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Nikanoru

Do you ever play on Nightmare?

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Just wondering if anybody ever plays Nightmare mode seriously (other than for the hell of it, like "lol dude I'm getting pwned so much"), since I seem to notice UV being the standard for most people.

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Nightmare makes some maps more interesting, but more often than not it'll break the maps that I like to play (I usually play ZDoom maps that have a lot of scripts - Nightmare tends to screw things up sometimes).

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NM playing can be an interesting challenge for some maps, but I don't play it regularly. I don't particularly like its hectic atmosphere, although I do have, for instance, completed every map in Ultimate Doom (except E4M6, so far!) in NM from scratch.

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Yes, I love NM, though on almost all maps you need to have a route planned out in advance to have much of a chance. With that proviso, it provides a fantastic challenge and often quite an adrenaline rush.

Playing on UV with the -fast parameter is a good option if you wish to spice up a map but also want to play it without much pre-planning. I don't use that as often as I used to though, as nowadays I try to play Pacifist-style (or sometimes Tyson-style) if the map appears to allow it.

Actually, I don't particularly like killing monsters, and on NM there is the reassuring thought that most of those that you couldn't avoid killing will soon be alive again anyway. :p

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Nightmare is a great way to play coop. Especially with 4 people. It keeps the action constant.

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NM is for coop imo. When I play Nightmare by myself I get killed quickly and surely. My standard is UV. I hate the whole respawn, fast monsters, and strong monsters. If you get hit half your shit is gone. That annoys me.

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Kinda mostly just for a demo session on pwads. But it is fun sometimes to play on that skill level. :)

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Mostly on DOOM and DOOM II, and not that much on PWADs. But that has to with familiarity. It's sure worth playing if a wad is good, you're familiar with it, and it's not too tough on Ultra-Violence.

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Grazza said:

Actually, I don't particularly like killing monsters, and on NM there is the reassuring thought that most of those that you couldn't avoid killing will soon be alive again anyway. :p


Awwww, Grazza cares about the imps ^_^

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DarkFoxSoldier20 said:

I hate the whole respawn, fast monsters, and strong monsters.

Strong monsters?

Whenever I play a PWAD and suspect I could be able to finish it in NM, I try to record a demo. IOW, Nightmare is my favourite category for recording. But casually, I play UV, sometimes with -fast.

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I find Nightmare a very dull way to play. To me there is nothing fun or exciting about the monsters coming back to life or the way they behave with -fast. At best, I would consider it frustrating.

I like my monsters to stay dead (as Graf put it) and the -fast behaviour is not satisfying IMO. Sometimes the enemies hardly move, but just stand on the spot firing in a very unnatural way.

I find Nightmare a pointless extra menu option that clutters up my screen, and that is all. :(

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Nikanoru said:
since I seem to notice UV being the standard for most people.

I used to do that, and people who are boring do it. But really, the skill level to use for a map depends on its particular difficuly, unless its lame and lacks difficulty settings, and on the task one sets out to do. Nightmare! is naturally hopeless if one goes in for a monster killing foray, but is superb for speedrunning, either risky enduring runs (like Donce did here quite recently) or short runs, like Grazza's where he relies on speed and tricks to get by opposition. Or just check COMPET-N for a load of examples either way.

This thread also got me thinking about custom objectives in maps; such as "get the Partial invisibility sphere and exit" or "kill the Arch-viles, pick up the Computer map and exit" which would also work very well on skill 5, on many maps.

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Hmm. Interesting to see how opinions vary so much on this.

So would it be a good or a bad thing if someone tailored the Nightmare mode in one of their maps, enemies and items, to actually provide a serious non-speedrun playable experience (instead of just adding even more monsters and making it "totally unfair")? Just as an extra, that is.

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Occassionally I do. Then I just beat'em up with the crap out of everyone and molest my shotgun straight into their ugly faces. Ahh. Modern art...

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Nikanoru said:
So would it be a good or a bad thing if someone tailored the Nightmare mode in one of their maps, enemies and items, to actually provide a serious non-speedrun playable experience (instead of just adding even more monsters and making it "totally unfair")? Just as an extra, that is.

Not sure how you mean, because Nightmare! skill doesn't affect the arrangement of things on the map, it just changes the monster behavior and provides more ammo, otherwise it's like skill 4. Skill 1 is similar (adds ammo and decreases damage to the Player but is otherwise like skill 2) and basically the game has three difficulty skills in relation to item placement; easy (Not too rough), medium (Hurt me plenty) and hard (Ultra-Violence.)

