What are you playing now?

[Lord_Z]

I have been playing through Eviternity and finished level 19 yesterday. It was a great map, if too long for what the rest of the set contains up to that point. It turns out it's really easy to break it in co-op too, haha.

[Rince-wind]

Doomish Den of Design (Yatte_Mimashou) - A map that teaches you map design. It teaches the basic dos and don'ts of architecture, level pacing and progression, monster placement and color combinations. I would consider these lessons more as guidelines than rules, creativity and experimentation in wads is always welcome in my book.

[FrancisT218]

Eviternity and Lunar Catastrophe from this year. Both are excellent wads, the former as a modern megawad & the later as a loveletter to UD, on par with or even beating DTWID. Lots of quality UD in the past year with SINERGY, Deathless, SPECTRUM, Eternal Damnation, and Gore as well. And perhaps UDTWID and SIGIL.

 

And for older wads, yet another UD episode Death Tormention 3 from 2005 (though using DTPACK.wad). Maps are challenging from a pistol start, especially without secrets, and probably on par with the top levels in WoS for quality.

[elend]

After having played MissBubble's and Count651's "Lunar Catastrophe" as well as Jimmy's "Deathless" recently I was really amazed by two things: The tight map design and "Vanilla Essence". Thus, I wanted more and have been checking out Crunchynut's "Sinergy", which was an awesome Ultimate Doom megawad with a shit ton of ideas, great, great visuals and just overal very memorable gameplay. Thus, I am now playing "Baculus" (also Crunchynut) and holy shit... did he ever get a Cacoward? Because he should get a Cacoward. Absolutely fun, tight little maps with a ton of ideas in every map. On top of that everything looks absolutely great and detailed, without being overbearing (vanilla style maps after all) or ugly due to stock assets. The opposite is true, Crunchynut shows immense skill of texture combinations, as well as sector lighting. Every time you think: "Yeah well, I could do that", please try... because only a few people can actually do it. That's the magic of those oldschool maps, they look and feel very simple on the surface, but if you look a bit closer you will see how polished they are.

 

All projects mentioned above come highly regarded and offer each a wholly different oldschool experience you just gotta see and play for yourself. Screenshots don't do those maps justice.

 

If I could recreate even just one map in this kind of style, I'd be happy already.

[Rince-wind]

classic1 (Jan Van der Veken) & Zar (Jeremy Statz) - Two short maps for Doom and Doom 2 respectively, focusing on vanilla gameplay.

Good if you want something quick and puchy to play through.

[Rince-wind]

Unknown Project (Morbid DooMer) - 2 maps for people who like shooting lots of monsters in cramped spaces.

 

Templum Dormiens Dei (Stormwalker) - One of my favourite Heretic wads, it's a single large level with great architecture and well implemented custom monsters.

A must play for any Heretic fan or for anyone who wants to get into Heretic wads.

 

Impromptu Minidido (rdwpa and others) - 23 mappers got together and each made one part of the map, ending up with a massive exploration heavy level with some intesnse fights and memorable set pieces.

[Andromeda]

Just played through Scythe. Favourite levels, in order:

1. MAP26: Fear

2. MAP02: Punchline

3. MAP30: Fire and Ice

Edited September 3, 2019 by Andromeda

[Rince-wind]

I'm going to recommend ALL of the Doomer Boards Projects because every single one of them is amazing.

[Rince-wind]

Switcheroom 1 & 2 - Two full megawads for Doom 1 & 2 whose gimmick is to take a level and mix it with another one from a different episode while keeping the original theme.

 

E3M1: The Baleful Fluids

 

Map01: Iconic

[sincity2100]

I'm Currently playing Doom 2016 and I'm actually immersed with the gameplay, I'm at Level 5 right now and the game is awesome so far.

[Rince-wind]

I Hate My Neighbors (Stanisáw "Chamelenoel" Grzyboówski, AnonimVio) - A 27 map megawad made in 2017, it consists of small and hectic levels with a noticeable difficulty curve. I foun this wad oddly charming, maybe because of the simple but competent level architecture and layout.

