if a bit overwhelming at times.
• I hate Doom guy's voice, granted that idk if those have been removed by now. I forget when I last played the mod.
• The mod works fine on a surface level, but once you get under the hood, it's an absolute nightmare of spaghetti code, and hacks keeping everything together. Most people won't care about this of course, but as a modder this is something that gives me anxiety just looking at it. I can actually describe Brutal Doom with a quote from American Psycho of all things: "All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great."
• The big one: The sprites are an eyesore to me. The weapons are all pretty good except for the chaingun that's blurry from being resized in photoshop, the BFG that with due honesty just looks like shit, and the fists. The fists are a sacrilege for me. Why do they have motion blur for god's sake. The body parts also feel lazy more often than not. A lot of them are just cropped sprites with meat placed over where the crop was made(not even shaded sometimes), and made to rotate in a clockwise/counter-clockwise motion. A lot of the death animations are very amateurish, beginner level frankenspriting, and some of them from what I recall legit just have a translucent red brush from photoshop painted over them hastily. Some of them also have very little actual frames, which you normally don't notice when they're buried over mountains of particles and blood. The executions are ambitious sure, but in practice they look awkward. It's animated like a Terry Gilliam cut-out animation and looks too comical.

I am aware that spriting can be hard for a beginner, specially when you have a workload that big. Having to craft thousands of individual body parts for enemies, it's not an easy task. We all have to start somewhere as spriters, and slowly hone our skills, like everything. After 10 years though you'd expect the sprites in this mod to improve, specially with how much he's made for it. But I think he has adapted his spriting style to prioritize quantity over quality from working on this for so long. He pumps out a lot of work, but nothing with particular finesse.

 

With that said, if people wanna enjoy it, all the power to them. If it gets them into Doom, even better. I'm just stating my snobby opinion because I guess that's what this thread is for?

[Redneckerz]

5 hours ago, DOEL said:

Uh, yea, that's why I said for me. 

This was not missed on me.

5 hours ago, DOEL said:

Did you even read the rest of my post? I gave a lot of context for this.

I did. Its great that you played Doom at release. It still makes the choice of phrasing not sensible. Using these modern features automatically means its not oldskool doom. 

 

I can see what you try to say, though.

 

That's why i linked to the oof in jest.

[Volerm]

19 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

I cannot say I really care about the mod itself. But it cannot be denied that it and its offspring play an important role in getting new players into the game.

Oh god that reminds me.

Back when I was in high school I shared doom WADs around the computer labs because our teacher didn't give a shit and Doom was one of the few games we could play on the school's ban-happy systems.

Guess which WAD ended up spreading like wildfire?

I think it's safe to say I got sick of brutal doom after that. Don't get me wrong, the WAD is fine, but it's one of the things you get so sick of that you decide "Alright. I had enough of this for a lifetime."

[nelguy]

Man I can't believe, that a post made by someone like ME, could have such a huge debate over if BD is a bad or a good, decent or mediocre mod. (it's a decent mod: 7.6/10)

 

but, if you want to play a super-duper-good mod, play Duke it Out in Doom, SmoothDoom, Beautiful Doom, Total Chaos, lilith.pk3 (that's debatable), Extreme Weapon Pack, Nuts (i know it's a map, but whatever), Nuts 2 (map), Nuts 3 (map), Blood Rebirth, Bloom, D4V, DooD, Metroid Dreadnought, Marine Doom, Hearts of Demons - Baron Master, Hocus Pocus 3D, Wolfenstein 3D TC, Doom or Doom 2 Enhanced Music, HD textures, Too Many Super Shotguns, Russian Overkill, WolfenDoom and others.

 

those are super-duper-good mods

 

[Bauul]

17 minutes ago, nelguy said:

Man I can't believe, that a post made by someone like ME, could have such a huge debate over if BD is a bad or a good, decent or mediocre mod. (it's a decent mod: 7.6/10)

 

For the first few years after it was released, Brutal Doom was a major flash point for the community here for a number of reasons. In the last few years opinion on the mod has mellowed considerably to mostly indifference, but raising it will always garner a decent amount of response as you've observed.

