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Pistoolkip

Doomer Boards Project 48 (review)

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TitleDW.png.c7a5fa21908215b6d2e9d74c57e4590d.png

DBP48: is a very odd one in the series. It's ZDoom only, and features some heavy gameplay alterations with new weapons, new enemies, new sprites, a new HUD, and new classes. At the same time, it uses stock textures almost exclusively. Most of the regular DBP folks are not involved at all, as it was made mostly by Kontra Kommando, with some additional maps made by Gokuma, Mayhemicdestructor, and Comfy. Many assets were added from other sources or made by other folks.

It is, despite its name and appearance, not a joke wad.

But is it good? 

Nope.



The WAD is very chaotic. There is no readme or explanation of the mechanics or classes. The different factions all seem to fight each other, so as soon as they hear or see Doomguy (or Steven Seagal) they start infighting like crazy. Expect an overload on the senses. The metal midi's, sound bites, and copious amounts of gore also add to the overall chaos. Some enemies can turn invisible, some turn into floating items (expect to be attacked by floating torches), and Jason is simply unkillable. 

There is a ton of new weapons, but also the classic doom weapons, which seems like overkill. The regular doom weapons are probably not needed. It's hard to keep track of the weapons and all the items.

As for the level design: Map 1 is a cool rendition of the spaceship from aliens, with a late 90s look. But it's also very mazy with a ton of vents and one-sided doors. The flashlight is also needed in some parts. And the first room is filled with enemies and can kill you very quickly. 
 Map 2 is short and hectic alien hive, maps 3 and 4 are your standard Doom bread-and-butter hell temples. These look and play like 90s levels. But they do feature some ZDoom features like slopes and scripted doors.

That's as far as I got.

In conclusion: a weird, hectic mess of ideas, that's bloated and chaotic, but it's never boring. Play at your own risk. 


Anyway, here's map 1, played cold at UV. 
 


And finally, the link: Download

 

Tips:

Turn off alt-hud

Turn off auto-pickup

Enable mouselook

Jumping and crouching are required

Use F for Flashlight

 

Edited by Pistoolkip

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Let me be blunt:

 

It's shit.

 

See below for some screenshots and thoughts of mine:

 

Spoiler

1NseRF6.png

The first room erupts into an absolute cluster of noise, chaos and confusion, half the map then proceeds to kill itself before you even see it:

 

DvhgdqX.png

pnMQ5kU.png

vb1HH5d.png

 

(163 dead and I killed literally nothing, I didn't even fire a weapon)

 

AiBa9S3.png

The second level is again an abrupt start of absolute chaos and once again I do nothing and the game just plays itself.

 

Then the real cracks begin to show, I am confronted by a Jason enemy that has 10000 health, no really:

4MTugib.png

Who, upon dying spawns a phantom you must kill otherwise he instantly comes back if it is in melee distance, however because the maps are the size of a fucking shoebox and the phantom spawns on his location upon death the replacement Jason spawns instantly and kills you nearly instantly.

 

Then the maps themselves both look terrible and are filled with bugs like stuck enemies and 90's amateur mapper quirks like misaligned textures:

Z9GWrQt.png

ZmuMUQs.png

KQdUQZo.png

3unb3Pc.png

 

Another thing to note is the marine NPCs will, I dunno, shoot themselves to death(???):

UGfnRiH.png

(They get stuck in an endless painstate trying to shoot and just die)

 

The wad is absolutely unbalanced, either I'm being tickled or absolutely obliterated by instakills from nowhere (the xenomorph enemies are absolute bastards for this), not only that but every map is a cacophony of discordant screams, shrieks and poorly mixed movie quotes making it utterly insufferable (not a fan of the lamps that scream about sucking dick in hell making that soundbite every 5 seconds)

 

Then there's map 5, and HOLY SHIT, it's just 80% copypaste from IWAD maps, no really:

 

0KHzt1O.png

bSGVkYE.png

(Unholy Cathedral)

YQz0r3N.png

(Ditto)

TDBGmzU.png

(The Citadel)

unue4RW.png

(Ditto)

UTSejBY.png

(the Factory, had the decency to retexture this one)

J3OEu4H.png

(The Spirit World (?))

