My thoughts on pistol starts

[valkiriforce]

For future reference, I intend for everyone to play my maps however they please - on any difficulty, pistol-starting or continuously, with IDFA+IDDQD+mods or whatever else. Go crazy.

[Nefelibeta]

I'm the kind of guy that plays on UV and pistol start ever since Plutonia Experiment (lol) even if I tell other people to play on HMP or continuously.

[Doomkid]

3 hours ago, roadworx said:

while starting an individual map with a pistol isn't a modern concept - playtesting and warping pretty much require that you do so - a player doing that for an entire wad instead of doing normal continuous play absolutely is. a few people probably did it in ye olden days ofc, but it's something that really only gained traction in the 2010s. before then, the vast majority of wads were made with continuous (and pistol-start ofc) in mind.

To add on to this, the reason pistol starts were always accounted for in the old days was because of the possibility that a player dies without having saved. If you get to Map05 and die but haven’t saved since Map03, you’ll need to be able to beat the map starting with just 50 bullets.

 

For this reason, the vast majority of maps are “fair, but at their hardest” from pistol start. Since I love Doom’s combat and gameplay feel inherently, I don’t mind taking the edge off some encounters by having extra ammo, but in a set so easy that I’m walking around with a BFG and 600 cells constantly, the ability to pistol start is a nice option.

 

Even then, BFG blasting hordes, will always be a joy, and there are times where I know for sure that pistol starting would make the gameplay a lot more grindy for me personally.

 

Since designing for pistol start has (pretty much) always been a thing, it’s compatible with it being a common approach these days. In the same way that someone might choose to start every level as small Mario in a SMW rom hack, to experience the level at its hardest.

[Astronomical]

I actually felt wads became easier to blast through pistol starting.  I started doing it with Scythe and never looked back, single segment always left me without much health or armor.  Ancient Aliens was the only wad that that didn't happen in because of the standardized level exits.  Other wads would be too hard as I wouldn't have enough ammo or health and would need to pistol start anyway because I needed the health.

[Nine Inch Heels]

On 1/17/2022 at 2:48 AM, T-Rex said:

I know there's a lot of people here in the Doom community who are treating pistol starting each level in a megawad as the standard way of playing Doom, and although I don't see anything wrong with that, I don't believe it has to be the end-all, be-all approach to playing Doom wads. To me, dying in any level past the first one and having to start again with just your pistol is more of a penalty for failing to beat the level, and you must try again, only with the challenge jacked up.

This depends a great deal on the player and the maps in question...

 

Most of the time on the player's side, it really comes down to "snowballing" - which is to say that, if the previous map makes an exit at >100% health (+ maybe some spare armour) easy enough, then playing continuous will practically always put the player ahead of the game in the early stages of the following map, because the difference between starting with a pistol and starting with an SSG + perhaps some rockets or cells to spare can make an otherwise tricky start to a map a lot easier. And now that you have easier access to the next map, you'll lose less health when it starts, since you have more firepower under your belt... You repeat that scenario several times over the course of a megaWAD, and you'll be floating health, ammo, and armour like crazy in most cases - it turns out most people greatly underestimate how much of a difference that makes in modern outings, especially when you project that advantage across a dozen maps and not just a couple...

 

Of course, there's the very rare case of a map that is so tight on ammo that you're gonna have next to no carry-over whatsoever, but how many times out of how many maps you've played has it truly happened? Not often, I'd wager, and that's because ammo is usually provided in reasonably generous amounts, so that most of the time, you'll finish any given map with more than you started with, unless you're being wasteful with your resources...

 

There is the counterargument to make that a severe health disadvantage can snowball too, where, if you exit a map at critical health levels, there's a chance the next map can be a headache if it starts with an abundance of hitscanners, for example, but this seems to be more of an exception to the rule than anything you can expect to see regularly - and since the added firepower may offset the health-disadvantage to some degree (what is dead doesn't deal damage to the player), it's probably a wash overall anyway...

