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Gougaru

Longest Doom break

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What was the longest you went without playing Doom, and what was the reason you needed a break? What made you come back? 

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Longest break would probably roughly be from 2015-2020 or so when I was in university and wanting to do something more with my life, like probably 5 and a half to 6 years. Also, severe depression and desire to play more games were probably responsible for my other and many breaks. Even then though, I might still've played something every so often, so maybe my longest break is really more like 3 1/2? It's safe to say that I stopped at even semi-regular basis in 2015 though. Probably when I saw a Mt.Pain video linked on Facebook(I still considered it a favorite game, regardless of how much time I'd spent with it), heard of the Wadazine from a comment on his video, and plunged at the beginning of 2021.

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Does playing Doom a bit as a kid on a Super Nintendo at a video rental store and then not playing Doom again until I get my own computer decades later (and only doing it to be a contrarian, as Doom 3 had just been released and people were criticizing it for being too different) count as a break? :P

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In about 1998 when I was about 14 I decided that I had become utterly obsessed with Doom 2 and mapping, as well as Duke Nukem and mapping for that. My personal life was suffering in every way; bad grades, hardly any friends, I was staying up all night, and my physical and mental health were suffering. I made a conscious decision to give up video games. It was the right choice and I grew and developed in important ways that I would not have been able to if I hadn't made that decision. It lasted for 14 years, until 2012 when I rediscovered Doomworld after seeing modern screens shots from Doomworld posted on Imgur or something.

 

More recently I took a 2 year break as my life got too busy. I was working full time, in several bands, and running a live music venue.

 

Fun Fact: I'm running sound at a Fury Convention right now! No, I'm not wearing a suit...

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Maybe when I was overseas for 4 weeks mid 2013 and did not take my laptop on that trip. :D

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The longest break i took from mapping was maybe two months.

 

The reason was i caught the doom mapping bug and i got burnt out in the end of mapping all day, everyday. As far as playing doom. Not very often 

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2010-2015ish?: i was on too much dang quake 3/quake live (back when it was browser only!) and a whole lot of other multiplayer frustration inducing programs, both console and pc. i'm aging way faster than i expected, and i lost my patience for electronic sport in its myriad forms in the process, especially after getting yelled at time and time again by a "teammate" for breathing (supplying body with what is ideally oxygen in order to live).

 

my dooming has been off and on since then. both playing and mapping, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for a year or two. mostly on since earlier this year, as i've been working on at least throwing some (hopefully completing more than one!) sector layouts down again before going back to working with brushes in trenchbroom, for whatever can take a quake .map and make it playable in whatever engine.

 

no matter how long any future breaks may be, i don't think i will ever 100% lose interest in doom.

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I stopped playing/mapping in 2002 because I had other interests.  I started playing and mapping again right around 2012/2013 because it sounded like a good time and I needed a new hobby.

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Like sixish years from 2003 to 2009, since then it's been on and off annually, my biggest return in 2009 was discovering Skulltag, that year I went positively Doom crazy and then learning DECORATE a year later. I'd say activity as of 2021 picked up astronomically as last year alone I finished around eight megawads, most of which were returns of wads I haven't seen in easily a decade or more, and since just mopping up what I missed circa 2003-now. That means for instance, I never played any of the Scythes.

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Longest break I had was around 11-12 years.

 

Played Doom as a kid from around 2001 to 2003/2004. Only played the original iwads and on the original exe back then. Eventually moved to other games after losing interest in Doom.

 

Came back to Doom at around 2014-2015 after discovering the huge modding scene and source ports that brought QoL features to Doom. Initially, Brutal Doom was the big reason for impressing me, but later on I gave contemporary mapsets and megawads a try. Valiant was brand new and very talked about at that time and I just had to give it a shot and BOY was I sold. Felt like a proper expansion pack as it had new monsters, environments, textures and a new boss fight.

