Unpopular Doom Opinions

[miccasx]

Doom is an outdated game and has no relevance in today's gaming industry.

[Matt Mello]

Doom Eternal sucks

Doom 64 also is highly overrated. PS1 Doom strikes the perfect balance between horror and action for the Classic Doom games and keeps the iconic monster designs from the PC version while still having the colored lighting effect and dark ambient soundtrack.

[Chocolate_Doomer]

- Doom 1's hell levels aren't as bad as people make them out to (Though, Episode 1 is the best episode)
- The second half of Doom 2's vanilla campaign blows.
- Doom 3 is better than 2016.
- Doom was meant to be played with keyboard and mouse (IDK why this one's so controversial amongst my fellow vanilla purists, the demos featured in game turn way too fluently for anyone exept BeefGee to be using keyboard only).

- All genres of music belong in Doom wads, from metal, to emo, to electronica, to hip-hop. Hell, I think someone could even put classical music into a Doom WAD and have it fit.
- Chex Quest's city levels beat the crud out of Doom 2's city levels.
- Chocolate Doom is great, actually (though, I still use GZDoom when I want to experience a WAD that isn't vanilla compatible, like Cyb's Freaky Colonoscopy, or the Chex Quest 3 IWAD).

- The Pain Elemental is one of the most annoying enemies in Videogame history, up there with Hammer Bros, Balloon Boy, or Dopples from TBoI.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

19 hours ago, Maribo said:

It's more like a spectrum, in the end, and judging a map by its ability to hit the pinpoint center of this spectrum means that you'll be missing the point of many of them.

There were some pretty eye-opening comments in the last "slaughter bad" thread. Doom (and games in general) give you obstacles to overcome, and people who gravitate toward challenge maps seem to understand that well, even if a map is overly challenging, that doesn't make it bad, it just makes it hard. If the player is passionate in understanding the necessary mechanics, and have the patience to make dozens or hundreds of attempts, the sky's the limit. 

Two people can fail to beat dimensions map01, one will say it's bullshit, and the other will say they'll get back to it at a later point.  There are challenges I can and challenges I can't overcome right now. What baffles me is the unwillingness to admit that. 

We all seek different experiences in games and life but can't we just be honest with ourselves? Just say this kind of experience isn't something I can appreciate - easy. It feels familiar to the talk about modern art. If it's something I personally can't appreciate, then it's bad. If Pollock's paintings seem to me like the canvas was smeared with dogfood, maybe I can talk to somebody who does appreciate it, and perhaps get to see the beauty in it too. Or not. But it doesn't hurt being open to new experiences and worldviews.

Edited May 4, 2023 by Sneezy McGlassFace

[Ozcar]

 

18 hours ago, miccasx said:

Doom is an outdated game and has no relevance in today's gaming industry.

Eh... i dont know.... i know leven design can be hit or miss.. but the gameplay is still fun, other shooter of that era tries to beat doom and they didnt beat it IMO.
 

[Maribo]

12 hours ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

There were some pretty eye-opening comments in the last "slaughter bad" thread. Doom (and games in general) give you obstacles to overcome, and people who gravitate toward challenge maps seem to understand that well, even if a map is overly challenging, that doesn't make it bad, it just makes it hard. If the player is passionate in understanding the necessary mechanics, and have the patience to make dozens or hundreds of attempts, the sky's the limit. 

Two people can fail to beat dimensions map01, one will say it's bullshit, and the other will say they'll get back to it at a later point.  There are challenges I can and challenges I can't overcome right now. What baffles me is the unwillingness to admit that.  

We all seek different experiences in games and life but can't we just be honest with ourselves? Just say this kind of experience isn't something I can appreciate - easy. It feels familiar to talk about modern art. If it's something I personally can't appreciate, then it's bad. If Pollock's paintings seem to me like the canvas was smeared with dogfood, maybe I can talk to somebody who does appreciate it, and perhaps get to see the beauty in it too. Or not. But it doesn't hurt being open to new experiences and worldviews.

I actually used to hate slaughter in the past, same with platforming in Doom. Nowadays, slaughter is one of my favorite broad styles of design in Doom. What changed? Keeping an open mind, looking at things from new angles, maybe finding one thing that spoke to me on a level that reached me, which then opened the door for more things to follow.

 

Happened to me outside of Doom as well. Used to broadly hate poetry, didn't really get the point and found it drab, pointless, boring, etc. We read l(a by E. E. Cummings in one of my English classes in high school and it touched me in a way that other poetry had previously failed, ended up revisiting other things we had read and started seeing things I had previously written off. Used to think EDM music was really boring, stumbled across a handful of old disco and house records and from there ended up listening to a borderline unhealthy amount. Hated abstract art and thought it wasn't "real art", got my brain pulverized by some errant lines and paint splatter, haven't been the same since.

