Doom 1 or 2?

[dew]

what? i am not made of startan1 or uac crates!

[magicsofa]

HA! nice entrance

[Vegeta]

I'm not saying that DOOM 2 should be more realistic, the thing is that all DOOM maps fit with their respective episode theme, you have an idea where you are (in a base, in a base corrupted by hell, in hell). In DOOM 2 there are some maps that fit with their themes of course, but there are many maps that are just random (specially in the city and hell maps).
Map13 in example could be done a lot better if they added an extra sector surrounding each building. Maps like tenements, courtyard, gotcha, and others, while fun to play, they totally ruin the city atmosphere.

Some city decorations would have added to the atmosphere a lot.

I missed the nice dynamic interpics of DOOM, the victory screens (even the final bossback pic was lame in comparison with the end of E2 and E3), nice boss fights at the end of each episode (yeah, we have some battles here and there that could be taken as boss battles like dead simple, the first encounter with an archvile, gotcha, perhaps the first spidermastermind under a crusher), but they didn't were as satisfying as the ones of DOOM. The end boss being a fucking wall was also poor, they could have made something better yet as majestic with sprites.

[bimlanders]

I still can't believe that people are complaining in such detail about id's map designs from 1994. In the context of its release, it was awesome. You really can't fault it because people make more detail, realistic looking maps today. The game was fun to play, and that's all that mattered. Now I know that people are really comparing Doom 1 and Doom 2 here, but all we have in this argument is that ep1 looked like a tech base, and therefore it's better. I saw this game once called "Call of Duty" and I saw a lot of realistic stuff. I wonder what your priorities really are when you want everything to look realistic.

[DeathevokatioN]

The whole reason I enjoy the DooM series so much is to escape from reality and go a world with a surreal environment, so to be honest, a realistic earth would have killed the atmosphere completely and entirely for me in DooM2, but then again I guess it's safe to say that atmosphere a subjective thing when you think about it, my last post was at 2 AM, so I was doing more typing than critical thinking, heh. I don't want to walk around a map going, "ok so this must be the kitchen", or "oh so this must be where the passengers pay for their tickets to get onto the airplanes (on the air port map), eh? Everything makes sense now!". It would have been too distracting and would have looked horrible with the textures that they used. I want to walk around thinking about which trap or battle I'm going to run into next or about how much I hate it when they place a mob of revenants just around the corner.

And level 28 is awesome, damn you! >:(
hehe

magicsofa said:

I've played shitty 1994 wads that were a lot more fun - in my crazy opinion - than some of the modern wads with amazing detail.

Totally agreed, lots of those wads actually are much funner than modern realistic uber detailed wads! It's odd how mappers have lost the plot so much that they feel that fancy architecture determines how much fun you have in a game, and so they'll replace the balls to the walls action that made DooM so awesome, in favor of realism and detailing and one dimensional battles where monsters are placed where they look cool, rather than to create a certain style of battle.

Sorry for going off topic, but I figured that this is the official thread where people fling shit at stuff they don't enjoy in DooM wads and get away with it. :)

[40oz]

DeathevokatioN said:

Totally agreed, lots of those wads actually are much funner than modern realistic uber detailed wads! It's odd how mappers have lost the plot so much that they feel that fancy architecture determines how much fun you have in a game, and so they'll replace the balls to the walls action that made DooM so awesome, in favor of realism and detailing and one dimensional battles where monsters are placed where they look cool, rather than to create a certain style of battle.

That's not true! I can't speak for all mappers, but I for one have been spending a good deal of time making small test/experiment maps that test certain ideas for monster fights with numerous types of traps and trying to determine the fun ones from the boring or impossible ones, and saving them in a backup folder that I can review every now and then for ideas for traps to put in my future wads. One example is the yellow key room trap in my Abandoned Doom Advent Calendar Map that I once made outside of that wad and utilized it in this one.

[DeathevokatioN]

I probably should have elaborated a bit further, and also worded differently, heh. I didn't necessarily mean that a lot those 1994 wads are better than EVERY single Modern Wad. But that a lot of them are more fun than a lot of modern wads, because too much modern wads leave out the most important aspect, and this is GAMEPLAY.

UAC Ultra is awesome, but because the action is awesome and intense, and while looking great, the architecture has ALSO been built with fast pace fighting in mind.