 

It's not for me to say whether continuous play is fun for anybody, let alone if it should be, but I will say that this type of snowballing also means that you're gonna be running into the situation that a carefully crafted and possibly fun and slightly frantic start of a map that has been put time and effort towards is now an experience you have kind of "locked yourself out of", because of how "over-geared" you are when you get there... If you've ever asked yourself when the map you're currently playing will be getting serious while you're already halfway through all its monsters, then there's a chance you've gotten to that point because you've been hauling more ordinance than the mapper could have anticipated...

 

So, yes... Pistol starting usually means that the next map may need to be approached more carefully, and is, in the vast majority of cases, also more challenging. For most megaWADs this means that beating the previous map also means you're good enough to start with a clean slate come the next one, however...

 

 

 

Now for a slight tangent: Death exits...

I've seen people bitch about those more times than I could care to count. MegaWADs like Valiant and also older ones like scythe employ death exits in order to split episodes up such that you end up with the same effect you would get out of OG doom's episode selection system. And I really mean BITCH about it to the point where people got so angry that they started throwing ableist slurs around... Let me tell you straight: If the mapper wants to spread "inventory resets" across their set, because they know how much snowballing affects the maps they put weeks worth of time into, and you don't like that, because you confuse doom2 with diablo2 that's entirely your problem. And if you happen to dislike that, then that's fair game, just go play something else instead... However "karening around" and asking to see the manager immediately is the wrong way to go about it, and people who do that are complete and utter morons... Just figured I'd mention this, because it turns out that's the opposite side of the supposed gatekeeping that people assume happens when they're told to look at what the mapper recommends...

 

 

On 1/17/2022 at 2:48 AM, T-Rex said:

With that said, I feel that pistol-starting each map should be treated as more of a form of challenge to take if you really believe you are that skilled and willing to take on a level that may not be kind to you for not having the best arsenal, and this is so true with the wads from the Doom days of yore since a lot of those wads at the time were primarily designed for continuous play (like some maps having rocket or cell ammo with no weapon for them, or maps that present strong monsters that will prove to be near impossible to take straight on for the ill-equipped).

Another point to consider is when sets or megaWADs are designed for pistol starting. Whether or not you adhere to what the mapper recommends is up to you, but it should be noted that if you don't feel like doing it by the books on a first playthrough, it might still be worth pistol starting the maps you have enjoyed the most for the added mileage you get out of what's perfectly good custom content...

 

Having said that, my stance is that maps should be treated the way the mapper said they are meant to be treated first and foremost, and if the player opts to deviate from the suggested formula, then they should at least be aware that they're doing that, and how it may affect the way they experience the content (this also holds true for source port features like jumping, crouching, and free-aim), rather than arguing that the mapper doesn't have any idea how they wanted the content they put together to be played in order for people to get the intended experience out of it - most mappers do know, though...

 

As for gatekeeping: Most of the time that buzzword is thrown around, it's when people suggest playing the way the mapper planned for. Whether or not you agree with the mapper's suggestions is a different story, but pointing out what the mapper wanted in the first place, and why they might have wanted it to begin with, needs to be sufferable enough for most people in order to not invoke straw men...

 

 

On 1/17/2022 at 2:48 AM, T-Rex said:

Choosing your desired difficulty is also a factor as you should know your limits, like if you can take on a megawad on Ultra-Violence, then no problem, but if you find yourself struggling, crank it down to Hurt Me Plenty or lower.

Last but not least: I generally agree with this, but turning it down, or up, or even sideways is at odds with continuous play...

 

I still have somewhat vivid memories of some poor sod who played alien vendetta on UV continuous or whatever the megawad was he complained about, and then the player got brick-walled by the last few maps, because the megaWAD went from small and medium scale fights to something resembling slaughter... So what do you do then??? Dial down and start the whole megaWAD from scratch..? Dial down and pistol start some earlier map..? Dial down and cheat..? Whichever way you choose, changing difficulty settings deep into a set eliminates your inventory in like >99.99998% of all cases... I also remember that I got accused of gatekeeping in the respective thread from a couple years ago, because I told the guy that he might have been better off not playing continuous, so he would have noticed he's in over his head a lot earlier, which would have spared him a lot of frustration on the last couple maps...

