Brutal or Vanilla: Which do you prefer?

[holaareola]

I prefer vanilla, but I do play Brutal Doom or PB once in a while.

 

My issue with Brutal Doom/PB especially is that they are a tasteless mess. They strike me as being made by people that love being down in the detail tweaking away. There are some good gameplay ideas, weapon feel is often an improvement (especially in PB) and many of the effects are genuinely awesome and I suspect took aeons of happy time spent tweaking them to perfection.

 

But this love of tweaking minor things means that there is no overarching taste or mature design sensibility at work. It's just throw in everything that comes to mind or you've seen in COD so you've got more stuff to tweak the fuck out of, no matter how ill-fitting, how redundant, how half-baked.  The old adage about something being finished not when there's nothing left to add but nothing left to subtract comes to mind.

[DNSKILL5]

I feel like this was asked already on another thread and I answered there, but anyways... I prefer vanilla over brutal. Doom on its own is already quite brutal enough and enjoyable for me. I don’t really like the added features BD offers. I get why others like it so much, but it is not for me. 

[Mr. Freeze]

Smooth Doom. 

[ppwbh_the_H]

Brutal and Vanilla

Edited October 12, 2020 by ppwbh_the_H : IDK how did I'm can't reply anymore

[Hypnotik]

Vanilla. 100%

[MFG38]

Not gonna lie, I'm slightly shocked how often Brutal Doom still gets brought up as a standard comparison against vanilla. I mean yeah, it is the biggest Doom gameplay mod, but you'd think the hype around it would've died down, especially following the halting of its development and all the unfortunate incidents SgtMark was involved in. Maybe it has, but it still looks a lot like BD steals a significant portion of the wind from other (arguably more optimized and balanced) gameplay mods. But I've already talked about my distaste with BD and its fanbase in a number of other threads, so I'll refrain from going further into it this time around.

 

What I'm mainly getting at here is that I wish BD would stop being talked about so prominently. Once again, I can't deny the mod's status - not only inside the Doom community but also outside it - and I do have to give BD and SgtMark some degree of respect for achieving that, but that doesn't mean that Brutal Doom has to be brought up in every second thread that pops up here. (Slight exaggeration, but you know what I mean.)

 

Spoiler

Oh right, guess I could answer OP's question. Vanilla over BD for me.

 

[Biodegradable]

15 minutes ago, MFG38 said:

Not gonna lie, I'm slightly shocked how often Brutal Doom still gets brought up as a standard comparison against vanilla. I mean yeah, it is the biggest Doom gameplay mod, but you'd think the hype around it would've died down

 

You'd think with the unending plethora of unique and interesting gameplay mods that the clever sods over on the ZDoom forums keep pumping out, there'd be more to talk about. How come nobody ever talks about Smooth Doom, Beautiful Doom, DN3Doom, Slayer's Rampage, Pandemonium, Doom Incarnate, High Noon Drifter, Zagemod, Hellrider, Guncaster, Final Doomer, Trailblazer, Treasure Tech, etc? There's a whole world of fun mods to explore, people!

[Omniarch]

To be honest, I just can't stand Brutal Doom. It feels so... excessive. I don't find the gameplay fun and I just loathe the new soundscape. Also, the mod has more weapons than I know what to do with. Don't get me wrong, BD is an amazing achievement (having merely dabbled in DECORATE and adding custom blood and effects, I can just barely begin to image the technical wizardry at work, and it blows my noob modder socks off), it just runs completely contrary to my tastes. In general, I don't tend to like gameplay mods unless they are integrated with the wad (like Struggle) or are both interesting and don't drastically unbalance most wads (Final Doomer is an excellent example of this in my opinion).

 

That's not to say I enjoy nothing about BD. I do find it enjoyable in small doses, especially for just blasting through Ultimate Doom. But I do overwhelming prefer vanilla.

[URROVA]

Nah, i like more vanilla.

[Zeskofp]

Brutal Doom still hot right now? Thought that thing would've died after 5 years max.

 

Talking about preference, I don't play gameplay mods in general. These thing have been getting larger and larger I'd be downloading Google.

 

But even with NASA speed, I like my stuff clean and simple. Come on, I'm in for 1% CPU Doom singleplayer on my 2 dollar netbook, not sweaty bloodbath billion dollar tournament.

[eviltechno]

I was always more of the "ketchup" goremod guy rather than brutal doom.

But after a longer break from doom and mods brutal doom 21 RC1 got me back to doom and even enjoying brutal doom for the very first time. Later then when RC2-RC7 got released in a kinda short period of time (giving the amount of time RC1 was around) I lost interest as it just got way too much and especially the blood effects didn't have a fitting setting for me anymore. On setting 3 it was so much that some enemies just disappear behind the red sprites and on setting 2 there were just to few effects in general, but still too much with certain weapons. So I kept playing some modded version of bd21 (RC1) and bolognese goremod. Still looking forward to future projects. (BD22 or other goremods)

[Kyukon]

It was fun to play through all the official iWads once with Brutal, but that's about the extent I got out of it.  The Brutal Doom wad was kind of fun, but not really something I'd like to replay.