Sorry for singling out wads, but I'm going to make some examples so you know what I'm talking about. It's more wads like The Lost Seraphim that annoy me with one decent level at the beginning, then the rest have terrible gameplay, on map 3 there is a massive fight where I spent the whole time swimming aimlessly around an island, looking for a way to get on this island while trying to evade 10 revenant homing rockets at any given time(that swim faster than you as well), getting attacked from all sides, by hordes of monsters including 5 cyber demons, about 20 cacodemons, and tons of revenants, and a lot more... after about 45 minutes I finally said fuck it and quit because I ended up with a massive headache, and still no way to get onto this island... this isn't what I call fun at all, and isn't what DooM is about for me. I played 3 minutes into map 2, it was supposed to represent a portal or something, so the whole time the player is flung across different directions along a set path through tight spaces, with monsters also getting getting dragged down these paths with what I think are wind scripts conbined with current scripts, and they shoot at you while they fly past... while it may sound like an alright idea, after a few minutes it gets annoying, and it looks pretty stupid as well. The maps (except for map02) look beautiful, but tried so hard to be unique and play in a melodramatic and gimmicky way that it wasn't fun at all.

http://doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=11446

Then there's Darkness Falls which has intense detail, but the fighting is terrible at best. The gameplay is one dimensional and monotonous, and uninspiring, as if monster placement was done in 5 minutes.

http://doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=15565

I'll take Eternity (Serenity 2) and DooM2 for that matter (and 95% of 1994 wads over Darkness Falls and The Lost Seraphim anyday.)

[fatal error]

Starke Von Oben said:

The levels on Doom2 are more abstract. But I do agree, the level design in Ultimate Doom is far better.

Perhaps thats why Ultimate doom is ported to more systems than Doom 2. Example: Doom for the iphone.

[Woolie Wool]

40oz said:

I don't really understand what this "realism" conversation is about. Granted Doom 2 had some pretty weird stuff in it, but if you ask me they captured the realistic aspect of it too, just in a much more low-def form. I mean, if you ask me, this area in MAP16: Suburbs easily looks like an abandoned condo if you use your imagination. Especially when you compare it to the drab monotony of Ravenholm in "OMG THE MOST REALISTIC GAME EVER" Half-life 2.

Ravenholm is about the worst example you could have used because Ravenholm was drenched in atmosphere and as creepy as fuck. The only place in HL2 that was creepier was Nova Prospekt. Half-Life 2 in general had no shortage of atmosphere.

[EvilNed]

fatal error said:

Perhaps thats why Ultimate doom is ported to more systems than Doom 2. Example: Doom for the iphone.

Or maybe it's because if you're gonna port Doom to anything, you might as well start with Doom 1.

[40oz]

Woolie Wool said:

Ravenholm is about the worst example you could have used because Ravenholm was drenched in atmosphere and as creepy as fuck. The only place in HL2 that was creepier was Nova Prospekt. Half-Life 2 in general had no shortage of atmosphere.

What the hell? Are you kidding me? You constantly run around inside of apartment buildings that are all basically identical. Just some square rooms with crappy hardwood floors, torn up wall paper and doorways in and out of each one. Throw some old matresses, a table with a tv on it, a cardboard box and some milk cartons and you got yourself a new room. Doom was the same thing minus the props.

[Mr. T]

fatal error said:

Perhaps thats why Ultimate doom is ported to more systems than Doom 2. Example: Doom for the iphone.

Doom 1 also had smaller architecture, less enemies, etc. in order to be able to run on a 386. Doom 2 required a better computer.

[Aldaraia]

40oz said:

What the hell? Are you kidding me? You constantly run around inside of apartment buildings that are all basically identical. Just some square rooms with crappy hardwood floors, torn up wall paper and doorways in and out of each one. Throw some old matresses, a table with a tv on it, a cardboard box and some milk cartons and you got yourself a new room. Doom was the same thing minus the props.

On the contrary, I remember much more in Ravenholm. Running across rooftops as you avoid those freaks chasing you and climbing up pipework, sneaking through alleys while desperately fighting those headcrabs and a classic brawl in the graveyard. Ravenholm was frightening.

[phi108]

With Doom, you have the initial basic setup of an FPS, so good level design is gameplay-intensive, and many agree that Doom 1 is superior to Doom 2. (I guess Romero did a super job of introducing the world to Doom with E1, though maybe playing that episode first hardwired all our brains to beleive that E1 gameplay is the best there is.)

But with the Source engine and Half Life 2, you have more lighting, sounds, scripting options, so you can make a horror/apocalypse/etc experience beyond what Doom can do, similar to what a movie does. It can have inferior gameplay to Doom, but people can be distracted by the experience. In my first HL2 playthrough, I didn't know what to expect. I just enjoyed the story and the atmosphere, but it does fail in replayability. The gameplay in H2 feels annoying and like a chore to complete, so you deal with it to see the new plot points like in HL2 EP2, but then you forget about it and go back to Doom where gameplay was the focus because that's all the engine could do.