 

Whether or not the advice I gave them holds true for anybody else is certainly up for debate, but at least it stands to reason that pistol starting maps that already took a bite out of the player who is riding the "continuous wave" could be a very self-serving endeavour, rather than something that has anything to do with gatekeeping...

[Murdoch]

7 hours ago, Egg Boy said:

So I have a problem with these 3 particular points. For the first one, progression is not always defined by what you have, in a lot of doom wads it is defined by what you're up against.

 

Both are forms of progression. Obviously, this is a very subjective thing. Most of what I said was, of course, entirely subjective.

 

Quote

For this next part, I have an issue with you saying it was "intended" to be played continuous, especially when you consider Sandy Petersen saying most of the playtesting for doom was done in pistol start. So I could just as easily say that because that's how it was tested, that's how it was "intended" to be played.

 

As @Doomkid said, this allowed for people who died and have not saved for a while to restart the map without being significantly disadvantaged, and it allowed for people to warp to and replay favourite maps. The maps in a given episode go from one to the other, with numbers, but most importantly of all, it is coded so that you keep your inventory between maps. This is a very intentional act from a programming perspective which would have taken longer to implement than chucking some more resources into the maps to allow for pistol starts. Were the maps not meant to be played continuously, they would have coded it to dispose of everything between maps.

 

Quote

But I'm not going to. For the last point, I disagree outright, controlling the players ammo reserves doesn't necessarily have anything to do with "micromanaging" an example would be a room you design specifically for the rocket launcher, you lay rockets around and even a rocket launcher to tell the player to use this, and since they will likely have less for other weapons, they will be even more inclined to use it. Lets say the player enters this room with a fully loaded BFG they got in a secret from last map, no matter how well the monsters and geometry are placed, the fight will lose any intended strategy or intrigue and become a cake walk, dampening the fun for the player.

 

You are correct here. I was somewhat rushed in my original post and guilty of not being specific enough. The comment was in the context of a mapset, not an individual map. Balancing is tricky, even with a single map, more so with many maps, even more so with many maps compiled from multiple authors. Personally when I play, I tend to use the weakest weapon that I think will do the job for the challenge I see before me and not bore me to death so this can result in an overabundance of higher end hardware.

 

Ideally, there should be a timeline of sorts planned out by whomever is charge of the project, so that the authors know that it's at least possible that the player might have certain weapons at a certain point so they can design their maps accordingly. Personally, I HATE running out of ammo. It's my number one Doom annoyance, and so I tend to encourage map authors to err on the side of caution when giving it out. It's impossible to get it 100% right for everyone. People will bring different strategies to bare that you might not have anticipated, and so allowing for every possibility just simply isn't possible. So if a fight is designed more with layout and enemy placement in mind, it's going to be likely to be more fun than if it's designed with the idea that the player will have exactly x weapons and y ammo. If you want to create such a challenge, then you need to communicate with the authors of the maps coming before yours, or perhaps realise the idea that you have is maybe not compatible with a mapset made by many authors that the player might be playing continuously.

 

If people want to pistol start for personal preference and added challenge, go for it. Do what's fun for you. Just don't tell me it's the "intended" way to play when there are a few clear things which - at least in the original games - show it's clearly not. 

[baja blast rd.]

On 1/19/2022 at 12:29 AM, jmac said:

As someone who's been pistol-starting for a couple years now, I want to point out that it's not always done as an added level of challenge. ...

 

This. 

 

When I play pistol starts, which I usually do, it's simply because pistol starting creates the dynamic I generally prefer as a player. It's not like there's a decision of harder (pistol starts) vs. easier (carryovers) where I chose "harder." If there were a peripheral mechanism that made carryovers more difficult than pistol starts, I would not choose that for the "added challenge." The fact that pistol starting tends to be harder is largely irrelevant to me. I imagine this is true for like 95% of people who pistol start. 

