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bimlanders

What disappointed you about Doom?

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The great thing about the greatest games of all time is that they raised the bar for what you expected out of your gaming experience. When I first played Doom I was so blown away, but eventually I couldn't help but wonder, "why not this, or why not that" after literally thousands of plays. Of course, back then, I wasn't so educated on concepts like Deadlines, and Hardware Restrictions. But what were you hoping that there would be more of, or different when you first played Doom's original IWAD, and Doom 2, for that matter?

Mine: Doom 1

1) Hey, there are flat, inanimate sprites in this game! Believe it or not, it took me many plays through the Shareware to realize that objects like lamps, and dead bodies, were flat. I remember attempting to spy the other side of a Baron corpse and being horribly shocked that the image rotated with my view. Doom seemed so real to me that this was impossible to consider!

2) Music repeats. Every map in the shareware had its own tune. I really came to identify each map with its music, so finding music being repeated later in the full version was a disappointment.

3) Two new bosses in Registered Version, but only two new regular enemies, the Lost Soul, and the Cacodemon. And I hated the former with a passion.

4) Final Boss way too easy. I don't think I need to elaborate on this one.

5) Secret levels for Episode 2, and 3, not worth the effort of finding. I'd prefer secret levels to be like the one in the shareware: fast paced, challenging, but offering up plenty of secrets to get all the goodies you may have missed up to that point. The later secret levels were just gimmick maps.

Doom 2:

1) Only one new weapon. But the Supershotgun is still the most fun weapon to use in any Doom game.

2) Lacking episode format. I liked to able to choose between episodes each time I booted up the game.

3) No practical new bosses to mark the end of "episodes." The Icon of Sin was just a wall texture, really.

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2) Never realy thought about that but it is pretty disappointing. And surprising.. why could they have 20ish different songs for Doom 2 and not 30?

3) Hate the lost soul. Not a challenging enemy, just an annoyance.

4) After years of playing Doom either only multiplayer or cheating in single player, I can officially say the whole game is pretty much too easy. It seems there is a very fine line between too easy and too hard to enjoy, though. On UV the game goes from slightly harder than the other difficulties to all of a sudden I can't even play it after about MAP11.

One thing that always bugged me is the how completely different the single player game is vs coop. In single player you have to be able to finish the whole level without dying, period. In coop you can die 100 times. My buddy told me last night that next time we play it's Doom 2 Survival in Skulltag.

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I can honestly say nothing in Doom disappointed me. Hate to be a fanboy, but I feel Doom is perfect. That's the reason Doom still lives on today while other games have died quick deaths.

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I liked all secret maps.
E2M9 was really a kind of gimmick, though relative to the game's levels it was a new thing.
E3M9 was really cool - it was different from the other secret levels with a nice "hey!" effect.

Agree about missing episode format in Doom2 - would have been nice if the Doom2 things where more "coated" in additional episodic gfx.
But they didn't want to spend unnecessary workforce on something that was already dated... another "bleeding edge" title was already in the making.

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Environments not being infinite. I felt so immersed in the world I wanted to go and explore outside of the play area, expecting to see fully fledged planets and such. I had that itch for a few more years in any other game in the first person perspective as well.

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The only thing that disappointed me about Doom (and Doom II) was the lack of a Flamethrower. :P

While Doom does have some flaws, it still ranks as one of the greatest games I have played in my life.

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When I first played Doom, I didn't even think about what it could have that it didn't at the time. I just knew there were monsters, they needed to be killed, and I was scared to death by all of them.

Wolf3D was the same way.

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Not very much. Doom was a pretty flawless game and there was nothing about it that was disappointing. I was too busy shooting demons to try too hard at picking out faults.

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bimlanders said:

Doom 2:

1) Only one new weapon. But the Supershotgun is still the most fun weapon to use in any Doom game.

2) Lacking episode format. I liked to able to choose between episodes each time I booted up the game.

