Doom 2 The Way id Did [Final Beta Released!]

[Devalaous]

40oz said:

haha probably a BFG Edition homage.

Oh my god, if this is true, this is amazing and makes this a must-play.

Quick, someone sneak one of the developer's terrible 1994 levels in as a secret MAP33!

[Tarnsman]

Meh is all the criticism I need.

[Xfing]

Not liking D2TWiD is like not liking Doom 2 itself.

I have heard similar voices of discontent regarding DTWiD too. Hopefully Thy Flesh Consumed will shut them up.

[pavera]

Guys, don't you see? This is exactly the criticism we were looking for. If d2twid had been universally well received as a great mapset, we would have failed in our mission!

[Marcaek]

We're all too happy to hear about what issues anyone has with the set. What we don't want is useless posts that have absolutely nothing we can use to improve the experience.

[Tarnsman]

Meh tells us that the experience was a bland, unexciting, and boring pile of mediocrity not worth saying more about :P.

[esselfortium]

Tarnsman said:

Meh tells us that the experience was a bland, unexciting, and boring pile of mediocrity not worth saying more about :P.

Perfect! We've met our goal!

[pavera]

Tarnsman said:

Meh tells us that the experience was a bland, unexciting, and boring pile of mediocrity not worth saying more about :P.

What is a meh?! A miserable little pile of mediocrity!

[pcorf]

The MAP15 Secret Exit room needs to be retextured to CRACKLE4 or something like that if there is not going to be any Wolfenstein secret levels.

[sgtcrispy]

Ok, ok, calm the heck down people.

Bad mood + boredom = Over reacting = Meh.

Anyway, I'm replaying and am currently up to map12. Will finish the rest tomorrow. While I'm still not convinced at the epic god status that others are proclaiming, it is growing on me.
However that being said so far I have a few notes.

Map01: Looks slightly better than a dwango map. No map01 vibe at all.

Map02: Better than map01, but still not getting the feels.

Map03: A bit more complex/detailed than the original but tasty.

Map04: Good map but once again too detailed/complex. Plus it doesn't come close to capturing the look/feel of the original. Revenants? Why so soon?.

Map05: Lava bad. Bad!

Map06: Solid map, but again a little much for so early on.

Map07: Mancubi and Arachnotrons shouldn't be together. So sayeth the lord! ;) Feels more like Doom 1 than anything. Plus the Mastermind is a bit much no?

Map08: Speaking of Doom 1...

Map09: Needs to be a little smaller maybe? Not bad.

Map10: I like it.

Map11: Not quite the same vibe but good map.

Map12: Need to go through it yet, but why is all the brown Water damaging? Really? Seems to have the right vibe though.

Conclusions so far... Mostly decent maps so far, but lacking in the original Doom 2 vibe/feel.
Will report back tomorrow. With 98.3% less meh!

[esselfortium]

Brown sludge is always damaging in the IWAD.

MAP04 is already slated for authenticity overhaul™.

There are several predominantly Doom 1-themed levels in Doom 2.

[Xfing]

Levels feeling like D1 is nothing bad. Several levels that made it to Doom 2 were made with D1 textures, as they were originally intended to appear in D1. Authenticity would only demand that such levels are included.

[Avoozl]

Well I just tried it and well I feel map01 may just be a little too simple in comparison to the original MAP01, particularly because of the cracked cement wall outside the windows of the first room and the lighting looks a little off for some reason.

[Guest]

So. Feedback.

Map 01:
-Decent little introduction to the set. Feels a little bland, probably needs more detail.

Map 02:
-Far too square and blocky. Needs some angles to offset all that blockiness. Especially the red key area beyond sector 66. Not an angle in sight. It really cheapens the look of this level. Too blocky and too little detail.
-Why does linedef 463 have a S1 Exit level (Go to secret level) action on it?
-The use of SUPPORT3 in this level is crap, being used predominantly on 32 length linedefs instead of 24. I understand trying to imitate the 'oldschool misalignments' of the original Doom2 iwad, but if this is the case, then it has gone too far in this direction. Also some SUPPORT2 linedefs to break up the TEKGREN areas would be better.