[Nine Inch Heels]

Can't say I care much about brutal doom... The (stereotypical) instances where "consumers" assume that it should be possible to use it with anything and everything out there (and if your stuff doesn't support brutal doom for some reasons then it sucks) have long since reached meme status. The same counts for people who genuinely believe Mark_IV did everything by himself, and then move on to the usual "hero-worship", which also involves dismissing most other things the community at large has brought forth over the years as "lesser". These displays of hero-worship also usually result in said "customers" being told that their favourite modder isn't the saint they think he is, so that's also a nice cause of potential drama, which Bauul probably also meant when he used the expression "flash point", I suppose...

 

If there's anything that I think stands out to me as a "problem" with brutal doom itself rather than its "surroundings", then it would be the lack of "focus". The mod comes across extremely bloated, in particular in the "load-outs department", and some of the design choices made lack a general sense of cohesiveness, or are "clashing" in my opinion. The novelty aspect is neat for a while, I'll give it that much, but for me it wore off pretty fast. After having played both Doom2 and plutonia with brutal doom (basically out of morbid curiosity) I've had my fill, and I'm not going for seconds, because I feel like I've seen enough of the mod over the course of 64 short maps.

 

That being said, cool if people enjoy it. But I'm not touching that mod again, and I'm also not going to make changes to my maps so they run properly with it.

[ReaperAA]

My opinion is that Brutal Doom is a decent mod (and its mapset "Extermination Day" is actually pretty good). It has that ability of attracting new folks to the doom scene (which is a good thing).

 

However, like NIH mentioned, it's a mod that heavily relies on the novelty factor. It is bloated and lacks focus (even more true with the latest v21 that introduced vehicles, extra weapons, map enhancement system etc etc). Which is why I now seldom play it outside of its own Extermination Day mapset (although I used to like it in the past).

 

I am not even going to mention the whole controversy surrounding Brutal Doom and SgtMarkIV. That is another can of worms.

[idbeholdME]

Meh..

 

I tried it once and was put off by the ridiculous amounts of blood and gore everywhere. I have no issue handling violence, blood and gore in games, but it was so overblown that it actually broke my immersion. Everything is literally just a blood bag waiting to be popped and paint everything around you red in blood and viscera.

 

I really like the blood splatters on walls that (G)Zdoom added and it feels well within reason and perfectly fits with the vanilla game. Brutal Doom has caricature levels of blood and gore.

 

For me, it is an entirely different game from normal Doom.

[DiamondDude11]

Eh, Brutal Doom is a really fun one. It introduced me to mouselooking... which I am not sure if it would be legal for more vanilla/Boom maps... but I still play with it on...

 

[Dubbag]

they should rename that mod to "Brutal on your stock CPU" Also I don't think its good that it takes less shots to kill something. I mean you can kill a Caco in one super shotgun blast. Challenge significantly decreased. And revenants being shot in half and living almost EVERY time is super annoying. The fact that it takes less ammo to kill shit really knocks the balance off of alot of WADs. For instance, I played Hell Revealed 1 with Brutal Doom and beat it. Tried it again in vanilla Doom, no way. Not saying its a bad mod and I do like it but it's not perfect.

Edited February 14, 2020 by Dubbagdarrel

[seed]

I wonder how these BD topics keep popping up periodically tbh :V.

 

Either way, I respect BD for being a decent mod and getting me into Doom again, but later on I realized that it relies too much on its novelty factor, and that quickly wears off. It also started losing focus after v18. Nowadays I find it excessively violent (note, however, that this is also coming from someone who is kind of obsessed by violence in media), this meaning that I just don't find it "tasteful" and being so exagerrated to look more "edgy" - my kind of pixel art gore is best illustrated by the MK Arcade trilogy and the Build engine games, mmmmmm delicious -, noisy, and too busy.

 

And let's not even get into the past controversies...

 

[VanaheimRanger]

1 hour ago, seed said:

I wonder how these BD topics keep popping up periodically tbh :V.

I have suspicions that they are all Sgt Mark's sock puppet accounts trying to remind people that BD is a thing ;)

[The Nate]

I used to be one of Mark's lousy fanboys.

