Doom 1 and 2 are ugly?

[SilverMiner]

8 hours ago, HombreSal said:

I think it's like the third time I've showed the games to a friend. They all say they're effing ugly and I think they've aged well.

When I showed Doom games to my friends, they said it's a Minecraft mod lol

[M_W]

I think Doom looks pretty alright at the original 320x200 resolution. Going into high resolution territory makes it so much more apparent how simple the map geometry is. As far as the sprites are concerned, I'm probably going to be burned at the stake for this, but id Software spritework isn't even the same league the best spritework of the era. The texture work is also kind of all over the place. I have a soft spot for the way the game looks, but I'd be lying if I said I thought it's great. BTSX does a great job of showing how good the game can look while working within the same constraints of the vanilla engine.

[Eric Claus]

42 minutes ago, M_W said:

I think Doom looks pretty alright at the original 320x200 resolution. Going into high resolution territory makes it so much more apparent how simple the map geometry is. As far as the sprites are concerned, I'm probably going to be burned at the stake for this, but id Software spritework isn't even the same league the best spritework of the era. The texture work is also kind of all over the place. I have a soft spot for the way the game looks, but I'd be lying if I said I thought it's great. BTSX does a great job of showing how good the game can look while working within the same constraints of the vanilla engine.

 

I have the wood and torches ready.  In a more serious note I can see what you are saying, and I agree and disagree with some of it.  I think the spritework is variable, for example, I love the Baron's look an animations and sound design even if they just function as a big meaty imp, but while the Cacodemon has a certain charm to it it lacks animations and just looks derp sometimes which is why I think it ended up so memeable.  The Arachnotron and Spider Masterminds are derp looking and also derp sounding in my opinion and didn't age well.

 

As to the textures I agree a bit more.  Sometimes they look plain and other times look great but then end up overused, and they had a tendency to not break up spaces visually.  I don't know if this is because of some sort of vanilla restrictions or hardware limitation in rendering at the time.  For example so many spaces have the walls and the floors the same color/texture...why?

 

Honestly I feel some aspects of Doom were rushed and it shows, and Sandy Petersen gets crucified a lot, but when you have to do most of the damn maps the level design is probably gonna suffer a bit (I know he had some skeletons to work with on a few but nonetheless, finish a bunch of maps, come up with a bunch from scratch and try to do something unique with each one? I can barely make one map feel right I can't imagine doing more than that in a time crunch.)

[Gifty]

I don't really find Doom to be either traditionally ugly or pretty, its timeless quality comes more from a uniquely cobbled together aesthetic that's very specific and charming. It's like a John Carpenter movie or a Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You can't reduce those to merely "high" or "low" budget films, they each have a very unique identity pieced together from what the artists had on hand, and THAT'S the quality that endures moreso than the art's technical qualities. I don't think Doom has visually aged particularly well or poorly, because it's difficult to compare Doom to almost anything except itself.

 

This is also why I think holding out for a 100% pure art upgrade for the game is a waste of time, because art is nearly always inextricable from its technological limitations. It's like taking John Carpenter's Halloween, adding about 3 million dollars to the budget, and expecting the movie to come out exactly the same "but better." It might still be a great movie, but you're never going to get exactly the same movie.

Edited September 20, 2020 by Gifty

[Eric Claus]

8 minutes ago, Gifty said:

I don't really find Doom to be either traditionally ugly or pretty, its timeless quality comes more from a uniquely cobbled together aesthetic that's very specific and charming. It's like a John Carpenter movie or a Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You can't reduce those to merely "high" or "low" budget films, they each have a very unique identity pieced together from what the artists had on hand, and THAT'S the quality that endures moreso than the art's technical qualities. I don't think Doom has visually aged particularly well or poorly, because it's difficult to compare Doom to almost anything except itself.

 

This is also why I think holding out for a 100% pure art upgrade for the game is a waste of time, because art is nearly always inextricable from its technological limitations. It's like taking John Carpenter's Halloween, adding about 3 million dollars to the budget, and expecting the movie to come out exactly the same "but better." It might still be a great movie, but you're never going to get exactly the same movie.