Map 03
-Another decent little map cheapened by being too blocky. Some more SUPPORT2 and -3 textures could be used throughout. Get some angles in there too.
-Also getting some darker areas in there would help. There is nowhere on this level darker than 128.

-Map 04
-Other than again being a little too blocky and square, a decent little map. The red key fight represents a massive difficulty spike compared to the rest of the level, but overall pretty good. Maps 2 and 3 need overhauling more than this one does.

Map 05
-Still too square, and the lava would look far better as nukage, as well as being more appropriate to a map this early in the wad. And still more SUPPORT3 abuse. But otherwise an interesting and well made map.

Map 06.
-linedef 651 needs to be impassable.
-Alright. Enough with the intentionally misaligned SUPPORT3 already. I understand occasionally doing this, but not on every single map. In the first 8 maps of the Doom2 iwad, only Map 05 did this, but even there the majority of SUPPORT3 were on 24 length linedefs, which actually looks good. Map 08 used some also, all on 24 length linedefs. So only 1 map in the first 8 had misused SUPPORT3.

Map 07.
-as mentioned, feels like Doom1 more than Doom2. But otherwise, a really unique take mo the map 07 thing. The mastermind is probably a little much for the easiest difficulty settings. There is a major HOM on linedef 193, which doesn't add to the level much.

Map 08
-Looks and and feels far more Doom1 than Doom2, but otherwise a pretty good level overall.

Generally many areas suffer from being a little too conservative. Dark areas are considered kinda 'cheap' now so rarely do light levels drop below 128 anywhere here. Overdetailing is 'bad', so some of these levels have gone too far the other way, being actually underdetailed in places. The first 4 maps need varying degrees of work. Maps 5 to 8 are generally pretty good.

[Alfonzo]

Thanks for taking a look here, Kyka. A couple of points to address:

KiiiYiiiKiiiA said:

Map 02:
-Far too square and blocky. Needs some angles to offset all that blockiness. Especially the red key area beyond sector 66. Not an angle in sight. It really cheapens the look of this level. Too blocky and too little detail.

Taking a look at McGee's contributions, most of his decisions to draw an angle that wasn't straight up square were made when he was forming interconnecting passages (such as in Underhalls or The Focus) or more natural looking height variation (The Crusher's nukage river). At the moment I feel that geometrical authenticity is one of the fronts on which we've been most successful when it comes to McGee layouts.

-The use of SUPPORT3 in this level is crap, being used predominantly on 32 length linedefs instead of 24. I understand trying to imitate the 'oldschool misalignments' of the original Doom2 iwad, but if this is the case, then it has gone too far in this direction.

I'm not sure it's possible to too convincingly imitate an author's style in a project that demands you do precisely that, and we can't afford to cherry pick which aspects of the game's design we want to replicate on account of it then failing to meet the project goal. While it would of course be questionable to implement these decisions at the cost of entertainment, we thankfully don't have to: Doom 2 sports a unique brand of gameplay that many people find fun to play, so we can get down to the task of recreating the game as best we can without worrying about pleasing a wider audience or selling it all short.

Besides, the ability to say "this area looks too appealing" or "that path is too balanced -- make it an inferior path that nobody ever wants to go down first" is something that's way too fun. You'd be hard pressed to find such a style of development anywhere else (...maybe in Evilution The Way TNT Did)!

Map 03
- [...] getting some darker areas in there would help. There is nowhere on this level darker than 128.

Possibly, yes! We'll see what essel has to say. I think it could be a little too uniform in its lighting, although part of its apparent brightness could be due to the texture selection. bigbrick1 and other Waste Tunnels associates tend to make areas appear darker than their actual setting would imply.

Map 05
- [...] the lava would look far better as nukage, as well as being more appropriate to a map this early in the wad.

I know Pavera had a few concerns with using lava as the dominant liquid flat in this map, but I think it presents itself as something McGee might have decided to do. Lava is used in map06 in a couple of places, so it doesn't feel out of line with the E1 theme in my mind.

Overdetailing is 'bad', so some of these levels have gone too far the other way, being actually underdetailed in places.

I can't say I agree with this, for the most part. The Gantlet and The Crusher epitomize bland, American level design, and you can really only flag up maps like The Inmost Dens for its vertex count (the largest in Doom 2) if you're prepared to conceded that almost all of it is poured into things like that obscenely ornate cut-out in front of the exit.

