Unpopular Doom Opinions

[Budoka]

I generally prefer custom midis too, mostly because they tend to be way better music than the original IWAD OSTs most of the time. Still, WADmakers re-using a track from the IWADs doesn't bother me as long as it's not in the exact same slot where it was used in the corresponding IWAD. THAT is mightily distracting.

[97th Century Fox]

34 minutes ago, Budoka said:

I generally prefer custom midis too, mostly because they tend to be way better music than the original IWAD OSTs most of the time. Still, WADmakers re-using a track from the IWADs doesn't bother me as long as it's not in the exact same slot where it was used in the corresponding IWAD. THAT is mightily distracting.

There's no better way to make someone absolutely sick of Running from Evil!

[bofu]

On 9/21/2022 at 1:04 AM, Devalaous said:

Heres one that popped into my head while playing: I really really dislike it when mappers put down a giant pile of rockets, then a cyberdemon or spider mastermind that your meant to use them on. Rockets are TERRIBLE for those two monsters, as they are immune to the splash damage of them. I pretty much always ignore the rockets (aside from topping up to 100) and ssg/plasma the bosses instead. Given how common this setup is even today, it must be an unpopular opinion that I dislike these heavyhanded suggested strategies.

 

Someone pointed out that the rocket launcher still has a higher DPS than the SSG even without the splash damage, but I still would rather use the SSG against those enemies than a rocket launcher. But I'd counter that the SSG has a much higher chance of stunning those enemies, doesn't hurt the player when it hits something too close to it, and is also more reliable, being a hitscan weapon.

 

I do think there's some fun to be had when a map forces you to use a suboptimal weapon against an enemy, as long as it's not overdone.

[Lucius Wooding]

The rocket launcher is the most fun and skill based weapon in the entire arsenal. Face rockets and misses happen to the best of us, but no weapon is more rewarding of good players than the RL. Since the ammo is usually somewhat rare and it actually penalizes you for being in range of splash damage, and rocket placement can drastically improve its efficiency and damage output for crowds, it becomes a far more interesting weapon and has the highest skill ceiling. It's also highly effective at long ranges, far more so than the SSG or BFG relatively speaking. The boss's immunities to splash damage is an artificial penalty for RL use, mainly for infighting/self-infliction reasons. The vanilla Doom boss monsters are just shitty to fight head on in 95% of maps anyway so a weapon not being effective against them doesn't affect my enjoyment of it a bit.

 

The SSG is popular because the ammo is common, it's fairly easy to use and versatile enough if you base your movement and timing on the slow rate of fire. People like it because it's a safety blanket and is very comfortable to use, as well as not feeling wasteful. In terms of effectiveness it comes in fourth among the Doom 2 weapons. The chaingun is criminally underrated for some situations, but it's greatly limited against the Doom 2 roster of monsters. It's an effective defensive weapon against hitscanners and anything that can be stunned easily, but among the full arsenal it becomes simply an economical choice of ammo against light or stationary targets. The plasma is highly useful but it's literally an implement of spamming, as well as blocking your vision. In large quantity using plasma is more annoying than fun for me, and killing bosses may be more fun than using the rocket launcher, but still tedious. The BFG is obviously OP beyond any comparison; in fights designed to stand up to the BFG there is effectively no choice of weaponry since the alternatives can't come close in terms of damage output. But once the player understands the mechanics behind it, there's not a ton of skill; either street sweep or just spam and run into everything and it all just dies.

[Shepardus]

2 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

The rocket launcher is the most fun and skill based weapon in the entire arsenal.

I don't disagree with your assessment of the rocket launcher, but I don't think you give the BFG enough credit. I think there's plenty you can do with it that doesn't simply boil down to "either street sweep or just spam and run into everything." And even in situations where you don't necessarily need to use it well, it can still an interesting optimization problem to get the most out of it, e.g. for speedrunning. RL + BFG is more fun than either on its own, anyway.

[baja blast rd.]

The BFG skill ceiling is huge and bigger than every other weapon. There are dozens of individual tactics associated with it that a lot of people don't realize. And even just spamming it has a lot of difference and nuance between great use and good use. In standard-difficulty maps a lot of that doesn't come into play (which might contribute to the impression that there's no upper ceiling, because using it half decently is enough), but once you start getting to the harder parts of Sunlust and harder, that stuff becomes obligatory for success or (just as importantly) comfort.

