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TasAcri

Why wasn't the 4th episode based on DOOM II?

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Every time i replay this episode i wonder how come this isn't an expansion of DOOM II? It was released much later than that so why did they go back to the original which lacks the additional monsters and Super Shotgun?

 

It's a great episode but playing without the extra content, it drags it down IMO.

 

Same thing applies to Sigil. Again, based on the original AFAIK (i haven't played it yet).

 

I get Romero wasn't happy with how DOOM II turn out or something?

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So Thy Flesh Consumed was an expansion of DOOM 1 and Final DOOM was the same for DOOM II in that, they wanted to support/expand both DOOM 1 and II and sell both?

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Episodes 4-6 of Wolf3D were not originally retail products. You could buy them separately from the first three or all six as a complete package through mail order.

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2 hours ago, TasAcri said:

So Thy Flesh Consumed was an expansion of DOOM 1 and Final DOOM was the same for DOOM II in that, they wanted to support/expand both DOOM 1 and II and sell both?

 

Final DOOM aren't really expansions. They do not need the original Doom II to function. The "story" (such as it is) is completely self-contained. Completely standalone Doom games that use Doom II as a base to dictate enemies, weapons, map structure etc. I have never tried, but I am pretty sure you could load a map made for doom2.wad under one of the Final DOOM iWADs and have it work, just have different sky and music if the map itself supplies none.

 

I suppose you could call them "Standalone expansions" but I have always found that term silly and oxymoronic.

Edited by Murdoch

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3 hours ago, TasAcri said:

Every time i replay this episode i wonder how come this isn't an expansion of DOOM II? It was released much later than that so why did they go back to the original which lacks the additional monsters and Super Shotgun?

 

It's a great episode but playing without the extra content, it drags it down IMO.

 

Same thing applies to Sigil. Again, based on the original AFAIK (i haven't played it yet).

 

I get Romero wasn't happy with how DOOM II turn out or something?

As others have said, it was basically a way to get the original Doom into retail. However, given that there was a considerable amount of engine changes, tweaks, and additions between Doom and Doom II (for example, the map intermission stuff is pretty much nuked), it wouldn't have quite worked right with the Doom II engine/executable.

 

Hence, it makes more sense for it to be built off of the Doom I executable, which is exactly what they did.

 

It also helped protect the sales of Doom II - if you got all the Doom II monsters and goodies in Ultimate Doom, what incentive do you have to buy it?

 

9 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

Final DOOM aren't really expansions. They do not need the original Doom II to function. Completely standalone Doom games that use Doom II as a base to dictate enemies, weapons, map structure etc. I have never tried, but I am pretty sure you could load a map made for doom2.wad under one of the Final DOOM iWADs and have it work, just have different sky and music if the map itself supplies none.

There are some texture differences that would make some conflicting texture definitions not display correctly if it used ones that differed from Final Doom's IWADs compared to the Doom II IWAD, but otherwise this is by and large correct.

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13 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

However, given that there was a considerable amount of engine changes, tweaks, and additions between Doom and Doom II (for example, the map intermission stuff is pretty much nuked), it wouldn't have quite worked right with the Doom II engine/executable.

 

Hence, it makes more sense for it to be built off of the Doom I executable, which is exactly what they did.

Aren't both games using the same binary executable though? I thought I read somewhere that the code development converged at some point, it's just that Doom/The Ultimate Doom does not use the new stuff from Doom II. But the code is there. Am I wrong?

 

As for why the expansion was for the first game and not the second, the whole point of The Ultimate Doom was to bring the original Doom to the retail scene -- it had not been available as such before that. I suppose that the addition of the new episode allowed GT Interactive to boast some new content to what would otherwise be an approximately two-year old game already.

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21 minutes ago, MrFlibble said:

Aren't both games using the same binary executable though? I thought I read somewhere that the code development converged at some point, it's just that Doom/The Ultimate Doom does not use the new stuff from Doom II. But the code is there. Am I wrong?

You are correct. The proof being that you can use doom2.exe to play Doom 1 and doom.exe to play Doom II. In fact Doom II-specific code first appeared in some of the update patches for Doom before Doom II was even released. IIRC it's v1.5 where you can get Doom II stuff in a semi-working state? v1.666 was the first version with support for Doom II, and that included removing the "MF_COUNTKILL" flag from lost souls. Ever since then speedrunners don't need to bother killing them to max out a level. (I still don't get why they did this. Sure, the pain elemental would screw up the percentages, but so do the arch-viles anyway, to say nothing about the icon of sin...)