[40oz]

I know this is isn't standard protocol to desecrate the sacred "first impression" by not playing this in UV, and I'm probably the only person here who is going to make a judgmental opinion based on playing on a difficulty as desensitizing as skill 5, but sometimes being pitted against unfair circumstances can say a lot about the authenticity in the design of the levels, beyond aesthetics and visuals alone.

Anyway, I can genuinely admit that beyond a few screenshots, I haven't played any one of these levels by themselves until just now, and I'm kinda doing a blind run into unforgiving territory, using my knowledge and acquired skills from the Doom 2 IWAD alone, and so I'll be careful in my choice of words to not indicate that I thought anything was "too easy" or "too hard" given my choice of skill level.

So, here are my demo attempts at MAP01-MAP03, MAP04, MAP05, and MAP08. I didn't bother doing a recording of MAP07 guessing in advance that you guys probably didn't design a boss battle that would be easier than dead simple, but I did run through it to look around, and will have to get back to completing it another time. I have a demo of MAP06, but it's not a first because I accidentally saved over it and had to make a new one, the second recording was significantly better.

http://jbserver.com/forums/attachments/8348_d2twid-40oz-nmfdas.zip

My impressions were that the first couple maps, while mostly survivable in Nightmare, tended to have a lot more monsters than I anticipated. They might just be more spread out instead of lumped together in such a way that Doom 2 does, and there seemed to be a lot of cases of "windows everywhere" where I was highly exposed which I don't remember happening as much in Doom 2.

It's tough to say much because you guys probably have your replies ready to refute everything that can be said with specific Doom 2 History research, but I've made the mistake of glancing at the authors to all the maps in the map list, which broke the authenticity barrier for me, as everyone's specific mapping details inevitably showed no matter how hard they tried to cover it up. It's hard to describe why I'm not sold on some of these maps as I'm trying to avoid the pedantics of "This isn't right because its not the way id did it, but you can't do that because that's the way id did it."

I thinking I could have been convinced if I had played it at 320x200 resolution, and this had arrived in the mail on a CD with an installation package, and I had been playing it at my mom and dads house on our old PC, on the computer desk and old brown carpets we used to have before they remodeled their living room to really set the it's-not-2013-anymore mood.

I did surmise early on when this was announced that I wouldn't find this particularly convincing, mostly because of how inconsistent Doom 2 is, and how finding that perfect level of 'varied but not too varied' would be nigh-impossible. And I think if this were more of a 1995 the way the community did wad, it would make a lot more sense. Somehow I wonder if a project like this would have benefitted from having a "buddy system" where each mapper got their designated playtester, and they worked together side by side to ensure that no quality of their maps fell through the cracks. I think some maps would have gotten the attention they deserved that way without the mapper being overwhelmed by large numbers of varying feedback. But then again, I wasn't there.

There's something about Doom 1 that made the original DTWiD thread that much more exciting but it's hard to show the same enthusiasm for this. Still yet, the levels are very fine and dandy, have a lot of character and are very fun to play for the most part. But I think I'm more excited for Doom 2: The Lost Episode where all the overflow maps would be compiled, and the weight of having to feel immersed is lessened.

Also one more thing is that I managed to witness a lot of instances of "two medikits paired right next to each other" in.. well a lot of the maps so far. I could take a few screenshots, but I utilized them a lot in my demos. That probably wasn't a concious design decision, but I felt as though I was getting my butt kicked in some of the maps because health wasn't spread out as much because of it. idk though.

EDIT:
I poked around in an old thread I made a long time ago called If Doom 2 were a PWAD, how would you review it? anxious to see if the same criticism Doom 2 got in that thread were the same it got here. I did see some similarities. I suppose a fun inverse would be If D2TWID were your IWAD, would you sign up to Doomworld.com?