 

Shameless, but a welcome change from the actual original content, which looks more like this:

1pYQLcX.png

I5cbUQu.png

(Yes, this is as boring as it looks)

ubyaHiG.png

(Every one of those square rooms at the top looks exactly like this, the Human SLIDGE returns)

 

Skipping ahead we get this awful map:

h95KFDC.png

9tlDORl.png

And what a disaster it is, ended before I even knew what was going on.

 

It eventually just ended and I was sat there baffled, this is a DBP? This looks like a shitpost, this looks, sounds and plays like a troll, it's fucking shit.

 

What a disaster, don't bother.

 

 

 

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13 minutes ago, mrthejoshmon said:

Let me be blunt:

 

It's shit.

 

See below for some screenshots and thoughts of mine:

 

  Hide contents

1NseRF6.png

The first room erupts into an absolute cluster of noise, chaos and confusion, half the map then proceeds to kill itself before you even see it:

 

DvhgdqX.png

pnMQ5kU.png

vb1HH5d.png

 

(163 dead and I killed literally nothing, I didn't even fire a weapon)

 

AiBa9S3.png

The second level is again an abrupt start of absolute chaos and once again I do nothing and the game just plays itself.

 

Then the real cracks begin to show, I am confronted by a Jason enemy that has 10000 health, no really:

4MTugib.png

Who, upon dying spawns a phantom you must kill otherwise he instantly comes back if it is in melee distance, however because the maps are the size of a fucking shoebox and the phantom spawns on his location upon death the replacement Jason spawns instantly and kills you nearly instantly.

 

Then the maps themselves both look terrible and are filled with bugs like stuck enemies and 90's amateur mapper quirks like misaligned textures:

Z9GWrQt.png

ZmuMUQs.png

KQdUQZo.png

3unb3Pc.png

 

Another thing to note is the marine NPCs will, I dunno, shoot themselves to death(???):

UGfnRiH.png

(They get stuck in an endless painstate trying to shoot and just die)

 

The wad is absolutely unbalanced, either I'm being tickled or absolutely obliterated by instakills from nowhere (the xenomorph enemies are absolute bastards for this), not only that but every map is a cacophony of discordant screams, shrieks and poorly mixed movie quotes making it utterly insufferable (not a fan of the lamps that scream about sucking dick in hell making that soundbite every 5 seconds)

 

Then there's map 5, and HOLY SHIT, it's just 80% copypaste from IWAD maps, no really:

 

0KHzt1O.png

bSGVkYE.png

(Unholy Cathedral)

YQz0r3N.png

(Ditto)

TDBGmzU.png

(The Citadel)

unue4RW.png

(Ditto)

UTSejBY.png

(the Factory, had the decency to retexture this one)

J3OEu4H.png

(The Spirit World (?))

 

Shameless, but a welcome change from the actual original content, which looks more like this:

1pYQLcX.png

I5cbUQu.png

(Yes, this is as boring as it looks)

ubyaHiG.png

(Every one of those square rooms at the top looks exactly like this, the Human SLIDGE returns)

 

Skipping ahead we get this awful map:

h95KFDC.png

9tlDORl.png

And what a disaster it is, ended before I even knew what was going on.

 

It eventually just ended and I was sat there baffled, this is a DBP? This looks like a shitpost, this looks, sounds and plays like a troll, it's fucking shit.

 

What a disaster, don't bother.

 

 

 

You forgot the part about the monsters being random for each spawn. Making the maps a complete crapshoot and having zero consistency. You basically have to hope you get a good dice roll to be able to survive some of the "less good" encounters.

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7 minutes ago, ABearInThaWoods said:

You forgot the part about the monsters being random for each spawn. Making the maps a complete crapshoot and having zero consistency. You basically have to hope you get a good dice roll to be able to survive some of the "less good" encounters.

Forgot about that, I just abused quicksaves after the first few bullshit deaths so I got to dodge that particular part.