[Mr. T]

phi108 said:

With Doom, you have the initial basic setup of an FPS, so good level design is gameplay-intensive, and many agree that Doom 1 is superior to Doom 2. (I guess Romero did a super job of introducing the world to Doom with E1, though maybe playing that episode first hardwired all our brains to beleive that E1 gameplay is the best there is.)

But with the Source engine and Half Life 2, you have more lighting, sounds, scripting options, so you can make a horror/apocalypse/etc experience beyond what Doom can do, similar to what a movie does. It can have inferior gameplay to Doom, but people can be distracted by the experience. In my first HL2 playthrough, I didn't know what to expect. I just enjoyed the story and the atmosphere, but it does fail in replayability. The gameplay in H2 feels annoying and like a chore to complete, so you deal with it to see the new plot points like in HL2 EP2, but then you forget about it and go back to Doom where gameplay was the focus because that's all the engine could do.

Yeah HL2 was pretty fun the first time through, but I never felt the need to replay it, it's just not really fun. TBH the best game from the HL canon was Opposing Force, and that wasn't even made by Valve lol

[40oz]

Aldaraia said:

On the contrary, I remember much more in Ravenholm. Running across rooftops as you avoid those freaks chasing you and climbing up pipework, sneaking through alleys while desperately fighting those headcrabs and a classic brawl in the graveyard. Ravenholm was frightening.

That's what I'm saying though. You do run across rooftops. Monsters do chase you. You do sneak through alleyways. Doom has the same shit. It's just not portrayed as well as a game that came out 6 years later. But it's definitely there. As I had already described in a few posts above, Doom 2 may not have the greatest maps, but I can still see what things are SUPPOSED to be. We're talking about level design anyway aren't we? That's what I'm defending.

[esselfortium]

A bit more episode-specific texture and decoration usage would have gone a long way towards making Doom's locations feel more believable. Seeing the same UAC-techbase doors and computers and blue carpets and such adorning apartments and the like really didn't help set a convincing location, and swapping them out for something more theme-appropriate would have probably made a big difference without having to change the map structures themselves.

[Woolie Wool]

40oz said:

That's what I'm saying though. You do run across rooftops. Monsters do chase you. You do sneak through alleyways. Doom has the same shit. It's just not portrayed as well as a game that came out 6 years later. But it's definitely there. As I had already described in a few posts above, Doom 2 may not have the greatest maps, but I can still see what things are SUPPOSED to be. We're talking about level design anyway aren't we? That's what I'm defending.

Well 1994 maps have a lot of those same features, but that doesn't mean they aren't hideous, ugly pieces of shit. Does the words "art direction" mean anything to you? What about "atmosphere"? I'm sure there's some shitty mid-90s wad set in a pyramid or tomb with Egyptian textures and it might technically have all the things AV map20 has, but it won't be one tenth as scary, and it CERTAINLY won't feel like something straight out of a twisted, evil mockery of an Indiana Jones movie like Misri Halek does, because the craftsmanship is not as good, the texturing sloppier, the textures uglier, the lighting more simplistic, and the atmosphere nonexistent.

The vanilla Doom 2 maps have ugly rooftops, ugly alleyways, generally ugly everything. They're just plain ugly, especially Sandy Petersen's maps. And many of them just don't look like any goddamn thing (see map06, map09, map10, map11, map17, map21, etc.).

[40oz]

esselfortium said:

A bit more episode-specific texture and decoration usage would have gone a long way towards making Doom's locations feel more believable. Seeing the same UAC-techbase doors and computers and blue carpets and such adorning apartments and the like really didn't help set a convincing location, and swapping them out for something more theme-appropriate would have probably made a big difference without having to change the map structures themselves.

Absolutely agreed. There appears to be much less of city appropriate textures available which is why I don't think Doom2's level design is at fault for why it appears to not look as good as oh say, the cities in Duke Nukem 3D.

I mean, there are tons of brown brick textures, but only a handful of windows, and pretty much no door textures or other city-styled things like graffiti and street lights and such which make it hard to create the homely environment that was to be desired. For what they had, I think they did a pretty damn good job.

[DeathevokatioN]

And I'll take some of those hideous looking 1994 wads over most modern wads that have hideous gameplay.

But whatever... haha

[Clonehunter]

Maes said:

You win the thread. Here's an internets.

