Should Doom have had a BFG-wielding enemy?

[Captain POLAND]

One of the conventions from lots of older shooters I like (Descent 1 and 2, Dark Forces, etc.) was that there would be an enemy (usually the final boss) who would use the player's own most powerful weapon against them. It felt like a fitting conclusion and challenge for the final fight of the game. So I've always been kind of disappointed that Doom never had an enemy that used the BFG.

 

Maybe for the final boss of Doom II, instead of the Icon of Sin, it could have been a larger, scarier-looking Cyberdemon, with somewhere from 6000 - 10000 HP, and it would have exchanged its rocket launcher arm for a BFG. Maybe it could also have a secondary attack, like a super chaingun, in order to keep the player on their toes while the BFG recharges, although that might be overthinking things.

 

What do you think?

 

 

[Decay]

Only if it was the beta bfg that looked like christmas

[ViolentBeetle]

BFG as it currently implemented is screwy, but I think the logic of BFG from Doom 3 onwards (Projectile that shoots at player) would work.

[Uncle 80]

Imagine how fun it would be for players not knowing the Doom engine behaviour inside-out fighting a 10000 HP Cyberdemon wielding a BFG on their first playtrhough!

[Captain POLAND]

22 minutes ago, Uncle 80 said:

Imagine how fun it would be for players not knowing the Doom engine behaviour inside-out fighting a 10000 HP Cyberdemon wielding a BFG on their first playtrhough!

 

Conversely, imagine how fun it is for players who don't know the trick to the Icon of Sin fighting it on their first playthrough. At least you can damage the BFG Cyberdemon with any weapon.

[baja blast rd.]

Yes but a zombieman.

 

You shoot it thinking it's a normal zombieman and then instead of dying its eyes glow red and it starts sprinting around at lighting speed spamming BFG at you and taunting you in the chat.

[Decay]

Sounds like the average exec match

[Mr Masker]

It has a powerful BFG projectile, but it dies in 1 hit to literally anything. The perfect glass cannon.

[magicsofa]

1 hour ago, Captain POLAND said:

Maybe for the final boss of Doom II, instead of the Icon of Sin, it could have been a larger, scarier-looking Cyberdemon, with somewhere from 6000 - 10000 HP, and it would have exchanged its rocket launcher arm for a BFG. Maybe it could also have a secondary attack, like a super chaingun, in order to keep the player on their toes while the BFG recharges, although that might be overthinking things.

 

Yeah that would have been pretty cool. Too bad there's no way it can be accomplished with modding...

[Artman2004]

If I could give an enemy a BFG, it would most likely be the spider mastermind. It is supposed to be the final boss after all.

[ViolentBeetle]

In brief, faithful copy of BFG would be obnoxious because it'll be hitting you from behind in unexpected ways.

[PsychEyeball]

The Sky May Be featured imps that shot BFG projectiles and experiencing them should teach you this is a bad idea.

[Lucius Wooding]

I don't think an effectively AOE hitscan weapon would be very balanced or fitting to use against a single player. Also, think about the kind of strategy and movement an opponent would employ with said weapon. It simply wouldn't make for good gameplay, especially if the opponent had thousands of HP. You'd be hiding all the time and if you peeked out to shoot at a bad time, you'd be one shotted. There's no way most players would understand how it works, as well as having to keep track of each projectile and when it hits walls. 

 

At least something like the archvile hitscan is balanced since it's tied to the animation cycle, not some cumbersome mechanics around projectiles. But Doom was never about the bosses anyway, they've always been the most shit enemies to fight and there's no way around it. Doom is about hordes of various monsters, terrain, and managing chaos.

