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hervoheebo

The pistol sucks

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Now that I got your attention...

I think that the pistol in Doom sucks. Well, it doesn't suck completely, but it could be a lot better. Namely, it's almost completely superseded by the chaingun. Now, there are some very niche situations where you may want to save a bullet and deliver the coup de grace to a cyberdemon with your sidearm. However, from what I've experienced, these "one bullet makes all the difference" situations are mostly romantic nonsense. If ammo is that tight, and said situations occur sporadically, the fault is usually in the player and/or the PRNG. If it happens consistently, you should look at the map or the player for a reason.

Ironic enough, the chaingun makes for a better sidearm for the Doomguy than the pistol. One feature that makes the chaingun stand from most other weapons is sniping. I think that the pistol should always have pinpoint accuracy, and the chaingun's spread should be present from shot one. This would help give all weapons an use. The chaingun is already great for clearing lots of weak enemies and stun locking monsters with a high pain chance.

But the pistol being weak as it is, this would weaken sniping considerably. Therefore the damage of pistol shots should be increased so its damage per second would come closer to the chaingun, but not so much that it'd become a viable primary weapon.

But that's just, like, you know, my opinion, man.

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Your point is valid but I don't think the pistol at all, sucks. I think it sucks without perkristians high resolution soundpack though. It's sound is just waaaayy too wimpy in 11,025 Hz.

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I don't think it sucks I just find it useless once you get a hold of the chaingun. Not to mention that the chaingun has a much more usefull feature of being 100% accurate on the 1st two shots...
That's why I found ways to put an end to pistol/chaingun "conflict" in my project making them both very usefull in their own distinctive ways.
The reason keeping me from saying "it totally sucks" is that when you start a map, at least you have something, which is better than nothing.

The only reason why I would actually use it is when I get hammered and get the crazy idea of playing though Doom using nothing but the pistol =)

40oz said:

Your point is valid but I don't think the pistol at all, sucks. I think it sucks without perkristians high resolution soundpack though. It's sound is just waaaayy too wimpy in 11,025 Hz.


I'd like to check that out for sure.

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Creaphis said:

I doubt the pistol was ever expected to be used for longer than the first half of e1m1.


This.

If playing a map from pistol start requires me to kill more than a handful of zombiemen and one or two imps maximum, it bores me to death instantly and I get really angry, hating the map from the beginning haha

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Other than those "niche" ammo-tight situations (which are all but unusual in a certain mapper's levels...), they have their use in puzzle solving (activating switches with exactly one shot, or damaging barrels from a distance for the minimum amount of damage possible without using your fists, e.g. to dislodge them as part of a puzzle).

However I'll concede that these are niche uses too, and except for the exploding barrels (or dastardly constructed puzzles) the CG would work just as well.

I almost forgot: the pistol lets you shoot with just one bullet left ;-)

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The pistol is awesome and has saved me many times...mostly because I like to spray rooms with bullets and waste a lot of the stronger ammo.

It's better than sluggin' demons in the face with your fist...imo...

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The pistol comes off as a sufficient firearm for first time Doom players. Zombie men go down in about 2-3 shots. Imps can be brought down in 5. Not too bad. On easier skill levels you never really are introduced to the shotgun until it's handed to you in the starting room of E1M3, unless you're really good at finding secrets, which from what I've noticed as of late, secret finding is an acquired skill.

I think it only sucks because us doomers are already predisposed to the range of high-tier monsters that are tedious to kill with the pistol. I like to use the pistol some times though because I found that I usually get much better at Doom if I spend more time in rooms with monsters alive than killing them as fast as I can. If you get more practice evading attacks by killing higher tier monsters with the pistol, you'll have less trouble when you play crazy difficult megawads.

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Give it a new firing sound and bam, you're going to love it. Same for the chaingun, Perk's high-quality sounds are nice and all, but they still sound too wimpy when fired and thus, makes them rather unsatisfying too use. Making the pistol burst-fire 3-4 rounds could also help making it more useful.

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Maes said:

.

I almost forgot: the pistol lets you shoot with just one bullet left ;-)

Invalid point,the chaingun also lets you shoot with just one bullet left.It will display its normal animation,but will shoot only one bullet.

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The Pistol isn't very useful once you obtain the Chaingun, but with "skill" you can gun down shotgun guys, Imps, and single Lost Souls due to it's high pain chance. Also it's useful if you want to conserve more powerful ammo if it's tight. However the Chaingun is essentially a rapid fire pistol and if anything that kind of annoys me. I once did a Chaingun mod that shot four bullets instead of two and used 2 ammo per shot (which translates to 4 bullets per burst), so on full auto it was an incredibly powerful weapon but this made gunning down even an Arch Vile hilariously easy.