 

It's not a hard wad, it is a cheap wad that will sucker punch you when you ain't looking and the idea of it being random makes it worse.

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18 hours ago, Silent Wolf said:

Very informative review. Out of interest, have the DBP people had a release thread here on DW? If not, why just on MODDB?


I don't want to get involved in the politics, but I think the beta thread for this on DW got removed.  

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Just now, Pistoolkip said:

I don't want to get involved in the politics, but I think the beta thread for this on DW got removed.

Ah, I see. I feel the same way.

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30 minutes ago, Gez said:

Is it actually DBP48? I mean, independently of the quality issue. It's not been added to the Complete Archive of Doomer Board Projects on the site so far.

 

It is. Confirmed by 40oz, much to the surprise of almost everyone on DB.

 

You're right about the lack of a release thread, but the wad is still undergoing bugtesting

 

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Fair comments, I'll work with the others to address some of the major issues.

 

I wish there wasn't a time limit, otherwise I would have spent more time on it. It is a bit tough with my personal and professional obligations.

 

The mod is meant to be played primarily with melee. It features a faster version of fist redux. Right click is kick and left click is punch. There is stamina, the mini berserker gives you 300 stamina. Basically you primarily punch and kick through the hordes of infighting enemies. That's how the game is meant to be played. That's the reason for the berserker and mini berserker drops. I recommend turning off auto pick up too, so to not break the flow of combat. Perhaps I should put that in a read me file.

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Special characters and spaces in the filenames..  that is already a -10 points in my book.  Does it hurt for those who use the terminal to add _ or - ?

This one seems really odd in terms of quality..  what the hell happened?

 

I didn't play it because the stupid main menu reduces my framerate to about 2 FPS..  forget that.

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5 minutes ago, Gibbon said:

Special characters and spaces in the filenames..  that is already a -10 points in my book.  Does it hurt for those who use the terminal to add _ or - ?

This one seems really odd in terms of quality..  what the hell happened?

 

I didn't play it because the stupid main menu reduces my framerate to about 2 FPS..  forget that.


Which sourceport did you use?

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21 minutes ago, Pistoolkip said:


Which sourceport did you use?

GZDoom 4.7, GLES renderer at 1080p.  Though my machine is hardly a gaming rig, it really nailed it on the menu.

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Because it's obviously crap, I(suddenly) decided to edit ENTIRE wad to be limit-removing, now I kinda wish theres was a UDMF-To-Limit-Removing converter, because it took me about few hours to remove all of "flat on walls & walls on floor" crap
 

Spoiler

G9GYkcF.png
uqbCyDw.png

 

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24 minutes ago, D1m3 said:

Because it's obviously crap, I(suddenly) decided to edit ENTIRE wad to be limit-removing, now I kinda wish theres was a UDMF-To-Limit-Removing converter, because it took me about few hours to remove all of "flat on walls & walls on floor" crap
 

  Hide contents

G9GYkcF.png
uqbCyDw.png

 

Wow, you edited the entire mapset to be compatible with limit-removing? I think that is going to please a lot of people who were upset about it only working for GZdoom.

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Ugh...

 

I have no idea what went wrong - but this is so far below the quality of even the worst former DBP projects that I really cannot believe it's made by the same people.

Just godawful - an instant nomination for a "Worst WAD" Cacoward... :(

 

 

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For Jason, I wanted to incorporate him in a way where he was sort of like Mr. X from Resident Evil 2. Especially since his aspect is represented by a single actor, while the others have hordes. By making him a juggernaut, he would feel as omnipresent as the other factions. However, you are able to defeat him. You need to attack the respawning black spectre cloud and kill it before it respawns him. Or kill him in a way that the cloud cannot spawn. I find fighting him, one on one in the hallway with a lot of kicks and punches with the berserker pack can defeat him.

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5 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

Ugh...

 

I have no idea what went wrong - but this is so far below the quality of even the worst former DBP projects that I really cannot believe it's made by the same people.

Just godawful - an instant nomination for a "Worst WAD" Cacoward... :(

 

 

We are all thinking what you just said.