In fact, when you make a map the flag for things allows you to place them ina any or all these three settings (easy, medium and hard) while "baby" and "nightmare" aren't part of the editing process directly (they go with easy and hard.)

If you were to make skill 4 easier you could get skill 5 to be more playable, but it'd still not be a standard difficulty because it would rely on the monsters being quick and coming back (making "100% kills" very hard to ascertain ingame.)

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myk said:

Not sure how you mean, because Nightmare! skill doesn't affect the arrangement of things on the map, it just changes the monster behavior and provides more ammo, otherwise it's like skill 4. Skill 1 is similar (adds ammo and decreases damage to the Player but is otherwise like skill 2) and basically the game has three difficulty skills in relation to item placement; easy (Not too rough), medium (Hurt me plenty) and hard (Ultra-Violence.)

In fact, when you make a map the flag for things allows you to place them ina any or all these three settings (easy, medium and hard) while "baby" and "nightmare" aren't part of the editing process directly (they go with easy and hard.)


Gah, yes I know, and I forgot all about that. Oh well.

If you were to make skill 4 easier you could get skill 5 to be more playable, but it'd still not be a standard difficulty because it would rely on the monsters being quick and coming back (making "100% kills" very hard to ascertain ingame.)


Yes, that was exactly my intention, for it not to be a "standard difficulty" but to be somewhat of a different gameplay experience, without being downright impossible or only suitable for speedruns. And I was wondering if that sounded like a good or a bad idea. ;)

Though I guess if you'd do something like that you'd essentially make UV worthless. Then again, you could just put the entire "conventional" difficulty in NTR and HMP, and not suffer too much from it.

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Texas Libra said:

I've only gotten as far as E1M3 on Nightmare mode, and that's after playing through the first 2 levels consecutively :(

E1M3 is a hard map for NM, as is Episode 1 generally. IIRC, stx-Vile ranked the Ultimate Doom episodes in descending order of difficulty: E4, E1, E2, E3 - and of course he really knows what he's talking about when it comes to these things. In E1 there's just lots of rapid fire from all directions, and it's very hard to anticipate where it will be coming from when you revisit areas.

Likewise, the first episode of Doom2 includes some maps that are quite tough on NM (i.e. where the difference between UV and NM is very large).

So don't give up on NM as a category generally just because you have inadvertently tried some that demand a high level of "Nightmareability".

Nikanoru: There are plenty of maps that are suitable for NM playing where you need to fight your way through the monsters, and where killing most of them (once or more) is the natural way to proceed. I don't recall many where UV has been kept deliberately easy in order to make NM more feasible, but plenty of the older maps (from a time when the average Doomer was much less skilled than is now the case) function in that way. The main things that make NM a huge jump from UV are:

  • lots of hitscan enemies
  • wide-open areas where the player is under attack from all sides
  • areas that the player must revisit (assuming there are monsters in them)
  • combinations of the above

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Nightmare is a good way to sober up.

I sometimes play E1 on nightmare, mostly because I've played it on UV too many times.

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SLIGE + Nightmare mode = possibly the ultimate challenge.

Kiss yo map familiarity goodbye. :P

Speaking of which. I need to figure out how to make SLIGE work on WinXP...

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I only play on NM when I'm really, really bored and only on ultimate doom or doom II. for pwads I'll only play on UV. like graf said, I like my monsters to stay dead.

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Little Faith said:

Awwww, Grazza cares about the imps ^_^

Too busy raping them. ^__^

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ravage said:

Too busy raping them. ^__^

Unless Grazza makes an amazing, witty comeback (like many Mods have been known to do), I believe that's good game.

I need to get looking at good Demos soon, to see how people beat this game on Nightmare!, so hopefully I can manage harder maps on UV. I can just see my title one day: "Worst. DooMer. Ever."

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I only play on UV. Not too much fun for me killing the monsters over again. I remember Duke Nukrem 64 on nightmare mode. Used to have fun with that because if you destryoed the bodies they would not respawn. Some one should come up with a mod for doom like that.

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Technician said:

Some one should come up with a mod for doom like that.

Wouldn't be very hard to do. You could even make it so that certain weapons "stun" enemies, while others kill them. Suddenly, I am reminded of the T1000 monster from that AvPvT mod. Basically, the monster would appear dead sometimes, but really only be in his pain states which were made to last very long. Makes for a tense battle when you aren't certain about whether an enemy is dead or alive.

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