Post Your Opinions About Doom (Whether Controversial or Not)

[Chip]

1 hour ago, DOEL said:

also add BTSX episode 1 to my list of overrated. but for both combat *and* aesthetics

WHAT?! Now that is controversial!!!!! 

[omx32x]

1 hour ago, DOEL said:

also add BTSX episode 1 to my list of overrated. but for both combat *and* aesthetics

i agree except visuals i love how it looks but i just dont feel the gameplay though i wouldnt say its overrated

[Stupid Bunny]

I think Tom Hall's contributions to Doom are broadly underappreciated and are big part of what made the first Doom so special.  I think he gets maligned a bit as the Doom Bible guy who tried to make Doom some kind of bloated adventure game and is frequently remembered for being largely ignored and then booted off after some differences of vision, but games like Rise of the Triad, Commander Keen, and Wolf3D all demonstrate how little narrative touches and bits of world-building and easter eggy comedy go a long way to creating an immersive environment--things like secret-hunting and puzzly bits and eating dead bodies when mortally wounded and other interactions with characters and the environment that make the game feel like more than just a mechanical bundle of levels.  It's part of the reason, dumb as it is, that E4 never grabbed me as much as the first three, or Doom II's hell always felt so dry compared to E3: the places are all supposed to be, well, places, of a sort, with a thematic consistency and vision and a sense that I'm actually going into an infernal city of flesh and stone and steel instead of, you know, playing MAP21.  Also teleporters and Refueling Base are cool

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

People don't like floorceil.wad because they don't understand the lore. It takes place in Japan, and like any story that takes place in Japan, you are a samurai. The last of the samurai, in fact. You were ordered to commit harakiri in 1850, but escaped the evil shogun. You sit in an abandoned hut for 150 years, contemplating your treasonous acts. Finally, you decide that the shogun was right, and you do deserve to have your bowels ripped out by your cheap rusty sword. You walk outside the hut just to discover that the entire Japanese landscape has been erased by the UAC, whoever the fuck they are. You are still focused on the deed though, so you walk straight ahead, so focused that you can no longer see walls. You journey for hours, looking for the shogun. Finally, you realize that times have changed and the samurai no longer use swords. You are happy to see that the shogun never forgot about you, being merciful enough to leave you an explosive barrel. You finally understand. "Maybe if I stand in front of this barrel and point this weird thing in my hand at it and squeeze the thing my finger is resting on, it will fire a high-powered round similar to the ones that were used in rifles by the members of my sacred clan, thus causing the radioactive barrel to explode and blow my intestines and other assorted entrails from my body! Oh, fuck that, I'd rather look at these ceilings and floors!".

Edited July 27, 2021 by TheMagicMushroomMan

[dmslr]

I think the idea of putting map33/34 into megawads is lame. Why do I need to cheat to get into these super-super-secret maps; why I can't get there naturally after hitting the exit switch? Not to mention that the "32-levels megawad" looks badass.

[Screamapillar]

Shawn's got the shotgun is best track in Doom 2. I know everyone really likes Into Sandy's City, but it doesn't pump me with adrenaline quite like SGTS. Also, while I love this track, I don't like it's usage in map 29. Getting too Tense is such a perfect penultimate track, and it's wasted on map 28 (that's nothing against map 28, I actually really enjoy this map).

[INfront95]

I can't play original wads anymore. They are too vanilla. After 20 years of custom wads, levels look barren and uninspired. I don't remember when last time  i finished D1 or D2.

[Wagi]

Capture the Flag as a game mode in Doom is criminally underappreciated and there really isn't any other game on the planet that provides CTF experience anything like it. The sheer acrobatics involved, the risky rocket jumps, ridiculous maneuverability and speed of the player just makes every game chaotic and frantic from start to finish. It was crazy back in the mid 2000s back when Skulltag was at it's peak, and it would probably be even better now that internet connections are a lot more stable and lower ping.

[Zulk RS]

My spicy take on Doom:

Doom 2 >>> Ultimate Doom.

 

All other IWADS >>> Plutonia.

