What's the most annoying thing in the classic DOOM games?

[Doom-X-Machina]

Pinning a Revenant under supressing fire in it's pain state and it STILL somehow manages to get a rocket off...

<insert lots of rude words and hand gestures>

[Hisymak]

In Vanilla Doom, I don't like the lack of native flexibility when it comes to modding and creating custom megawads and campaigns, and that many things are hardcoded into the executable.

The most notable example is lack of MAPINFO-like flexibility, the level names, par times, episode-ending messages, and position of secret exit is strictly hardcoded, so each single vanilla megawad has a secret level after 15th level, which looks very stereotypical.

Hexen made it much better with so mentioned MAPINFO lump, ANIMDEFS for possibility to make custom textures animated and other stuff like that.

[dmdr]

man you guys are crazy, the RNG is awesome... except for revenant damage, that shit is way too swingy (this is my answer to the question btw).

 

ACKSHYOUALLY monster attack damage should have flatter curves in general since if you're taking damage it's because you fucked up/got cocky/because the mapper's a jerk who puts archies in areas with no cover or exits, and generally speaking mistakes should be punished about the same each time you make 'em (if the mapper sux play a better wad).

Conversely, I'm totally ok with player weapon damage swinginess, it's a good way to give the monsters a bit of variance and since you're firing so many shots your damage is going to cluster around the average over time anyway. It also requires you to be adaptable since you can't necessarily predict what's gonna happen, and so makes the game more interesting. This is a big reason why Quake sucks dog's arse compared to Doom (fyi, every game sucks dog's arse compared to Doom, that's not necessarily an insult, and I do actually quite like the big Q); shoot 2 grenades at that ogre, one ssg blast each for the grunts, it just feels so choreographed, you don't get situations where you have to think on your feet because that rev took two rockets and is still coming at you... do you have enough time to finish him off quick or should you run to cover before the cybie on the pedestal blasts you? Maybe the player's weapons should be swingier...

[Rosh Fragger]

The inescapable nuke and lava pits.

[Optimus]

- The Radiation Suit leakage bug/feature. It's totally unexpected and freaks me out. Momentary I think I was hit by a far hitscanner, then I realize that I unfairly lost a percentage of my health even if I planned carefully when to grab the radsuit and use it timely before it ends. Worse when you are low in health already or you are trying to do a 0% damage run.

 

- Lost Souls. I think they are too beefy for their size and numbers, the PS1 devs (or was it done in Jaguar initially?) did pretty well when they reduced their health to make them take only one well aimed shotgun blast to be killed.

 

- The Icon of Sin in Doom 2. Unpopular opinion, I hate this boss and I would prefer a regular megaboss fight. In every classic megawad I play, as it's canon, they have a variation of this and every time I run around trying to figure out what kind of switches and tricks to do in order to be able to beat it, but till it happens it's full of monsters and I am just blocked by now. It's annoying because for canon, every megawad will do it and at that point I am very tired after 30 levels and end up cheating. I think there might be very few megawads that just don't use it.

 

Other than that, I love the RNG, it makes it more interesting and more RPGs. Some enemies will variate between 2 or 3 SGs or SSGs, other will want exactly N good ones, I learned the patterns of which monsters what and if you change that, my mind locks.

[GarrettChan]

16 minutes ago, Optimus said:

- The Radiation Suit leakage bug/feature. It's totally unexpected and freaks me out. Momentary I think I was hit by a far hitscanner, then I realize that I unfairly lost a percentage of my health even if I planned carefully when to grab the radsuit and use it timely before it ends. Worse when you are low in health already or you are trying to do a 0% damage run.

That's why I personally don't dig the idea of using 20% pain sector for non death pits or somewhere you need to cross during your normal play.

 

I've done some UV Max/Reality runs involving this and this always freaks me out since I always assume I will be damaged somewhere and I have no control of it... Sigil E3M1 and Doom E3M6 have this, but it's not too long, so it's fine. Speed of Doom Map04 though... that's kind of long, but fortunately, I didn't get damaged in all of these, but man, that thought haunts my mind.

