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KVELLER

Does anyone actually like playing on Nightmare?

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That skill level is almost like a joke (maybe it actually is). Damn, even the game itself warns you about how unfair it is, and most PWADs authors say "It's beatable in UV". Maybe you finished the games in that difficulty to feel like a badass that could finish the game in the hardest difficulty (I know I did :P ) but do you actually enjoy taking showers of fireballs that go at 300% their normal speed, getting shotgun blasts to the face by zombies that react faster than your human brain and having to deal with a neverending supply of hellspawn?

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Outside of the challenge in the concept alone, it's not very fun. Not ashamed to admit that i've never gotten past Underhalls in Nightmare. 

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23 minutes ago, KVELLER said:

That skill level is almost like a joke (maybe it actually is).

It literally was. It was added in 1.2, IIRC, as a response to people saying the game was a tad on the easy side.

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1 hour ago, Blastfrog said:

It literally was. It was added in 1.2, IIRC, as a response to people saying the game was a tad on the easy side.

Well, that explains the huge difficulty spike between UV and Nightmare.

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I find it quite fun and tactical. Doom has you being an overall badass who tears their way through demons without much rhyme or reason.

 

At the very least, Nightmare forces you to stop and plan on how you'll play the level, because you can't afford to kill that one archvile ten times.

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When it's too wasy on UV, I try NM... I even try NM when it seems ridiculous, because it's fun to re-route a level, or I do it simply for the sport of it... When looking at iWADs, NMs "difficulty spike" is mostly an issue in very hitscan heavy levels (E4M1 is gross, for instance). The moment the "projectile hell" breaks loose, it's wicked mad fun...

Edited by Nine Inch Heels

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I'm certainly glad the difficulty setting exists, it's fun to challenge yourself from time to time and see how far you can get!

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I'm not a fan of the way it changes the gameplay, so no I don't.  If I need a level to be more difficult, I'll either force myself to use weaker weapons, avoid health, or something along those lines.  I also generally ignore Nightmare altogether when I design levels and are planning the difficulty levels.

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1 minute ago, YukiRaven said:

I also generally ignore Nightmare altogether when I design levels and are planning the difficulty levels.

Is that right..? ;-)

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If I play nightmare it's either for messing around or to speedrun and ignore everything I can except powerups and getting to the exit.

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I have only played through Nightmare on the first three Quake games and Doom 3, with the first two Doom's I would rather play on UV with -fast mode than Nightmare.

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I've played Doom 2, Plutonia, and TNT in Survival mode on Nighmare (some maps, not all) in ZDaemon. It's always a fun experience with a group of friends together. But strictly no when having multiplayer Lag!

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Nightmare is a prank you play on people that never played Doom. That's why it's a joke.

 

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Nightmare is a too much speedrun-oriented difficulty to have fun when you want to play normally. When I want to play a easy/normal wad and it's a bit boring in Ultra-Violence , I prefer to put the fast mode so that monsters don't respawn and I can take my time.

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My favorite way to play Doom WADs is blind, so my answer is an emphatic NO!

 

11 hours ago, Marveller said:

Outside of the challenge in the concept alone, it's not very fun. Not ashamed to admit that i've never gotten past Underhalls in Nightmare. 

Yup, same!

 

I should probably give NM another try though. A friend of mine on YouTube has been doing a NM walkthrough of Doom 2, and so I'm learning a lot about the changes in monster behavior, etc. Might be fun to speedrun Scythe or something "not too rough" on NM mode... (see what I did there? :-P)

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I remember opening Nightmare in Doom 1 out of curiosity, when I was first starting out Doom. I died a few times to the respawning Shotgun Sergeants (dumb me wanted to get the level 100%). Then, I was scared and I closed the game immediately. So I went with UV, which is reasonable.

And I always wondered: << How do these guys do the NM speedruns? They must be really good!!!>>

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6 minutes ago, ShotgunDemolition said:

I remember opening Nightmare in Doom 1 out of curiosity, when I was first starting out Doom. I died a few times to the respawning Shotgun Sergeants (dumb me wanted to get the level 100%). Then, I was scared and I closed the game immediately. So I went with UV, which is reasonable.