 

On a more serious note, having played all 4 IWADs, I can confidently say that I don't like Plutonia. Now I can see why it's so well regarded. It's just that the tight, arcadey combat that Plutonia favors is not how I like to play Doom. When I play Doom, I like to play slow and cautious and sometimes even tactically. This makes Plutonia maps, which discourage this type of slow and steady approach, feel heavily restrictive to me. I do see what would make it so well loved. It's just that the things that make it well-loved are not the things about Doom that personally appeal to me that much.

 

As for Doom 2 >>> Ultimate Doom, well I will say that Ultimate Doom has more varied and colorful visuals and better music than Doom 2 on average. Additionally, the combat designs of UD are good. However having come from playing Doom 2, I just can't enjoy Doom's smaller monster pool and the lack of the SSG. With the absence of the SSG a lot of the monsters in Doom like Pinkies, lost souls, cacos and Barons feel a lot more tanky than they actually are. This is mainly because you either use up a bunch of rockets or cells to kill them or you are stuck shotguning them to death. Also this might be an illusion due to the general smaller size of the maps but it feels to me like UD has a lot more damaging floors than Doom 2 does. I don't like damaging floors. So that's why Doom 2 >>> than Ultimate Doom

[tescari]

Doom 2016 and Eternal are not Doom games, they are okay FPS games, but not even close to Doom 2/Doom1.

 

Eviternity, Moonblood are both overrated slogfests. The latter half of the maps you just want to rush through because it becomes so damn bland and boring.

[D4NUK1]

1 hour ago, tescari said:

Eviternity, Moonblood are both overrated slogfests. The latter half of the maps you just want to rush through because it becomes so damn bland and boring.

Bold take, but are you saying that Eviternity it's bland? Are you rushing the .wad or something?

[tescari]

8 minutes ago, D4NUK1 said:

Bold take, but are you saying that Eviternity it's bland? Are you rushing the .wad or something?

Well I completely messed up there. I meant TNT Evilution! Sorry

 

Eviternity is still amazing

[kinker31]

Not sure if I've posted here or not, but allow me to post my Bad Takes/Opinions™:

• Brutal Doom's not that bad, even if it is praised way too highly by most of Steam's Doom community. There's more to GZDoom than the Brutal mods, as much as the Steam Community Center wants you to think otherwise.
• Likewise, HDoom isn't all that bad either... though the "H" part is about the only thing going for it, might as well be a mundane spriteswap otherwise.
• Doom II and Doom 64 would've benefited better from an episodic structure, there's only so much of a 32-map campaign one can handle before simulation motion sickness sets in. Mapping might be more convenient too.
• Revenants need to have at least a little less health, ideally taking no more than one single point-blank Super Shotty blast to take 'em down. The homing aspect of their projectiles are also a little ridiculous.
• I wish Bridgeburner released low-spec versions of his maps, I'm honestly even surprised my deck can even run his stuff at all considering it's over 8 years old (admittedly with an upgrade in it 4 years back or so, but still) at this point. Quite a shame too, from what I've seen, they're pretty darned good.
• I'm surprised id didn't try turning the shotgun into an autoshotty considering they were also bringing in Super Shotgun, it would give it more use aside from a "use it to kinda snipe enemies until you get the Super Shotgun" weapon.

[Umbra]

Here's a few:

- I think BD is just overrated, and nowhere near as bad as they claim. Sure, it kind of "ruins" the original game's atmosphere and pacing with its over-the-top gore and its superfluous arsenal, but there's worse things (more on that in one of my following points).

- After playing all 10 official campaigns (yes, I deem SIGIL an official campaign, and Master Levels is a campaign as well if you stich it together), I can say that there's only a couple of maps that make me gag in disgust (most namely The Chasm (Doom II's MAP24), Mephisto's Maosoleum (Master Level's MAP15), Central Processing and Administration Center (TNT's MAP20 and 21 respectively), as well as Sewers and Betray (E1M10 and MAP33). Aside from those, I think I love all other maps equally, and I love playing through them endlessly. I never get tired of the official campaigns.