[pavera]

I'm going to comment on MAP05, as this one seems to be receiving the most divided opinions out of my submissions thus far! The map originally had no damaging floors whatsoever, and the liquid of choice was brown sludge. This obviously made the map a lot easier because the player didn't have the extra layer of danger to concern himself with, but I somehow felt that the combination of colors (brown brown and grey) was just really bland, even for Doom 2. I chose lava because I imagined this scenario where some sort of reactor in the starport had melted down and flooded a region with boiling overflow. Perhaps that's a bit too much of a setup, but that's my justification for the presence of lava on such an early map. I don't plan on switching the lava out for nukage because I feel that would remove the one aspect of the map that separates it from being just another face in the early game crowd. Controversial map design is fun! And what's Doom 2 without a little controversy?

Anyways, I'm glad to see MAP11 and MAP16 have been generally well received, as those were the two I spent the most time putting together. MAP05 was the last map I made for the project, and I spent the least amount of time laying it out. Cheers :)

[Memfis]

rofl, what is this talk about lava being too early for map05? Like, why the hell not, is it too scary? хD Also there was some lava on doom2 map06 iirc.

[Marcaek]

The lava in the Crusher is nowhere near as prevalent or even threatening as it is in the Boiler. It's literally in 2 inescapable pits compared to the Boiler's rivers of pizza-flavored death. I like the Boiler as it is fwiw, just thought I'd mention the difference. It still does feel like something Mcgee would have done.

[schwerpunk]

Just played up to The Gorge. I like this megawad. Aesthetically, I thought MAP01's textures were a bit rough, or maybe just unfamiliar, but gameplay-wise it was a good introductory level. Nice 'n' short. Actually, all of the levels so far do a good job introducing enemies, traps, tricks, and weapons at a good, digestible pace. It's got a bit of that old IWAD feel. Antroid is sure to say something disparaging about 'difficulty curves' here.

Doom II is definitely harder to pin down aesthetically than Doom I (imho), so I'm not too unchuffed about that. The gameplay feels good so far, though. :)

[esselfortium]

KiiiYiiiKiiiA said:

-Decent little introduction to the set. Feels a little bland, probably needs more detail.

-Far too square and blocky. Needs some angles to offset all that blockiness. Especially the red key area beyond sector 66. Not an angle in sight. It really cheapens the look of this level. Too blocky and too little detail.

-The use of SUPPORT3 in this level is crap, being used predominantly on 32 length linedefs instead of 24. I understand trying to imitate the 'oldschool misalignments' of the original Doom2 iwad, but if this is the case, then it has gone too far in this direction. Also some SUPPORT2 linedefs to break up the TEKGREN areas would be better.

-Another decent little map cheapened by being too blocky. Some more SUPPORT2 and -3 textures could be used throughout. Get some angles in there too.

-Alright. Enough with the intentionally misaligned SUPPORT3 already. I understand occasionally doing this, but not on every single map. In the first 8 maps of the Doom2 iwad, only Map 05 did this, but even there the majority of SUPPORT3 were on 24 length linedefs, which actually looks good. Map 08 used some also, all on 24 length linedefs. So only 1 map in the first 8 had misused SUPPORT3.

For the most part, I'm pretty sure our maps are actually more "detailed" than those in Doom 2. Look at Underhalls, or even better, look at The Crusher as an example: a few select areas have some basic stuff in them for visual enhancement. The remainder of The Crusher, the connecting tissue between these areas, is a set of completely square, completely flat, completely empty METAL2 corridors. The map is almost entirely built from that one single texture, too!

Underhalls is more visually complex overall, but it's still an extremely simple map structurally. It looks nice due to a combination of complex textures like the pipe walls, a bit of 1-sided-line detailing in the form of indented/extruded texture transitions, and some sectors for wall computers in exactly two rooms near the start.

Speaking of indented/extruded texture transitions: the reason you didn't find many SUPPORT3 misalignments from MAP02 through MAP04 (and there are some you missed, like on the entry to the bigbrik fort in Underhalls) is simply because SUPPORT3 was barely at all used in these maps. Adding more supports would definitely not be authentic, given that McGee primarily only used them in windows or doorways, or to build entire structures with (like in The Inmost Dens or The Waste Tunnels). He preferred to transition textures between rooms or at the point where two structures meet (lots of places in Underhalls, like the pipes into the gray stone, or the gray stone into the bigbrik). The Catacombs is a major exception to this, like it is an exception to most of the other usual McGee traits, in that it's loaded with SUPPORT3 -- but it's all misaligned :)

The Gantlet uses METAL2 all over the place rather than bothering with much in the way of support textures. So, you won't find any misaligned supports there, probably. But you will find that the METAL2 that replaced it is aligned just as lackadaisically (if at all) and almost always used with zero regard to the length of the line it's on.

