Wow, Doom 1 episode 1 really isn't as hard as I had thought

[Stupid Bunny]

The first time I played Doom was when I was about 6 years old. My parents said I could play if they turned the monsters off first, in the hope it would be less scary that way. Which is very amusing because I don't know how many nights of sleep I lost after that.

Anyway, after rediscovering Doom 6 or so years ago I mostly played on HNTR, periodically needing to cheat to get past nasty situations. I'm working on beating every episode on UV (I've done so for E1-E3 and TNT so far.) Good fun.

[40oz]

StupidBunny said:

The first time I played Doom was when I was about 6 years old. My parents said I could play if they turned the monsters off first, in the hope it would be less scary that way.

How did that work out? That's like playing counterstrike without the terrorism.

[Stupid Bunny]

JohnnyRancid said:

How did that work out? That's like playing counterstrike without the terrorism.

Yeah...does it surprise you I didn't find the game all that fun back then? :P

[WillWater87]

Shamefully, I first started playing doom just about 5 and I thought it was very hard (Well as you can see, I was messing around at certain times), nowadays it's is easier, except Nightmare becuase it does play unfairly.

[Lich]

tubers93 said:

Shamefully, I first started playing doom just about 5 and I thought it was very hard (Well as you can see, I was messing around at certain times), nowadays it's is easier, except Nightmare becuase it does play unfairly.

I played it when I was about ten and I got my ass beat routinely.

Oddly enough, I can beat Nightmare on only the first episode of Doom without dying half of the time. As for other episodes and Doom II? No fucking way.

[myk]

Lich said:
Oddly enough, I can beat Nightmare on only the first episode of Doom without dying half of the time.

Episode 3 at least should be easier, because of the many invulnerabilities. E1 can be nasty on NM due to the many shotgun guys.

[Doctor Faust]

myk said:

Episode 3 at least should be easier, because of the many invulnerabilities. E1 can be nasty on NM due to the many shotgun guys.

Never seriously tried E3 in NM, but maybe I should give it a try. I could beat E1 in Nightmare, once you get the chaingun in E1M2 you can rapidly mow through the enemy as there are enough bullets (Amo pickups in NM count twice). If you try to use the shotgun as main Weapon the shotgun guys can become a real pain with their higher attack rate.

Doc Faust

[Lich]

myk said:

Episode 3 at least should be easier, because of the many invulnerabilities. E1 can be nasty on NM due to the many shotgun guys.

Shotgun guys are easily the weakest enemies that deal the most damage. But I've always been good at dealing with them as long as I have decent cover.

E2 and E3 sucks for me in NM because of Cacodemons. They're just Goddamn ammo sponges.

[PhilibusMo]

been playing since I ws 7, 10 years later and I still haven't beaten Doom2 on UV. Have beaten every episod of Ultimate Doom though, which I suppose is atleast something, and on UV. When I first started I couldn't get past MAP02, when you get the red key it seemed to become impossible and when I finally did get to MAP03, when you go up the lift to the outside area I became sure that it was physically impossible. Now i've gotten to MAP28 but can't get past it on ultra violence, I hate fighting Revenents in an open area. Slowly making my way through PL2 now, stuck on MAP11.

[Reevys]

I first played Doom when I was about 5 or 6, and managed to complete Doom on the lowest difficulty. I could never finish map 30 in Doom II though.

After that I spent 10 years playing PS Doom, so I was used to it's controls. I completed all the levels a good 30 times each on UV, and decided I was bored completing the same thing over and over, so I purchased Doom for the PC. I couldn't get used to the controls, however, so I bought an adapter that let me plug my PS2 controller into my laptop, and I was all set.

Since last month (which is when the adapter thingy arrived in the post), I've completed all 36 levels of Ultimate Doom, all 32 levels of Doom II, as well as this wad, all on UV. I'm currently working my way through The Plutonia Experiment, also on UV, and it's proving to be quite a challenge.

It is actually a very good way to play Doom, the controls work brilliantly. Definitely the best thing about PS Doom (which in retrospect is pretty rubbish).

[40oz]

E1 on Nightmare is so hard. E1M1 is pretty rough, E1M2 is cake, E1M3 is a bitch because of the backtracking, E1M4 is pretty hard too I don't think I've ever beaten that one. I can imagine that E1M7 had got to be hell.

