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Leon

What was Doom missing? Opinions here

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Wagi said:

More attention to deathmatch, which ... was clearly an afterthought.


Heh. Another first for Doom. The game apparently pioneered the 'Deathmatch added as an afterthought' which has been the way in too many games since.

At least Doom's single player never became the even worse 'Just Deathmatch with bots'.

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To me DooM is just perfect as is. But if i needed something else, i think Duke Nukem 3D added it:

Flying, great cities levels, fun weapons and a great level of interactiviy, but with focuss on business: kill things.

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Naitguolf said:

To me DooM is just perfect as is. But if i needed something else, i think Duke Nukem 3D added it:

Flying, great cities levels, fun weapons and a great level of interactiviy, but with focuss on business: kill things.

For as simple as it was I absolutely loved 2 player DM on Duke's football field.

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Ok, sure this game is awesome and one of the thing that most conditioned my life from i was 12 and i played it the shareware from first time until today, and always founding it impressive, but this game needs more Miku.







Oh, and that stuff from alpha versions and the original BFG shoot concept...

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walter confalonieri said:

but this game needs more Miku.

That is one of those otaku fads that has gotten way too large. Along with Super Sonico.

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Ubik said:

-A grenade launcher.
-A railgun, or powerful rifle-style weapon.
-Tripmines/landmines - some more tactically varied weapons.


I don't think any games around at the time had any of these.

I never saw a grenade launcher until Quake.

Had no clue what a rail gun was until I played skulltag for the first time.

The pipe bombs from Duke Nukem were kinda close to a land/tripmine I suppose.

Did anyone know what a railgun was or heard of it around the time doom came out?

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I never heard of a railgun until Quake 2. I've never witnessed a railgun as efficient and natural feeling as Quake 3's. None.

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For me Doom was mostly missing more great levels. When I first played the shareware episode, it blew my mind. Then, many months later, when I played through the full version of the game and through Doom 2, I remember feeling quite disappointed with most of the levels. They felt uninspired and lacked that immersive quality of Romero's E1.

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Baron of Hell vs Hell Knight - it sounds cheap at first, but remember that even back then Barons were considered mostly harmless bullet sponges. I remember reading an interview or something mentioning that they introduced Knights as the less boring version. They deal just as much damage but don't require as much time to take down. If you're still not convinced, Heretic has so many monster variations and most of them don't even look different !

Come on, even DooM diehards and fans should admit not everything in DooM was perfect:

* The bosses except glorious and frighteningly powerful Cyberdemon were uninspired at best. Spider Mastermind in particular is a letdown as a final boss.

* Super Shotgun not so much adds to the game as replaces the ordinary one. You have to bend over backwards to find a reason to use Shotgun, when SSG deals 3x damage for only 2x ammo.

* melee monsters are infamous for being pathetic. I can't think of a game where melee monsters were more of a joke. Demons simply can't deal damage to an alert and sober player in vast majority of cases. Almost all exceptions are workarounds like placing demons in groups or placing them in confined spaces. Lost Souls aren't much better.

* melee weapons are very hard to use mostly because they're buggy. Fist is hard to hit with even if you touch the monster. Arachnotrons, Mancubi would make great chainsaw targets if it wasn't for the cross-section and blockmap bugs.

* Infinitely tall monsters. There's an imp somewhere below, and None Shall Pass. It often turns into a guessing game when you try to find a way down.

* Partial Invisibility is just harmful unless there are only hitscan monsters around. It could've been changed to be useful for everyone with some creativity. Make it so monsters shoot at the spot you were 0.5 second ago. That's a lot of time in DooM.

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As for things that DooM genuinely lacked, in my opinion:

Grenade launcher. Not to bounce behind corners, but to hit stuff in various pits.

Interesting flying monsters. There are only cacodemons, which are limited by their huge size, and skulls. Gargoyles in Heretic are an excellent counterexample. They work just about anywhere and are fun to fight. 2 more flyers with unique mechanics would be great.

At least a token way to have path over path. Flying magical bridges like in Hexen would be okay, they would even fit in the Hell episodes and some monsters appear to use magic anyway.

I disagree about landmines. Would slow the game down, and would enable grind (place mine, lure monster, place mine, lure monster, place mine... not very fun).

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I don't really think infinitely tall monsters were much of an issue. Depending on the performance hit it doesn't impact the game enough to bother with. I haven't looked at the code but I guess it would probably just be one extra coordinate check which shouldn't impact performance much. I can only think of a handful of times it would have had any impact, though. And the WTF feeling I get when I land on top of another player or monster in Skulltag leads me to believe it's not much better.

I also don't think grenade launchers would add much to the game. Dropping them in to pits would be nice but again, it situation doesn't come up enough to miss them.

Agreed on landmines. The trip mines and pipe bombs in Duke3d were entertaining but not really useful.

And I don't think any sort of bridge at the time was practical. They must have at least considered it and decided against trying to implement. Dealing with the contraints of the period they obviously did an awful lot. If these things were practical and fun they probably would have been done.

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b0rsuk said:

* Super Shotgun not so much adds to the game as replaces the ordinary one. You have to bend over backwards to find a reason to use Shotgun, when SSG deals 3x damage for only 2x ammo.


How very dare you Daemon lover desecrating the holy Shotgun!

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One thing I would have preferred is the presence of more hellish rock/stone textures. What's there works decently, but dark and orange rocks would have blended really well with lava and blood liquids and made for an even more foreboding atmosphere.

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Took me a while to find something, but I wish you could put in non-hardcoded events, like "Kill all of these monsters to open this door". From a map editing standpoint, there were several instances in which I wished Doom had this.

Hard to use the hardcoded events when they're only in a select few levels (E1M8, E2M8, E3M8, E4M6, E4M8, Map07 of any Doom II-based game).

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Source ports with scripting capabilities allow for exactly that (and a whole lot more, of course)

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Or DeHacked, for that matter. You can use that to create all sorts of craziness without even switching source ports.

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peach freak said:

Hard to use the hardcoded events when they're only in a select few levels (E1M8, E2M8, E3M8, E4M6, E4M8, Map07 of any Doom II-based game).

What happens in E4M8?

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That pillar in the middle of the Spider Mastermind room lowers all the way to the floor (Tag 666) when the Spider Mastermind is killed.

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peach freak said:

That pillar in the middle of the Spider Mastermind room lowers all the way to the floor (Tag 666) when the Spider Mastermind is killed.

Doh.. I meant e4m6. All the final levels I get. :)

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Snakes said:

Or DeHacked, for that matter. You can use that to create all sorts of craziness without even switching source ports.

Not sure it can change the map that the monster death specials work on though.

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You can do that with the Keen death pointer, of course that limits it to one particular kind of monster for the entire wad.

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qoncept said:

Doh.. I meant e4m6. All the final levels I get. :)


After killing the Cyberdemon, the bars behind the Cyberdemon open like a fast door (they are tagged 666).

So essentially, any door tagged as 666 in an E4M6 level will open like a fast door when all Cyberdemons are killed.

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