Old Ultimate Doom WADs - What makes them so different and enjoyable?

[Pechudin]

    Lately I have been drifting more and more towards vanilla-style gameplay, and substituting GZDooM for PrBoom+. So, I decided to play a couple of old WADs, TEUTIC.WAD (The Evil Unleashed) and SUDTIC.WAD (Slaughter Until Death). For some reason I keep enjoying these wads way more than any of the polished newer wads. It is a different kind of enjoyment, though. Here is what I found:

 

1) The cramped design. So claustrophobic, this is something I have not seen since the cramped hallways of E1M3.

2) Hordes of single-type enemies. These are not minmaxed encounters like the ones in Plutonia. Dozens of zombies in a clump, or a bunch of spectres/demons, or boxes of imps opening up, often more dangerous to themselves than to the player.

3) Jagged level design, it feels very 'pointy', so to speak.

4) Abstractness that makes the seldom appearences of something resembling a real-world place all the more impressive.

 

    I guess what I like the most about these levels is the exploratory aspect. The cramped hallways feel oppresive, and sometimes the architecture or traps are downright dickish. No guaranteed teleporters in nukage pits! Also, any texture can be a door!

 

    So, what about you? Do you enjoy old WADs? Do you like the chaotic, often unpredictable ways the map plays? Nowadays I find that a lot of times I can 'predict' what a map will do, there are so many well-established mapping tropes that surprising the player is a bit hard.

[P41R47]

Yeah, oldt-syle doom mapping is amazing!
Check this post, the wads there will surely satisfy your hunger for old-style vanilla megawads.