Do you think Doom 2 should have been an expansion pack or a standalone game?

[Doominator2]

IMO I Think that Doom 2 should have just been an expansion pack since most of the game play mechanics were the same as the original. So what do you think, Expansion or Stand alone game?

[Dragonsbrethren]

Stand alone because it was the only retail release Doom had at the time.

[MegaTurtleRex]

umm standalone is better since you don't have to buy or install a hundred things. And yes Ultimate Doom is a hundred things so shuz up.

[Stupid Bunny]

I never really questioned that Doom II should be standalone. I guess the most obvious way of making it an expansion would be to release the Doom II IWAD by itself, and run that with the DOOM executable (I do this on one of my computers), but that would be kind of an asshole thing to do since it would require owning both games. As similar as it is, I still think it's worthy of a standalone release, on its own merits if nothing else.

[darknation]

there was such a thing as an expansion pack back in 1994? rly?

tabletop rpg shenanigans aside, the first expansion packs I can remember were GTA london, Sonic and Knuckles (retarded double cartridge thing) and probably C&C. Doom predates these.

[Doominator2]

darknation said:

there was such a thing as an expansion pack back in 1994? rly?

tabletop rpg shenanigans aside, the first expansion packs I can remember were GTA london, Sonic and Knuckles (retarded double cartridge thing) and probably C&C. Doom predates these.

Hey did you ever hear about the wolfenstein 3d expansion spear of destiny. Which was released before doom

[esselfortium]

Doominator2 said:

Hey did you ever hear about the wolfenstein 3d expansion spear of destiny. Which was released before doom

Wasn't that a standalone commercial game too?

[GreyGhost]

darknation said:

there was such a thing as an expansion pack back in 1994? rly?

The first that spring to my mind are the Battleset disks for Harpoon, then there's the Damocles Mission Disks (which I suspect are little more than edited game saves) and a New Worlds data disk for Utopia. Can't think of any more at the moment.

[DooM_RO]

It's not good enough to be a sequel. If today you did a sequel that reused more than half of the assets with NO changes people would be really mad. That and in terms of visuals, the game was actually inferior.

So yes, it should have been Doom: Hell on Earth.

[Dragonsbrethren]

DooM_RO said:

It's not good enough to be a sequel. If today you did a sequel that reused more than half of the assets with NO changes people would be really mad. That and in terms of visuals, the game was actually inferior.

So yes, it should have been Doom: Hell on Earth.

i'd leave: this is just
more monsters and levels.
what a load.

It's like Romero wrote that one for you :)

esselfortium said:

Wasn't that a standalone commercial game too?

Spear of Destiny was, but I'm not sure about the two "episodes" for it. I got mine on a Wolf3D CD (and later Steam), but did they require a normal SOD install to work, or were they also standalone?

[esselfortium]

DooM_RO said:

It's not good enough to be a sequel. If today you did a sequel that reused more than half of the assets with NO changes people would be really mad. That and in terms of visuals, the game was actually inferior.

So yes, it should have been Doom: Hell on Earth.

This is a mix of subjective aesthetic opinion and claims that are just plainly untrue. There absolutely were changes made to the engine between Doom's and Doom 2's creation, and Doom 2's levels took advantage of them: one of the most obvious would be Doom 2's frequent focus on big open spaces, making use of large/tall scale and open lines of renderer-sight that earlier versions of the Doom engine had major issues with. Combined with the expanded monster bestiary that opened up countless new gameplay opportunities in and of itself, big height-varied levels like The Living End and Industrial Zone are nothing like anything that appeared in the original game.

Of course Doom 2 didn't change the core tenets of Doom's gameplay, but it expanded on them pretty significantly within that framework.

[Waffenak]

stand alone game of course, no question about that

[chungy]

No one seemed to get mad about Left 4 Dead 2 when it was new... and it was released in around the same timeframe of the original that Doom 2 was. :p

At any rate with the new enemies and flexed level design... Doom 2 is fine as its own game.

[printz]

Compared to Doom walk-in-the-park episodes 1 to 3, Doom 2 may well be an awesome thing. But it's less extraordinary when compared to episode 4, Thy Flesh Consumed.

