What if monsters could pick up health

[Clippy]

How terrifying would that be

 

You injure a baron and then all of a sudden he picks up a soul sphere what

 

Or you trying to grab that medkit you desperately need and some imp shows up and it's just like this is mine brah

[Biodegradable]

That'd certainly be a solid method to amp up tension when you're playing on a higher difficulty setting heh

[Martin Howe]

In ZScript this would be possible; amending the eating corpses stuff to use health packs would be relatively easy, I would have thought. Too busy to try it now, anyone else wanna have go? :) I imagine it's probably possible in Vavoom C or any other Doom scripting language that has map iterators built-in.

[elend]

It would certainly add a ton of pressure and make you think twice of leaving a medikit behind for "later use". Also, it'd probably lead to some funny competitive sprints to the medkit in the corner.

[baja blast rd.]

Wouldn't always work well with existing map designs, but could be an amusing variant or small gameplay mod.

 

Another option: just give that power to one monster who has no attack other than to seek out health pickups and destroy them:

 

[printz]

I did it once in a Wolf3D.exe mod. The problem is that monsters would only pick up health if it's in their way. Also the healing is minimal compared to your firepower.

[MFG38]

I actually thought up a similar concept for a monster once: a monster that can pick up weapons and use them against you.

[Aaron Blain]

I forget offhand whether Mario Bros has a level timer, but if you take too long fireballs start shooting across the screen. And if you're slow to finish off a baddie, they pop up again in super-speed mode. Joust of course has the pterodactyl and Spelunky has the ghost.

 

I've never seen an explicit discussion of this from Id (I'd love to be pointed to one), but it seems clear that the Pain Elemental and Archvile were introduced to add this kind of time pressure, to create situations where the player doesn't want to flee or hide while infighting grinds down the baddies.

 

Resource gathering, and the forward momentum it creates, is one of the main reasons I don't have time for FPS games other than Doom. What if you also had to defend those resources? You see something like this with Brutal Doom's rescuable marines, but it often doesn't work well.

 

Map design would have to adapt to this. Now, if the baddies knew what was good for them, they would destroy all pickups in sight once they knew a marine was on the premises. But here's an idea: if damaged baddies grab health pickups in line of sight, this would make slow+safe sniping a bad idea, because you'd be depleting any potential health pickups in that area. To preserve the resources, you'd have to charge in decisively.

 

It could also create a cool dynamic where, let's say, mid-tiers would switch from "approach player and shoot" to "approach health pickup and shoot", so if you're grinding down a mob some of them would start to fall back. You could make it so a certain number of baddies would 'call dibs' on a given pickup, and beyond that no one else would try to grab it. Could lead to some really cool emergence.

 

I'm sure it could be done in Zdoom.

[dr_st]

You could make an immortal missile turret by putting a Cyberdemon stuck in place with 10,000,000 medikits under him.

[printz]

8 minutes ago, dr_st said:

You could make an immortal missile turret by putting a Cyberdemon stuck in place with 10,000,000 medikits under him.

You could just put 20 Cyberdemons in queue to teleport on top of the first one and the player won't have enough ammo to kill them all.

[Gokuma]

See about halfway down this page of this topic:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/57270-things-about-doom-you-just-found-out/?page=272