what's the worst WAD you've ever played?

[AnonimVio]

Xaser said:

CC1 MAP06.

This. So much this.

[yakfak]

admittedly I opened this thread just to see if I was being dissed rn

[7hm]

Suitepee said:

Ghosts of Pingfang.

Yeah I think it might be this. Even bad Doom wads are usually fine, just because Doom itself is so fun. Pingfang is offensively bad and unfun.

[NinjaLiquidator]

CC1MAP06 is bad, but CC2MAP16 is worse.

[Gothic Box]

Xaser said:

Not quite sure about which wad off the top of my head, but the worst single map I've played from anything is probably CC1 MAP06. Everything it does is wrong.

Oh jesus don't remind me about that monstrosity, the layout gives me suicidal thoughts

[T-Rex]

Xaser said:

Not quite sure about which wad off the top of my head, but the worst single map I've played from anything is probably CC1 MAP06. Everything it does is wrong.

Considering the fact it's by the same guy who did that infamous behemoth from the same megawad CC1 MAP29.

[kuchitsu]

Wats so bad about it?

[Ancalagon]

I don't understand the hate against cc29, it can be a fun map. cc06 is indeed a really bad map.

[baja blast rd.]

Ancalagon said:

I don't understand the hate against cc29, it can be a fun map. cc06 is indeed a really bad map.

I haven't played CC map29, but I'm assuming based on this comment that there's a BFG and a lot of monsters.

[joe-ilya]

scifista42 said:

What about this?

This is definetly the worst.

Here's a less worse example :

[Spectre01]

On the subject of map hate, what the hell's the deal with map 9 in D2TWID? That was one of the most irritating puzzle maps I've played. Christ m8, my blood pressure was through the goddamn roof! None of Sandy's maps were that frustrating so I don't know what the author was imitating there.

[NinjaLiquidator]

rileymartin: This. I played D2TWID and stopped in Map09 cause it was shit.

[Impie]

Shitwads I can just ignore, so they don't bother me. The ones that bother me are the ones that showed so much potential, but boneheaded design decisions utterly ruined the entire thing.

When I think of "worst wads" in this regard, the original Wolfendoom wads come to mind immediately. Great opportunity to reimagine Wolf3D with the Doom engine, like how Blade of Agony did it years later. What does the Wolfendoom author do? Endless, identical corridors, with obsessive-compulsive placement of the same two or three goddamned enemies that have too much health and have to be killed with shitty weapons. Even the ones that initially show promise -- Rheingold or Arctic Wolf -- rapidly descend into boring monotony. Being made in the 90s doesn't excuse any of it: the potential for interesting level design is there, in the hotel lobbies, city streets, and arctic harbors; fear or lack of imagination (or both) restricted this expansive project to terminal blandness and soul-crushing boredom. Every time I think about Wolfendoom it makes me wanna break my keyboard over my knee.

Pinochetstein 3D makes my list too, for similar reasons, except at least in that megawad the map aesthetic was great. Each map really gave you a sense of place. Too bad he had the enemy placement restraint of a three-year-old, dumping buckets of hitscanners into every crevice of every map, so that every step you take is death. Coulda been great, but again the designer had no idea what he was doing and crashed it into a mountain. It can be fun if played with Russian Overkill, I guess, but you have to cheat to get any of those guns and stand a chance against the onslaught, and that's assuming you manage to type the code and switch guns before you're instantly killed.

[Dylan Jarvis]

To be honest? My vote goes to Plutonia 2. Not because the maps are ugly or bad per se. It just didn't live up to its potential. At first it started great, with nice short maps that have nonlinear paths and mostly fun encounters. But then you hit a Wall of shit by the name Arch-Violence, then it never recovers from it. The wad descends into these huge key/switch treasure hunt maps that take 20 plus minutes each. They all felt the same too. Not every freakin Plutonia 1 map was so god damn confusing people! The encounters also felt stale as well. Most encounters were predictable, or unfair. To be fair though Go 4 It was pretty damn awesome though, except for the random Icon thrown in at the end. And don't get me started on that shitty last map! Overall it just was a mess of a WAD. It claims that it gives a Plutonia feel and it just simply doesn't. Plutonia was a WAD that started challenging, that ended challenging. Plutonia 2 started challenging and ended overly complex and confusing, where the levels drag on too long. Bleh!

