How important is difficulty?

[Spectre01]

Something I've been thinking about after finishing Swim with the Whales. How difficult should a map be for the gameplay to not feel boring and whether or not harder scenarios make a map more enjoyable? I assume it's a big factor for most people since UV-only is a rather popular sentiment, as is pistol starting or playing with no saves for the added challenge. But then again, if you're able to clear maps in a reasonable number of attempts without saving, would they not be considered too easy? Also, when people pick Plutonia as their favourite IWAD or E4 as the best episode, is it due to the added difficulty that those provide?

[Voros]

I never heard of anyone claiming Plutonia or E4 to be their favourite. To me, its UDoom and E1.

I always play in HMP, but yes, harder situations are much more fun, with the running around, shooting demons, etc.

To answer your first question, it actually depends on the map. If its oriented to battles more, than you can expect lots of enemies with the occasional "press this switch here to open this thing", or puzzle oriented, then you can expect regular amounts of enemies (meaning simpler situations) with dvanced puzzles like "press these three switches in three seperate areas to open three doors containing three keycards to open a triple locked door"

[rehelekretep]

depends on what you mean by 'difficulty'

if you mean finding the exit, solving puzzles, then my personal preference is for 'easy' please

if you mean surviving the map's encounters, then yes i think it is important.

a map that is too easy is forgettable, and over too soon
a map that is too difficult, can quickly become annoying and tiresome

so i think how someone remembers a map is very directly influenced by the difficulty they experienced

[sudo459]

Voros said:

I never heard of anyone claiming Plutonia or E4 to be their favourite. To me, its UDoom and E1.

I do, so there's one I guess :p

[SavageCorona]

Voros said:

I never heard of anyone claiming E4 to be their favourite.

Have you blocked me or something?

On topic, difficulty is the only way I feel the game can be different due to how oversaturated Doom maps are nowadays. I personally only like hard wads because if it's a cakewalk, I just get bored. I like having my shit kicked in and the adrenaline rushing as I escape a pit of revenants, chaingunners and archviles with 1 health and see the light at the end of the tunnel which ends up being a megasphere.

[Jayextee]

Voros said:

I never heard of anyone claiming Plutonia or E4 to be their favourite.

I right, I stopped saying it because I figured, hell, everyone knows.

Plutonia is my favourite. ;)

(No, really, search my wads on idGames - you'll find those Plutonia exit teleporters in Murderous Intent, Sinister Intention and Nex Credo. Fanboy much?)

On-topic: difficulty is IMO less important than challenge. Attempting to fight an Archvile in an open space with no cover is difficult. Stick an 8x8 pole in there for line-of-sight cover, then it becomes something that can with effort be overcome. A challenge.

[DMPhobos]

Voros said:

I never heard of anyone claiming Plutonia or E4 to be their favourite. To me, its UDoom and E1.

Plutonia it's my favorite of the official IWAD's for coop, it's been a long time since i last played it on coop, but it was really fun!

[TheNerdTurtle2]

Voros said:

I never heard of anyone claiming Plutonia or E4 to be their favourite. To me, its UDoom and E1.

No offense but are you living under a rock? People love E4 almost as much as E1. And there are a select few people that love Plutonia, I'll just pretend I'm not one of those people so I don't get hated haha

[Camahueto]

Challenge is nice, atleast for me. Though i only recently i started to play on harder difficulties. Also some levels feel better on harder difficulties, like The Crusher. Squashing a SMM is much more gratifiying than a few Barons.

[Voros]

I never heard/remembered until now. Thank you for refreshing my mind guys!

[Maes]

How difficult is importance?

[RUSH]

I enjoy difficulty, but not slaughter maps. Having lots of high HP meat shield enemies doesn't necessarily make a map hard. Just tedious. Strategically placed monsters is far more interesting. Plutonia did this well, although it kind of went overboard with the amount of chaingunners.

[Maes]

RUSH said:

Having lots of high HP meat shield enemies doesn't necessarily make a map hard. Just tedious. Strategically placed monsters is far more interesting.

How about strategically placed asshole traps with high HP AND hard-hitting monsters? E.g. like unleashing 20 archviles on your ass if you pick up the "wrong" item, or come too close to the "wrong" wall?

[RUSH]

^ Monster closets and item traps are cool.

...not so sure about 20 arch-viles though O-O

[Maes]

RUSH said:

^ Monster closets and item traps are cool.

...not so sure about 20 arch-viles though O-O

Need to play MOAR Chillax ;-)

[baja blast rd.]

RUSH said:

I enjoy difficulty, but not slaughter maps. Having lots of high HP meat shield enemies doesn't necessarily make a map hard. Just tedious. Strategically placed monsters is far more interesting. Plutonia did this well, although it kind of went overboard with the amount of chaingunners.

Not sure how you can simultaneously think Plutonia is hard (it's far from it, by modern standards) while thinking slaughtermaps aren't 'hard, but tedious', unless you are playing easy low-quality slaughtermaps like nuts.wad or using lots of saves (latter of which makes assessments of difficulty pointless). Play any good modern slaughterwad and you'll find out that high monster counts and 'strategic placement' are very far from contradictory.