 

Ironically, it's when I play with carryovers (not counting gameplay mods) that it's usually for the added challenge. It can be fun to go through an episode or stretch of levels I'm familiar with and see how long I can hang on for. 

[Gez]

The way I see it, there are two ways to approach Doom. The first way is as a role-playing game. I don't mean the CRPG genre specifically, since you don't have much in the way of character progression, dialogue, etc. But in the way that it's a story, you're playing a character. This is kind of how Doom was presented back in the days: "You're a marine, one of Earth's toughest..." and so on. With that approach, continuous is what comes naturally. After all, if you're fighting the forces of Hell to save humanity, why would you drop all your weapons and armor between two buildings?

 

The other approach is as a puzzle game. Each map is a self-contained challenge. When you clear a map, you start a new challenge. This is kind of how Doom is understood nowaday in the modding scene. After all, when you try a new map you've just downloaded, you probably start it from scratch, instead of idkfa-ing yourself the full arsenal you've legitimately acquired through thousands of previous playthroughs.... With that approach, pistol start is what comes naturally. Continuous therefore, by letting you start with stuff you won't need to acquire, is robbing you of a part of the puzzle. Kind of like starting a crossword except it's already half-filled by someone else.

 

Both approaches are of course perfectly rational and valid.

[RHhe82]

4 minutes ago, Gez said:

 

The other approach is as a puzzle game. Each map is a self-contained challenge. When you clear a map, you start a new challenge

I sometimes think of Doom as an arcade game that sets before me challenges to overcome. The game gives me score in a form kills, items, secrets and completion time. This mindset also lends itself to pistol starts as opposed to role-playing. (How this view differs from the puzzle game mode you propose, I don’t know, probably doesn’t, but I thought I’d say it out loudj.

[Nine Inch Heels]

9 hours ago, Gez said:

After all, if you're fighting the forces of Hell to save humanity, why would you drop all your weapons and armor between two buildings?

For the same reason Samus Aran discards all her equipment between missions, which is the same reason why Mario never has a stack a mushrooms with himself when he is on another adventure, which is the same reason why you don't get to keep items you've gathered in a successful dead cells or hades run, which is the same reason why you don't get to keep your gear between missions/chapters/runs in any other game with that built-in reset...

 

...It's because it makes sense gamplay-wise, and offers additional legroom for the developers because they're less likely to "map themselves into a corner", to say it in classic doom terms.

[SleepyVelvet]

pistolstart.wad - a philisophical jokewad, and horror story.

 

MAP01: you walk towards an exit switch, but a zombieman pops up and you have to pistol through it to continue.
MAP02: you are forced to run across nukage and hit an exit switch, leaving with 15% health.
MAP03: same as MAP01 (pistol-whip a pop-up zombie and exit).
MAP04: you are locked in a 64x64 room with a barrel getting crushed, but the explosion pushes your pancaked gib through a small gap, sliding into a death exit. (impossible from pistol start)
MAP05: same as MAP01 (pistol-whip a pop-up zombie and exit).
MAP06: you walk towards an exit switch, but a megasphere pops up and you have to walk through it to continue.
MAP07: you see an exit switch, but it's cramped and a barrel is in your way that you have to destroy. (impossible from pistol start)
MAP08: same as MAP01 (pistol-whip a pop-up zombie and exit).
MAP09: you are given a rocket launcher and have to rocket jump over a gap into the exit. (impossible from pistol start)
MAP10: you walk towards an exit switch, but a zombieman pops up and you have to pistol through it to beat the mapset.  But instead, you rocket yourself with your remaining rocket.  (because you did... not... pistol start.)

 

Then, you sit there staring at your screen and a dead Doomguy, contemplating life while Refueling Base/Suburbs midi plays into the night.

[Gez]

1 hour ago, RHhe82 said:

(How this view differs from the puzzle game mode you propose, I don’t know, probably doesn’t, but I thought I’d say it out loudj.