 

25 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

And even in situations where you don't necessarily need to use it well, it can still an interesting optimization problem to get the most out of it, e.g. for speedrunning. 

 

Also this.

[Ozcar]

Alright ill change in my mind, i actually like the level design of doom 2. Even i like the chasm. Sandy petersen didnt deserved hated for his level design.

[Codename_Delta]

Running From Evil is unironically one of the best doom 2 tracks imo, yeah it's overused, but things like the guitar part are just :chefskiss:

[HeatedChocolate]

Dunnae if this be the place, but I really dislike Heretic and love Hexen.

Heretic feels too bright and fantastical(?) compared to Hexen's dour colors and more natural settings.
Also Guardian of Steel is the most atmospheric level in Seven Portals don't @ me.

[Nefelibeta]

With so many people constantly opening up editors and ruining secrets, I've decided that it's better to be a chad and place fake bars w/ fake tags connected by fake voodoo doll closets as a counter attack.

[Lucius Wooding]

A real chad is appreciative of people enjoying their maps, not neurotic about people playing them wrong.

[spineapple tea]

19 minutes ago, Nefelibeta said:

With so many people constantly opening up editors and ruining secrets, I've decided that it's better to be a chad and place fake bars w/ fake tags connected by fake voodoo doll closets as a counter attack.

If someone is determined enough to ruin a secret by opening the map in an editor, they could probably find out how the mechanism works given enough time.

[invalidlain]

Honestly, my unpopular Doom opinion is that I don't like a single Doom game released after Doom 3. I appreciate 2016 and Eternal for the strives they made for game design and the new things they attempted to do to make the game feel fresh, however, I just can't really connect with them in the same way the original, Doom 2, Doom 64, and Doom 3 connected with me, so I feel incredibly disconnected playing them. This is especially a pain with Eternal, as I feel the core game there is so damn good, but I just can't get into it for an extensive period of time, especially with the story cutscenes that, to me, feel out of place. I also absolutely love Quake and it's probably my favorite ID shooter, and I bring this up just so you can get a sense of how odd it is that I can't get into 2016 and Eternal.

[Sonikkumania]

I think D_STALKS is a good atmospheric track that suits it's levels.

[Codename_Delta]

33 minutes ago, Sonikkumania said:

I think D_STALKS is a good atmospheric track that suits it's levels.

Eh, The Healer Stalks is a good enough song, and I do agree you on it fitting, for the most part, except for Map 11, that's the one map I feel it doesn't fit in, not just because of the archie, and I feel Cammy did a much better job of making Concocting Erinon's Milkshake fit than The Healer Stalks.

[Lewonx]

- 2002 A Doom Odyssey is horribly overrated. It's a meh wad at best. There are a few good maps, but they are lost in the sea levels ranging from okay with some problems to bland and boring to infuriatingly awful. E2M5, E5M1 and E4M7 from this wad are some of the worst maps I've ever played. It also seems to have started the awful trend of we can't make the og Doom levels as hard as the ones from Doom II in any fun way, let's just make them difficult in most bs ways possible, like spamming damaging floors in idiotic places, giving the player almost no health and then trapping them in a small cramped room with monsters and almost no way to dodge their attacks, and maps requiring guides to play them (let's hide a necessary berserk in our Tyson level in an obscure secret). Also, there is a lot of slowly and boringly killing barons with a shotgun.

 

- Difficulty does not equal quality. Sometimes I like to challenge myself with a hard, fun map, sometimes I like to blast through an easy, fun map. Similarily, there are hard maps that I don't enjoy (like half the maps in 2002 A Doom Odyssey) and easy maps I don't enjoy (like half the maps in 2002 A Doom Odyssey).

 

- Mount Pain is not the hardest map in TNT, River Styx is much harder (at least from pistol start no UV).

[Alfonso]

7 hours ago, Lewonx said:

- Mount Pain is not the hardest map in TNT, River Styx is much harder (at least from pistol start no UV).

Correct 

 

[Lippeth]

Lost souls are usually quite fun to kill; I find their AI and short attention span engaging and amusing, their graphics are cool looking and they can be seen in the dark. The occasional one flying into a rocket at close range is small beans because they usually fly right into a shotgun blast, chainsaw, or berserked fist and rocketing a group of them is endlessly satisfying.