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I've got to agree adding a new sound makes it *feel* a lot better, but it still sucks compared to the other weapons.

Always liked Quake more on that point, fast-firing shotgun as a starting weapon, actually fun to use.

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Phml said:

Always liked Quake more on that point, fast-firing shotgun as a starting weapon, actually fun to use.


Indeed, but then came Quake 2. Blaster. HAHAHA! Even worse than the pistol in Doom

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Phml said:

I've got to agree adding a new sound makes it *feel* a lot better, but it still sucks compared to the other weapons.


Let alone that them more badass a new sample sounds for the pistol, the more it will suck for the chaingun (damn shared samples...)

The worst offender is probably some random 1994 PWAD that replaced the pistol sound with a stereotypical Spaghetti Western gunshot, complete with hammer cocking and long ricocheting whistling sound.

Imagine how THAT sounded with the chaingun and zombies.

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pistol is valid if you dont have shotgun, to lock monsters in by painchance in tight areas, all that depends on map

pistol could have, as earlier mentioned, semi-automatic fire with low spread, or even reandomly limited recovery rate based on how fast you actually press fire in semi-automatic, so at first two shots it is really rapid, but after 5-10 shots or so you notice that it is a little bit slower than usual, or you just keep the same fire rate for 2-3 more shots before you maybe slow down or not .. and so on

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Speaking of useful pistols... Postal 2's semi-auto was so overpowered and accurate that it could literally snipe better than the dedicated sniper rifle: it was trivial getting 100% accurate 1-2 kill headshots well beyond the enemies' alert range, while other weapons fared much worse at melee range, when all hell had already broken loose.

Based on that, I'd give the pistol some extra damage at close range (let's say, a 10-20-30 damage spread) so that there would be a chance of taking down an imp in 2-3 shots and most zombies in 1-2.

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Can't say I'm a pistol fan at all. It's no fun to use and it's completely obsoleted by the chaingun. That and I never really cared much for the way it looks or sounds (though Perk's done a good job at remedying the second problem).

I really like how DV2 improved just the pistols while leaving the rest of the weapon set alone. Somehow it brings everything a lot closer together -- the dual pistols are just fun as hell to use there for some odd reason.

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I'd give the pistol some extra damage at close range (let's say, a 10-20-30 damage spread) so that there would be a chance of taking down an imp in 2-3 shots and most zombies in 1-2.


Probably why I liked Wolf3D's pistol so much.

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40oz said:

I think it sucks without perkristians high resolution soundpack though. It's sound is just waaaayy too wimpy in 11,025 Hz.


The sound is still way too wimpy even then. I think the pistol sound in PSXDoom64 is the best sound for it, and it has the added side effect of making the chaingun sound much better.

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I agree the pistol becomes almost completely useless when you have other weapons. I believe the Doom 64 pistol fired faster though didn't it?

Off topic, what about the shotgun? It becomes almost useless when you get the SSG. The only thing is that you can use sg for sniping.

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RDMonkey said:

I agree the pistol becomes almost completely useless when you have other weapons. I believe the Doom 64 pistol fired faster though didn't it?

Off topic, what about the shotgun? It becomes almost useless when you get the SSG. The only thing is that you can use sg for sniping.

Or killing imps and below if you don't want to waste ammo.

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Interesting thing I remembered last night - when you pick up the chainsaw in vanilla Doom, you can't switch back to the fist until you get a berserker pack, a valid sidegrade itself. But when you pick up the chaingun, it has its own weapon slot and you can switch between it and the pistol at will. This would lead me to believe that the pistol was not intended to be completely obsoleted by the chaingun. But how to fix it? "Berserker pack" for the pistol that makes it cost no ammo? Or one that makes it do more damage?

The mention about wolf3d's pistol was interesting, too, as I remember it was not completely useless even with the MG or the CG and felt somewhat satisfying to use. So how about scaling damage for the Doom pistol depending on range? For example x - x+5 point blank, y - y+5 medium range and z - z+5 for extreme long ranges.

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All you have to do is hit the 1 key twice to switch to the fist after obtaining the chainsaw. Even the shareware version had this functionality.

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The pistol is reason number one why I tend to prefer playing with weapon mods. A pistol can be the most versatile weapon in a close-quarters combat situation, so it confuses me why so many of these sorts of games limit it to a "fallback weapon" role. Granted, Doom's pistol can be used for sniping at the cost of roughly half its firing rate (another thing the chaingun does vastly better).

On the other hand, I don't like the chaingun very much, either - it's massively underwhelming compared to its predecessor, the Wolf3D chaingun. Oh, how I pined for a mod that would restore that weapon's powerful firing sound and blazing fire rate back in 1994...

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