Sure, Doom 2 provided more enemies, but it only provided one more gun, and an identical engine. It probably stood to prove a point though: FPS games can't and don't need to be different, which is evidenced by the general lack of variety.

Still, I wish Doom 2 were just a bit more advanced mechanically, like Doom 64. It seems like it was more of a designer effort than programmer effort, other than updating the engine from 1.2 to 1.666 by raising some limits and fixing some bugs. Was Carmack rather busy with Quake?

[Captain Red]

darknation said:

there was such a thing as an expansion pack back in 1994? rly?

It was something Origin systems was doing as far back as 1990 With the original Wing Commander (which was in part an inspiration for John Carmacks early 2.5D engines) with The Secret Missions and Secret Missions 2: Crusade.

There was also Forge of Virtue for Ultima VII: The Black Gate, the Speech Accessory Pack and Special Operations 1 & 2 for Wing Commander II and The Silver Seed for Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle all pre-1994.

Though seeing as Origin systems took a lot of it's inspiration from Pen and Paper RPGs it's not surprising they'd be pioneers in trying to implement something similar for their games.

chungy said:

No one seemed to get mad about Left 4 Dead 2 when it was new...

Plenty of people got mad when Left 4 Dead 2 was new.


All that said, Making Doom II a standalone for retail fit with id's business model at the time. I can't really hold it ageist them.

[DooM_RO]

esselfortium said:

This is a mix of subjective aesthetic opinion and claims that are just plainly untrue. There absolutely were changes made to the engine between Doom's and Doom 2's creation, and Doom 2's levels took advantage of them: one of the most obvious would be Doom 2's frequent focus on big open spaces, making use of large/tall scale and open lines of renderer-sight that earlier versions of the Doom engine had major issues with. Combined with the expanded monster bestiary that opened up countless new gameplay opportunities in and of itself, big height-varied levels like The Living End and Industrial Zone are nothing like anything that appeared in the original game.

Of course Doom 2 didn't change the core tenets of Doom's gameplay, but it expanded on them pretty significantly within that framework.

Of course, of course. I know about those changes but I don't think they're tangible enough. For this reason, I consider Duke Nukem 3D to be the real Doom 2. The aesthetics were much more consistent and convincing, there was an interesting inventory system, had new ways to find secrets (like blowing up walls). For me it was everything Doom 2 ought to have been (especially the second episode). Doom 2 didn't even have intermission screens.

[Gez]

Doominator2 said:

Hey did you ever hear about the wolfenstein 3d expansion spear of destiny. Which was released before doom

Spear of Destiny was the "commercial" sequel to Wolf 3D. In other words, it was to Wolf 3D what Doom II was to Doom.

You might have thought of "The Nocturnal Missions", a prequel expansion pack for Wolf 3D which added the last three episodes. (Wolf 3D itself originally only had three episodes, ending with the Hitler one. The last three were added later.)

darknation said:

there was such a thing as an expansion pack back in 1994? rly?

tabletop rpg shenanigans aside, the first expansion packs I can remember were GTA london, Sonic and Knuckles (retarded double cartridge thing) and probably C&C. Doom predates these.

According to Wikipedia:

Wikipedia said:
Board games and tabletop RPGs may have been marketing expansions since the 1970s, and video games have been releasing expansion packs since the 1980s, early examples being the Dragon Slayer games Xanadu Scenario II[1] and Sorcerian.[2]

Also, still from Wikipedia: Syndicate: American Revolt (1993), Oh No! More Lemmings (1991). And of course the Origin games mentioned above.

Also, I want to make a special mention for Might & Magic IV: Clouds of Xeen and Might & Magic V: Darkside of Xeen. Darkside was a standalone game that was also an expansion pack for Clouds! If you install both games, you get access to content that is unreachable with either game alone. And oh yeah, Darkside was released in 1993.

All my examples are PC games by the way.

[MFG38]

I honestly don't see any logic or reason as to why Doom 2 should have been an expansion. id intended it to be a standalone and I can live with it.

[Luke Dacote]

DooM_RO said:

If today you did a sequel that reused more than half of the assets with NO changes people would be really mad. That and in terms of visuals, the game was actually inferior.