 

If you go for their last official DOS versions, the differences between the exes are that:

  • Doom II: as the first v1.9 released, it supports Doom (shareware and registered) and Doom II. It doesn't handle the fourth episode of The Ultimate Doom and doesn't have the strings for Final Doom.
  • Ultimate Doom: add supports for Thy Flesh Consumed. Perfectly capable of playing Doom II, however since it expects four demos it ends up crashing if you leave Doom II in attract mode since DOOM2.WAD does not have a DEMO4 lump.
  • Final Doom: adds support for the Final Doom IWADs, which is basically just different tables for level names and intermission texts. Still expects four demos, though. Also introduces the teleporter height bug.
  • Anthology: fixes a few bugs, including the teleporter height bug and the sky not changing bug. Only play the first three demos, including when playing Ultimate Doom.

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42 minutes ago, MrFlibble said:

Aren't both games using the same binary executable though? I thought I read somewhere that the code development converged at some point, it's just that Doom/The Ultimate Doom does not use the new stuff from Doom II. But the code is there. Am I wrong?

 

Actually UD does use some of the new engine features, such as fast doors, switches activated by keys, and sector type 17. (A very quick look through the maps shows that fast doors are in E4M2, E4M3, E4M6, E4M7, and E4M8 - I didn't check which maps the other features are in but E4M2 quite famously has a yellow key switch.)

Edited by NiGHTMARE

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14 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

It also helped protect the sales of Doom II - if you got all the Doom II monsters and goodies in Ultimate Doom, what incentive do you have to buy it?

Because you want more Doom II? :P

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3 hours ago, Rudolph said:

Because you want more Doom II? :P

That's what Final Doom is for :P

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18 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

But I want MORE

That's what Perdition's Gate and Hell to Pay are for.

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3 minutes ago, ChopBlock223 said:

disgusted-dog.gif.872c4fdac70be7d666915f7a93eee30a.gif

Hell 2 Pay for this shitty .wad

Perdition's Gate is cool though

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I did not enjoy PerdGate a lot, about half the maps felt like samey and unimaginative filler, much of the visuals were dull, and it really didn't challenge me at all. Yeah I played on HMP, but that was because the ReadMe claimed I would probably need cheats to play on UV.

 

There's some really cool ideas in the .wad, but they're so very underdeveloped and underutilized. Remember that part in Map 15 where you visit some little hellish flesh asteroid/planetoid out in space somewhere, and some cave made out of cuboid crystal formations? Wasn't that really cool? Weren't you really disappointed that you only got to see something like that one brief time and that most of the levels following were the same uninspired brown brick/metal levels you already saw a lot before? I was.

 

I really hope the Perdition's Gate 2 project has a lot more imagination and uses those visuals much more extensively, there's a lot more potential left.

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6 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

I did not enjoy PerdGate a lot, about half the maps felt like samey and unimaginative filler, much of the visuals were dull, and it really didn't challenge me at all. Yeah I played on HMP, but that was because the ReadMe claimed I would probably need cheats to play on UV.

 

There's some really cool ideas in the .wad, but they're so very underdeveloped and underutilized. Remember that part in Map 15 where you visit some little hellish flesh asteroid/planetoid out in space somewhere, and some cave made out of cuboid crystal formations? Wasn't that really cool? Weren't you really disappointed that you only got to see something like that one brief time and that most of the levels following were the same uninspired brown brick/metal levels you already saw a lot before? I was.

 

I really hope the Perdition's Gate 2 project has a lot more imagination and uses those visuals much more extensively, there's a lot more potential left.

If you thought it was too easy, may as well try UV. It’s never Plutonia difficulty. I think the difficulty curve is a little screwy - I found the first half harder than the second personally.

 

As far as the visuals go I think they’re quite decent for the time - the custom textures are nice, especially in the second episode. Certainly better than most of TNTs, with which this is contemporary. But of course this is s question of personal taste.

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On 5/5/2022 at 1:34 PM, Gez said:

v1.666 was the first version with support for Doom II, and that included removing the "MF_COUNTKILL" flag from lost souls. Ever since then speedrunners don't need to bother killing them to max out a level. (I still don't get why they did this. Sure, the pain elemental would screw up the percentages, but so do the arch-viles anyway, to say nothing about the icon of sin...)