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Hey, is what it is, I guess I'll have to do better next time.

 

1 hour ago, Graf Zahl said:

Ugh...

 

I have no idea what went wrong - but this is so far below the quality of even the worst former DBP projects that I really cannot believe it's made by the same people.

Just godawful - an instant nomination for a "Worst WAD" Cacoward... :(

 

 

 

One of the main reasons why a lot of people didn't join was specifically for the fact that it was for GZDoom. They wanted it to be a limit-removing mapset. Thus, there weren't too many contributors, and we were spread very thin with not a lot of time.

 

I wouldn't mind working with different source ports. My real contribution comes from my sprites and textures. I would just need to learn them.

 

17 hours ago, ABearInThaWoods said:

You forgot the part about the monsters being random for each spawn. Making the maps a complete crapshoot and having zero consistency. You basically have to hope you get a good dice roll to be able to survive some of the "less good" encounters.

I feel somewhat differently about it, I think can be amusing sometimes. But also, makes things spontaneous. Though it can be a crapshoot, and knowing you are dead before the second you start. I felt the spontaneous aspect was too much to sacrifice for a few lame starts from time to time.

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36 minutes ago, Kontra Kommando said:

 

One of the main reasons why a lot of people didn't join was specifically for the fact that it was for GZDoom. They wanted it to be a limit-removing mapset. Thus, there weren't too many contributors, and we were spread very thin with not a lot of time.

Nah, it wasn't just that it's GZDOOM, the project is a complete mess, that's why there was drama all month. You can't use time restraint as an excuse, you guys used an entire two months for the project where every other DBP was made in only one month.

Edited by lunchlunch

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Just now, lunchlunch said:

Nah, it wasn't just that it's GZDOOM, the project is a complete mess, that's why there was drama all month. You can't use time restraint as an excuse, you guys used an entire two months for the project where every other DBP was made in only one month.

Well I mean relatively speaking. I actually don't have a lot of free time to work on mods, and even less lately which was unplanned. That's actually why I haven't made anything in a very long time.

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21 minutes ago, Kontra Kommando said:

I feel somewhat differently about it, I think can be amusing sometimes. But also, makes things spontaneous. Though it can be a crapshoot, and knowing you are dead before the second you start. I felt the spontaneous aspect was too much to sacrifice for a few lame starts from time to time.

I'll just be blunt about it. It's not fun.

 

Randomness is one of those qualities to a game that needs to be handled with extreme care. Rougelite games like Binding of Isaac, Darkest Dungeon, even something simple like Vampire Survivors, have randomness baked into the core of the game but don't let it run rampant. It uses randomness to pull a set of specific scenarios and confront the player with the choice of how to tackle it. DBP48 just doesn't come off as a fully baked idea and suffers from some really poor decision making. Randomness comes off as a crutch to make it "interesting" or "spontaneous" but it doesn't really achieve that goal in action. It's just annoying.

 

For example, I played the first map and was close to finishing it... until I was killed by a 20 damage floor. After struggling against the monsters that changed every time I spawned in, after killing a Jason, painting entire rooms with green Predator blood, dancing around in pools of Alien slime, stomping Terminators, and fighting the occasional Doom monster, it's all just snatched away by a poorly telegraphed room that was entirely marked with 20 damaging floors for no explainable reason. That is not fun. 

 

I immediately quit and deleted the wad. I don't think you'll be able to convince me to play it again. Especially after seeing the SLIDGE map and the blatant map rips from IWADs. 

 

I congratulate you on releasing the project. It's a wad. Yet, I think you're going to find that people will not agree with your brand of Doom. I'm sorry if I come off mean but I think this is a harsh reality you need to accept, this isn't very good.

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31 minutes ago, ABearInThaWoods said:

I'll just be blunt about it. It's not fun.