3) No practical new bosses to mark the end of "episodes." The Icon of Sin was just a wall texture, really.



that's pretty much what i thought too of doom 2, the game should have kept the episode structure with bosses at the end of each one. the icon of sin wasn't bad at all imo, just different from the fire breathing huge devil i expected.

i liked the episode structure from wolf3d and wished doom had 6 instead of just 3 episodes. at the the of ep.3, i had the BFG, ran toward the spiderboss holding down the trigger, expecting to be splattered like in the previous episode (well, strafing was an alien concept to me)...and instead, the boss just fell. eh?

however, i was pretty happy with both doom and doom2. my real disappoinment was the lack of any new enemy in both final doom parts. the afrit is one of my favorite creatures from the beastiary, it's so true to the original style that id should have made it, plus some imp variants. and the vaunted gatekeeper? nothing.

for all the weapon balance doom is known for, the shotgun and the chaingun could be a little more powerful, in both single player and deathmatch.

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Phobus said:

The community over-analysing the games.

Were people doing that in '93 though?

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I don't know, I was 4. I'd dare say yes, given all the magazine articles and stuff that Maes and the like keep digging up.

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Phobus said:

The community over-analysing the games.


Isn't that pretty much everyone here? To clear things up, I'm been a Doom fanatic since '94, and still am. I could write an entire ten page essay on what I would have wanted to see in Bioware's Baldur's Gate, but that's only my second favorite game of all time. I feel that great games open up the imagination, and have people wonder just how much better it could have been. Sadly, new generation games have shifted gears, so we can only wonder.

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bimlanders said:
2) Music repeats. Every map in the shareware had its own tune. I really came to identify each map with its music, so finding music being repeated later in the full version was a disappointment.

This mildly annoyed me when I first played the full version, especially E2M3's music. They can't use that music in a level, that's the intermission music!

This has nothing to do with the game itself, but I also thought it was a bit weird to have only about 20MB on the Doom II CD. Probably because CD-ROM discs were relatively expensive only a year or two earlier and I expected them to cram more data onto them. (I'm not sure what, maybe the shareware or something. Or was that already on there?)

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no regenerating health
no long cutscenes
no deep ambitious plot that you have to replay the game 3 times to figure out what the hell is going on
no motion controls which respond to your movements
no long loading times

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Porsche Monty said:

In retrospective, I think the hand sprite for the berserk pack looked like shit and was poorly animated, but that's just being arrogantly picky.


Although all the weapon animations are a bit choppy, I felt they really could have cleaned this up, too. To have the right hand just completely disappear like that really bothered me and still kind of does.

bimlanders said:

Hey, there are flat, inanimate sprites in this game!


I distinctly remember playing the shareware and actually being disturbed that the enemy corpses would "follow" you as you circled around them. It seemed to me that if they had multiple angles for walking, attacking and receiving damage, then why not the death animation, too? Of course, after awhile I realized that like a hundred extra frames of animation would have to be implemented, and for something so petty, too.

bimlanders said:

[In regards to Doom 2] Only one new weapon. But the Supershotgun is still the most fun weapon to use in any Doom game.


I remember being a bit pissed about this one. I immediately IDKFAD'd after running Doom 2 for the first time, and thinking, "Only ONE new weapon?" Perhaps if the game had been released a year later, they could have modified the engine enough to have a grenade launcher, flame thrower, or sniper rifle, or whatever.

bimlanders said:

In regards to Doom 2] Lacking episode format. I liked to able to choose between episodes each time I booted up the game.


This was not only disappointing, but a bit confusing, because if you use the setup program to manually start the game on a particular map, you can choose between three level sets: "Starport," "The City" and "Hell." It seems to me that id should have spent another week or so putting together some cool graphics to visually represent that in the game's intermission, rather than using the overly familiar "creepy skull mosaic."

Here are a couple of mine:

Ultimate Doom:
1) No fourth episode intermission graphic; just the creepy skull mosaic once again. I was really hoping to see something epic, especially considering how amazingly awesome Inferno's graphic was.

2) Episode 4's secret level was a bit of a let-down. It had this E1 feel, which kinda turned me off, since I prefer the second and third episodes.

3) Another E4 complaint! It's a great add-on, but I remember thinking that outside of the new maps and new background, there was no new content; maybe a couple of new textures, if even that. I wanted more surprises!