This pretty much applies to anyone of you fags who actually read this shit... Including me.... So yah, I'm in the fag club now too....


Anyways, I think Myk up thier hit this right on the spot. (his first post, so I agree with all that.)

And, yes, ID did have Peter Pan in mind when making this game.

[DoomUK]

Hookay, I know I'm a little late in the day with this but I stumbled over Gamespot's review of Doom II for the Xbox360 which, according to the author, asserts modern shooters have so much more to offer in the level design department. The following passage is particularly disconcerting:-

Gamespot said:

One thing you can't really adjust to here is the antiquated level design. At some point between 1994 and today, game designers seem to have realized that making players wander around mazelike levels collecting keys and hunting for doors to open isn't always enjoyable, but Doom II's levels are built on precisely this concept. Things can quickly get frustrating when you find yourself going in circles trying to figure out how to proceed or consulting the minimap to determine where you're supposed to go next.

What. People don't like to be able to explore and be challenged anymore? Makes sense I guess. Linear level design is disturbingly fashionable in FPS' these days, and even sandbox-y shooters like Crysis (1) and Stalker have some kind of navigational aid which tell you where you're supposed to go. If wanting to figure out for myself where I'm supposed to go is antiquated then I guess my tastes are antiquated. I mean sure, technical restrictions meant that Doom's levels were confined to mazelike environments with switches as opposed to vast landscapes with an array of objectives to complete, but nevertheless this remains part of it's appeal and is, to me, still more fun than what the majority of contemporary shooters have to offer.

While the person who wrote this is perhaps just an idiot whose opinion is in the minority, reviews like this on well-established websites such as Gamespot feel like official statements on what people want out of games today, and since there's a market for uninspired linear shooters they will continue to be produced. While I'm not one of these guys who hates all modern shooters and games in general, no one is willing to take a risk and do something different.

[esselfortium]

I thought the press had stopped unironically calling game levels 'mazes' some 15 or 20 years ago. Speaking of antiquated...

[Captain Red]

Yes sir, I sure do miss the days where I spent hours lost in levels wondering what I was supposed to do next.

Sorry. There are things I miss about id's early 90's attitude toward game design, but 'confusing abstract levels' isn't among them. What you are calling "Challenge" is what most people call bad game design.

[_bruce_]

Dude should by a shepherd dog, an armlet and sun glasses... this would increase his navigational skill for sure.

[DoomUK]

Captain Red said:

Yes sir, I sure do miss the days where I spent hours lost in levels wondering what I was supposed to do next.

Sorry. There are things I miss about id's early 90's attitude toward game design, but 'confusing abstract levels' isn't among them. What you are calling "Challenge" is what most people call bad game design.

Please tell me you're joking.

[Rizera]

It might be antiquated, yes. Actually, I do agree on that. Sometimes the game can get frustrating when you spend hours looking for where to go and etc. On the other hand, everything is part of the challenge and I find it pretty adequate if the path you should actually head to isn't an mind-boggling puzzle.

To be honest, I find it pretty funny how fussy modern first person shooters can get, having hours of sissy and silly introductions, videos, cutscenes and etc. To even that up, they all have completely linear routes and paths to go. How come...

[Captain Red]

DoomUK said:

Please tell me you're joking.

I'm not really interested in having a dick wave about how good I am at old video games son, but There are people who post on these very forums and have done so for YEARS who admit that they've never actually finished Doom II without no clipping. You know why? Because the maps become cluster fucks of adventure game logic to get to the end of. Remember "The Living End (map29)"? you actually had to find a hidden door to finish that god damn map.

How about in Final Doom Plutiona "Impossible Mission (map22)"? You had to push a button to raise a platform to shoot some walls with demon faces on them to open a door someplace. The only clue was the button raised a platform. A puzzle like that had never come up before, nor was used since. It took me and my brother hours to work it out. A stupid puzzle out of absolutely nowhere.

While I don't think Doom would be improved with CoD like linear levels, It could learn a few things from modern video game design.

[hex11]

Coming from a heavy D&D background (playing since early 80's), I found the mazelike maps a pure joy to explore and lose myself in. Sometimes the map IS the challenge, even going so far as to dangle visible secrets in front of your face, taunting you. ;)

[DoomUK]

hex11 said:

Sometimes the map IS the challenge

This is precisely what I believe in. And for me, it was half of the appeal of Doom. I'm sorry Captain Red, but I like to feel like I'm getting my money's worth out of a game when it takes me ages to complete it and I rack my brain trying to figure stuff out. If I want to be thrilled for a couple of hours before a conclusion is reached then I'll watch a movie.