How would you change the Doom's difficulties if you could?

[idbeholdME]

On 6/1/2020 at 8:57 PM, Spie812 said:

Nightmare's fast monsters are not the same as -fast monsters. The wiki is down right now but Nightmare removes their "reaction time" iirc. I think I would remedy that. This could go either way but I lean toward removing reaction time for -fast as opposed to enabling it for Nightmare.

True, that is the reason I stopped playing on UV with -fast toggled on in ZDoom options and made new difficulty by copying the Nightmare skill definition and removing double ammo and respawn from it in hopes it removes the delay and acts like proper Nightmare. Not 100% sure if that did the trick but at first glance seems like it did.

 

Here it is:

 

   AmmoFactor = 1
   FastMonsters
   RespawnTime = 0
   SpawnFilter = Nightmare
   name = "UV/NM hybrid"

 

Can someone confirm that this removes the small reaction time like Nightmare does?

[Maes]

1 hour ago, depr4vity said:

have ITYTD heavily reduce enemy attack frequency, but HMP monster amounts, exclusively reduce enemy damage by 50%, self damage increased to normal

have HNTR also keep HMP monster amounts, exclusively reduce enemy damage by 25%, reduce attack frequency

 

have HMP become current UV

 

have UV increase enemy damage and attack frequency by 50%, same monster count as current "hard"

have NM increase monster count (new difficulty), disable respawning, double enemy damage, attack frequency, AND health amounts, keep doubled ammo from current NM, add reaction time minimum to monsters to give a chance to react, all enemies have 50% increased movement speed other than pinkies which remain at current NM speed

 

All of these changes would become...uhm....interesting if they were implemented in the same way as the Nightmare Demon speed.

[depr4vity]

8 minutes ago, Maes said:

 

All of these changes would become...uhm....interesting if they were implemented in the same way as the Nightmare Demon speed.

 

hahaha i remember seeing that bug in a video when i was young, imagine a minigun shotgunner dealing 90 damage a hit :D

 

lets just say, that bug wouldnt be a thing in this scenario as the numbers would be hard coded for each enemy on each skill, the % increase was just to say how much each stat was increased by

[dr_st]

13 hours ago, Pegleg said:

Without armor, 1 hit, from anything, kills you, for the masochists who like that sort of thing

• There is only 1 type of armor, and it may allow you to survive 1 hit, depending on what it was
• No health (because health is useless anyway)
• You could still cross damaging floors with a rad suit

That would still make certain levels impossible, because there are place where you must cross damaging floors with no rad suit, since the expectation is you can take a few hits. You could make special adjustments to treat radiation damage differently. But then, a lot of other encounters would be impossible to (except by RNG luck), since a bunch of hitscanners in a room will usually hit you at least once, before you can do anything.

[Maes]

42 minutes ago, depr4vity said:

 

hahaha i remember seeing that bug in a video when i was young, imagine a minigun shotgunner dealing 90 damage a hit :D

 

lets just say, that bug wouldnt be a thing in this scenario as the numbers would be hard coded for each enemy on each skill, the % increase was just to say how much each stat was increased by

 

I was assuming that the changes would be applied in id's trademark hack-esque way. Way too tempting to just apply them programmatically especially since they are percentages/doubling, and then forgetting to revert them. Having an extra state table for each skill....nah, definitively Not The Way id Would Have Done It (TM).

[WowozuelaSpammer]

I would probably leave Nightmare untouched, i think it was a joke by Id that wasn't intended to be played seriously.

I think that the other difficulties could get a rework, they're divided in Easy (ITYTD, HNTR), Medium (HMP) and Hard (UV, NM) and the only difference is ammo andnumber of monsters in a level, i think the game could add something new to the difficulties, like:

 

The hard difficulties have tougher monsters, for example, a Hell Ruler, that deals 3x the damage of a Hell Knight and has the same health as a Mancubus.

 

The easy difficulties have less monsters, i think that the easy difficulties are fine with the, well, difficulty.

 

The medium difficulty could turn monsters into glass cannons, like the Hell Knight, except now every single enemy is weak and powerful at the same time.

[Nine Inch Heels]

4 hours ago, Can't play on Nightmare said:

4 difficulties are ideal for fps games. I dont recall seeing any fps game with 5 difficulties except for doom engine games.

 

1 hour ago, Can't play on Nightmare said:

Ah, there was also Serious Sam. I forgot that game but 4 difficulties would be enough for that game as well.

 

Okay, I think it's safe to say that - by now - people understood that 4 difficulties are "enough", from your point of view. What I haven't seen here from you is any manner of substantiation, or anything with regards to why 4 difficulties is something FPS games should have, or why more or less than 4 difficulties would be bad or not needed. Are you aware that there are games out there - just any genre of game - where just one difficulty is "enough"? Look at games like Zelda, or any Super Mario game, which usually only give you one difficulty to begin with? At the same time there are games out there which have dynamic difficulties on top of a selection of "core difficulties", which means that some games can effectively present players with well over a dozen different difficulties as they play and make progress.