The silvery SUPPORT2, by the way, was almost never used in Doom 2 by anyone other than Sandy. McGee used it (misaligned!) alongside the entrance door behind you in The Focus, and Romero used it for lifts occasionally.

What writing this post has taught me is that, if anything, we might need fewer support textures in our McGee maps. But certainly not more :)

[Feniks]

I don't get all the "a bit too much" comments. Episode 1 isn't difficult at all on UV, it feels like it's perfectly suited for mediocre players like me. It is somewhat harder than the original Doom 2, but that's okay. Hey, DTWiD's Inferno was nearly twice as hard as the original episode 3, but no one complained! On the contrary, most people were pretty satisfied with its difficulty.

To me, this is probably the best megawad ever. Honestly. To hell with detail and aesthetics, Doom is all about gameplay, not visuals.

I remember that, back when I was a lurker on here, I read a pretty long-winded post by 40oz where he explained that Doom 2 had been one of the main inspirations for his map design, at least in terms of gameplay. Well, I must admit that I played UAC Ultra 2, and it wasn't nearly as entertaining as this wad. In UAC Ultra 2, there were plenty of insipid E1-style fights that were neither very challenging nor fast-paced. Sure, the player can rush through the maps, but even so, they aren't particularly entertaining. However, D2TWiD is a different kettle of fish. It keeps you busy all the time, forces you to play fast, but you're allowed to play even more aggressively if you want to, and you'll only be punished by death if you completely screw things up. Unlike in most ultra-hard PWADs, here you can survive most near-death situations with enough agility and persistence. The thing placement is exemplary on each map I've played.

[Tarnsman]

Here are some various things I'd like to point out.

1. Doom 2 is not nearly a varied as people say. Yes texturally and concept wise the maps do explore a gigantic variety of subjects but as I've had to repeatedly point out during this project, id mappers were extremely "lazy" (by today's standards, by 1994 standards they were extremely "holy fuck this map needs to be out in 3 days, I don't have time to bother with doing extra shit). McGee, Sandy, and Romero tended to be very set in how they approached creating everything and were more than happy to flat out recycle rooms with the shape tweaked (Romero loved doing this most of all.)

2. What variation it does have however kind of brings it to the point of frustration. Because people like McGee used a different texture theme for each map, but still had a certain type of texture they would only use. Which became a nightmare because it came down to "What textures hasn't McGee already used that he WOULD use". Like McGee would never be caught dead using something like CEMENT or any of the textures you normally associate with Sandy, but the Texture set is also limited enough that you don't have very many textures to chose from beyond that. Sandy's love of constantly changing up concepts made it very hard to make original maps for him considering he'd already done most things. Romero thankfully wasn't as difficult because he used 90% of the same textures on every map and was the recycling king.

3. The biggest problem with making totally original feeling maps in an id style for Doom 2 goes back to point 1 that the mappers had a very specific way they liked to do things. Sandy for example always used the bare minimum architecture to merely accommodate for the concept. For example: when making a map about a bunch of isolated concepts he either had them all connected to a bunch of doors centered around a hub (Tricks and Traps) or connected with teleporters (Nirvana and Barrels o' Fun) had Nirvana been more than just 3 scrap areas you probably would have seen more teleporters in the central hub making it resemble Tricks and Traps more.

4. There are certain things we kinda had to do for Doom 2 the way id did. We had to have city levels. We had to have large central structure levels. We had to have Romero catwalk levels. Simply because these are things Doom 2 demanded. E2 was set in a city it needs city levels and unfortunately how someone like Sandy is going to do a city level is pretty much always going to be the same. A series of disconnected concept rooms surrounded by a sandbox exterior. Suburbs is pretty much the same map as Downtown design wise, just with less grid and less height. Map 7 has to be a Dead Simple clone just because the specials were made specifically for that map and making any map that wasn't exclusively about that concept made them feel shoehorned in.