 

You make a good point, and honestly I think a problem is some level design didn't age well especially after we got spoiled by limit removing ports and many years of people getting mapping experience who are not trying to cram level design in a 10 week span necessarily.  If the original levels were a bit more refined things might be different, but it might simply have not been possible as it was "new" and we didn't have almost 30 years of mappers to refine the ideas.

[Gifty]

Yeah, I think if there's anything in Doom you could judge as aging "well" or "badly" it's more in the realm of design decisions in levels or mechanics. A big one is the emphasis on first-person platforming, which I personally love but is generally considered to be a pretty dated concept.

[croc_rock]

I think the game looks good, especially the textures/skyboxes. but I'm not a graphics expert

[Kokoro Hane]

Whilst DOOM may not be the prettiest game on Earth, I still think it holds up. But of course, after you've played a lot of mods, and community wads which can make the game outright gorgeous, the original games can look a bit dated. Even so, I enjoy them and I wouldn't call them "ugly", but "pretty" wouldn't be the word either haha. I mean, it's a game about killing demons, so that automatically makes it unsightly anyway lol. 

[M_W]

I think it's important to make a distinction between ugly from a visual design perspective and ugly subject matter. I don't want to come off as too harsh, because id Software were a small company and this was nearly thirty years ago, but let's just take the animation, for example:

 

They clearly had a limited budget for the amount of frames they can have in the animation of each monster, and to vastly improve the workflow, they started with digitized images of physical models, and touched them up after the fact. There is nothing wrong with this, especially when you consider you need to make every frame from eight different angles, but the way these frames are used leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion.

Very few melee attacks have any sort of anticipation to speak of (the Revenant being the main exception), and the follow-through lacks momentum since there are so few frames to work with, and they are perfectly on-model (because they, you know, used models), not using any degree of squash and stretch. Even something as simple as a smear on the Revenant's punch would have gone a long way into making it feel more impactful. Secondary animations can also go a long way, but there's not a whole lot in the monsters' designs that really allow for that. If this makes no sense, I might open up photoshop later and try to do a quick and dirty version of what I'm talking about.

[Eric Claus]

16 minutes ago, M_W said:

Stuff

 

I don't think you are being too harsh necessarily and I do agree some of the melee attack animations are very fast or don't have much detail to signal them, a good comparison is the cacodemon's bite vs the pinky in terms of animation.  I can also see what you are going for with the secondary animations or touch ups such as the revenant punch, and I think you are going for an example if it had more if a swooshing blur to give it a sense of depth.  Maybe looking at the work of contemporary games of the time I think might be a good way to point out what you are trying to say.  I also don't think it is unfair to critique aspects of an old game as a means to get better design ideas for newer games or even mod work on the old game.  As I mentioned earlier people have improved on the ideas of Doom level design quite a bit over the almost 3 decades and I think it is pretty clearly visible in comparing to the stock maps and other maps of the era.  In my opinion I think Doom holds up still because while there might be individual flaws it comes together well, allows you to alter through custom maps and dehacked patches some aspects you might not like and that id accomplished what they set out to do for the most part which was fast paced demon shooting action.

[M_W]

Okay, just going by the animations alone:

Here's the default animation for the Revenant punch. Three frames, each holding for the exact same duration.

Feels pretty stiff and not much impact, yeah? Let's try again, using the same three frames, exactly as they are, but changing for how long they stay on screen.

Already feels better, yeah? All I did was increase the duration the anticipation frame stays on screen and reduced the duration of the mid frame. It's not perfect, but you can already tell it looks like there is force behind the punch. It's like a whip cracking. By distorting the model, we can increase this sense of speed and impact even more.

 

This is a really, really quick and dirty implementation just using the smudge tool (I am NOT an artist), but you can already see how fast and powerful this punch looks. The smudge tool in Photoshop blends colors, so the blur here probably has colors that won't fit in Doom's limited palette (not to mention the partial transparency going on in this image), but a talented artist could accomplish the same effect with much better results AND easily stay within the technical limitations of Doom's engine.

Like I said, it's a thirty year old game, but these animation principles have existed long before the nineties, and other pixel artists of the era were already using these principles to great effect. It's one of the reasons I think a modern player could call the game "ugly" and I'd have to agree with them.