 

Map01: Mince

[Lila Feuer]

Beat Doom 1 on Nightmare for the first time, albeit on the Switch port, and not including episode 4 because of the utterly infamous E4M1. I can tell this isn't 'pure' nightmare as there was changes made to things like speed, or the lack of in some cases (normal pinky demons). Still, it made me see the game in a whole new way and still pressured me. Speedrunning is a must on this difficulty, and E1 was the toughest episode to overcome, especially E1M7. The rest was much easier, with only some difficulty spikes.

[seed]

11 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

Beat Doom 1 on Nightmare for the first time, albeit on the Switch port, and not including episode 4 because of the utterly infamous E4M1. I can tell this isn't 'pure' nightmare as there was changes made to things like speed, or the lack of in some cases (normal pinky demons). Still, it made me see the game in a whole new way and still pressured me. Speedrunning is a must on this difficulty, and E1 was the toughest episode to overcome, especially E1M7. The rest was much easier, with only some difficulty spikes.

 

What? They managed to bork NM twice?

 

They did this with the BFG Edition first but supposedly that got ironed out in a patch, now they repeat the same mistake? Fascinating.

 

From my experience, E4M2 is actually the worst offender in terms of difficulty. On E4M1 if you bump into the fence where the red skull is, you can grab it through the fence and skip the nastiest trap in the whole level. E4M6 can also make your day suck if you don't know what's the best approach to the map and the order to do things.

[3saster]

7 hours ago, seed said:

From my experience, E4M2 is actually the worst offender in terms of difficulty.

E4M2 is a lot easier if you know the cheese way of getting the BFG. Huge help if playing continuously too.

 

[seed]

2 hours ago, 3saster said:

E4M2 is a lot easier if you know the cheese way of getting the BFG. Huge help if playing continuously too.

 

 

Start always gets me on NM and UV -fast, I already know about tricks :p.

[Rince-wind]

I've been playing Joel's mapping contest wads, I'm sure most of the people in Doomworld know about this, but I would still reccomend playing them.

[Lila Feuer]

22 hours ago, seed said:

From my experience, E4M2 is actually the worst offender in terms of difficulty.

 

Yeah you're right, I actually did beat E4M1 today but E4M2 is pure RNG for me, I got as far as entering the mouth of the cavern with the spectres and cacos before ultimately giving up, as this was very quickly turning into the definition of insanity.

[seed]

55 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

Yeah you're right, I actually did beat E4M1 today but E4M2 is pure RNG for me, I got as far as entering the mouth of the cavern with the spectres and cacos before ultimately giving up, as this was very quickly turning into the definition of insanity.

 

The start is the worst part, it's brutal.

 

I think you also need to play aggressively on these maps, I found myself dying the most because I was too afraid to push forward harder. If you survive this, the only other nasty map is E4M6, the rest is easy in comparison.

[galileo31dos01]

I really didn't keep with this, but it's charming to see other people still do. Anyways, as for me, I've been replaying mostly favourite or memorable wads according to my mood. Lineup is TNT (iwad) - Ultimate Doom - BTSX:E1 - BTSX:E2 - D2INO - Ancient Aliens - Plutonia - Alien Vendetta - NRFTL - Eternal Doom (dropped on map 14 due to boredom change of plans) - Resurgence.... and now on Plutonia 2 for the fifth or sixth time in three years. Yeah that says quite clearly how much I like it :P

 

As for "new" stuff, the three wads in DWMC, all very good selections on their own. 

[BigBoy91]

Maxing Evilution currently. I was stuck on map 21 for a couple weeks and decided to take a little break from Doom altogether. Came back to it the other day and beat it and then I noticed a major drop in difficulty. Maxed maps 22 and 23 first try in one sitting. Love this megaWAD. Might actually be my favorite of the original 4.

[P41R47]

Struggle: Antaresian Legacy in Crispy Doom. Its a total blast to play and pretty difficult!!!
The dehacked work that Antares031 made is incredible!
Playes TNT: Evilution a few days ago... what a chore! i didn't remember it was that boring in the last levels. But well, now i had a fresh mind to tackle TNT: Revilution (although a little slaughter-ish to my taste, even in HMP) and the soon to come TNT2: Devilution.
Also Eviternity in LZDoom... but it lags a lot (my pc is old) in the snow levels because of the weather effect. I tried playing it with Glboom+ but... don't know... It feels really different. Now i'm playing it with DoomRetro and it plays pretty good and feel really old-schooley (a little too slippery in the snow levels, something that doesn't comes as a problem in Glboom+ and LZdoom).