- I think all these colorful and flashy slaughtermaps (Sunlust to mention just one, but there's others, some of which made it into the Cacowards) are awful. Slaughtermaps as a whole are some of the biggest slogs ever, and it's kind of cringey to see their makers play "Quicksave/quickload" simulator when streaming them.

[Nine Inch Heels]

6 hours ago, kinker31 said:

Doom II and Doom 64 would've benefited better from an episodic structure, there's only so much of a 32-map campaign one can handle before simulation motion sickness sets in. Mapping might be more convenient too.

As somebody who has made both ult-doom and doom2 maps, I can assure you there is no benefit to an episodic structure as far as the process of creating maps in the editor is considered... There is even a case to be made that ult-doom's intermission screens are an obstacle for more ambitious vanilla projects, because aside of the usual mapping and dehacked efforts, there is the added difficulty of making the intermission screen fit with the project in question, which - if entertained - involves even more custom assets and probably also additional messing around with code on some level, though I can't say much about the feasibility of the latter....

 

6 hours ago, kinker31 said:

Revenants need to have at least a little less health, ideally taking no more than one single point-blank Super Shotty blast to take 'em down. The homing aspect of their projectiles are also a little ridiculous.

I would suggest practising a little more instead of making revenants useless with regards to the weakness in OG doom's roster they are supposed to address. They fit a very specific niche that would otherwise be left open and result in a less complex and less diverse core game...

 

6 hours ago, kinker31 said:

I wish Bridgeburner released low-spec versions of his maps, I'm honestly even surprised my deck can even run his stuff at all considering it's over 8 years old (admittedly with an upgrade in it 4 years back or so, but still) at this point. Quite a shame too, from what I've seen, they're pretty darned good.

 

The problem here is that doom source ports - no matter which one - have one thing in common: None of them has multi-core support, and chances are we won't see that change in the near future... It's for that reason that average rigs, even somewhat recently purchased ones, are likely to start choking on the overhead of GZDoom's inner workings, for example... Unfortunately, matters such as this one aren't discussed a great deal in more visible places - instead, this kind of knowledge is something you would only come by "naturally", if you were hanging out in certain discord servers or if you picked it up during a tangent in some loosely related discussions... If you wanted a somewhat budget option to solve your problem, you would want to go for a rig that has an above average "per-core-clock-rate" to support the most ambitious GZDoom projects out there properly...

 

Last time I gave somebody the recommendation to check out some community highlights for stuff to play, I had to deal with the frustration that something wouldn't work smoothly on a 1,800$ desktop PC that was able to run stuff like Doom'16, Valorant and whatever else that compares on high detail settings overall... If we removed the people who are running a >10 year old potato on life-support - as well as those who happen to be particularly well-informed/equipped out of the equation - we would be left with a considerable number of people (I would argue a vast majority) who have no idea why a game that is over 2 decades old won't run properly on their machines. Keeping that lack of understanding in mind, I can wrap my ahead around the confusion and/or frustration, even though I have no horse in that race - neither as mapper nor as a particularly interested "consumer"...

 

Far be it from me to coax people into mapping some certain way as far as hardware limitations are considered, but if I had an affinity for "overdetailing" the shit out of everything I would probably still be asking myself how much accessibility I would be willing to sacrifice for small gains - both visually and gameplay-wise - because you just happen to get diminishing returns on every additional split to a linedef or sector at a cost that increases in a linear or even exponential manner... You could make the argument that extremely difficult maps suffer from a lack of accessibility as well, but I weigh these things differently, because detail settings are much more limited than the theoretical size of the umbrella you can create with difficulty settings, and no cheat code in the world will turn a mediocre rig into a modern gaming PC...

 

In the end I'd probably stick to leaving people to their own devices, because that's basically what I want for myself. It is a hobby after all. In a professional setting some of that "excess" definitely wouldn't fly, because studios want their products to sell to a large enough audience in order to make their operations economically viable. But as a niche in this community it's probably fine, even if it the entry barrier for many people is a monetary one in the end...