Like I said, I love the way Doom looks as-is! But there are definitely arguments to be made for it being ugly.

 

EDIT: This is a bit of an unfair comparison, since this is from a fighting game where characters only need to be shown from one angle, and there are more frames, but you can see the use of these principles in action, regardless. This is from 1996, I think?

 

Note how the frames are paced, the secondary animation of the coat, the smear to convey speed, and the distortion of the hand.

Edited September 21, 2020 by M_W

[Eric Claus]

5 hours ago, M_W said:

Stuff.

 

Thanks for taking the time and effort, and it is a good explanation of what you are going for. Naturally I can only speculate as to why these things were not done I believe it was probably a time factor or just simply not thought of. 

 

I could see how someone might see it as ugly from a certain perspective in the animation department.  I find weirdly it doesn't bother me as much, but maybe because the sounds offset it for me and lend impact where the animation might have fallen short.  Goofy revenant punch or not.

[Deadwing]

Doom 1: No

Doom 2: Yes.

[DooM Bear]

Awwwww Hell no!!! Punch them in the face and tell them their ugly!!!

 

Na, in all seriousness I can see where they are coming from and think it’s a case of different boats for different folks. I really like the look of early 90’s pixel art but find early PS1 3D models pug ugly.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

7 hours ago, M_W said:

Frame timings

 

It is kinda weird how wide spread this oversight is in id tech shooters. You can find it even in Hexen with Ettins\Centaurs. Very few enemies respect it like the fighter boss. Even worse the heresiarch has more walking frames than actual attack frames lol. 

[MattFright]

If we're talking about their respective campaigns, then yes, obviously they haven't aged well due to hardware limitation differences between 2020 and 1993-1994. However i feel like that discussion is kind of irrelevant nowadays, when most people play custom wads and mods after playing the original games only once, or in some people's cases, they get introduced to the classic dooms through custom wads in the first place (such was the case for me). And something people here seem to be failing to realize is that, just like in the late 90s there was a strong bias towards 3D games just because they are 3D games, nowadays the majority has just as strong of a bias towards graphical fidelity and amount of pixels.

 

Saying that one's enjoyment of art is subjective is one thing, a completely different thing however is failing to spot these biases, which blur people's own views on art, which could've been completely different had the majority of people playing games nowadays had a more diverse variety of games to pick from visually, or had big corporations invested less on making sure 90% of their games are gamefied photographies. And with all of this in mind: No, Doom 1 and Doom 2 are not *inherently* ugly (again, custom content), even using vanilla textures and sprites only if the mapper is artistically talented enough.

[Gunstar Green]

Of course Doom's visuals do not hold up to modern standards, how would they? That said I agree with others that Doom has aged better visually than most of the early 3D accelerated games and 3D console games. Its simplicity is basically a style at this point.

 

Similarly people make fun of Quake for being brown and green but I feel like if it were more colorful of a game its shortcomings would be even more apparent.

Edited September 21, 2020 by Gunstar Green

[Noiser]

With default GZDoom settings? Yes it's kinda ugly, at least for me. High resolution and hardware render can sanitize and remove the atmosphere from a few (vanilla) maps. But on lower resolution and with the proper render it's a perfectly fine retro game imo. I see pixel-styled graphics as timeless and Doom have beautiful sprites, good use of colors and nice lighting contrast. A rare example of how to make a game moody and energetic at the same time!

Keep in mind I'm talking about the original maps and gameplay. My answer could change with mods and\or custom maps. Valiant, Ancient Aliens or Sunlust definitely works better on higher resolution and some mods can improve visuals on hardware mode.
 

On 9/20/2020 at 11:51 PM, M_W said:

Like I said, it's a thirty year old game, but these animation principles have existed long before the nineties, and other pixel artists of the era were already using these principles to great effect.

On 1993? I'm not sure. Again, I don't think the animation is too bad on capped framerates. The clunkiness is more noticable when you remove that limit, as the animations can't keep that pace creating a disconnected feel between the two.

Even so, I agree that some weapons could benefit from better timing or at least one extra frame, more specifically the SSG and the Plasma Rifle. A few days ago I tested a dehacked file with some of that and the difference was huge!