Maybe because killing pain elementals close to walls can cause lost souls to spawn outside the level boundaries.

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31 minutes ago, Andromeda said:

Maybe because killing pain elementals close to walls can cause lost souls to spawn outside the level boundaries.

But that doesn't matter. The percentage is based on the number of monsters placed in the map at the start. Any monster spawned during run-time, by a pain elemental, an arch-vile's resurrection, or the Icon of Sin, screws up the percentage if it gets killed. A monster that roams the empty void is therefore irrelevant.

 

Unless you do dynamic percentages like ZDoom but then again ZDoom restored the count flag to the lost souls.

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On 5/4/2022 at 1:55 PM, TasAcri said:

Same thing applies to Sigil. Again, based on the original AFAIK (i haven't played it yet).

 

I remember reading somewhere that Mr. Romero wanted Si6il to feel like it was part of the original game. I've seen people complaining about how it doesn't have new monsters or weapons and that sort of things. But apparently they weren't in Romero's plan for Si6il, I guess that'll also be the case for Si6il 2, but I may be wrong

 

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22 hours ago, rzh said:

Hell 2 Pay for this shitty .wad 

Perdition's Gate is cool though

Hell to Pay is, on the whole, better than Perdition's Gate IMO. Perdition's Gate does have a fantastic start, but by the end the maps are just weird fillers. Hell to Pay has some questionable graphic replacement but there are less stinkers in its maps.

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8 hours ago, Gez said:

Hell to Pay is, on the whole, better than Perdition's Gate IMO. Perdition's Gate does have a fantastic start, but by the end the maps are just weird fillers. Hell to Pay has some questionable graphic replacement but there are less stinkers in its maps.

I do have to give it a second try then, I was very put off by those sounds and graphics.

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On 5/4/2022 at 3:13 PM, Woolie Wool said:

Episodes 4-6 of Wolf3D were not originally retail products. You could buy them separately from the first three or all six as a complete package through mail order.

The Nocturnal Missions... *giggles* Yep. I'm an adult.

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On 5/10/2022 at 1:32 AM, Alex S. said:

The Nocturnal Missions... *giggles* Yep. I'm an adult.

I always assumed that was intentional by iD

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They wanted to sell more copies of Doom 1 aswell as Doom 2.

 

You play Doom 1 for the levels and Doom 2 for the monsters. If Doom 1 had both the things nobody will buy Doom 2.

Also, It was kinda like a cashgrab made for Retail.

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33 minutes ago, SuyaSS said:

You play Doom 1 for the levels and Doom 2 for the monsters. If Doom 1 had both the things nobody will buy Doom 2.

 

The fact DOOM 1 has better level design wasn't widely known in the gaming community, back in the day, anyway. I don't remember any magazine at the time doing the distinction. It's something that has been agreed on in internet forums later on.

Edited by TasAcri

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11 hours ago, TasAcri said:

The fact DOOM 1 has better level design wasn't widely known in the gaming community, back in the day, anyway. I don't remember any magazine at the time doing the distinction.

I remember at least CGW pointing this out in their Doom 2 review. This might be anecdotal, but most and of my friends felt the same way. CGW also specifically singled out E1 as being the best. Though I agree with you in the sense that it came across more like "Doom 2 is great, but the best levels are still in Doom 1", as opposed to the much more polarized "Doom 2 level design is crap" or even "E2 and E3 are crap" that came later on the forums. Personally I've always liked all the episodes and both games, though I notice when replaying Doom 2 that I now tend to find the later levels more tiresome. I still like Barrels, Spirit World and Living End a lot though.

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On 5/9/2022 at 11:00 AM, Gez said:

Hell to Pay has some questionable graphic replacement but there are less stinkers in its maps.

I am surprised nobody has tried remaking Hell to Pay using either vanilla or better-looking assets.

 

Although, I am not going to lie, I think the Hellion (the Imp reskin) looks pretty good.

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12 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

I am surprised nobody has tried remaking Hell to Pay using either vanilla or better-looking assets.

 

What's there to remake? The easiest "fix" would be to load the WAD into Slade and just remove the shitty sprite/sound replacements.

 

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