[kuchitsu]

For me Plutonia 2 collapses somewhere around Map19. Most levels before it are very strong imo (I agree Arch-Violence is tedious though), but starting from it I see too much unimaginative monster spam. I like maps 20, 23 and 24 though.

[DoomPhreak]

Does anyone recall a WAD in which all the maps are only 1x1 in size? Or maybe 2x2. Basically, you are in a tiny room all the time. You pull a switch and go to the next level, etc. But I do recall a few clever touches (relatively speaking). My first thought was this WAD dared to be bad in a ballsy way.

[Gothic Box]

DoomPhreak said:

Does anyone recall a WAD in which all the maps are only 1x1 in size?

do you mean 1 unit by 1 unit? because that would mean you'd have zero room to move.

[gaspe]

DoomPhreak said:

Does anyone recall a WAD in which all the maps are only 1x1 in size? Or maybe 2x2. Basically, you are in a tiny room all the time. You pull a switch and go to the next level, etc. But I do recall a few clever touches (relatively speaking). My first thought was this WAD dared to be bad in a ballsy way.

Could it be Congestion 64?

[DoomPhreak]

gaspe said:

Could it be Congestion 64?

Yes I think so. One of those joke wads, lol.

[Graf Zahl]

'played' or 'checked out'?

The worst things I have ever seen didn't last long enough to be played, but if I only count something I actually started playing for real because it looked promising but ultimately found bad, the top spot is still held by Legacy of Suffering. Utterly crappy, boring and repetetive gameplay that somehow managed to get the worst aspects of modern gaming into a Doom mod.

[Chezza]

Just as others already mentioned I choose Ghost of Pingfang. Awful. There is even a dedicated button to commit suicide - right click.

[Spectre01]

Tactical Stiffy said:

To be honest? My vote goes to Plutonia 2. Not because the maps are ugly or bad per se. It just didn't live up to its potential. At first it started great, with nice short maps that have nonlinear paths and mostly fun encounters. But then you hit a Wall of shit by the name Arch-Violence, then it never recovers from it. The wad descends into these huge key/switch treasure hunt maps that take 20 plus minutes each. They all felt the same too. Not every freakin Plutonia 1 map was so god damn confusing people! The encounters also felt stale as well. Most encounters were predictable, or unfair. To be fair though Go 4 It was pretty damn awesome though, except for the random Icon thrown in at the end. And don't get me started on that shitty last map! Overall it just was a mess of a WAD. It claims that it gives a Plutonia feel and it just simply doesn't. Plutonia was a WAD that started challenging, that ended challenging. Plutonia 2 started challenging and ended overly complex and confusing, where the levels drag on too long. Bleh!

That's too bad, I thought PL2 was fantastic and one of the rare wads that I rated 5. Arch-Violence is a very confusing level that took me upwards of an hour to full clear the first time but I thought it was cool. There are definitely more lengthy maps compared to the original and the monster count is generally much higher. I don't get what's shitty about the last map compared to all the other shitty IoS closers. At least this one has by far the coolest looking Icon and no elevator bullshit, just a raised platform. The fight is also free aim compatible which is great. Anyway, have you tried Plutonia Revisited?

[Katamori]

About Ghosts of Pingfang and all the Proktor works: they had quite strong potential as a new aspect of horror. The point it fails is the undescribably terrible maps, and some of the resources.

It'd REALLY deserve a proper remake, though. Black & white visuals, genocide-like scale, the worst of human nature, and so on.

gaspe said:

Legacy of Suffering.

Graf Zahl said:

the top spot is still held by Legacy of Suffering. Utterly crappy, boring and repetetive gameplay that somehow managed to get the worst aspects of modern gaming into a Doom mod.

You've got to be kidding me.

There are SO MANY worse sets than that. LoS was actually very inspired and enormous in terms of scripting, new resources and level design, with quite good at the majority of them.

What made you hate it so much? I can't even imagine a proper reason,

[DMPhobos]

Can't remember the name of the wad, but this is the one on top of my head for the worst wad that i've played (i think it was made by cutmanmike waay before ghoul forest). It was an empty mansion, and after walking around for 5 minutes.... jumpscare... yeah, it was quite cheap.

[Demon of the Well]

Legacy of Suffering is a fucking trainwreck. A lot of love obviously went into gathering and organizing its components, no doubt, but the end result is a directionless mess that feels like an abandoned pre-alpha-grade fragment of a larger project.