 

Now, I regret having my old usernames (Sgt Jack V, Sgt Nate V).

 

BD is one of the biggest turds I have ever seen. It's bland, has poor design choices, and is badly coded (in the way that it looks fine on the surface but is a fucking mess if you look at it in SLADE).

 

And yet, I used to think it was the best thing ever.

 

Thank God for mods like Guncaster.

Edited February 15, 2020 by The Nate

[Horus]

1 hour ago, Sgt Nate V said:

I used to be one of Mark's lousy fanboys.

 

Now, I regret having this username.

 

BD is one of the biggest turds I have ever seen. It's bland, has poor design choices, and is badly coded (in the way that it looks fine on the surface but is a fucking mess if you look at it in SLADE).

 

And yet, I used to think it was the best thing ever.

 

Thank God for mods like Guncaster.

You can change your username once per year

[Mortrixs19]

I still like BD, it's actually the only mod besides GMOTA and D4T that I still play in a regular basis. As everyone says, it's a good mod but it's clearly overrated.

 

I like the gore system, which people keep saying it's coded like poop but it's still runs fine and I don't experience a lot of lag. The effects are ok, At least you can disable Most of them.

 

My gripes about BD come mostly from the balance in wads and how BD is not a vanilla friendly mod.

BD For me was an ''Enhanced and modern'' vanilla experience, with fancy effects, new abilities but still felt like vanilla.

 

In the current v21 version BD is like everything but something vanilla-like. Vehicles, New, and mostly useless, guns, the map enhancement system, etc. I think that BD now is more something like Project Brutality which I don't like because it's full of unnecessary shit. Also, the balance is kinda thrash. The new guns are mostly useless, some demons like the Arch vile and the Baron of hell are pathetic considering that in Vanilla doom they are high priority monsters and other monsters like the Spider Mastermind can go inside small tunnels they aren't supposed to go through.

 

I'm aware that you can disable the new guns, map enhancement script and the new monsters, but the fact that they are enabled by default mean that Mark wants you to play like that, it's shit like the texture filtering enabled by default in Gzdoom.

 

Honestly, BD is still good for me but it clearly needs some re-balance so the BD kids can stop crying that ''X'' wad is not balanced and compatible with BD

[Nine Inch Heels]

24 minutes ago, Mortrixs19 said:

Honestly, BD is still good for me but it clearly needs some re-balance so the BD kids can stop crying that ''X'' wad is not balanced and compatible with BD

This problem has more than just one layer, unfortunately. Not only does brutal doom have compatibility issues with for example maps that contain a decorate of their own, but it also "disturbs" the "vanilla balance" which is what maps are built around in like 99% of all cases.

 

I never tried playing anything that's higher up on the difficulty scale with brutal doom, but I would imagine stuff like "speed of doom" would still work fine or at least okay-ish with it. However, when looking at certain subgenres of mapping, then that's where I suppose there will be troubles to be had, depending on how many features one enables and whatnot.

 

The thing about gameplay mods of any kind is that all of them somehow "upset the balance". If they didn't, then it wouldn't be gameplay mods. Apparently this isn't something the "BD kids" understand entirely, so it is to be expected that, as long as the mod has a somewhat sizeable following, there will be complaints about it needing balance based on what people at the time like to play or not.

[BigBoy91]

Brutal Doom got me back into playing Doom in October 2018. I respect it for what it is, but as a purist, I can't enjoy it now. I need that run and gun action. Also, being able to dodge bullets like you're Neo in the Matrix is kinda corny. Need dat hitscan.

[seed]

"I sense a great disturbance in the Force" :D .

 

jk, but anyway that's a good point. All this "BD breaks the balance" stems from the fact that the majority of wads are designed and balanced around vanilla weapons and enemies, unless they provide their own roster. So obviously, if you're going to use gameplay mods, which have not been tested at all, you're going to run into some pretty big issues balance wise when playing, simply because whatever you're using there was not intended to be used at all.

