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Bryan T

Little rant

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What's up with people refusing to play any difficulty lower than UV? You know the people. The same ones who rate Sunlust bad on /idgames because it's too hard, when you know damn well they are playing on UV.

People, difficulty settings exist for a reason.

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Speaking of difficulty settings, I have an issue with you people playing lower than Nightmare. Your mother raised you better than that :P

EDIT: I was just joking. ;) I do admit that Nightmare is impossible (I couldn't even get past E1M1 in that mode!), but it's good for kicks once in a while.

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They must think they're 2good so if they can't beat it on UV it's "objectively too hard"

People are dumb

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Those reviewers are a virus that needs to be exterminated by a futuristic cyborg. But otherwise I agree. I actually don't play Doom II on UV. Hardly ever. But I never play UDoom, Thy Flesh included, on anything lower than UV unless I'm curious to see what's different. Usually I'll test new levels on UV, but will go to HMP if need be. Usually, I quit new levels because of getting lost than dying often, though.

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I find the most enjoyable experience is as difficult as possible. I like the challenge, and beating that challenge is what I strive for when I play. Maybe that's why I speedrun as well.

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I tend to pick the highest available difficulties in games (unless the very highest is said to be incredibly unfair or unbalanced or difficult for stupid reasons) because I really don't want to miss out on any challenge. I usually trust that the game/wad should be beatable on the highest difficulty/UV and balanced well enough for it, and lower difficulties always feel like safety wheels compared to the highest one available.

I don't leave bad reviews of wads or anything though, I do ragequit sometimes if I fall to something extremely bullshit but usually I just try the level again some time later, silently grumbling to myself about how it requires foreknowledge to survive and is therefore garbage. :D

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Protester said:

UV is chaos, and that is what i love about doom.


Nightmare is chaotic deathwish...

Anyway, UV is the most highest and fairest difficulty we can challenge ourselves with.
So... it is also a good way to test maps too, because you are pushing to the limit (let's make UV the limit, ok?).

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Doom is a lot easier to play on modern equipment than it was when it first came out. I remember when I played it for the first time on a 486 it lagged in linedef-heavy areas or with more than about eight monsters active.

Over the years the game naturally became easier to play, and experienced players all resorted to UV for a proper challenge where it was necessary to save often, revise strategy etc.

Passing that challenge makes you feel good, it makes you feel you're at a certain level. It's hard to give that up when the pwads come along, especially when you're an advocate of the game.

There's also the fact that, with a game setup like Doom's, you might feel you're missing out on 100% of the map experience if you don't play on UV. Big powerups could be missing, opportunities to set up epic monster infighting etc. None of us wants to feel we're missing out, so there's an unwritten rule almost that UV will at least be possible. Some mappers have really pushed this over the years. I have some sympathy here - UV should be really hard, but not insane.

Insanity is the preserve of Nightmare, which isn't so much a difficulty setting as a game mode, a mode incompatible with many pwads.

So, I admit, I always play on UV. If I really find it too hard, I don't complain, I just cheat :P

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pritch said:

So, I admit, I always play on UV. If I really find it too hard, I don't complain, I just cheat :P

Genius.

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Its probably also the case these days that most people will only play pwads once. Traditionally higher difficulties are there to add extra replayability for people who are already familiar with the game, but if you are only going to play it once then you'll want to see everything it has to offer I guess. And of course everyone figures they already know how to play doom, so the only thing that is going to be too difficult for them is stuff that is unfair anyway.

Trouble is, map authors are gonna make UV challenging for them, and if they have godly skills then it might be hard for them to balance the lower difficulties. Also there is the problem inherent in megawads where the difficulty rises steadily, so UV seems fine at the start but gets impossible later, and playing on HMP makes the first maps boringly easy.

Fuckin hell though, I've seen some bad players playing maps on UV and slagging them off for killing them without mercy, usually they are also using BD. They get ripped to shreds and then save with 5% health and complain when everything instantly kills them over and over.

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i tend to play challengy WADs like the Scythes, Plutonias, Speed of Doom and so forth on UV, die, try the next level, die, try the next level, seeing if I can beat one without saving. it's fun and the level set doesn't get worn out so quickly IMO. plus there's little other value to a level set that exists to be hard - may as well play it at the skill level it was balanced towards.

something more atmospheric (chiefly Russian level sets like Sacrament) is probably getting played on HMP or lower - you know a lot of these levels have been designed to envelop you with wonder and you are already too used to the core Doom 2 gameplay for that element of a level to impress you much. I find BTSX a weird one because the textures and music create a game-world you want to explore, but the combat is also really playtested and hard to evade - much as I love both level-sets I think one goal partially gets in the way of the other!

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UV is the default difficulty, only it provides the true experience of the wad, it is also what's always used in speedruns. So yeah.

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I refuse to go below UV because that's what's fun to me. I don't complain about it being too hard because that's stupid because I know full well I'm playing on the hardest mode.

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Memfis said:

UV is the default difficulty, only it provides the true experience of the wad, it is also what's always used in speedruns. So yeah.

That's the only thing that I disagree. It's not the default difficulty, it's the highest one (since Nightmare is more like a joke). By the game definition, I think the default skill may be HMP, because it's the medium difficulty and where the cursor starts out.

Playing on UV is fun anyway.

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A good challenge i used to always do was to try to play all the way through without dying at all. Made it a real different experience because dying meant so much more.
Obviously this only works with megawads or the original iwads.

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Doom II MAP29 is still so difficult even in HMP for me. I am not the hardcore gamer you boys might think.
In a of-topic note:

Spoiler

I am now with fear, because all that happened to me the previous month...

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Obviously the intended difficulty is the one selected/highlighted by default, for base game definition anyway. I prefer the second hardest difficulty for the increased enemy count because in my mind more baddies = more fun. Doom seems to work well on HMP however and I HMP'd all the IWADs not too long back and found all but Plutonia to be balanced.

With Wolf3D however I always do the hardest and while I bitch and moan about the cheap deaths and ridiculously high damage sustained now and again I am used to this game being hard so I can't really fault the game if I'm the one making it harder.

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Doominator2 said:

ITYTD is the real challenge, I dont what you guys are talking about but UV is nothing compared to ITYTD.


Funny thing is, it's actually possible to make a map that's harder in lower difficulty settings than on UV: it's possible to make specific monsters and pickups appear only in lower difficulties, so that even with the lower damage and higher ammo pickups, it will actually be harder than on higher levels. Almost like having two (or more) levels in one. I did that once for a map by Jodwin:

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/m-o/nostdmml

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I consider myself a good player so anything under UV feels way to easy. For me, UV is the default setting.

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I always play on HMP first time round. If the .WAD is good enough to warrant a replay, I'll crank up to UV.

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I assume that this is only about difficulty levels on official IWAD maps, right? Because how many PWADs really have properly implemented and tested difficulty settings?

And when playing certain types of maps, e.g. slaughtermaps or puzzle maps, does it really matter if damage to the player is down 50% and ammo pickups are worth double?

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