5. People need to learn to distinguish between what they "feel Doom 2 is" and what Doom 2 actually is. This was a gigantic problem in development. Most of our maps are too large and I've been harping on people about it for a long time. Why is this? Because most people remember Doom 2 being extremely large and "feel" that it's about 200% larger than it actually is. Esselfortium didn't realize his Map 6 was about 250% larger than The Crusher and contained a sector taller than any sector in Doom 2 until I pointed it out to him because he was trying to recapture the same feeling that the first massive area in the Crusher conveyed ("holy shit this is a lot bigger than anything in Doom 1") and so he made an absolutely gigantic central area not realizing that he had gone way overboard with it.

6. Doom 2 is terribly, terribly balanced. You either have retardedly hard pistol starts with no gear or you're totally saturated with power-ups, and then you have many maps that have both. Where the start is starvation and then the back half of the map just has way too much shit.

7. There are a lot, A LOT, of screw ups in Doom 2. id left some really special things in Doom 2, like managing to fuck up aligning SUPPORT3 on 24 wide surfaces. The unclosed sectors, gigantic missing textures, almost 80 pegging errors, the shit ton of flagging errors, stuck monsters, incorrect textures, METAL1 being used as a door track texture, and the glorious flat misalignments. D2TWID has no where near as many fuckups and this makes me sad. We also lack entirely pointless perfectly aligned rooms. Like Sandy's TANROCK5 aligned room or Romero's only two usages of alignment outside of switches and METAL on 16 wide surfaces, a BRICK10 staircase and an ASHWALL2 staircase.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Only played up to MAP05 so far due to being busy since the beta release, but I recorded FDAs if anyone wants to check them out:

http://dkk.slickproductions.org/files/doom/denis/d2twid_e_db_fdas.zip

[schwerpunk]

@ essel & Tarnsman: I don't want to sidetrack your thread too far abroad with philosophy of design (actually, I really, really do), but I feel this is a point of minor contention in the Doom community and should be addressed directly. We already separate wads by 'vanilla' & 'other.' I feel like, for these ode-to-the-oldies-type maps (which I see becoming more popular) a subsection in vanilla might be required as well. The games that will technically run in vanilla and the games that would have been made for vanilla, back-when.

The name of this megawad makes it clear enough for this project, but 'vanilla' doesn't quite capture exactly how vanilla some people wanted this project to come off. There are mappers who drew some inspiration from Sandy, Romero, et al., and there are those who employed a sort of 'method mapping,' completely taking on those mappers' styles, warts and all. These two styles are mutually exclusive - they completely change how a player should perceive and judge the map.

For my part, I just can't bring myself to add mistakes into my maps on purpose. I avoided doing so for my switcheroom! entry, and the reception was mostly positive. I can't help but think that, even when conforming to vanilla limits, it's a disservice to platonic beauty to carry along the ugly design elements of id along with the beautiful ones. That all said, I still respect it immensely as a style of mapping. In fact, I was just looking at my E1M2 clone next to id's in Visplane Explorer, and I couldn't help but feel like I wasn't grokking something essential in their design. [mine] [theirs]

I guess what I'm conceding is that, there is definitely something special in austere and, yes, at times even sloppy, design.

[durian]

Tarnsman said:

5. People need to learn to distinguish between what they "feel Doom 2 is" and what Doom 2 actually is. This was a gigantic problem in development. Most of our maps are too large and I've been harping on people about it for a long time. Why is this? Because most people remember Doom 2 being extremely large and "feel" that it's about 200% larger than it actually is. Esselfortium didn't realize his Map 6 was about 250% larger than The Crusher and contained a sector taller than any sector in Doom 2 until I pointed it out to him because he was trying to recapture the same feeling that the first massive area in the Crusher conveyed ("holy shit this is a lot bigger than anything in Doom 1") and so he made an absolutely gigantic central area not realizing that he had gone way overboard with it.