[printz]

E1M1 on nightmare is easy, because all monsters appear in front, so there are no backstabs.
M2 is easy too, but beware not to have your health sapped by the many zombiemen.
M3 is very hard, especially from scratch. I was able once to survive it with the chaingun I got from M2.
M9 is probably the hardest of the episode, I usually skip it.
M4 is not too hard -- there aren't that many sergeants in it.
M5 is middle-of-the-road, you can use all those powerups in the supercharger area to your advantage, but don't ever do the mistake of opening the wall in front of the blue door.
M6 is only hard by the end, where you'll need good timing with your rockets against the specter hordes.
M7 is hard again, like M3, and requires lots of attention and secret management.
M8 is not hard, despite all those specters, which can be defeated, as well as the barons.

You want a really hard Doom Nightmare? Try Episode 4 :)

Original Poster, come back when you have finished Episode 1 on Nightmare and make another post with the same title as this one! Nightmare makes you Doom God.

[Doctor Faust]

JohnnyRancid said:

E1M4 is pretty hard too I don't think I've ever beaten that one.

Hi, E1M4 is not too hard if you know how to use the shortcut in this level. Watch Compete-N demos if you don't know what i am talking about.

Doc Faust

[ReFracture]

As a kid I used to always play doom with cheats as well, but eventually I got comfortable playing on UV. NM, to me, is completely pointless outside of the entertainment of watching speed runs for it.

[Eric Vaughn]

I made a custom wad called zenmode.wad that is placed in the parameters of my copy of Doom Builder, so any time I test a map that I am working on, any damage I take will gib me immediately no matter how insignificant the damage is or how much armor and health I have. I adhere to a mapping philosophy that a player should be able to beat any map without taking any damage in the process if they are skilled enough, so I rigorously adhere to this principle whenever I am creating a map.

This means a few things:
1) You have to be careful about how you use damaging floors or provide radiation suits if traveling across them without taking damage is impossible.
2) Chaingunners become the most dangerous enemy in the game.
3) The usefulness of invisibility artifacts comes into question.

I always called a map run where you beat the level without taking any damage a Zen run. I don't know if other people have another name for it.

Sometimes I play other people's wads while using zenmode.wad just for fun and I've never experienced tension like that while playing Doom before. Unforunately, some maps I play make damage unavoidable.

If I ever actually release a wad I will probably include Zen Mode as a difficult setting.

Are there any other source ports that allow you to modify damage multipliers aside from Zdoom?

[Lich]

Eric Vaughn said:

I made a custom wad called zenmode.wad that is placed in the parameters of my copy of Doom Builder, so any time I test a map that I am working on, any damage I take will gib me immediately no matter how insignificant the damage is or how much armor and health I have. I adhere to a mapping philosophy that a player should be able to beat any map without taking any damage in the process if they are skilled enough, so I rigorously adhere to this principle whenever I am creating a map.

This is quite possibly the most sensible method of playtesting and gauging difficulty that I have heard of. I'm going to employ this on a single player ZDoom map I've got going.

[myk]

Eric Vaughn said:
I don't know if other people have another name for it.

There's the "reality" category. Sometimes it also demands using only lower powered weapons (no energy weapons), but just "no damage" has also been used.

Making maps always playable this way should give certain restrictions to the use of hit scanners and damaging sectors. Personally, I don't see any problem in inevitable or practically inevitable damage situations, as long as the damage produced is somehow accounted for. In that case, for the player it's a matter of assuring that damage is minimal in those situations.

Also, if you make most of your testing that way, normal play may suffer from a lack of attention.

[Eric Vaughn]

myk said:

Also, if you make most of your testing that way, normal play may suffer from a lack of attention.

I make Doom maps for lunatics.

[ReFracture]

Eric Vaughn said:

I made a custom wad called zenmode.wad that is placed in the parameters of my copy of Doom Builder, so any time I test a map that I am working on, any damage I take will gib me immediately no matter how insignificant the damage is or how much armor and health I have. I adhere to a mapping philosophy that a player should be able to beat any map without taking any damage in the process if they are skilled enough, so I rigorously adhere to this principle whenever I am creating a map.

I don't really agree with this. Maybe if you're playtesting for HMP, but UV should not be subjected to this kind of testing. It's Ultra-Violence for a reason.

[Creaphis]

Yeah, that's kind of a strange way to balance levels. Making sure that levels can be beaten without taking damage may be a good design principle, but I would say that the ideal player should be able to accomplish this, and not necessarily us fallible mortals.

[Eric Vaughn]

Zen Mode is essentially an extra difficulty level, so I can test it on the other levels just by starting a new game and choosing the difficulty level I want.