 

----------------------------------------

 

@Andromeda

It seems that you hate meaningless loss the most, then game taking away your control, then personal OCD, then perfection (doesn't bother you at all). I should have probably put "picking up a SoulSphere when you have 99/101/199 health" to test out my theory ;P

 

The odd number of shells/bullets is kind of funny for me. This used to rub me the wrong way really badly, but it got fixed after I began speedrunning. Also, I used to hoard rockets and only fire the amount that the map gives me beyond 100 somehow. Personal OCDs are kind of funny, if you ask me.

Edited June 23, 2020 by GarrettChan

[Marcinski]

E3M5: Unholy Cathedral. I just generally dont like the design of the map. The teleporters are what take most of the enjoyment out I could never be bothered to learn where each one leads.

[Loud Silence]

Invisibility sphere. You never know where imps and barons will aim. So often i dodge the ability to dodge.

[Pierrot]

Shared weapon slots. So dumb to have to hit the key and wait for the weapon to rise 2 times

[MetalVPocalypse]

Started playing the No End In Sight megawad and in the secret level for the first episode (E1M9: Quarantine Silos) you are thrown into a large open area with enemies above you and at your level with explosive barrels everywhere, with a majority of those enemies being imps and soldiers that constantly pester you.  I of course get you're supposed to keep moving, but trying to do this on a higher difficulty can just become tedious and puts me off from wanting to play it.  The .wad certainly stays true to its name.

[elend]

- I really, really hate it, when I strafe around a Baron / Hell Knight like a boss, only for him to launch a projectile from his back straight into my face. :(

 

- Archvile fire. They already take a ton of damage, they can see you from atop where you can't make them out at all (in cases of vanilla style no mouse look), sometimes they keep their lock on you, even though you clearly went out of sight for a second. So why for the love of god, do they also have to almost completely blind you? That just feels a bit unfair. Are there ports with the option to make the Archvile fire at least a little bit translucent?

[Grazza]

Being forced to pick up the chainsaw on a map where you'll be wanting to use the berserk quite often. Actually, pretty much any map that offers you the chainsaw (suggesting the map has no berserk, or at least not until near the end) and soon after the berserk. Anyone else ever found themselves trying to do a "glide" through a 32-unit gap between a wall and a chainsaw?

 

Non-slaughtermaps that present you with way too much ammo. Suggests there's going to be some huge fight that never actually happens.

 

Foreseeable bad weapon pick-ups. Surely when playtesting a map people must notice if they keep getting bad weapon pick-ups in the middle of intense firefights?

 

Sometimes, the game's lack of randomness in some aspects bugs me. Most things you can twiddle with in some way, as the game has several layers of randomness: trying a slightly different approach, or simply making multiple attempts, will lead to very different amounts of damage. But an inevitable arch-vile attack in open space? 83 damage no matter what.

 

[RonnieJamesDiner]

46 minutes ago, Grazza said:

Being forced to pick up the chainsaw on a map where you'll be wanting to use the berserk quite often. Actually, pretty much any map that offers you the chainsaw (suggesting the map has no berserk, or at least not until near the end) and soon after the berserk. Anyone else ever found themselves trying to do a "glide" through a 32-unit gap between a wall and a chainsaw?

 

Actually, I've always wished that after a Berserk pickup, the fists gained slot priority over the Chainsaw for this very reason.

[Cipherz Gaming YT]

When you're going for a pacifist run in E1M2 and the Imp blocks your path.

[Vadara]

So much as crossing a single electron against a wall slows Doomguy to an absolutely crawl. Absolutely infuriating in the more brutal slaughterwads where I'm flying all over the place trying to avoid the 40 different things trying to kill me and knick a wall and get blown up fifty revenant missiles.

[A Nobody]

The pistol becoming obsolete when you get the gatling gun.