[Urthar]

I find I become disengaged with a map if I'm constantly reaching for the save key. I tend to favor easier, pretty looking maps. But I don't mind how tough a map is in UV, so long as I can still enjoy it in HMP or even HNTR.

It's very natural for a mapper to create something that's engaging by making it challenge their own level of skill. Retaining the interest in an encounter on easier settings can be quite tricky. I remember a Doom Radio show where Tarnsman talked about handicapping himself by only using the keyboard or only walking to get a sense of how well a map worked on easier settings.

One technique I found of interest, was something the Half-Life 2 modder James Partridge said about stripping an encounter down to it's essentials by seeing how few monsters an encounter needed to make it work.

[Swine & Roses]

Doom is best if you can blaze through the level as if on speed, mowing down hellspawn left and right.
If a level ever requires you to take cover, it's trash. ;P

[40oz]

Urthar said:

I remember a Doom Radio show where Tarnsman talked about handicapping himself by only using the keyboard or only walking to get a sense of how well a map worked on easier settings.

I'm not sure that's the best assessment of difficulty for novice players. I'm sure players who play on easy (or choose not to but still die a lot) are still strafing and mouselooking and running. What I've come to understand about players of a higher skill caliber is that they are much better at using their peripherals.

Think of E2M8 Tower of Babel. The Cyberdemon is the focal point of the entire fight. You may have a lot of trouble fighting it with keyboard only or no strafing. Yet if you play on Easy, the Cyberdemon isn't replaced with a bunch of Hell Barons. The difference between Easy and Hard are the lost souls. The Lost souls distract you from your target and sometimes fly in your face when you've got the rocket launcher in hand.

Imagine you're in a difficult position in a map where you are fighting two archviles and getting sniped by shotgun guys in the distance at the same time. Even though the archviles are historically some of the hardest monsters in the game and the immediate danger here, it would severely damage the significance of the double archvile encounter if you remove one of the archviles or replace them with revenants instead. The shotgun guys are probably the real ones making it difficult because the player is not focused on them, despite them chipping away at the players health. A more skilled player can probably manage getting out of the line of sight of all the monsters at once, but a less skilled player would probably only focus on the archviles.

To be accomodating for lesser skill levels is to manage how many monsters the player is coping with at one time. A mountain range with revenants at various locations and heights dotted all over it and firing missiles at the player is probably not a whole lot harder than imps all across the mountain range doing the same thing. If you take those revenants off the mountain ranges and put them at ground level where the player can get at them, that would be much easier to deal with. Another accomodation of course is to provide more health items and maybe a bit more ammo to forgive errors.

EDIT: Now that I reread your post, that sounds a lot like what James Partridge said. Oh well. Hopefully it's helpful to somebody

[40oz]

To respond to the thread, getting killed sucks sometimes, but defeating a very difficult encounter is much more rewarding. It's a bit of a gamble, but most people prefer harder wads to easier wads because the harder ones are simply more exciting. There are plenty things the player can do to get through a hard wad anyway, such as playing on an easier difficulty (which I believe is always a very important feature) play with saves, with cheat codes, with weapon mods, etc. So there really isn't that much of a reason to make the hardest skill level on a map very soft.

For me, the challenges involved with making a map that is tough but fair are usually boiled down to two things.

1. The amount of time invested in a particular map

I usually don't like to keep a bunch of save files on hand so I often pistol start things from start to finish. So if I spend a half hour grinding away imps and pinky demons with a shotgun in a 500+ monster massacre, I really don't want to get picked off by a random chaingunner and have to start over. Sure I may have trouble completing the map, but not necessarily because it's hard for me as much as it is boring me and making me lazy.

2. The difficulty should rise as the player progresses

In some maps, immediate life-or-death situations like cyberdemon duels or archvile ambushes at the start of a map can be very fun, for the reason above -- the player doesn't lose much progress if he fails. But in the majority of maps, the suspense and challenge should rise toward a large and tough climactic fight at the end of the map (which isn't always easy to do, considering that as the player kills monsters, there are now fewer monsters left on the map.) You want to build the players expectations up by making him try a little harder with each monster encounter he approaches and get his adrenaline up. That's what makes things fun.

I hope that helps.

[Batelli_1605]

I think that just goes from player to player, I mean the cliché "casual/hardcore" gamer thing, I myself like a good challenge when I play videogames, but at the same time I don't like anything impossible, I think that the developers at the time found the perfect balance between difficulty setting and gameplay for Doom, that's why it was and still is so popular and enjoyable, the difficulty setting fits pretty well if you ask me every skill level for every newcomer(or not) to Doom, but that being said... This doesn't apply to Nightmare mode, which it's just a big clusterfuck where you will be running for your life 90% of the time when at the same time trying to find the exit.

[Spectre01]

Batelli_1605 said:

This doesn't apply to Nightmare mode, which it's just a big clusterfuck where you will be running for your life 90% of the time when at the same time trying to find the exit.

Nightmare is pretty much only good for speedrunning due to the respawn mechanic. Also, the -fast monsters parameter changes the base gameplay too much and not in an enjoyable direction.