I probably worded myself incorrectly before. I do test it on UV regardless because I need to make sure that the health pick ups are in good places (I can play a little bit lazy there). That being said, I don't apply the ideal of an average player onto my maps. I am very strictly into extreme difficult by choice and I know other people like maps like that too.

[myk]

Creaphis said:
Making sure that levels can be beaten without taking damage may be a good design principle, but I would say that the ideal player should be able to accomplish this, and not necessarily us fallible mortals.

Well, you don't have to, but if anything it may make play easier otherwise. Any situations where some damage is practically unavoidable would be eliminated.

To force no-damage-play, you'd have to reduce health to 1 and eliminate all healing items, or the like. This could easily be supplied as an option, with an extra DeHackEd patch making the changes for Doom (or Boom) or even as a menu entry in advanced source mods. In the latter case you could force it entirely, as well. But it's true that if it's only tested that way, it may be the only way to play it in a balanced way.

[Eric Vaughn]

myk said:

This could easily be supplied as an option, with an extra DeHackEd patch making the changes for Doom (or Boom) or even as a menu entry in advanced source mods.

In ZDoom you can modify difficulty settings and apply damage multipliers. I achieve my desired effect by simple multiplying the damage by 99999. For some reason, this is so strong that it will kill you even if you have god mode on. Might be a bug with the way god mode works.

[ReFracture]

Eric Vaughn said:

In ZDoom you can modify difficulty settings and apply damage multipliers. I achieve my desired effect by simple multiplying the damage by 99999. For some reason, this is so strong that it will kill you even if you have god mode on. Might be a bug with the way god mode works.

It kills you for the same reason that telefragging kills you even with god mode on.

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Telefrag#Technical

[40oz]

If a good map is one that is possible to be beaten without taking any damage, than are you saying that medical kits are around for weaker players?

I can't say I'm the greatest doom player ever, but I do know enough that I am pretty damn good, however I do intend to make a use of all available medikits and stimpacks whenever possible. In fact, forcing myself to make sure I dodge every single fireball and every single bullet reduces the fun in taking risks in doom, and the medikits are there to aid those consequences.

Eric Vaughn said:

In ZDoom you can modify difficulty settings and apply damage multipliers. I achieve my desired effect by simple multiplying the damage by 99999. For some reason, this is so strong that it will kill you even if you have god mode on. Might be a bug with the way god mode works.

Someone posted a video made by the guy who made The Sky May Be and he explained what the wad was about, and in demonstration of the weapons he made, he mentioned that Doom's source code allows projectiles to deal damage well over 10,000 or something, which can kill you even with god mode on. I guess god mode not being absolutely impervious to everything is what makes telefragging possible.

EDIT: yeah somehow I made this post with complete disregard to what Mike Reiner beat me to saying.

[Enjay]

I dunno, to me part of Doom is managing your health. It's almost like a fuel that allows you to motor around the levels and you have to manage it as you do any other resource. Removing that removes some of the fun IMO.

Also, if you set up a map to avoid places where damage is highly likely or you limit where hitscanners are just to make it more likely to be able complete the map without getting damaged, surely you are just replacing one form of health replacement with another? I don't see that placing the enemies in such a way as to make this kind of play easier is any different than not doing so but giving the player a medikit after a battle.

If this is supposed to be some kind of "reality" mode, do enemies really place themselves in real life to give their targets a fighting chance? Actual reality is often standing with your mates somewhere in a battle field and the next moment a bullet from an unseen attacker, or a mortar that you could never have seen coming (etc) kills you and that's that. You never knew what happened and you had no chance to do anything about it. But that kind of reality simply isn't fun and Doom is meant to be - so we forgo that kind of reality quite happily.

And finally, it is possibly in real life to sustain an injury but keep fighting (albeit, perhaps, in a limited capacity). So a "no damage" rule, if it is done for the sake of "reality" simply isn't correct IMO.

[myk]

Enjay said:
And finally, it is possibly in real life to sustain an injury but keep fighting (albeit, perhaps, in a limited capacity).

Realistically it may imply slower movement (if any), a constant red haze (like being dazed, groggy, or having bloody eyes), a disability on one arm, and so on. I guess the idea is that even one bullet impact on an unarmored body part is potentially disabling, so any damage is unacceptable. It's just an excuse for another way to play any level, really.

[Enjay]

myk said:

It's just an excuse for another way to play any level, really.

Now that's a good reason to do it. Just another way to play which gives a different type of fun. I can go for that. :)