Edited August 14, 2021 by Nine Inch Heels

[KeaganDunn]

5 hours ago, kinker31 said:

I wish Bridgeburner released low-spec versions of his maps

Bastion of Chaos has a low-spec edition. His other works, I'm not sure.

[giwake]

Some terrywads are legitimately funny, especially when you know the context behind them e.g. seancon.wad being made while the creator was suffering from heat stroke

 

brutal doom is stinky and it punched my dog (true story)

 

some of the doom 3d model and hd texture mods could potentially look good with a level pack made SPECIFICALLY for it.

 

that "BANNED HD DOOM MOD???" video makes me a little bit angry

[Charlie Love]

Love for Doom 2 is based on love of the super shotgun, new enemies, and user made wads, not the actual campaign itself.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

1 hour ago, Charlie Love said:

Love for Doom 2 is based on love of the super shotgun, new enemies, and user made wads, not the actual campaign itself.

I wouldn't exactly say that's too controversial. People talk about the maps in DOOM 2 being inferior to the maps in DOOM all the time.

[Charlie Love]

17 minutes ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

I wouldn't exactly say that's too controversial. People talk about the maps in DOOM 2 being inferior to the maps in DOOM all the time.

You would be surprised. I've found City apologists. Imagine!

[Pechudin]

I like the city maps TBH. Except MAP15 I guess, wtf is that red key placement, Romero?

[Paf]

startan2 is the best texture 

[Silhouette 03]

1 hour ago, Paf said:

startan2 is the best texture 

LIES! Fireblu is best texture! Prove me wrong, I dare you!

[Yumheart]

90 degree corners can look pretty awesome.

[BCHQ]

2 hours ago, Charlie Love said:

You would be surprised. I've found City apologists. Imagine!

 

Halls of the Damned excluded, I'll take Downtown or Factory over the entire of E2-3.

[TJG1289]

2 hours ago, Charlie Love said:

You would be surprised. I've found City apologists. Imagine!

 

Map 15 Industrial Zone is my favorite Doom 2 map, and may be my favorite id-designed map in general. I don't mind the city levels at all, as they're more exploratory and open. And going back to your original point, I do think most people prefer Doom 1's levels over Doom 2's. I personally prefer Doom 2's. It's probably because of the new enemies and the SSG, but looking back on Doom 1, I don't really like E2-E3. Some of the level design is just boring. True, Doom 2 has some meh maps, but I think its highs are higher than Doom 1's. I think id was really able to hone their level design chops a lot better in the sequel and make maps that have a better flow to them.

[Paf]

4 hours ago, Silent Wolf said:

LIES! Fireblu is best texture! Prove me wrong, I dare you!

I forgot about Fireblu, that's even better!

[Ragu]

I definitely prefer Doom 2 to Doom 1. Doom 1 draws heavily from its dungeon crawler roots by way of Wolfenstein, and levels tend to be relatively flat and corridor-heavy -- with some notable exceptions, of course. Also much, much, easier. Doom 2 feels like they could let loose and try new concepts, like the proto-slaughter of the Suburbs, the semi-open Downtown, the combat puzzles of Tricks and Traps (I guess those are all Sandy levels, but I'm also a big time Sandy level apologist and think they're the best part of Doom 2).

So many great levels which spawned so many imitators, Dead Simple being the most obvious, but The Inmost Dens, 'O' of Destruction, and The Living End-alikes also having ample representation in future PWADs. The Spirit World has the most visually arresting version of Hell of any of the original id maps, The Courtyard is glorious chaos, and for sheer rock 'n roll you can't go wrong with Refueling Base. There's plenty of stinkers, too, but highs are a lot higher than Doom 1, and the lows are never as uninteresting as... half of the maps in E3.

[galileo31dos01]

STUCCO is pretty

[JezChrist]

Doom 2 has one or two very good levels at most imo.

Overall, E2 and E3 are not that good... 2 levels only in E2 stand out. 1 in E3, compared to the entirety of E1.

 

Plutonia is really when levels start to get real good.

TNT sucks for the most part imo.

I never enjoyed it, always seemed cryptic and amateurish.

I might try and replay it someday, my mind may change.