This is an interesting point. It seems to me that, with a project like this, in which you're attempting to produce something that is highly similar, in certain key respects, to a very well known mapset, you run into the issue of deciding on the ways in which you want the two of them to be similar. On the one hand, you might focus on technical similarities - monster counts, sector heights, light levels, detail/glitches, etc. - and so attempt to ensure that the end product is as similar (or as 'not dissimilar') to the original as it can be, in terms of these (more or less) objective features. On the other hand, you might focus on more 'experiential' similarity - trying to produce a mapset that makes an impression on the player of the sort that DOOM2 is likely to have made on them had they - like many of us - played through it in '94. It seems to me that a map/mapset could succeed at the former without succeeding at the latter (and vice versa), and it wouldn't surprise me if successfully producing a playing experience that's reminiscent of the original experience of playing DOOM2 required producing maps which are dissimilar to DOOM2's in various, more objective, respects (as perhaps your rebuke of Essel over sector height illustrates - and one could take this point about scale and apply it to other things, like difficulty/monster count). So, as you've indicated, something that's a lot like DOOM2 in all sorts of determinate, measurable ways, may not necessarily going to feel much like DOOM2 on playback. In any case, it's certainly an interesting project to put the emphasis more on the objective elements that you've mentioned.

Anyway, played up to Map 5 so far and enjoying it :)

[schwerpunk]

durian said [truncated]:
. . . and it wouldn't surprise me if successfully producing a playing experience that's reminiscent of the original experience of playing DOOM2 required producing maps which are dissimilar to DOOM2's . . .

Yes, yes, exactly! When I play Doom 2 I can't help but be biased by rose-tinted nostalgia. Even when tut-tutting at the texture misalignments I involuntarily experience the whole IWAD with an element of childlike wonder, from when Doom was graphically unmatched, and mistakes were invisible to me. As a compliment, I will say that D2TWID does nail the gameplay so far, and in doing so somewhat shortcircuits the critical adult in me.

When I play a reimagining of a classic map, I don't feel the weight of that same wonder. I just see a very simple -- some might say 'meh' -- map made in 2013. It's an uphill battle for any old-style megawad, for sure. Anyway, Durian raised some great points about the potential need to exaggerate elements of the original IWAD in order to capture the same 'feel' of the original, if not its actual, technical parameters.

Personally, I'm on the fence, but it's an interesting thought.

EDIT: I should add that, of the maps I've experienced thus far, D2TWID does a great job of capturing the 'feel' of playing an id IWAD.

[Tarnsman]

We always go for feel over hard specifics that's why you won't be seeing any maps that are horrendously large being shrunken down.

[Xfing]

Well, I think that the "experiential" aspect has been succeeded with in DTWiD. It made me just as excited as when I played the original Doom. The boss level in E1 was an unforgettable experience. And I must say that D2TWiD, in its 1.0 version, has huge potential to do just the same. It already succeeds pretty well in that respect in beta.

As for the mistakes and fuckups: It is certain that D2TWiD doesn't have as many, but personally I don't think they add to the experience. Blatant fuckups are just annoying, and it's not like Doom 2 would have lost much of its charm if those were gone. Like for example the Pain Elementals being unable to shoot in "The Pit" (but that was due to there already being 20 Lost Souls in the level, I presume).

But I want to stress this because of the next logical step, Thy Flesh Consumed TWiD. TFC was riddled with much more bugs, fuckups and sloppy design than Doom 2. It stood apart from the other Doom episodes in that regard. But I didn't like it! It annoyed the hell outta me. Like the inability to get 3x 100% on "Sever the Wicked". It was completely needless. Please, guys - don't go that particular route when making Thy Flesh Consumed. What made that episode feel unique was the orange sky, lots of wood, green stone, gray rocks and lava. It was hellish, but very distinct from Inferno. I would focus on building on its qualities first and foremost - to replicate the first feeling of "Wow, it's so hard!" that we all got when first playing Thy Flesh Consumed. I'm personally not convinced that all the fuckups and errors getting in the way of gameplay are necessary, or even welcome.

[Tarnsman]

I absolutely disagree, Doom 2 would lose a lot of its charm if I couldn't open a 192 deep door with pegged sides and watch that GRAYVINE scroll up to the ceiling.

Edit: I should point out, that this isn't the case with everyone's maps but Alfonzo and I never put any intentional fuckups in our maps, we simply discovered them and elected not to fix them for authenticity.