[Avoozl]

Playing on UV with fast mode is so fun.

[baja blast rd.]

40oz said:

I'm not sure that's the best assessment of difficulty for novice players. I'm sure players who play on easy (or choose not to but still die a lot) are still strafing and mouselooking and running. What I've come to understand about players of a higher skill caliber is that they are much better at using their peripherals.

Strategy is probably the most important thing. Good players are way more likely to both know the approaches for a given type of setups that minimize potential harm and have more experience implementing these approaches without having to think too hard about it. That's somewhat related to "using peripherals" I suppose.

I'd say fundamentals are important too, the tactical complement to strategy. The baseline skill is being able to fight things in a clean and efficient manner. A really basic thing, for example: SSG-ing a manc. Better players are probably going to be strafing somewhere around the minimal amount necessary to dodge the projectiles (often predodging gracefully to the familiar timing of the manc's fireballs), and they will be comfortable fighting at near point-blank range. Less experienced players will probably be overdodging, moving with a more erratic rhythm, and introducing superfluous turning. More experienced players will be well versed with all the fundamental fight types like this -- the way to fight cybers, archies, revs, and so on -- and in ways that generalize to more sophisticated fights. (Being able to cut out erratic, superfluous, or "showy" movement is pretty big. Anyone can take on a couple of revenants while moving around like crazy, but in a more hectic setup, or even just one with a few extra monsters, you'll suddenly be a lot more likely to accidentally run into another monster's projectile.)

[Azuruish]

Maes said:

Need to play MOAR Chillax ;-)

I would like to rape the owner of these masterpieces. Especially for map21 and map27.

[deadwolves]

I love Nightmare difficulty. You have to think as well as fight, you have to plan out your levels, you're never sitting around bored either. You have to really concentrate on what's happening sometimes, but it turns boring levels into exciting ones.

rileymartin said:

Nightmare is pretty much only good for speedrunning due to the respawn mechanic.

Totally disagree. Just because you've got to move very fast, doesn't mean it has to be a speedrun. The enemies are so powerful that they rip each other apart just as easily as they do to you so sometimes just waiting for them to kill each other is safer and more reliable. Some rooms and corridors are just plain evil, but other times it pays to take it step by step.

E2M6 is probably the hardest original Doom map on NM. Check out how these two players deal with it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGlCmt74P9w (completed in 2 minutes)
Here's Rybacksda (who is so good that I once posted on here questioning if he was cheating). He knows where to go, he doesn't waste time or shoot unnecessarily, but he's playing for precision not speedrunning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMZa3IwTTD8 (completed in 8 minutes)
This guy is also an excellent player but he treats the map completely differently. Although Rybacksda is sharp and logical, this guy is more intuitive and practical. Both of them are very methodical and neither are playing for speed.

I love NM play but the leap from UV to NM is pretty big and it definitely puts a lot of people off, which is a shame really. It's a great difficulty level and deserves more credit.

[baja blast rd.]

deadwolves said:

I love NM play but the leap from UV to NM is pretty big and it definitely puts a lot of people off, which is a shame really. It's a great difficulty level and deserves more credit.

The niche community ended up staking its claim in difficult slaughter gameplay, some of the most popular mappers being Ribbiks, Dannebubinga, Insane Gazebo, Death-Destiny, etc. You don't consider these people who play UV on hard slaughtermaps with no (or minimal) saves cowards who are afraid of nightmare (on the iwads), right? Because I've sort of gotten the impression from previous posts that you believe NM to be the holy grail of Doom toughness or something, and nothing else competes with it.

[deadwolves]

rdwpa said:

The niche community ended up staking its claim in difficult slaughter gameplay, some of the most popular mappers being Ribbiks, Dannebubinga, Insane Gazebo, Death-Destiny, etc. You don't consider these people who play UV on hard slaughtermaps with no (or minimal) saves cowards who are afraid of nightmare (on the iwads), right? Because I've sort of gotten the impression from previous posts that you believe NM to be the holy grail of Doom toughness or something, and nothing else competes with it.

No way, I like watching slaughtermap plays on Youtube, but some of them make me laugh. Like, the creator thought "You know what, screw thinking. Let's just build a pyramid with 500 reverants on it. And then another pyramid with 500 cyberdemons on it. And put 1000 lost souls somewhere." Sure, it's difficult, but design is important too, and enemy overkill isn't good design.

Slaughtermaps are good for action, but most action games bore the hell out of me, I'm more of a chess or othello player. That's why NM appeals to me because you have to think about what you are doing. If you just rush in blasting without thinking, you'll always be toast.

[rehelekretep]

good slaughtermaps are not like that though. crowd control, infighting, weaving in and out, manipulation are all 'chess-like' in their strategy, just as you can say the same for NM.

[Aquanet]

It's pretty hard to increase the complexity of encounters in Doom without adding difficulty. For example, it's raining cacos on your hell knight parade.

Certain mappers really know how to destabilize a situation and can make 5 otherwise straightforward monsters really hard. That kind of ingenuity seems essential to Doom.

E1 isn't the toughest, but it's not the easiest, either.