 

Based opinions:

Spoiler

Come to think of it, I don't think I can come up with a single fun boss fight from an FPS; the closest I can come up with would be something like Metroid Prime or RE4 but they really aren't pure shooters. Usually it's just a tedious health sponge that takes ages to kill while you run around and take cover. A lot of modern games seem like they try and incorporate a bunch of Dark Soulsish dodging and countering by adding extra movement mechanics. That stuff is fine if you're keying in on one enemy that commands your full attention and you react to their cues or be punished. Since Doom doesn't have any of that, it's much better suited to more of an open combat style where you read and fight multiple very simple monsters at a time.

 

 

 

[Gregor]

BFG-wielding monsters? Oh God, no. Didn't you watch Doomkid's DeHackEd video?

Edited November 30, 2022 by Gregor

[xX_Lol6_Xx]

It's possible in theory, but in practice, IDK how well it would play

Spoiler

 

 

[SealSpace]

Only if it was directly applied or transplanted onto a new final boss as an integral part of is weapon set or attacks or something. 

 

For a regular enemy, that'd probably be a no-no. Balance would be distorted and fucked up beyond repair.

 

Though that being said, if I recalled, isn't there a BFG-wielding Zombie in one of the Doom mods on some videos whose names currently escapes my memory?

[Xyzzу]

BFG dudes are cool and the concept should be played with more.

 

[SealSpace]

An Icon of Sin itself using the BFG-ball (and maybe its tracers) as an additional attack to the Boss Cubes dealing instagib damage through telefragging in the form of a more tangible actor for the player to directly encounter and target against would have decisively been the better way to go, methinks.

[rzh]

I think it can be telegraphed easily, with a few seconds of warm-up before attacks.

The final boss could have a chaingun, homing rockets and a BFG.

The chaingun takes a few seconds to rev up, with some sprites/ frames of animation indicating it is doing so, deals constant damage and stops instantly.

The homing rockets get fired faster and also deal splash damage. Same deal, warm up is required.

The BFG takes the longest to fire and a fading green overlay like the ones used for picking up items, berserk, rad suits, taking damage etc. could indicate when the tracers stop dealing damage so you instantly know when it's safe to get out.

[The Dommo]

NO. I don't care if you are someone who religiously plays slaughtermaps or has beaten Plutonia on Nightmare! pacifist for the 6532th time this week, that is inSANELY overpowered.

[7Mahonin]

Always felt the spider mastermind would’ve been more threatening with a BFG, was faster moving, more aggressive, instagibs you if you get too close because it stomps on you, and perhaps unable to go into the pain state until it is very close to death. 
 

Though, I don’t think BFG enemies are that big of a threat compared to live players using a BFG. There’s a reason there’s a certain method to using the BFG in Deathmatch, and why using it the way you would in singleplayer usually doesn’t work.

[baja blast rd.]

More seriously, the conveyance part would be an issue, sure, but (high-HP) BFG monsters tend not to be especially fun to play against even if you're good at it. Unlike a monster where you visibly 'dodge' an attack of some kind -- whether avoiding a projectile or interrupting a hitscan/vile or even suppressing a PE or staying out of range of melee -- so what, you moved out of the way of the squelch sound? Uh, not a lot of feedback there. Doesn't feel especially like you did something skilled. Nor is it reliably possible to avoid the attack by a tiny amount and know you did it, which can be a lot of the fun of regular attacks ("Holy shit that almost hit me" or "Yeah I meant to do that 8-D"). Dying to them won't feel especially satisfying either -- it will tend to feel like a cheap death even if you mess up and 'earn it', again because of the lack of feedback. A good part of the fun of dangerous attacks is that dying to them can feel fun too. 

 

It'd help a lot make the monster's tracers more like a fast-moving messy field of projectiles, emanating like a cone from the monster itself, so that when you move behind a pillar, you see all those projectiles whizzing past you and you get that satisfying feedback of "yeah I dodged that shit, cool." Would have been impractical back then but it could work in a modern wad. Of course that would also help a ton with conveyance too. But funny how 'making it fun to fight when you're good at it' solves that too. :P 

[Snaxalotl]

With a boss enemy it could work, but giving zombies access to rockets or bfgs would turn into a nightmare quickly. A plasma zombie would be neat though, which is probably why you see way more of those.