 

Vanilla all the way now.

[D4NUK1]

Some wads play greatly with brutal doom and other's mods so.

 

60 % moded, 40% vainilla

[silentzorah]

Neither.  Half the fun of Doom is making your own shit.  So I just do that.

[xdarkmasterx]

It depends on the map. I'd rather play BD on levels with less "tight", E1-3 style design. It fixes two of the biggest issues I have with the base game, those being low-threat, high time to kill enemies and puny basic weapons. The additional equipment and gore effects are really nice, as well (though some of the FX looks a bit tacky).

 

On the other hand, constrictive, punishing, and generally very difficult maps get extremely messy with BD. Even E4 and Doom 2 are a bit much for me at some points. I couldn't imagine playing something like Sunlust after all the monsters took a lesson in asskicking 101 :p

 

 

[Reisal]

Largely vanilla, utilizing this modification of mine but without the absurdity. I say this being a former Brutal Doom fan and user, I just got tired of it and as others mentioned, it made some custom maps unplayable due to the balancing or voodoo doll bullshittery.

[Faceman2000]

I had no idea Brutal Doom was still popular.

[D4NUK1]

3 minutes ago, Faceman2000 said:

I had no idea Brutal Doom was still popular.

It's the most popular Doom wad ever, so always will have people talking about it. 

[OpenRift]

Dude I don't think most people who've played Doom for more than 5 hours play Brutal Doom as a primary method of play.

[EndHack]

I used to play a ton of brutal doom type mods but I lost interest in them, mostly because so many of those types of mods where way over the top in the edge department in my opinion and the gameplay just got repetitive, and now haven’t played any in some time, nowadays I occasionally play vanilla with prboom but that’s only when I’m playing a new wad, otherwise you’ll probably find me playing hideous destructor which I find very fun as it always seems to have some new crazy situation I have to think my way out of.

[Gaia74]

There are so many mods out there that I really wish this question wasn't just brutal doom

 

but I prefer vanilla over brutal doom

[inkoalawetrust]

In total I may have played more unmodded and (Mostly) vanilla Doom than I've played with mods, but recently (Like the past few months.) I've began playing more with Brutal Doom and Project Brutality and some other mods than with vanilla. But if I can choose between BD and PB, I prefer to play Project Brutality since I like the fact that it adds more weapons and with different firing modes to use, along with several additional monsters (Though I HATE some of them like the Flesh Wizards because they are incredibly annoying and hard to kill.).

I've also tried my hand at playing other mods such as Nobody Told Me About id, Guncaster, D4V and Hideous Destructor, but I haven't found them as fun to play with as BD and PB, I did find some mods like Gene-Tek fun though and and am pretty sure I'd like Blade of Agony too if it didn't just refuse to even start up on any PC I tried to play it on.

If my own PC wasn't so awful and could run mods at all or at more than 30 FPS I'd try A LOT more mods though, since for the foresseable future I have to play mods on a PC I only sometimes have access to.

If I get bored of playing any mods for too long though or just decide I've been playing with mods too much, I will just play vanilla Doom without any mods. Though I pretty much always only play Doom on ZDoom-based ports it ain't exactly completely 1:1 vanilla Doom.



TL;DR I like both Vanilla and BD/PB but recently I've been playing Project Brutality more, most other gameplay mods I usually don't find fun at all or for more than a few minutes to an hour though, but I'm sure that'll change eventually.

[june gloom]

I hate Brutal Doom for a lot of reasons that I won't go into, so I play vanilla.

 

I don't generally play with gameplay mods either, but I'm indifferent to the ones that aren't BD.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

Am I the only one who doesn't have framerate issues with BD or other mods? I have a fairly mid-range PC (GTX 1060, i7-3770), and I can play anything at 1080p or higher and my framerate rarely dips below 50, usually even at resolutions higher than 1080p.

[Repugnus]

I'm more of a Burl Tumd guy myself.

[AinuTheTaken]

1 hour ago, Repugnus said:

I'm more of a Burl Tumd guy myself.

I cannot find the link for this since both download links in the thread by the person who coded it are down. 

[Gifty]

22 hours ago, Kr4mpu5 said:

There are a lot of doom players that seem to only ever play any variation of brutal doom, as well as many other players that seem to despise anything to do with that damn mod, and prefer to play vanilla.

 

What is your preference and why?

 

Who are you and why did you steal my face

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

6 minutes ago, Gifty said:

 

Who are you and why did you steal my face

I thought he was you at first. I was wondering why you would be asking about Brutal Doom haha.

 

Doomworld needs a new user rank:

"Registered just to post about Brutal Doom"

[Sir Hattington]

Brutal Doom sucks more dick than the demons in H-Doom.

 

i dont like it

[Repugnus]

14 minutes ago, AinuTheTaken said:

I cannot find the link for this since both download links in the thread by the person who coded it are down. 

Here you go. Enjoy!