Edited September 27, 2020 by Noiser

[M_W]

2 hours ago, Noiser said:

On 1993? I'm not sure. Again, the animation doesn't look too bad with capped framerates imo. The clunkiness is more noticable when you remove the cap, because the game itself will be smoother but the animations will not keep that pace, creating a disconnected feel between the two.

Even so, I agree that some weapons could benefit from better timing or at least one extra frame, more specifically the SSG and the Plasma Rifle. A few days ago I tested a dehacked file with some of that and the difference was huge!

I usually play on 35hz and I still have this opinion. I tried my best to keep my adjustments to 1/35th of a second increments (this is pretty hard to do in Photoshop's animation timeline, and I didn't feel like opening premiere for this), and there's still a huge improvement. You'd be surprised how much you can do with very limited frames. Most traditionally-animated motion pictures, which have a frame rate of 24 frames per second, only have a new drawing once every two frames. Traditionally animated 2D games work the same way, there isn't a new frame drawn for every rendered frame.

 

Maybe one of these days I'll put together a DeHackEd patch that can improve the animations using only the existing frames. I'm unemployed thanks to the Corony-pony, so I got the time.

[Eric Claus]

2 minutes ago, M_W said:

I usually play on 35hz and I still have this opinion. I tried my best to keep my adjustments to 1/35th of a second increments (this is pretty hard to do in Photoshop's animation timeline, and I didn't feel like opening premiere for this), and there's still a huge improvement. You'd be surprised how much you can do with very limited frames. Most traditionally-animated motion pictures, which have a frame rate of 24 frames per second, only have a new drawing once every two frames. Traditionally animated 2D games work the same way, there isn't a new frame drawn for every rendered frame.

 

Maybe one of these days I'll put together a DeHackEd patch that can improve the animations using only the existing frames. I'm unemployed thanks to the Corony-pony, so I got the time.

 

I would check out that patch just to see you manage to do if nothing else.

[magicsofa]

12 hours ago, Pegg said:

Even worse the heresiarch has more walking frames than actual attack frames lol. 

Doesn't heresiarch have like, one attack frame?

 

Anyway it is kinda funny how this style got reproduced by other people. It's probably easy to get tunnel vision when you're handed an engine with existing content, that also happened to be very successful... if it worked in Doom it'll work in my game right?

[Smoothandz]

Is this something that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" would apply to? 

I think that most Doom fans will admit that Doom holds a special place in their soul. The memories, the joy, the excitement that Doom has brought us is the most beautiful thing and no matter what anyone says it, we stand firm. Ugly or not, DooM is beautiful to us :)

[Munisha]

Dunno, but I like graphics like those... The Classic Doom is beautiful to me!

[Aaron Blain]

Off the top of my head, Shinobi 3 and Aladdin were released in 1993 for the Genesis and feature character animation drastically superior to Doom's. (Vastly higher production values, I assume.)

 

Although stretch/squash is a stylistic choice, Doom's characters also simply have poor poses and poor frame timing. Watch an imp walk. What the hell is happening with its arms and legs? The characters are generally quite wooden and have little sense of weight.

 

Some of them look better than others. Baron is pretty good but still very stiff. The low-tier monsters are the worst. Heretic and especially Hexen have individual frames that are much better-drawn than Doom's but, as discussed by M_W and others, have rather poor timing.

 

It's been a wish of mine for some time now to re-make Doom's characters in Blender, with good animation, but eh maybe just let Doom be what it is.

 

Doom's retail levels are ugly overall. Some of Doom 1 looks pretty good but Doom 2 is largely pretty bad. And I always insist on 320x200, which helps tremendously.

 

Doom rode on the strength of its engine, and its atmosphere. The art and design range from pretty good to adequate to poor. There are many games from that era with much better art.

 

Also - whole other topic here, but later 'Doom-like' environments make extensive use of irregularly-shaped sprite decorations to break the visual planes and create a more natural-feeling space. REKKR does this brilliantly, but there's already a huge improvement between Doom and Hexen.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Aaron Blain

[Noiser]

51 minutes ago, Aaron Blain said:

Off the top of my head, Shinobi 3 and Aladdin were released in 1993 for the Genesis and feature character animation drastically superior to Doom's. (Vastly higher production values, I assume.)