Doom 2:
1) I was a bit surprised that the engine had been changed so little since the original Doom that it was practically identical. I was thinking it was going to be a huge leap in terms of technology.

2) The first handful of maps are okay. They didn't impact me the way Doom's episode 1 did. I felt like (and still do today, to an extent) that Doom 2 didn't really pick up until Dead Simple.

Doom 64:
1) As much as I respect Midway for staying true to the old school while updating more minute details, I wanted a few Build features, like freelook, slopes and jumping. Initially I was expecting it to be a fully 3D game like Goldeneye or Quake.

2) Most of the reinterpretations of the enemies were fabulous, but the identical former humans/shotgunners, the four missing demons, the somewhat less threatening Cyberdemon and the occasionally sloppy death animations were lame.

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Just MAP30. I died laughing when I saw that the final boss was a wall.

That's really about it. I loved the original and remember it being a thing of magic when I located Doom2 on a random CD-R my dad had lying around. Fun times.

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-E3M8 of course

-The Doom II city maps. I don't mind them now, but when I first played I was expecting them to be all realistic and stuff.

-How easy episode 4 got after E4M2.

-Some of Sandy's shittier Doom II maps (Map09, Map12, Map21, Map24)

Phobus said:

The community over-analysing the games.

-People making pointless troll posts in threads they don't like :P

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The one disappointment in Doom 1 was the Spiderdemon from E4M6. I expected a BFG-firing boss, not another Wolfenstein-esque chaingunner.

Doom 2 had many more disappointments but I won't list them here. I don't feel like complaining about that. I'd rather listen the disappointments I've felt about the vanilla Doom engine:

- impossibility to add all new maps with custom names (i.e. no "map info" facility).
- impossibility to easily change sprites or (apparently then) flats.
- the fact that switches don't check for heights, allowing you to trigger them from any height. The fact that you can use them even when they're buried.
- seeing maps completed by demo-speedsters by exploiting physics bugs.
- that the Spiderdemon is even easier than the Cyberdemon than just by Dehacked values (Cyberdemons are specially more aggressive and have a safer hitbox).

However, really now, Doom is a very well made game. It has a very stable and user-friendly vanilla engine that never twitches to the mouse or other input (no matter the performance) and the monster movements and behaviors are well-defined. Even by modding, the mentioned limitations aren't crippling and can actually be bypassed.

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Doom - nothing really. It totally blew me away and was everything I hoped it would be and more. Even though I really like tech/base levels and (like so many other people) I am a huge episode 1 fan, E3M9 is one of my favourite levels in Doom.

Doom 2 - dull maps that didn't seem to represent what the "story" is supposedly about. Doom2 is, for me, an editing resource pack. I don't really like the levels much at all and there are some that I have only played a handful of times.

Doom 3 - is, for me, the biggest disappointment in Doom. For such a great game to have an utterly lacklustre sequel is just wrong.

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1) I agree that the monsters' dead corpses cannot be viewed in other angles other than the front.
2) Around half of the DOOM II levels are meh, starting with map 9.
3) The Hell Knight's sprites is just a color swap of the Baron of Hell.
4) I also agree that I wanted to explore outside the map, like the mountains in Episode 1, they're beautiful in my opinion.
5) Some songs are repeated many times throughout the game, specially Demons on the Prey played four times in The Ultimate DOOM.

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UltimateDoom: Only one music track besides the end screen had an evil/hell style, the one first used in e2m6.

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1. The secret maps of Doom episode 2 and 3 sucks!
2. The dead bodies looks the same when viewed in any angles, same as how they dead.
3. There's only 1 new weapon, the SSG in Doom 2.

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I played them when I was seven. Back then, the concept of a 'disappointing' game totally eluded my mind.

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TimeOfDeath said:

What really pissed me off about Doom in the early years was how effing difficult it was.


I've heard of complaints of this kind before and I never understood it. I played Doom 1 and 2 all the way through, on UV, as a kid, and never found it to be "effing difficult." Well, I can't expect everyone to have the same skill level, but it's not like I'm some Doom champion.

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