Indeed it doesn't. I used the word puzzle instead of challenge because, as @rd. pointed out, it's not really for the difficulty. It's just for the satisfaction of having "solved" a map with only the resources that were provided on it.

 

A puzzle typically has three phases:

- discovery. This is the part where you explore the puzzle and figure out how you could try to solve it. In crosswords or sudoku it'd be looking for the easiest squares to fill. In Doom it's exploring your starting area and trying to find your first serious weapons.

- challenge. Once you have cleared the low-hanging fruits, you're left with the head scratchers. In Doom you've got some equipment and are now fighting the monsters.

- mop-up. As you progress, each success reduces the difficulty of what remains to be done. Eventually everything becomes easy.

 

With pistol start you go through these steps on each map; with continuous at some point you can enter new maps already in mop-up mode because you've got max ammo, a BFG, and 200 armor. You could imagine a mod that makes maps harder if you enter them continuous -- perhaps spawning more monsters, perhaps replacing monsters with harder varieties, perhaps something else, it doesn't really matter. That would increase the challenge part. But it wouldn't give you back the first part where you're exploring a hostile area and trying to find some better gear that will help you unravel the entire combat puzzle.

 

Take Doom II: you get chainsaw, shotgun, and rocket launcher right on MAP01. You get SSG on MAP02. You get chaingun and backpack on MAP03. Plasma rifle on MAP05, and BFG on MAP07. So from MAP08 on, in continuous play, you have a full arsenal right from the start. There's no longer any "early game" situation.

9 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

...It's because it makes sense gamplay-wise, and offers additional legroom for the developers because they're less likely to "map themselves into a corner", to say it in classic doom terms.

Yeah but that's a non-diegetic reason.

[Knee-deep-on-doomworld]

Yeah me too, I don't like too much to play doom levels with pistol start and pretty much on night are dificulty and its much worse when you play on a PHONE Yes I play on a phone. 

[Crusader No Regret]

Sense of progression is part of the draw of continuous for me.  At least one weapons mod I tried out is better suited towards continuous than single map.  (upgrades based on killing a certain number of an enemy type will do that)

 

Sense of progression with inventory also seems to flush down the drain when I've hit full weapons, ammo, and health at the end of map 8 in a 32 map megaWAD.  That may be an unconscious reason why I usually pistol start though being unwilling to commit the save slot is the biggest factor.  Both approaches are valid; it comes down to what I'm in the mood for.

[Zaxxon]

Can never understand the appeal of it. I can accept losing all weapons at the start of an episode, but every single map? Why? Which shooters since, i don't know, the beginning of shooters, do that? Imagine losing all your weapons in Half-Life at the start of every chapter. How cool will that be? The feel of progression is part of the fun in FPS games, it's one of the aspects that keeps the adventure fresh - the challenge increases and so is your arsenal. That's the standard for all FPS games and it's like that for a reason. Of course, people are free to challenge themselves however they like, but they have no right to tell others that it's the only legit way of play - it is not, and it never will be. And then there's others, who just like to pretend to be better players than they actually are, and so they say they're doing UV pistol starts only (no saves of course), but are they actually doing it? Who knows...

 

 

Edited February 17, 2022 by Zaxxon

[BGreener]

On 2/16/2022 at 9:33 PM, Zaxxon said:

Which shooters since, i don't know, the beginning of shooters, do that? 

Goldeneye and Perfect Dark would reset your weapons and have you start with what was assigned to you. Pistol starts mirror this in what weapons they’d toss your way near the start.

[Zaxxon]

^I knew i shouldn't have asked that question. :D But still, like 99% of the shooters are not designed this way and for a good reason.

[Kor]

I've always designed my levels with continuous play in mind, because that's how I've always played Doom.  To be honest, I've never really thought about doing it differently.  To me that's how games in general (or at least the ones I've played) are meant to be played, you gain more powerful weapons as you get further in the game, you don't start over from scratch.