 

Things just spiralled from that point :D

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I think I can beat everyone who's posted so far (not that that's good or anything).

 

I first played Doom in the DOS days, but just the shareware. In '98 I got Ultimate Doom95 as a birthday present, picked up Doom 2 for Win95 within a year of that, and discovered mapping tools I could actually use somewhere around '00-01. I was somewhat active in the early aughts, including here (though that was under a different name). Never released much of any particular importance. Made a megawad, but never released it because I kinda rushed to the finish and didn't have the interest anymore to go back and give it the polish it deserved (despite friends at the time telling me I should release it).

 

I don't recall when exactly I "left" (knowing myself, I didn't "leave" so much as just faded into the void). But the primary mapping for the megawad was done in '03 at the latest, so generously speaking I'd say I "left" in '05, making mine a 17-year gap.

 

Every so often I'd replay Doom/Doom 2 for funsies. On this year's occasion of such, I played my unreleased megawad afterwards and started making a big list of things I would have to change if I wanted to release it. I didn't think I'd actually go through the list, but I'm up to Map14 now and I've done at least partial reworks of at least 3-4 maps, so... yay progress?

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I may go silent from time to time and sometimes not play Doom THAT much, but I don't think I've ever completely stopped playing Doom since around the time it was released.

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2015 to 2021

 

Simple reason is that I didn't have a proper computer during that time after I abandoned my windows 7 desktop when it (probably) got some malware on it, and being a teen at the time, didn't fully understand proper file transferring.

 

Now I got a macbook and I've definitely been digging deeper into the community and the game (Megawads, Source Ports other than GZDoom, vanilla compatible mods on the vanilla EXE, Demos, 💖💞DeathMatching💘💝) than I've ever done during my teens which I mostly just remember playing Ultimate Doom on PS3 until getting stuck on e3m7 and beating Doom 2 for the first time via Brutal Doom and IDCLIPing on the IoS (which I have tried "rectifying" by going thru it via DSDA-Doom pistol-start-no-saves-UV-MAX but gave up and moved straight onto plutonia after the double whammy of Barrels-o'-"fun" and the Ch*sm)

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1995-1998 was my longest break. The reason should be obvious. When more modern FPS games with higher resolutions appeared, Doom's pitiful 320x200 pixels did not cut it anymore. I only got back when I got a source port that could do 640x400.

 

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Don't remember exactly, but can't have been more than 6 months.

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5 hours ago, IcarusOfDaggers said:

Break: About 10 years. (better games to play)

Reason to get back to doom: Doom mapping :D

This…. Ok well not quite this, but probably 2-3 years? Reasons same tho. 

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I played Doom for the first time less than ten years ago. At first, I just played through Ultimate Doom on UV, probably messed around with Brutal Doom for a bit afterwards, but then lost interest and played other games instead for a couple of years (maybe a little more than two years, maybe less). When I got back, I replayed Ultimate Doom and had my mind set on finishing the game on Nightmare, which turned out to be an insurmountable task, infinitely harder than UV. It was around this time that I finally played Doom 2 and Final Doom, and started getting interested in wads. Since then, I've been addicted to this game and never spend more than a few months without playing it. Originally, I was hoping to get good enough that Nightmare difficulty would be reasonable, but I gradually came to care more about custom content instead.

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about 7 years, between the ages of 6 and 13.

 

my ma banned me from it because I was apparently making threats to the kids in class, even though i remember no such thing

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2 years, got a computer and played TF2, then it just kinda "steam" rolled into b=playing better games.

I used gba doom at the time, on a gba port on my phone. forgot about it due to school, until I got recommended civvie's vid and decided to play again using gzdoom and zandronum, broleg's port.

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A couple years back (it's all a bit foggy) I completely burned out on Doom, especially with the mapping. Took me a year to get back into it. I had one of those episodes this year where I fried my doom brain for about 3 months.