[Rince-wind]

The S-Project (CarpetolA) - I'm really torn on this one. On one hand it's a really creepy wad with great atmosphere, on the other the levels themselves are mostly boxes connected to other boxes with dense monster placements (wich kinda ruins the creepiness) that you sometimes have to clear out. I'm pretty biased against this kind of gameplay, the kind I like is in the next wad, which is...

 

Hell Awakened 2 Episode 1 (Death Dealer, insanoflex312) - An incredibly punishing and insidious PSXDOOM styled wad with great architexture, I would recommend this to anyone who's masochistic enough.

 

The S-Project: MAP01

 

Hell Awakened 2: MAP04

[ironicmoustache]

Halfway through Revolution! right now. I'm a bit of a latecomer to Doom WADs so I figured I'd try and play some of the more notable WADs released over the past 26 years to try and get some sort of general overview of where things started and how far they've come, etc. I only ever played the base IWADs when I was a kid, and most of my Doom time in between then and the past maybe 1-2 years has been just going through the base games again, so yeah.

 

Back to Revolution: I'm enjoying it. It's not at all hard on UV, even for a mediocre Doomer like myself, but it's really quite fun. The bite-sized maps are a welcome relief coming from Evilution, and the size combined with the difficulty (or lack thereof) means that the maps so far have all been great for just keeping the move forward key pressed down and blasting things with the ever-satisfying SSG. Junk food Doom? MIDI pack is excellent.

[Rince-wind]

Tuning Contest#5 aka Freakmapping (Archi, Beewen, DragonHunter, Guest, Nil, Shadowman, Slavius) - In 2010 a competition was held for players to take a map created by a map generator and give it their own spin. While the quality of these maps varies, mind you there is no map I would call bad, the thing that surprised me the most is just how creative and out there the maps where (then again the maps where made by russians so it's not that surprising). The one element that is present in all wads is the incredibly high amount of detail and ZDoomisms on par with @Tormentor667 wads, so if you're put out by that, you probably won't have a pleasant time with these.

Still tough, no matter your preferences I would recommend this to everyone, if not to just have a taste of russian creativity.

 

The original map

 

fm5_shad.wad

[ironicmoustache]

Finished Revolution! a couple of days back. Charming megaWAD, could have been harder but it was nice to just zone out, enjoy the scenery and blast enemies with the SSG.

 

Now I'm on another classic WAD, Requiem. Up to Map 07 so far, really liking it. The final section of Map 05 was a bit of a pain with the barrage of sniping imps, though... 

[Archanhell]

Aside from the usual DooM and some casual Enter The Gungeon matches, right now I'm playing Skyrim.

As for DooM, I'm playing Project Brutality with Eviternity, some maps of Chapter 1 are cool so far.

[Lizardcommando]

I am almost done playing through Valiant (Vaccinated Edition) with my modified Eriguns mod. Tough megawad, but the levels look really nice, especially the Hell themed maps.

[valkiriforce]

I played Eternal Doom twice recently and I've been playing it for the third time now. Getting a better time on each map as I go!

[Juza]

1 hour ago, valkiriforce said:

I played Eternal Doom twice recently and I've been playing it for the third time now. Getting a better time on each map as I go!

Wish I had enough energy to get through Eternal Doom. The levels are massive.

[valkiriforce]

I did do a casual playthrough of it on YouTube not too long ago, but I took the time to kill monsters while trying to get through the maps quickly. This time I'm ignoring a lot of monsters and just rushing through it to see how fast I can finish some of the maps. I think Dark Dome recently took me over 15 minutes, but that was thanks to missing at least one of the needed switches to unlock the yellow key. Otherwise I seem to have most of the routes down to memory at this point. It's a pretty big commitment but I feel it's been worth it, and I may do another playthrough sometime so people can see the quickest routes.