[cannonball]

Putting aside the personal issues with the mod and it’s creator. I think BD has certainly got some plus points and brings a new level of interest to the IWads and some of the more classic megawads from the 90s where vanilla gameplay contains a lot of ‘out of date’ design decisions.

however a lot of arguments have come from the development of this was occurring during a time where was creators were trending towards a faster flowing scope of level design (skillsaw for example), which are pretty much unplayable with in this mod due to the much more open layouts and higher threat from incidental combat.  This causes the usual arguments where people complain about mapsets where the mappers had no intention for balancing outside of the normal gameplay mechanics of the original game.

In the end I have no problem with the mod, but wish that firstly people play wads using the appropriate mods, or better yet get some people together to make wads that are more

balanced towards BD.

[ZeroTheEro]

Used to play BD, but now I prefer Clusterfuck more.

[snapshot]

I only tried it briefly, It's cool but I don't see myself using it again, I'm not big on gameplay mods unless they also have levels that are designed around them (case in point the Starter Pack, which I haven't tried yet)

Edited February 15, 2020 by sluggard

[-TDRR-]

Being completely honest, i still think BD is rather impressive. The amount of special death anims, the fact it was one of the first mods to have both ADS, and reloading (No other mod had both, since altfire was the only other key you could use, but BD defines it's own key), the interactivity and amount of detail in a lot of places is quite the feat for something that still runs in Zandronum and even used to be compatible with ZDoom 2.6.1.

 

Obviously the code sucks balls and everything, and there's a HUGE load of stuff you can do to decrease all that copy-pasty code without having to remove anything, but the dude usually doesn't listen to those kind of suggestions.

 

Out of the technical side, i really have to agree that this mod heavily relies on the novelty factor. Started playing Doom back in 2014-2015 but i started out with DOSBox and Doom 2 (because i didn't know BD even existed lol), and not sure if that has much to do with this but i just can't stand playing BD for more than 15 minutes at most. It used to be fun the first 5 times but now it's super boring. I enjoy Project Brutality much more but even then i still can't play it for long, unlike Vanilla Doom or other mods.

I give it 6/10 if only for the amount of detail and the sheer quantity of stuff it has.

 

If anyone is interested in trying some other mod that isn't BD: D4V, D4D, D4T are all fantastic choices, Complex Doom is kinda similar to BD but far more balanced and varied, Super Skulltag is another BD-y mod but much, much nicer and streamlined, still keeping mostly a Classic Doom-style gameplay, and finally Varied Doom if you want some randomization but don't want any new weapons or anything and want to configure what kind of things will get randomized and which ones won't.

[Robo_Cola]

Brutal Doom is pretty cool, in particular when you play it with its starter pack "Extermination Day."  You can tell a lot of work has been put into it and it usually runs pretty good even on lesser rigs.  A lot of the resentment towards the mod around here comes from past drama with its creator and the occasional new Doom fan wanting other mods/wads to be made *for* Brutal Doom.

[Kizoky]

I never hated Brutal Doom, I hated it's newcomer fans that thought it did everything - from the engine to graphics, from mouselooking to crouching..
And of course, the please make it compatible with Brutal Doom!! part

Thankfully they disappeared

[twistedhydrgoen]

IMO, these mods are really great, project brutality and brutal doom are pretty good, but I don't really like to play them.
I like to play the vanilla doom more than mods, maps aren't included, I don't say that I despise them, they are good wads, really are!
but I just don't like that much gore and modernized doom I and II.

But, I'm not stopping you from playing them, feel free too! I won't judge you on what doom wad you play, you do you.

[DynamiteKaitorn]

BD is weird... I can't tell if the game is meant to be harder or easier with it. It's true the enemies thrash me a new backside but then all I need to do is lob a grenade at a horde of imps and shower in a big rain of blood. Personally I like the mod for the interesting weaponry... though I don't really like the new enemy AI the mod creator added in V21.

[Kontra Kommando]

On 2/13/2020 at 7:04 AM, Graf Zahl said:

I cannot say I really care about the mod itself. But it cannot be denied that it and its offspring play an important role in getting new players into the game.

 

That's absolutely true. Brutal Doom is the seminal Doom mod of the 2010s. Even people that dislike it, know it is true, deep in their hearts.