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3 hours ago, Doom_Dude said:

Took me a year to get back into it. I had one of those episodes this year where I fried my doom brain for about 3 months.

 

Fortunately by the end of the third month, our intrepid Doom Dude unscrewed the top of his head, plucked out the fried Doom egg, slapped it on a piece of toast and ate it. The source of protein helped him grow a new and stronger Doom brain, so he's all better now and making even better maps. :^)

Edited by Biodegradable

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Active from release until 1998ish, a few months in late 2000s, from late 2021 and now on my way out again. So, multiple decade-long breaks. Motivation was mostly lack of time / better games to play / dissatisfaction with community trends.

Edited by Thelokk

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i remember taking a break immediately after being introduced to alien vendetta cos I thought there was no way I could ever beat the maps

lol how right I was

but when I came back I started fairly obsessing over Hillside Siege and Toxic Touch, feeling good about beating them then becoming aghast when shown death-destiny stuff and Joshy maps which were fresh at the time and realizing the tiny wave of impossible was only the harbinger of a series of much larger waves of impossibility. by then I realized there was other stuff you could do with Doom, learned to not worry about being the best player and more or less became enfranchised (weird version.) i still take breaks every year though

 

edit: Morrowind is also to blame haha

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I didn't really play from when I sold my PSX to buy a Dreamcast until the Unity port dropped on Switch. I did play a bit on GBA and I bought the Xbox 360 versions but didn't really play them, bought them in Steam in a bundle years ago but only got round to Doom3.

 

It was from the add-on section in the Unity port that I first discovered pwads. I was always aware people made Doom maps but I'd played the Master levels on PSX and kinda assumed they were the best efforts and they weren't that great. So the fact people were still making them and many were far better even than the Id made stuff blew my mind.

 

So yeah a break from maybe 2000 to 2020. Funny thing is I thought for years I'd outgrown or got bored of FPS with only a few exceptions but it just turned out none were ever as good as the first one I played. As someone who flits around between multiple games the fact I've played one game constantly for a few years now is incredibly out of character. Maybe I'll stick around this time.

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I played Doom when I was like 5 or 6 years old. All I remember after was occasionally playing Doom 95 in years 2000-2013 and only really came back in 2013/14, when I discovered source ports, ZDoom specifically, as I was looking for a way to fix some Doom bugs, especially those in Doom 95. So it was not 14 years completely without Doom, but extremely occasionally and not consistently.

 

I went through a ton of megaWADs in years 2014-2020 or so. Since then, I haven't really played, giving the community time to create more megaWADs before I come back again. I think I might do it next year.

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I kinda left this place and stopped DOOM mapping; only ever playing occasionally, quite rarely at that; in the early 2000's and returned in the early-mid 2010's. So about a decade.

In short, I was wrestling with depression and burnout which I felt my mapping exacerbated; I may or may not have been wrong at that. Returned out of a desire to get back on the wagon and someday make an FPS with my old skills, which I felt fully capable of.

These days, I don't think I'd quit again but I haven't touched a map editor in almost a year; I lurk, mainly, and know that one day soon I may well take up the mantle again.

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I think I've been playing intermittently since 2013. My biggest breaks were probably during 2019 when I was the most busy and playing other games. I think the most I've gone without playing is around 5 months.

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About 14 years for me, between the early 2000s and the mid 2010s, which seems to be a pretty common timeframe based on this thread.

 

I actually remembered my old login information here, so have a nice 14 year gap between posts (I'd be curious to know if anyone has a longer gap!).

 

To put it reductively, I left because I got pulled into mapping for other games (Q3A and Doom 3 specifically), and came back due to nostalgia. I made a post about it when I first joined (and discovered how amazing modern map editors are).

 

I think in hindsight, as I got older I was looking for a creative outlet, and Doom mapping seemed to be the one thing I could reliably do. I like the idea that something I've made will still be around and occasionally played for years, even after I'm gone. Because as well know, Doom is pretty much eternal at this point.

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