 

It's important to keep an open mind with art, and yes, Doom is art. Every little linedef and vertice you throw down in a map is art, every node you build is art, every midi you sequence is art, every Thing you place is art, and every texture you convert or create in GIMP is art. I engage with people on this website because I'm always looking to have someone gift me with a deeper understanding of something that they love, and I only hope that I can do that in return for others.

[Alaxzandarz]

I have been replaying TNT Evilution and I'm having a lot more positive view on it than before. I actually really like the hitscan focused gameplay, it distinguishes the set form the other IWADs and I find the more slow, methodical way that it forces quite fun. I also like the massive empty areas (like the crater in MAP:12) and the claustrophobic tunnels (half of the wad). The empty areas give a sorta somber vibe that would be ruined by higher monster density and the tight tunnels are just weirdly comfy. I also like the often strange, occationally terrible new textures. I think that the first three maps in TNT are utterly terrible, they have made me stop a play through so many times in the past, so now I think I will just skip them in the future.

 

Another maybe controversial opinion for me is that shotgun is my least favourite weapon. Pistol sucks more, but mappers don't make the player kill 100 enemies with in (unlike with the shotgun). If I'm given a shotgun and a chainsaw, I will chainsaw most of the imps, pinkies and rev and cacos and everything else I can get away with. It is so utterly weak and dull, I hate using it. I also wish that shotgunners dropped shells instead of shotguns, so it would be easier to make maps where you get only the SSG and not the shotgun. The only time the shotgun is fun is when ammo is super super tight, so you aren't using it constantly, maybe only as a support weapon for your melee.

[Azure_Horror]

On 5/4/2023 at 4:41 AM, Maribo said:

Truly "fair" design in Doom is borderline impossible to achieve, and chasing it as some sort of ideal to meet is stifling. There are simply too many factors at work in Doom to determine exactly what "fair" means at any given moment, and more than anything I think that someone's idea of what is "fair" comes down to personal skill.

I disagree. The issue of skill is crucial, but the question of "fairness" still remains.

 

But "fairness" is very nebulous and complex issue. Big part of establishing "fairness" lies in proper communication between the mapper and the player. How unfair something may feel depends a lot of player's expectations.

 

Example 1:

the Valiant homage WAD Valorant includes some very nasty surprises, like kamikaze zombies appearing almost in your face suddenly, a full-auto rapid fire cyberdemon miniboss in a tiny arena, or a mandatory secret to disarm an otherwise unfair fight before it begins properly. In a vacuum, those elements feel out of place for a Valiant homage mapset.

 

However, Valorant is an April Fools WAD! All nonsense setups and cheap Gotcha!'s become parts of the "Tongue in cheek joke-wad" package. Thus, they feel much more "Fair", than they would be in a vacuum. In turn, this encourages the player to engage with them despite their objectively rough edges.

Communication with the player was established successfully, and the WAD won from it.

 

Example 2:

Map 11 In Kasei Valles from 1000 lines project 3 is a complex, challenging map, which layers dangeorous set ups on top of each other. All in all, map is cool traversal puzzle, which also includes some combat puzzle fights within. And the level looks gorgeous on top of that! Needless to say, this would be a perfect level for a first half of, say, a Sunlust homage - merciless, beautiful, complex, but not impossible by any means.

 

However, there is a problem: 1000 lines project 3 is not a Sunlust homage! Therefore, such merciless map 11 feels pretty and outrageous grating for its episode 1. And the map by itself is fine! If In Kasei Valles would have been map 20-something in the 1000 lines project 3 - it would feel much more "fair", despite remaining exactly the same level! And for something like Fractured Worlds, or Stardate 20X7, In Kasei Valles would feel like a cute semi-breather map!

 

In this example, communication between the mapper and the player broke down. The player didn't expect such level of challenge, and map felt less "fair", despite being fine in a vacuum.

 

Example 3: Scythe 1 difficulty spikes (change from episode 2 to episode 3, map 28, map 30). Once you stop worrying and love the Scythe.wad, nothing there feels too insane. Episode 3 is hard, but fair for the most part. Map 28 is terrifying on UV, but it is also short. Map 30 is really long, but its individual elements are not especially hard, when compared with individual encounters from other maps from 3rd episode. But when one boots up Scythe 1 for the 1st time, they may be in for nasty surprises with those difficulty spikes! They have only one for-warning: Episode 3 is harder than episode 2. But that's not enough to communicate the steepness of the difficulty spikes!