[Xe588]

I hate how in the vanilla Doom engine you can run into an enemy even though it's way below you.

[Vadara]

Oh yeah. Another thing. The inability to look up and down means that elevators in tight spaces can have enemies right next to them and you can't see where they are at all. Be it both vanilla and with mods, the amount of times I have been absolutely wrecked by three enemies at the top of an elevator I can't see at all is insufferable at times. I refuse to use mouselook as that's not how the game was intended, so I just have to eat that "gotcha, sucker!" moment every time it happens and remember when I play again.

[nname]

On 6/22/2020 at 2:16 AM, RonnieJamesDiner said:

Infinitely tall monsters. THERE, I SAID IT.

I was about to say this.

[A Nobody]

1 hour ago, Vadara said:

Oh yeah. Another thing. The inability to look up and down means that elevators in tight spaces can have enemies right next to them and you can't see where they are at all. Be it both vanilla and with mods, the amount of times I have been absolutely wrecked by three enemies at the top of an elevator I can't see at all is insufferable at times. I refuse to use mouselook as that's not how the game was intended, so I just have to eat that "gotcha, sucker!" moment every time it happens and remember when I play again.

It's fine to play with free look. It was just a limitation at the time. Free looking was added to Heretic afterwards.

[Andromeda]

Monsters in teleport loops.

[Vadara]

I forgot another one. The teleport sprite. This obnoxious piece of trash blocks my entire vision for like two whole seconds. I just died in Doom the Way iD Did 2 map06 because I fell into a pit, ran to the teleporter at the bottom, and got placed back on the map on a tiny as hell platformer with ZERO indication of which way I was facing and with like 4 cacodemons and two hell knights plinking at me so I couldn't actually figure out where I was before falling off again. Repeat this three times till the lava kills me.

 

x__X

[kawadec]

On 7/6/2020 at 7:02 PM, The Strife Commando said:

It's fine to play with free look. It was just a limitation at the time. Free looking was added to Heretic afterwards.

Sure wish Nightdive agreed with that. Great port, but going back to no free look for the Steam version of Doom 64 took some getting used to, especially after years of playing versions of those maps in GZDoom with various mods on.

 

As far as vanilla classic, I would say elevated surfaces that are just high enough that Doomguy's stiff joints can't step onto them or grab items off them. The Pitfalls map in 64 was the most egregious example I experienced, not helped by how dark that level was on N64 with a CRT.

 

Infinitely tall sprites also mess me up occasionally, though once I have it in my head that they exist I can usually adjust pretty quickly.

[Swordofdanu]

Not having the super shotgun for Doom 1. 

[Reisal]

On 6/22/2020 at 2:51 PM, AtimZarr1 said:

Random chance to get hurt from a damaging floor - I don't know why this is a thing, even if it's a very low chance.

 

Doom engine bug I think? Fixed in modern source ports AFAIK.

If not mentioned yet? GHOST MONSTERS.

[Chip]

the only voice lines being words said backwards.   

[Curie The Ace]

the height values 

[A Nobody]

12 hours ago, Swordofdanu said:

Not having the super shotgun for Doom 1. 

https://www.moddb.com/games/doom/addons/super-shotgun-in-the-ultimate-doom

 

https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=43&amp;t=65201

 

There you go my friend. :)

[DooM Bear]

The Icon of Sin!!!

 

Playing as a kid when DooM 2 came out, I had no idea what I was meant to do to beat the level!!! Maybe I was just stupid and I missed some kinda clue :-P

 

Nowadays... it is THE most underwhelming boss fight of any game I can think of!!!

[A Nobody]

3 minutes ago, DooM Bear said:

The Icon of Sin!!!

 

Playing as a kid when DooM 2 came out, I had no idea what I was meant to do to beat the level!!! Maybe I was just stupid and I missed some kinda clue :-P

 

Nowadays... it is THE most underwhelming boss fight of any game I can think of!!!

Limitations can suck, huh?