 

I usually find cacodemons less fun, they look like a rejected Dr. Seuss character and always seem to end up in annoying locations. I don't hate them or anything, but they can really feel like a chore to fight. I do like how they always find time to smile though.

[baja blast rd.]

There's this thing I call the "fallacy of one" in wad discussion where people incorrectly assume that, or talk as if, creators have one singular style / mode / tendency / set of preferences that they use in all of their maps, at any given point of time. (And that stylistic evolution is a shift from that one to another one.) 

 

But in reality, even many of the most tropey authors usually have more than one distinct approach at any given moment -- different priorities that their output shifts between -- that have very meaningful differences from one another. 

 

So it's more accurate to say that such an author has many different (even if related) styles at one time.

 

Lumping everything into one bucket makes a lot of criticism feel shallow because it's more about identifying weak correlations and peripheral traits and other tics that often don't really factor into the experience or intentionality of any given map much (because those are the sorts of elements that can persist across many very different maps) -- instead of being able to spot what the author is going for in a more meaningful sense with certain types of map they make. 

[baja blast rd.]

The RL is the most important weapon against pain elementals. It's not always going to be the best weapon (it's usually no worse than 2nd or 3rd though). But when it is, it is by a big margin and you'll get shafted pretty hard by not using it because of being afraid of face rockets (which is a very overstated worry anyway). 

 

Also a fun "fighting PEs with RL" tip: making your implied subgoal "killing pain elemental" is sneakily bad. Like awful. It should be more like "firing 2 rockets at PE." That is basically the same thing when they land, but instead of tunnel visioning on one pain elemental and having to go through a mental sequence of "is it dead? okay now I can move onto the next target" (or possibly "wait it's not dead let me fire a third rocket!") which adds a lot of reaction time slowdown (which is game losing sometimes), you are already switched over to the next target and can also free up mental overhead to avoid lost soul face rockets. 

 

This fight in Slaughterfest 3 map08 is a good example of that. 

 

 

That would feel a lot harder if you had to kill every PE one by one. But with the goal being to just lob two at some (and even one sometimes), it's basically easy mode. 

 

In many other types of fights, the proper gameplan is something like landing some number of rockets on the pain elementals as a group, then switching to another weapon (like CG/PR/SSG) to clean the weaker ones and the souls up. Like this block of four pain elementals here I even prefer starting with one (!) rocket because that is so much better than killing them all with plasma alone since you can usually get 200 avg damage on one and maybe 40-100 damage on the others with that rocket. (Leading with two is safer because with just one, sometimes a PE can block it by insta-spawning a soul, but I don't mind because I'll just reswitch to the RL and fight them at point-blank that way. :P)

 

 

 

(Also I know that setup is coming, and footing is precarious enough that if it was an FDA I probably would not have time to react and RL switch. But there are setups in other maps that are more forgiving in that sense and where I'd switch to RL when I see many PEs.)

 

The CG and PR are cool weapons against lower numbers of PEs because of suppressing the soul spawns, but once there are more PEs, those weapons lose a lot of ground in comparison. Killing them more quickly becomes more important because you're going to burn through so many cells on something like 8 PEs because you can't stop them all from being soul-spawning hoes. (8 PEs is 3200 HP but it might be well over cyb HP if you account for how many souls you end up having to take out.) And rocket splash also helps with the souls that inevitably get spawned. So RL and RL-leading combos start being very important. 

[Roofi]

I dont dislike when ports show monsters/secrets/items count but  after playing hundreds wads on DOSBOX, I eventually think this feature deteriorates immersion.I like not knowing how many enemies I have left to kill or how many hidden areas the level contains.

 

I think I prefer now playing a wad without access to the stats for the first time and play with them a second time if I like the wad and want to know all its secrets.

 

 

 

 

[MIDIchlorine]

I have never been a fan of Bobby Prince's music. Like 80% of the Doom and Doom 2 soundtracks (as well as Blake Stone, his contributions to Duke 3D, probably others) are just a four-bar riff played over and over again in a 12-bar blues progression, and it gets really old really quickly.

[Lucius Wooding]

53 minutes ago, MIDIchlorine said:

I have never been a fan of Bobby Prince's music. Like 80% of the Doom and Doom 2 soundtracks (as well as Blake Stone, his contributions to Duke 3D, probably others) are just a four-bar riff played over and over again in a 12-bar blues progression, and it gets really old really quickly.