You look at it on paper, and it's quite easy to see what the author was going for--Doom III with a Doom II attitude, right?. Pretty much an old chestnut by this point, though I suppose it was a little more novel then, in fairness. So, in pursuing this target setting, we naturally see a ton of dark grimy corridors and some reworked gore effects (I recall they reminded me most of the blood spritzes from the original Quake) and the like, as well as some vague semblance of a story. Scripting or no, though, it's still the (G)ZDoom of several years ago and not Doom III proper, so the narrative aspect basically boils down to a few dubiously-drawn splash-screens featuring English that is irretrievably broken to the point where it's sometimes difficult to tell even the gist of what's being communicated, and a pop-in cardboard cutout of a ghostly lady (the player character's girlfriend or something?) that jump-scares you in a dingy little stairwell at some point. There's very little room for storytelling through level design itself beyond the basic Doom conceit of beginning in a techbase and ending in Hell, as almost unfailingly each level is a flat boring linear tunnel that attempts to substitute a host of new texture assets and decals for actual substance, far beyond the level of even other contemporary ZDoom releases that have historically been disparaged for doing much the same thing, ala Daniel Gimmer's "Sapphire Orbital Research" and the like. By the time the Hell segment rolls around, we are seeing something that, barring one dropoff and a few closets, could have very nearly been made in Wolfenstein 3D, an orthogonally-patterned quasi-maze with occasional straight shootouts with meat-monsters. It is dire.

Scripting? What scripting? You mean the constant locked-door arenas that make you kill a few small waves of enemies before you can progress? The early game is certainly filled to repletion with those, though as aforesaid by the time the game reaches Hell there is very little of even that superficial level of nuance left. The most complex and ambitious piece of scripting I recall involved what should have been the set's final boss only being fully vulnerable to one particular weapon, having a specter effect that expired halfway through, and teleporting around a bit. Certainly some ideas at play there, I'll grant you, though in practice the fight sort of plays like a weird clunky cover shooter since the boss is powerful but essentially behaves as a super-tanky turret most of the time. In the whole of the game I remember one decent fight, versus a horde of imps and maybe an arch-vile in an interesting pillared/braced checkerboard room that repeatedly expanded as the fight went on, but the rest of the time the gameplay is Painkiller using Doom II stuff, which is generally not a recipe for success. The best I'll say for it is that using the quad shotgun to one-shot hell knights as though they were lowly imps was sort of satisfying in its way, but of course even that bit of levity only goes so far when the core gameplay is so unrelentingly shallow. Speaking for myself, the thing I found most unforgivable of all was the way the thing just suddenly ends--you slog through the god-awful Ken's Labyrinthian Hell map thinking there's going to be some sort of payoff, and at long last you teleport to a void-island with a couple of arch-viles that looks like it might represent the first spate of actual gameplay in what feels like hours....only, rather than fighting you, they simply tell you that the game is over via one more splash-screen (in more horribly broken English). And right they are, apparently. Fuck you too.

At the end of the day what we're treated to is a Doom III-styled WAD that supra-magnifies all of Doom III's flaws while capturing absolutely none of its virtues, something it's so preoccupied in attempting that it doesn't play to any of Doom/Doom II's strengths. It almost feels more like a flea market-quality Doom clone than Doom itself.

All that said, I still don't reckon it's really in the running for the worst (serious/credible) project I've personally played. One could fill every tome in the proverbial library of Alexandria with a treatise on what's wrong with the gameplay in Super Sonic Doom, for instance.....

[Li'l devil]

Oh my god now that's a huge wall of text!
tl;dr, mate.

[baja blast rd.]

Demon of the Well said:

One could fill every tome in the proverbial library of Alexandria with a treatise on what's wrong with the gameplay in Super Sonic Doom, for instance.....

You should get started. :)

[Demon of the Well]

I would probably crash the board software. ;)

Also really really bad: Rakehell. Bad in sort of an interesting way, though, like Doom as some sort of primitive sniper simulator.

[Da Werecat]

I don't remember Demon of the Well overreacting in such a way about a lot of things. It seems that the concept is the "problem" here rather than execution.

BTW, as far as broken English goes, story texts in LoS are relatively comprehensible.

[Frisky]

Gothic Box said:

do you mean 1 unit by 1 unit? because that would mean you'd have zero room to move.

YOU MEAN THIS FANTASTIC PIECE OF ART OF A WAD?!