[Kute]

On 1/18/2022 at 8:37 AM, Gibbon said:

It is a form of challenge.  It cannot be a 'standard' as the actual way most megawads are intended is a level-by-level approach with using what you previously got in other levels.  

 

 

 

This just isn't true.

 

But anyways, I'll say what I always say when this topic comes up:

 

You're only playing for your own entertainment, so do whatever you want.

 

I personally don't consider content beaten without pistol starting, but that's just my personal preference.

 

Too many tricky fights are trivialized by a couple BFG blasts.

[Gibbon]

13 minutes ago, Kute said:

 

This just isn't true.

 

But anyways, I'll say what I always say when this topic comes up:

 

You're only playing for your own entertainment, so do whatever you want.

 

I personally don't consider content beaten without pistol starting, but that's just my personal preference.

 

Too many tricky fights are trivialized by a couple BFG blasts.

 

Well actually..  it is.

 

Did anyone here play Doom in 1993 and reloaded each level for a pistol start?  Did anyone do that in 1994 with Doom 2?  I highly doubt it.

[BGreener]

56 minutes ago, Zaxxon said:

^I knew i shouldn't have asked that question. :D But still, like 99% of the shooters are not designed this way and for a good reason.

It’s certainly a popular preference, but I also wouldn’t be so dismissive of shooters following the “mission based” structure that don’t maintain that kind of weapon progression, i.e.  Halo! 

[ApprihensivSoul]

Honestly, I do find the BFG itself a very, very difficult weapon to include in a game. I try to avoid it in general, and just limit Cell across the board until the levels start having enough challenging encounters to justify the BFG. (I'm pro-Save Scumming, to so "Challenging Enough" can be alot more dangerous than it would be for others.)

And personally, pistol starts to me are like Deprived runs in Dark Souls: The people that love to do them can't get enough of them, but people like me just can't relate enough to their reasons. Several people have stated "sense of progression", and I think that's really the thing for me. I love feeling like that unstoppable space marine, and Pistol Starts actually take away from that. 

I agree with a few others that have posted and would say I consider content beaten when I have done it the original official way: UV, No saves. (Pistol on death, keep the rest of the time.) 
I very, very much wish that UV Fast was an option in the menu, because I would wholeheartedly endorse that as the correct way to experience the original iwads, but it being a command line switch kind of makes it feel a bit too much like a hack. (Obviously it's not actually a hack, and is fully documented in original release info, but still, "if it's not in the menu, it's not real" is kind of the way I feel sometimes.

Oh, and BGrieber, funnily enough Halo does occasionally let you keep your weapons, making it more in common with Eviternity and wads like that then like straight pistol starters. But you're right, that's a game that's largely built entirely around scavenging over progression, and yet it has easily some of my favorite gunplay in the genre.
 

[BGreener]

1 minute ago, ApprihensivSoul said:

Oh, and BGrieber, funnily enough Halo does occasionally let you keep your weapons, making it more in common with Eviternity and wads like that then like straight pistol starters. But you're right, that's a game that's largely built entirely around scavenging over progression, and yet it has easily some of my favorite gunplay in the genre.
 

I think Wolfenstein The New Order was similar, I think you kept that plasma rifle thing while the rest of your gear would be reset and assigned for the mission. I only made it halfway through the campaign before losing interest, though.

[ReaperAA]

2 hours ago, BGrieber said:

Goldeneye and Perfect Dark would reset your weapons and have you start with what was assigned to you. Pistol starts mirror this in what weapons they’d toss your way near the start.

 

Not just those, but even CoD games have missions based campaign where we get a fixed amount of resources at the start of mission.

[BoxY]

Everyone can play however they want which is the default response to literally everything, but if you carry a BFG over from a previous map and then nullify every single fight in the ten maps after it by deleting all the hard enemies the second they appear, you eventually might start to feel like something is slightly off.

[dasho]

I think pistol starts are just the result of good QA testing (i.e., don't force the player into an unwinnable situation just because they have an old save/forgot to save). Anything more than that is just an arbitrary challenge.