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Doom 1 or 2?

Which one is your favorite?  

426 members have voted

  1. 1. Which one is your favorite?

    • DOOM/The Ultimate DOOM
      202
    • DOOM II: Hell on Earth
      224


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The first Doom is a better-designed and less rushed production, but Doom II has more gameplay assets and makes a better platform for community stuff.

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Doom 2 is better from a technical perspective because of the added textures, monsters, weapons, etc. Most WADs use Doom 2 as a base for that reason.

But in terms of gameplay and atmosphere, I prefer Doom. Preferred the more concrete episode setup with the intermission screens, and liked how the levels felt a bit more cohesive in design.

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Da Werecat said:

Maybe it's less rushed if you only count E1.

At this point I'm convinced a bunch of people out there haven't actually played all of E2 or E3. They're arguably uglier than Doom 2 on the whole, not to mention far less challenging.

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I used to think Doom II was superior to the original, and in some ways it is if you take PWAD content into consideration, but if you take the stock IWAD for what it is it's much easier to judge based on id's efforts.

Doom 1 has tighter, more claustrophobic level design, few outdoor areas or levels, which lends to the feeling of isolation and paranoia. Not every room is a huge fight, and some rooms have no monsters in them at all. It's got a greater horror atmosphere going on because of these design decisions, even if you want to say its because they were playing it safe after Wolf3D with the new technology whereas D2 goes balls-out with more outdoor areas and more verticality and crazier geometry since D1 has a lot of 90 degree angles and not a ton of height variation.

D1's themes are more solidly grounded, with techbase, infested techbase, Hell, and some kind of ancient Earth in E4. D2's starport was OK but the city portion is piss-poor and hardly represents a real earth environment (while games like Quarantine and even LameDuke had more convincing cities but then again they did have the better assets and textures to support them). Hell is also surprisingly un-Hell-like outside of MAP28 and is a pretty big letdown for returning to it.

It's without a doubt D2 has the more ambitious and more varied level design over the original but it's not as cohesive or as well conveyed. So even with seven new monsters and the super shotgun I prefer D1's campaign due to the aesthetic, color usage, atmosphere, themes, pacing, and the superior soundtrack. I just wish there was more PWADs out there for it.

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I prefer Doom I because I dislike most of Doom II levels.

Doom II to me is just a platform for playing community WADs.

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Da Werecat said:

Doom 1 is crap because it's flat, boring, and overrated.

Doom 2 is butt because it's brown, ugly, and not particularly pretty. Also a glorified add-on!!

I don't know which one to choose.


Final Doom, obviously. That one was perfect.

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Doom and Heretic. I mean the old ones, before they added extra random episodes.

MusicallyInspired said:

I'd like to see the levels of Doom 1 reworked for Doom 2 with the extra enemies and whatnot. Best of both worlds.


I did the opposite: bulk converted Doom 2 levels to Doom with DM2CNV32. It was interesting, but of course the fun stopped on 7th level, where the linedefs don't work as expected, so you can't exit. I guess it would be pretty easy to fix this by editing a few maps that need it.

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As a standalone game (meaning no fanmade content), Doom 1 is perfect. Doom 2 has had way more levels made for it though (and I do like the added weapon and monsters), so for every crappy IWAD level, there are 100 good fanmade levels to play instead.

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Doom is more consistent in its levels, Doom 2 is a mixed bag of levels. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it's more apparent that you're playing a game with Doom 2 whereas, with Doom I, there was somewhat more of an effort to make the levels make sense to a degree, even after Tom Hall's vision of Doom was rejected.

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They both have their ups and downs. Doom feels more to be like a proper game and it manages to convey something in its progression. Doom II overall as way more memorable stuff.

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I guess I'll join the "I prefer doom 2" club. I've always thought that with some exceptions, the doom 1 hell and subverted techbase levels looked acceptable, if not amazing, but I don't find many of them particularly fun to play. I mean I don't think they're awful to play, its just that shotgunning a baron to death does get a little old after a while. The bestiary expansion was such a massive improvement, and sure the SSG is a bit odd balance wise, but it is great to have around, considering that a lot of the new monsters in Doom 2 fill that massive gap in the original bestiary (400 hp cacodemon to the 1000 hp baron, though of course the baron in implementation is a stronger imp with over 10x the hp)

sure the maps are kind of ugly in doom 2 in some ways, but I have terrible preferences so I can get around it. I actually somehow unironically enjoy MAP13. Of course I don't really play the IWAD levels much anymore, with the exception of Plutonia which is pretty damned fun.