 

Randomness is one of those qualities to a game that needs to be handled with extreme care. Rougelite games like Binding of Isaac, Darkest Dungeon, even something simple like Vampire Survivors, have randomness baked into the core of the game but don't let it run rampant. It uses randomness to pull a set of specific scenarios and confront the player with the choice of how to tackle it. DBP48 just doesn't come off as a fully baked idea and suffers from some really poor decision making. Randomness comes off as a crutch to make it "interesting" or "spontaneous" but it doesn't really achieve that goal in action. It's just annoying.

 

For example, I played the first map and was close to finishing it... until I was killed by a 20 damage floor. After struggling against the monsters that changed every time I spawned in, after killing a Jason, painting entire rooms with green Predator blood, dancing around in pools of Alien slime, stomping Terminators, and fighting the occasional Doom monster, it's all just snatched away by a poorly telegraphed room that was entirely marked with 20 damaging floors for no explainable reason. That is not fun. 

 

I immediately quit and deleted the wad. I don't think you'll be able to convince me to play it again. Especially after seeing the SLIDGE map and the blatant map rips from IWADs. 

 

I congratulate you on releasing the project. It's a wad. Yet, I think you're going to find that people will not agree with your brand of Doom. I'm sorry if I come off mean but I think this is a harsh reality you need to accept, this isn't very good.


This is pretty much it.  It needs to be fun.  Regardless of the vision or of “what it could have been”, in the state it was released, it absolutely is not fun.  People will not play things that are not fun.

 

It isn’t about elitism or about not liking DBP stuff (which I can tell you we all love here).  It’s just that it is not enjoyable to play..  and that title screen..  just use an image instead of 1000 monsters reducing frame rates to single digits.

 

For me, this has absolutely ruined the prestige that DBP had.  From Auger Zenith and the Dreamcatcher to this.  It is an absolutely huge disparity in quality.  I think all that’s happened here is poor time management, poor ability to push out a project that can be done in the time allotted and poor vision.

 

I don’t think I’ll touch another DBP project if this is what we will be expecting in the future.  It’s not only harmed the prestige but it’s harmed what DBP meant.  High quality monthly wads.

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This seems like shitpost/jokewad set under DBP name, you need a stroke of genius to understand and appreciate it. 

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20 minutes ago, Gibbon said:


This is pretty much it.  It needs to be fun.  Regardless of the vision or of “what it could have been”, in the state it was released, it absolutely is not fun.  People will not play things that are not fun.

 

It isn’t about elitism or about not liking DBP stuff (which I can tell you we all love here).  It’s just that it is not enjoyable to play..  and that title screen..  just use an image instead of 1000 monsters reducing frame rates to single digits.

 

For me, this has absolutely ruined the prestige that DBP had.  From Auger Zenith and the Dreamcatcher to this.  It is an absolutely huge disparity in quality.  I think all that’s happened here is poor time management, poor ability to push out a project that can be done in the time allotted and poor vision.

 

I don’t think I’ll touch another DBP project if this is what we will be expecting in the future.  It’s not only harmed the prestige but it’s harmed what DBP meant.  High quality monthly wads.

 

Those are all static decorations that use monster sprites. My computer runs it just fine, I have a Dell G7 17 laptop.

 

The irony is that I created Doomer Boards! lol

 

I think this is a bit dramatic, but for each is to own.

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Good for you, you have a gaming laptop.  On a non gaming HP first generation elitedesk it runs like trash, really.  I have an M1 Macbook too and while it is better there is still a huge performance dip compared to other demanding wads.

 

Why would I care if you created DB?  It’s a point and click creation with zero programming knowledge.  Big wooop.

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3 minutes ago, Gibbon said:

Good for you, you have a gaming laptop.  On a non gaming HP first generation elitedesk it runs like trash, really.  I have an M1 Macbook too and while it is better there is still a huge performance dip compared to other demanding wads.

 

Why would I care if you created DB?  It’s a point and click creation with zero programming knowledge.  Big wooop.

In all honesty, I didn't account for testing for performance on other computer models.

 

You could have a lot of programming knowledge, and not know how to start a community.

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Just now, GarrettChan said:

What? DBP has a non limit-removing mapset? I lost all hope on it now.

 

I find a lot of people were mostly turned off to that.

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