What about the COD series? That's a series which basically reuse the previous games gameplay, graphics and level design without much deviation. If someone showed me a few stills from the Modern Warfare and Black Ops series and told me to identify which game each of the stills were from, I'd be completely hopeless. Comparing Doom II to those games is no contest. Doom II while yes, reused the same graphics as the original and is in some ways inferior, still gave us a ton of mapsets that couldn't be done in Doom 1. The SSG also works well with the way the game is designed. If you had the SSG in Doom 1, the game would be way too easy. But with the higher number of enemies and the more frequent open areas of Doom 2, the SSG makes a worthy addition. In fact the BFG also works a lot better in Doom 2 than it did in the original. In Doom 1, I only ever used the BFG if I was surrounded by enemies or when fighting the Spiderdemon. Doom 2 however, it becomes your new best friend whenever you're on a level with lots of high rank enemies. Tone wise, the two games are also very different. Doom 2's levels were a lot crazier and faster paced in comparison to Doom 1's which were a bit more grounded. It well deserved being its own standalone game.

Now Final Doom could have easily been an expansion pack but then again, I think it's better as it's own thing just for convenience sake.

[EvilNed]

IMO, Doom 2 is a bigger, better version of Doom 1.

There's plenty of new monsters, textures and gameplay additions. Not everything are things you see. There's plenty of new linedef actions, for instance.

For instance, were the Key switches in Doom 1? I can't remember.

[Gez]

EvilNed said:

There's plenty of new linedef actions, for instance.

Keep in mind that they're available in Ultimate Doom as well.

[DooM_RO]

EvilNed said:

IMO, Doom 2 is a bigger, better version of Doom 1.

There's plenty of new monsters, textures and gameplay additions. Not everything are things you see. There's plenty of new linedef actions, for instance.

For instance, were the Key switches in Doom 1? I can't remember.

Really? THAT'S enough to justify a sequel? The D3 BFG guardian boss also had a different colored skin AND an extra attack but people still complained.

EDIT: Oh, and I wouldn't call the quantity of new monsters and textures "plenty". It was far from it. I don't think people should be afraid of criticizing a game simply because it's a classic.

[kristus]

Captain Red said:

Plenty of people got mad when Left 4 Dead 2 was new.

Yes, but that was because Valve had promised to keep supporting L4D and then switched around and released L4D2 as a sequel instead of as an upgrade. Then kept on claiming they would still support L4D but basically never did.

DooM_RO said:

Of course, of course. I know about those changes but I don't think they're tangible enough. For this reason, I consider Duke Nukem 3D to be the real Doom 2. The aesthetics were much more consistent and convincing, there was an interesting inventory system, had new ways to find secrets (like blowing up walls). For me it was everything Doom 2 ought to have been (especially the second episode). Doom 2 didn't even have intermission screens.

Not sure if serious...

[DooM_RO]

kristus said:

Not sure if serious...

Oh, I'm very serious.

[BaronOfStuff]

Dragonsbrethren said:

Spear of Destiny was, but I'm not sure about the two "episodes" for it. I got mine on a Wolf3D CD (and later Steam), but did they require a normal SOD install to work, or were they also standalone?

They were standalone. And pretty awful.

DooM_RO said:

I know about those changes but I don't think they're tangible enough. For this reason, I consider Duke Nukem 3D to be the real Doom 2.

Stopped taking your post seriously here. Also:

Doom II's intermission background.

[DooM_RO]

Which is inferior to what we saw in Doom 1. A recolored texture, how lazy.

[darknation]

yeah, much better.

[Maes]

How could Doom II even be technically possible as an "expansion pack"? It was way more than just a bunch of new levels and textures (BTW, similar "expansion packs" for Doom I existed. Essentially, whenever a bunch of PWADs was sold commercially, suddenly they became "expansion packs" rather than "megaWAD of the week"). And way more than you could hack into the Doom I executable with DEHACKED.

Ultimate Doom actually came after Doom II, chronologically, with a unified executable/codebase, so if anything, you could consider Ultimate Doom to be the original Doom ported to the Doom II engine, plus a new episode ;-)

[DooM_RO]

That is not the intermission screen.

http://images.wikia.com/doom/images/a/a1/Imscrngo.png

This is an intermission screen.

[Deleted_Account]

I didn't like the level design and the Taco Bell music in Doom II, the Super Shotgun and new baddies were a nice addition though.