 

BTW, I noticed that 2020 WADs feel much more fair on average than the older WADs. It seems like Doom mappers did learn, how to make maps "more fair", despite "fairness" being so nebulous. My skill has little to do with this issue: I definitely improved my skills, but older maps being more manageable not always translates into them feeling more fair!

Spoiler

 

Sometimes, it even goes the opposite direction: when I was playing Ancient Aliens map22 2 years ago, I was like "such a wonderful map, wish I was more skilled, so I could engage with it properly!". But now I am like "this is a good map, but ambushes do feel grating oftentimes... Could have been designed differently." And the ambushes are definitely more manageable now. But something feels off, nevertheless. What exactly the issue - I cannot say. However, I didn't have similar issues with 2022 Mapping at Warpspeed wad, despite it containing some pretty outrageous setups (like 50 archviles chasing the player at once).

 

 

[Pexu]

Doom 3's Mancubus design is the best of all.

[Matt Mello]

Said it before and I will say it again. I unironically like the Icon of Sin and I think the only reason Icon of Sin maps get such a bad rep is because Doom II botched it and made a bad first impression.

 

 

[TheSlipgateStudios]

Doom 3 is better than Doom 2. There, I said it.

[WorldMachine]

DOOM 2016, by today's standards, is an unbalanced mess.

 

I also unironically like key hunts (blame DOOM 64)

[yum13241]

Thy Flesh Consumed should've added D2 content to D1.

[Marcinyk]

On 5/4/2023 at 7:21 AM, Chocolate_Doomer said:

Doom was meant to be played with keyboard and mouse (IDK why this one's so controversial amongst my fellow vanilla purists, the demos featured in game turn way too fluently for anyone exept BeefGee to be using keyboard only).

I think I have less popular opinion on topic, than yours. Not many people said that (even the ones, who made YT vids about it) in vanilla you just can't setup the mouse to match today's standards of gameplay, even 1997 standards. You just can't get rid of moving by mouse. If you setup mouse+keyboard (with suitable key bindings), it'll be just fine to play Knee-Deep in the Dead and probably many other maps of official IWADs, however maps requiring some sort of precise movement will be really painful to play. Also, many maps, especially in Doom I becomes easy on Ultra-Violence, when you switch to sourceport with mouse used for turning and not for moving. It was said many times, that Hurt Me Plenty was likely a default challenge for Doom, so I think ID Software designed the game probably mostly with keyboard-only users in mind. 

Fun fact: I started with classic Doom games with shareware through DosBox and then I bought the games on GOG in 2020 I think. I finished them vanilla-style with keyboard only, since I cannot setup the mouse to work like we're all used to. Now it's sourceports time for me.

[baja blast rd.]

I was thinking about the hub area of Sunlust map04 and how it shows that one of the most important concepts is "not caring about stuff that does not matter." 

 

 

what matters disproportionately in this area: 

 

- not getting boxed in by revenants or getting taken out by a barrage of revenants projectiles (this is basically it)

 

ideas that people might expect matter but are irrelevant here: 

 

- avoiding lava damage (the damage from this is never going to kill you and being frightened of the lava cuts down on the space you have to work by a lot)

- avoiding picking up shellboxes when you have near-max capacity (irrelevant: you will never run out of shells on this map)

- switching from SSG to shotgun/chaingun to clean up a weaker target (same as above)

- prioritizing hitscanners (lol)

- avoiding picking up medkits when you have nearly 100 health (completely irrelevant, because you will get a megapshere in this area -- and I went out of my way once to troll this)

- edit: using shots efficiently and hitting every shot

 

 

Caring about stuff in the irrelevant category adds to the cognitive load of playing and makes you worse at the key ideas that do matter in a situation. If you know anything about bottleneck theory, that makes you play worse even if you are doing more separate things "better." 

 

It also adds 'fake constraints' that might not help at all. For example just like no-damaging a fight is often much harder than simply surviving it normally, satisfying some constraint that doesn't matter in the context of the map or the fight might be upping the difficulty level a lot for no reason.

 

So whether it is trying to max a map, or playing a fight that has killed you lots (and thus given you information), an important goal should be to identify what doesn't matter and not care about it. This is also relevant in FDAs and first plays because you can develop an intuition for what does not matter. 

 

Generic concepts like "avoiding damage" and "hitting shots" (expressed in that broad way I mean, not the idea of avoiding damage and hitting shots entirely) are mostly relevant in easier wads. In harder wads they are more like placeholders for a more precise understanding of what is needed.