 

I could comfortably make the argument that just one difficulty is "enough" for any game as long as it has stages/levels/maps/areas which are "entry-friendly" as well as a steady difficulty ramp from one stage/level/map/area to the next, and I would have no issues defending that statement in an argument, because it worked well in the past, and still does today.

I could also make the argument that having more difficulties to choose from is always better than just having "enough"difficulty settings, because it allows for a more accessible game that casts a wide and fine net in which more players will be able to find their comfort zone, and start working their way up from there, if they want to.

 

So really, the idea of what's "enough" depends a lot on what kind of audience a game wants to appeal to, how wide of a net it wants to cast, how it is structured, how it accounts for player performance (if at all), and a whole host of other things.

[magicsofa]

On 5/30/2020 at 2:56 AM, Can't play on Nightmare said:

 

4 difficulties are ideal in games.

No way. 5 is a Fibonacci number, and therefore superior

[GarrettChan]

6 hours ago, Can't play on Nightmare said:

 

Ah, there was also Serious Sam. I forgot that game but 4 difficulties would be enough for that game as well.

SS has 6 difficulties, and many of them have slightly different things to fit different players, so no, 6 is perfectly fine.

[Pegleg]

5 hours ago, dr_st said:

19 hours ago, Pegleg said:

Without armor, 1 hit, from anything, kills you, for the masochists who like that sort of thing

• There is only 1 type of armor, and it may allow you to survive 1 hit, depending on what it was
• No health (because health is useless anyway)
• You could still cross damaging floors with a rad suit

That would still make certain levels impossible, because there are place where you must cross damaging floors with no rad suit, since the expectation is you can take a few hits. You could make special adjustments to treat radiation damage differently. But then, a lot of other encounters would be impossible to (except by RNG luck), since a bunch of hitscanners in a room will usually hit you at least once, before you can do anything.

 

That is true. That hypothetical difficulty setting would have to come with its own set of thing placements. I'm no programmer, but if this wasn't via an actual separate setting, then perhaps it could be done via some algorithm.

• Rad suits could be placed near every stretch of wide enough damaging floor
• Hitscanners could either be removed, or have their numbers lowered and their behavior changed so that they were less accurate or unable to hit the player until they were a certain distance away (so you don't end up being sniped by distant hitscanners you can't see, like the chaingunners in Map 29).
• All health, health bonuses, and armor bonuses could be removed (they're useless in this hypothetical mode anyway).
• All armor would be converted to regular armor.

[Maes]

5 hours ago, GarrettChan said:

SS has 6 difficulties, and many of them have slightly different things to fit different players, so no, 6 is perfectly fine.

And Postal 2 had something like 10 difficulties originally but RWS just kept adding new ones version after version.

[GarrettChan]

On 6/2/2020 at 3:02 PM, Pegleg said:

• Reality

 

I actually want something like that because when I'm doing a Reality run, I always have a strange feeling that I got hit somewhere that I can't see. It's good to have the game to judge that for instead of staring at the screen every single tic to verify.

 

1 hour ago, Maes said:

And Postal 2 had something like 10 difficulties originally but RWS just kept adding new ones version after version.

 

I have to say that's a little bit strange. They should probably add a custom difficulty and let the player do whatever they want. My reply above is basically that number is not the point to focus when discussing this. Whether the difficulty has actual audience is the thing.

[wallabra]

UV -fast -respawn is harder than Nightmare because it has 1x ammo, rather than NM's 2x. (Restricted saves and other features that aren't directly related to the progression of gameplay aren't considered!)

 

So I would make UV have a chance to double ammo pickups as well. (I'd say 50%?)

And make NM monsters slightly more healthy (except demons and spectres)

[Maes]

6 hours ago, GarrettChan said:

I have to say that's a little bit strange. They should probably add a custom difficulty and let the player do whatever they want. My reply above is basically that number is not the point to focus when discussing this. Whether the difficulty has actual audience is the thing.

 

Well, in the case of Postal 2 the whole point was having exactly a ridiculous number difficulties with equally ridiculous names (e.g. "Lieberworld", "Hestonworld" etc.) and just they kept adding difficulties beyond the hardest ones with every expansion and update.

[Phobus]

If I were to change up the difficulty settings, I'd have one menu option for each difficulty filter supported by the mapping format ("Easy", "Medium" and "Hard" for traditional Doom, and ZDoom supports skills 1-8, for example) and then have the modifiers be a second set of options ("reduced damage", "fast monsters", "respawning monsters", "respawning items", "multiplayer-only monsters", "no cheats" and "double ammo", are the ones I can think of) so you can fine-tune your experience without needing to use the command line. As things are, there's a huge step between ITYTD and HNTR, and then another huge step between UV and NIGHTMARE!, whilst the three in the middle are entirely down to mapper discretion. Being able to play with reduced damage, double ammo, fast monsters and respawning, all on the "Easy" Thing filter would be pretty exciting and feel manageable, I suspect. An "I'm Too Young To Have Nightmares" setting, as I think I saw it called elsewhere/earlier.