And I always wondered: << How do these guys do the NM speedruns? They must be really good!!!>>

Maybe because it's impossible to do a 100% kill ratio. Just kill the necessary monsters to progress, like a speedrun or something and you'll clear the map somehow...

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Ehhh... Usually, when I make my maps, I make sure to test it out on ALL difficulties, including Nightmare! Nightmare can pay off in some weird fetishist way I believe.

 

Per instance, once I made a "zombie invasion" map, composed of 3000 pinkies rushing in houses, stables, chapels, keeps, cars, trucks, biting down every custom marine they can find. I made like two more (they will never be released because I never bother replacing the vanilla textures), and the Nightmare! mode gives a certain edge to it.

 

Like, on any other difficulty, if one is patient, the entire "zombie" army could be eliminated slaugther map style. Plus pinkies aren't that quick and the player is usually twice as fast, so they could be outrunned instantly. However, on Nightmare! mode, its a fucking carnage. Pinkies rush in like sandstorms, and by the time you fire and reload a supershotgun, you're done for. You could hardly outrun them. If you made a mistake, you're dinner.

 

Of course, pinkies cannot ever be eliminated, so no hope of reaching for that juicy 100%, and getting to the exit becomes twice a challenge.

 

However, the advantage of custom marines on Nightmare! difficulty is: quicker fire rate (like, fuck,a plasmaneer squad can clean out a hallway in a matter of seconds), quicker reaction time (usually marines lollygag around before taking another shot or spray, n! marines shoot on sight, no, sense), and in general, better pathfinding (being quick on reacting usually makes one so), so having a platoon of n! marines ARE of major help. Yeah, you could die if you got in front of them, but still, having artillery support by rocketeers on pillars can be better than being on your own.

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Nightmare! seems to be popular with speedrunning, it requires an intimate knowledge of the map's design and taking shortcuts to reduce time spent dealing with dangerous enemy respawns. As for actually playing it like you would UV or even UV -fast I don't see how the game would be much fun still what with all the cheap deaths caused by rooms cleared out and an eventual exhaust of resources.

I've been playing Heretic on skill 5 however and generally think it's way more fun with faster monsters. I can't imagine how different it would play with everything coming back after 12 seconds when you can be spending upwards of 15 to 20 minutes on average per map.

The second D'Sparil fight is almost impossible on skill 5 though.

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3 hours ago, ShotgunDemolition said:

<< How do these guys do the NM speedruns? They must be really good!!!>>

Determination and many, many restarts!

 

 

and probably 6th sense

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4 hours ago, leodoom85 said:

Maybe because it's impossible to do a 100% kill ratio. Just kill the necessary monsters to progress, like a speedrun or something and you'll clear the map somehow...

Yes I know, but I wasn't aware of that at the time I played in NM. I learned a lot of things since that time.  :)

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Depends on the mapset for me. Easy mapsets like CQ1 through CQ3 can be done on Skill 5 no questions asked. Usually though when Nightmare is too difficult I just end up switching fast monsters on.

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4 hours ago, leodoom85 said:

Maybe because it's impossible to do a 100% kill ratio. Just kill the necessary monsters to progress, like a speedrun or something and you'll clear the map somehow...

Actually, in vanilla (and classic ports), the kill ratio on the intermission screen is computed this way: The number of monsters that died (including respawned monsters, so it can be an arbitrarily high number), divided by the number of monsters that were in the map when the map started (that is, not including respawned monsters, so it's a fixed number). Therefore, it is easily possible to do a 100% kill ratio, and go much beyond 100%, too.

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4 minutes ago, scifista42 said:

Actually, in vanilla (and classic ports), the kill ratio on the intermission screen is computed this way: The number of monsters that died (including respawned monsters), divided by the number of monsters that were in the map when the map started (that is, not including respawned monsters). The number that you multiply by is basically unlimited, whereas the number that you divide by is fixed. Therefore, it is easily possible to do a 100% kill ratio, and go much beyond 100%, too.

Yeah, but in a Nightmare gameplay, you only think of strategies to survive the ordeal. So, you have two options, take it or leave it...

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I played through all of Doom 1.2 (the first three episodes) on Nightmare! waaay back, but it included a lot of saving :P In Doom 2, I never got past "Underhalls" either. -Fast or -Respawn one at a time is more than enough if the base games are too easy. Both simultaneously are too much.

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