 

It's probably because more than half the tracks from Doom were jacked from popular metal groups of the day. Blues influenced rock and metal, of course. I'm not too familiar with his non Doom work but I wouldn't be surprised if you found more of the same. 

[MIDIchlorine]

9 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

 

It's probably because more than half the tracks from Doom were jacked from popular metal groups of the day. Blues influenced rock and metal, of course. I'm not too familiar with his non Doom work but I wouldn't be surprised if you found more of the same. 

It doesn't bug me so much that so many of the riffs he used were slightly tweaked versions of ones from existing songs; it's the fact that he used the same freaking chord progression in almost every single one. There's nothing wrong with 12-bar blues, but like, he could have used any chord structures he wanted. Why stick to just the one? Every time I go back and play Doom or Doom 2 again, by the time I get to the fourth or fifth map and I hear that shift from the tonic up to the fourth for the millionth time it takes genuine effort not to roll my eyes so hard that my whole head turns inside out.

Edited October 15, 2022 by MIDIchlorine

[Devalaous]

I played through the first five maps of CC2, and I had the most fun with Gene Bird's map.

[No-Man Baugh]

On 10/14/2022 at 11:42 PM, MIDIchlorine said:

I have never been a fan of Bobby Prince's music. Like 80% of the Doom and Doom 2 soundtracks (as well as Blake Stone, his contributions to Duke 3D, probably others) are just a four-bar riff played over and over again in a 12-bar blues progression, and it gets really old really quickly.

I personally dig his work, but any song Bobby Prince made inevitably turns into winga-dinga music

[Andromeda]

20 hours ago, Devalaous said:

I played through the first five maps of CC2, and I had the most fun with Gene Bird's map.

Gene's levels get an unfair bad rep that I frankly fail to understand.

[SMG_Man]

On 9/21/2022 at 1:04 AM, Devalaous said:

Heres one that popped into my head while playing: I really really dislike it when mappers put down a giant pile of rockets, then a cyberdemon or spider mastermind that your meant to use them on. Rockets are TERRIBLE for those two monsters, as they are immune to the splash damage of them. I pretty much always ignore the rockets (aside from topping up to 100) and ssg/plasma the bosses instead. Given how common this setup is even today, it must be an unpopular opinion that I dislike these heavyhanded suggested strategies.

 

The way I view this in my maps (as well as in places like E2M8 and E3M9 of the original Doom) is that the rocket launcher is your fall-back option if you come unprepared / are playing on pistol start. For example, I made a map for a community project replacing E4M6 (which has a death trigger for the Cyberdemon), and I set it up where there's plenty of rocket ammo out in the open for the player to make use of at the start of the level confronting the Cyberdemons, but if they look for secrets, they can find a few other weapons and some ammo for them like the chaingun and plasma gun as well, kind of as a way to reward exploration. It's a way of ensuring that the player isn't in an unwinnable situation without making it too trivial by handing them a BFG or whatever.

[Devalaous]

5 hours ago, Andromeda said:

Gene's levels get an unfair bad rep that I frankly fail to understand.

 

If I had to guess, I would say its likely because CC1 and CC2 are full of high-concept experimental wads and magnum opuses that stand out for both good and bad reasons, and then Gene's levels are 'just good old Doom 2 maps'

 

Citadel at the Edge of Eternity comes right after a Gene level, and Mucus Flow is followed by one. That surely doesnt help the view of them. As for me, I like them well enough. Good simple oldschool Dooming fun, and in a megawad full of contending opuses, his levels are good palette cleansers.

[rzh]

I feel like the IWADs look and play best with the original aspect ratio and resolution.

I sometimes use higher resolutions and rarely 16:9 to match my monitor but the textures and sprites lose some grit at higher resolutions and look much blander at even 640x400. I guess it's because of the way my brain works and not for any objective reason, but still to me they look more detailed, grittier and some imperfections aren't noticed as easily.

And framing a room in a 4:3 ratio also makes it look better to me, sometimes a room could look empty or there could be too much visual noise on the sides. 4:3 also makes certain proportions look more natural in some levels.

 

For custom WADs it depends, for example I can't play Sunlust in low res because so many details get mushed togheter.