[GarrettChan]

10 hours ago, Gustavo6046 said:

UV -fast -respawn is harder than Nightmare because it has 1x ammo, rather than NM's 2x.

 

They are not comparable since NM also disabled the 8 ticks before enemies' attacks, so they shoot you on sight instead of waiting a little bit.

 

4 hours ago, Maes said:

 

Well, in the case of Postal 2 the whole point was having exactly a ridiculous number difficulties with equally ridiculous names (e.g. "Lieberworld", "Hestonworld" etc.) and just they kept adding difficulties beyond the hardest ones with every expansion and update.

 

That's funny. Probably I should at least look at the game just because of this :P

[seed]

1 hour ago, GarrettChan said:

They are not comparable since NM also disabled the 8 ticks before enemies' attacks, so they shoot you on sight instead of waiting a little bit.

 

It actually goes both ways, I think Looper originally discovered this.

 

Steps when they would otherwise shoot on sight, and shoot on sight when there would be steps.

[idbeholdME]

2 hours ago, GarrettChan said:

 

They are not comparable since NM also disabled the 8 ticks before enemies' attacks, so they shoot you on sight instead of waiting a little bit.

 

1 hour ago, seed said:

 

It actually goes both ways, I think Looper originally discovered this.

 

Steps when they would otherwise shoot on sight, and shoot on sight when there would be steps.

How does this behave in (G)ZDoom? I've always wondered but never got a definitive answer.

 

I assume that playing on UV and just enabling fast monsters in gameplay options results in the "imperfect" Nightmare behavior with the 8 tick delay still being there. Am I correct in that assumption?

 

And would using the custom difficulty I wrote in my previous post fix that?

 

It is one of the things that I am still not sure about when it comes to Doom. A highly technical question but if anybody knows, please let me know. I want Doom to be as hard as possible and that 8 tick delay could be making it very slightly easier than it should be :)

 

Thanks.

[wallabra]

Ah yes, reaction time. I went to reproduce the demon speed bug, in the normal-save, NM-load, half-step direction (which crashed Chocolate Doom on the 2nd load with an infinite tic loop ;-;). I did notice that in NM monsters shoot you basically as soon as they see you. I had to sidestep plenty to not take damage from the shotgunner guarding the first switch in MAP02, heh! :P

[Aaron Blain]

When I played Halo, I brought in my understanding of Bungie difficulty levels from Myth. Normal is for your first playthrough, and Legendary is for when you can anticipate everything. I suppose there's nothing to stop me from playing Doom in this way.

 

But I think Doom is usually designed in the reverse way. UV is standard, and the designer iterates down from there. In other games, Normal is standard and Hard is an upward iteration, a sort of elevated "counterattack" against what the player did in Normal.

 

I think Romero-style "UV First" design is still the standard, but I've seen instances where it's not.

[wallabra]

I do still use HMP-first.

[Doot Guy]

Just play on Ultra Violence without the violence.

[Marcinski]

Nightmare would just be itself but without respawning and half the ammo so a box of shells for example would give 10 shells.

[Chip]

Realism DOOM mode. 

 

the computer knocks you out. You are armed with a pistol and stranded in the desert where demons come from nowhere. you die, humanity dies, and it's all thanks to Todd being such a dick and telling you to use the mode in the first place!

[SlayerOGames666]

U L T R A - N I G H T M A R E

[Can't play on Nightmare]

14 hours ago, iconofeggsafe666 said:

U L T R A - N I G H T M A R E

 

Save possible only in the beginning of the level?

 

Non-human players such as Zero Master would play only.

 

Is it needed? As if Normal Nightmare is not hard enough? Seriously?

 

Something like Mega Ultra Violence would be better.

 

A mount of monsters double. Might as well double the ammo, though.

 

How does it sound?

[SlayerOGames666]

Quadriple the enemy damage, no saves, cheats, or map changes, Pistol-start all maps, half ammo, deaths force you to restart the game from the beginning.
"Are you REALLY, REALLY sure? You'll be screaming at your computer 5 minutes in."

[Chip]

Living heaven! mode

 

every time you die, you are sent to a level in heaven and have to ride a pony back to hell

[Loud Silence]

I would make Nightmare 2x harder, so this guy could finally let it go and stick to UV-Fast instead of complaining how Nightmare skill does not fit in his perfect world.

[Aku]

I would turn the pistol into a laser pistol with unlimited ammo(like in doom 4)

Meaning no matter what, you have some sort of attack to get through things, i think that would solve both issues of ammo scarcity and having a useless weapon in your inventory.