[Maximum Matt]

On 5/9/2023 at 11:20 PM, yum13241 said:

Thy Flesh Consumed should've added D2 content to D1.

Certainly the SSG.

[MrHellstorm17]

Hell Revealed is a piece of garbage. I have no idea why it is the most speedrunned pwad of all time. Kudos to johnfrinky for uv-maxxing the shit out of HR though.

[Kwisior]

15 hours ago, MrHellstorm17 said:

Hell Revealed is a piece of garbage. I have no idea why it is the most speedrunned pwad of all time. Kudos to johnfrinky for uv-maxxing the shit out of HR though.

It was hard, and one of the two authors was a speedrunner. He even held a competition for UV-Maxing MAP25 of HR as fast as possible and recorded three speed-demo collections for the WAD with other runners, which just begged to be beaten.

 

Your opinion is pretty popular btw.

Edited May 13, 2023 by Kwisior

[baja blast rd.]

Luckily the real GOAT will overtake it one day. 

[Nefelibeta]

It used be popular because it's like one of the few selected slaughter wads on Compet-N

[Kyka]

HR used to be popular for no other reason than simply because it was a Doom2 megawad. 

 

We played it because it existed. I mean, back then we weren't spoiled with dozens of high quality releases every year like we are now. We had to survive on as little as one megawad every couple of years.

 

Those were dark times.

 

*shudders.

 

[Kwisior]

1 hour ago, Kyka said:

HR used to be popular for no other reason than simply because it was a Doom2 megawad. 

 

We played it because it existed. I mean, back then we weren't spoiled with dozens of high quality releases every year like we are now. We had to survive on as little as one megawad every couple of years.

 

Wasn't Eternal Doom, Strain and Requiem released the same year? I always heard it got popular due to its difficulty.

[Kyka]

3 hours ago, Kwisior said:

Wasn't Eternal Doom, Strain and Requiem released the same year? I always heard it got popular due to its difficulty.

 

I didn't realise that was the case that they came out so close to each other. Wow. Not as much of a megawad desert as I had imagined. And you may well be right about the difficulty thing too. It definitely stood out because of its difficulty, but even so, in my mind, (and I am sure I am not the only one,) the main reason I played it is simply because it existed. I think we just accepted the difficulty in a way that we might not now. New maps were a blessing. And the Slaughtermap genre didn't exist, obviously, as HR really started that whole thing. (Or that secret map in Plutonia, depending on how you look at it.) Good/bad/average were titles that, I feel, came later. I thought HR was great at the time. Now, less so. But I have some great memories of playing through it all those years ago.

Edited May 13, 2023 by Kyka

[TheSlipgateStudios]

Here's another one for the record: when I played TNT Evilution recently, I started to appreciate the later half of the WAD even more, making it one of my favorite wads in recent memory!

[Kyka]

24 minutes ago, TheSlipgateStudios said:

Here's another one for the record: when I played TNT Evilution recently, I started to appreciate the later half of the WAD even more, making it one of my favorite wads in recent memory!

 

I'm glad that Civvie's reviews didn't turn everyone off. The later levels in TNT are amazing.

 

*Mostly.

[LadyMistDragon]

I'd play any half-baked ZDoom scripted mod over Hell Revealed.

[Andromeda]

15 hours ago, MrHellstorm17 said:

Hell Revealed is a piece of garbage. I have no idea why it is the most speedrunned pwad of all time. Kudos to johnfrinky for uv-maxxing the shit out of HR though.

Scythe overtook it some time ago.

 

13 minutes ago, LadyMistDragon said:

I'd play any half-baked ZDoom scripted mod over Hell Revealed.

Like Myhouse.wad?

[Ozcar]

18 hours ago, MrHellstorm17 said:

Hell Revealed is a piece of garbage. I have no idea why it is the most speedrunned pwad of all time. Kudos to johnfrinky for uv-maxxing the shit out of HR though.

Hey aleast it has great midi selection.

[SkeletSpook]

The original E3 trailer for Doom2016 looks more interesting than the final game.

[Roofi]

On 5/13/2023 at 2:56 PM, Kyka said:

HR used to be popular for no other reason than simply because it was a Doom2 megawad. 

 

We played it because it existed. I mean, back then we weren't spoiled with dozens of high quality releases every year like we are now. We had to survive on as little as one megawad every couple of years.

 

Those were dark times.

 

*shudders.

 

 

 Yes, I played ton of 90's wads and just having multiple levels in the same wad and a custom soundtrack is quite a feat for a 1997 wad.

 

I think people would prefer playing HR than an endless serie of single maps showing no personnality with D_runnin playing in the background.