Although stretch/squash is a stylistic choice, Doom's characters also simply have poor poses and poor frame timing. Watch an imp walk. What the hell is happening with its arms and legs? The characters are generally quite wooden and have little sense of weight.

That's a good point, but you have to take account the amount of sprites these games have. A game like Aladdin have more frames per action while Doom had to use more sprites for rotations and reactions from every angle. Technique was also different, Doom used physical models for most enemies while Aladdin was hand-drawn like a cartoon. That matters a lot and can make some comparisons a bit unfair. Prince of Persia for example is from 89 but used rotoscoping to achieve smoother frames (but it's also a game with less characters to animate).

Still, games like Aladdin or Earthworm Jim were exceptions to the rule, way ahead of what was expected at the time. That's why I think Doom animation is fine after all, but that's just me.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Noiser

[Aaron Blain]

31 minutes ago, Noiser said:

That's a good point, but

I completely agree. I think the main thing is that Doom was forging into territory where techniques were not well established, and what they achieved was pretty good, especially with a small team. If you look at the characters from ROTT or Mortal Kombat 1 nowadays, they look a bit static and silly.

 

If Doom had a team of highly-trained anime artists doing all the rotations, the game could have looked much better. There just wasn't a strong connection between traditional animation and videogame art in the western sphere, it seems. Japanese games from that era just hold up much better, visually.

 

Your point about in-betweens is a good one. Perhaps Aladdin is a bad example. (I mentioned it because of its strong, expressive keyframes.) Look at Magic Sword from 1990. Many cool enemies with 3-4 frames per animation, that are very expressive.

 

Doom looks O.K. . It's not a timeless beautiful thing like Mario 3 or Day of the Tentacle. It's a little janky overall, but it's adequate and it has some good bits and tons of personality. I love it the way it is, but I'm not shocked or offended when the uninitiated call it ugly.

 

BTW, re PoP -- if anyone hasn't already watched this, the story of how the creator filmed his little brother in order to animate the game is great.

[DuckReconMajor]

On 9/20/2020 at 4:23 AM, HombreSal said:

I think it's like the third time I've showed the games to a friend. They all say they're effing ugly and I think they've aged well.

 

3 times? It's ok if a friend likes different things, I'll make a passing suggestion of something I like to a friend if the situation calls for it, but I won't push past that.

I'm sure you'll meet some other human who loves the Doom games at some point and you can be friends with them too!

There's just so much content in this day and age I feel like it's almost a waste, having an 'overlap' in interests.

 

In other news, I don't think anyone's commented directly on this yet, but filtered textures are just as pretty as un-filtered textures. Fight me!

 

36 minutes ago, Aaron Blain said:

BTW, re PoP -- if anyone hasn't already watched this, the story of how the creator filmed his little brother in order to animate the game is great.

 

That was a great one. The Ars Technica War Stories in general are an awesome watch, at least from what I've seen. I need to finish the rest of them.

[Ashurion Neonix]

On 9/20/2020 at 9:23 AM, HombreSal said:

I think it's like the third time I've showed the games to a friend. They all say they're effing ugly and I think they've aged well.

Some of the later levels in doom 1 and 2 don't look as good as the earlier ones (especially doom e3m7 and tnt map 21) best to show them in a modern source port like gzdoom. Maybe they just don't like the art style or old bsp maps. I can easily see how doom 2's maps wouldn't look as good as they tend to focus less on  visuals. but still, calling doom episode 1 bad. You're friends clearly have completely different tastes in games to you.

[Ashurion Neonix]

On 9/20/2020 at 2:49 PM, Thermal Lance said:

the spider mastermind for example kinda looks like toys nowadays.

I always thought the spider mastermind and episode 1 sky look too realistic for doom's art style.

[Ashurion Neonix]

On 9/20/2020 at 7:29 PM, Eric Claus said:

 

The Arachnotron and Spider Masterminds are derp looking and also derp sounding in my opinion and didn't age well.

I always found the arachnotron kinda cute.