[baja blast rd.]

1 minute ago, Snaxalotl said:

giving zombies access to rockets ... would turn into a nightmare quickly

 

For the zombies maybe :P 

 

 

[Maribo]

Everyone in this thread should give Map 11 of Judgment a good college try. :)

[Argent Agent]

5 hours ago, Decay said:

Sounds like the average exec match

Or Judas23_ match

[bofu]

The boss from Quake II had a BFG, but the implementation was a bit different — the ball moves slowly and does ray damage to everything it sees. If someone could implement that, it could be a potentially interesting enemy boss fight. You might even be able to do that with a custom projectile and some real janky (MBF21) DEHACKED or less janky DECORATE magic. In fact, I'm all but certain there are projectiles that do that in DoomRL Arsenal. (The Monsterpack also has a Spiderdemon BFG variant.)

 

I don't think there needs to be an enemy with the BFG as it is in Doom, though. The BFG is a janky weapon that operates counterintuitively: it doesn't draw line of sight from the projectile when it explodes, but from the player that fires it, and only in the original direction of the weapon. It has no basis in reality whatsoever, which is fine when it's a weapon that the players have equal access to, but when it's a monster shooting it? Nah fam, it's not really fun. It'll either be trivial and unengaging or force the player to play 4D chess with their movement paths depending on how the level is laid out. Rapid fire, homing, or explosive projectiles would make for a far more interesting enemy.

[Xyzzу]

1 hour ago, baja blast rd. said:

It'd help a lot make the monster's tracers more like a fast-moving messy field of projectiles, emanating like a cone from the monster itself, so that when you move behind a pillar, you see all those projectiles whizzing past you and you get that satisfying feedback of "yeah I dodged that shit, cool." Would have been impractical back then but it could work in a modern wad. Of course that would also help a ton with conveyance too. But funny how 'making it fun to fight when you're good at it' solves that too. :P 

The changes I made to the inquisitor in Strife mostly fits the bill here. This BFG alternative could make for a really fun enemy in Doom, one that's more clearly intimidating than a zombie :D

 

[banjiepixel]

6 hours ago, Captain POLAND said:

Maybe for the final boss of Doom II, instead of the Icon of Sin, it could have been a larger, scarier-looking Cyberdemon, with somewhere from 6000 - 10000 HP, and it would have exchanged its rocket launcher arm for a BFG. Maybe it could also have a secondary attack, like a super chaingun, in order to keep the player on their toes while the BFG recharges, although that might be overthinking things.

 

I feel that dual weapon setup and being even more of a damage sponge would be too much, especially if that secondary attack would be a hitscan attack. Keeping the rocket launcher as secondary attack or short bursts of plasmagun firing would be more fair and fun. Or maybe just the boss would switch between normal bfg attack and the beta bfg attack. And personally I really wouldn't give enhanced Cyberdemon with a bfg attack and a secondary attack any HP beyond 5000 HP. If anything, I would rather nerf it to have same amount of health as spiderdemon (3000 HP) and make the new boss have more dangerous attacks instead. Unless the secondary attack would be monster spawning, then having more HP would make much more sense and it would create fun loop of boss basically wiping it's helpers with bfg shot and then summoning more while recharging the bfg attack.

[banjiepixel]

1 hour ago, Snaxalotl said:

With a boss enemy it could work, but giving zombies access to rockets or bfgs would turn into a nightmare quickly. A plasma zombie would be neat though, which is probably why you see way more of those.

 

Both rocket and bfg variants of zombies exist in Complex Doom and are generally fine as long as they are much more rare than more normal versions. Also the basic rifle zombie is replaced with plasmagun zombie with rifle zombie's attack pattern. These are generally the least problematic of the new monster variants, I would say that SSG zombies and Quad Barrel Shotgun zombies are much more nightmarish.