ED: since it's been a long while I fired up E3 on UV. On my first attempt of E3M2, I promptly sequence break something and get trapped in the ring finger. this bodes well for the rest of the run.

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DoomGater said:

I prefer the shareware.
It's available for free, everywhere available and does not take too long to finish.

Does shareware count?

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I'd have to say DooM II because it has more weapons, more demons and more bloodshed with slightly enhanced graphics too. Also DooM I was way too short and in my opinion DooMs II soundtrack was way better.

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Warmaster said:

DooM II ... slightly enhanced graphics

How so? Do you just mean that there are more textures and more sprites, or are you finding some actual qualitative improvement?

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scifista42 said:

How so? Do you just mean that there are more textures and more sprites, or are you finding some actual qualitative improvement?


Yes there was more textures and sprites but i also found the graphics a little sharper and the contrast and colours were way less gray than they were in DooM I.

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The only way I can really tell that Doom II is a technical improvement over Doom is that Doom II has larger environments, to the point where some computers at the time really strained with some of the larger levels. id was taking more chances and just sort of throwing things at the wall to see what stuck. It allowed some more innovative levels but at the cost of a lot of them being hit-or-miss.

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Warmaster said:

I'd have to say DooM II because it has more weapons, more demons and more bloodshed with slightly enhanced graphics too. Also DooM I was way too short and in my opinion DooMs II soundtrack was way better.

The Ultimate Doom actually had more maps than Doom 2, 36 altogether. Granted, the episode format limited you to nine at a time.

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To be fair, you're including Thy Flesh Consumed in that which didn't come out until after Doom II. When Doom II first released, Doom only had 27 levels, 5 fewer than Doom II. Also, if you count Plutonia and TNT as one since the bundle is just called Final Doom, then that had the most at 64 levels, 32 per WAD.

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TheNerdTurtle2 said:

Who wants the shareware? That's pretty much retarded, and besides the one questionable thread just take Ultimate Doom over Registered it's just more stuff. If anyone says Shareware or Registered I'm sorry, you're wrong. It doesn't even matter if you don't want to play anything except E1 why wouldn't you just take the rest of the game?

EDIT: This sounds angry and it kind of is but I'm not trying to offend people



Well I do prefer Ultimate Doom just because it has an additional episode, even though it's not in connection to the story of the original Doom.


Doom II was fun to play, and i beat the game many times. But most of the levels in D2 are HUGE, i mean literally so HUGE that you can sometimes get lost and never will be able to get back!

Eg. The Suburbs
Downtown
Monster Condo

These maps took me at least 2 hours to finish!

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Feirup said:

I've always kind of thought of Doom as a sort of training simulation, while Doom II is where the real fun begins.


Funny, it kinda worked that way for me. When I started playing Doom 2 on the Mac in 1995, I kept dying in Map03 because I had no idea how to deal with Spectres. I had death after death where I'd be in the water looking up at this horned shadow, feeling utter terror. So I downloaded the shareware as a sort of Boot Camp for Doom 2, and once I graduated I didn't play Knee Deep or any of the other Doom 1 maps again for a couple years.

But over time, my heart went to Ultimate Doom. As a cohesive artistic experience, IMO Knee Deep In The Dead is the height of all Dooms. It's easy yet engaging. It has totally fun secrets. It's also the only representational episode in the 2 IWADs.

I do enjoy some of the E2 and E4 maps, and hats off to Sandy Petersen for saving id's assess by getting the maps done on a very tight schedule. Why wasn't Romero working his ass off on new maps? His E4 maps are brilliant, but came much later.

There's a lot I hate about Doom 2 level design, but a lot I like as well. I guess I'm among the few American McGee fans because I think Underhalls, The Gantlet and The Focus kick ass. I'm totally Team Romero, but I really like Tricks 'n Traps and Barrels o' Fun. I also appreciate the pressure Sandy seems to have exerted on Romero such that he began to produce really hard maps like Industrial Zone and his masterpiece, The Living End.

The Doom 2 maps began to get really ugly the deeper you went into the mapset, but even so, some of those ugly maps had very interesting design elements and they could be super nasty thanks to all the new anti-circle strafing monsters like Revvies, Mancs, Chaingunners and Archies. Arachnotrons are a great area-denial monster.

So in the end, my head says that Doom 2 is the overall better product, especially given its impact on our community of dedicated content creators. But the irrational side of me says it has to be Doom 1, and FWIW, the maps I make for Ultimate Doom tend to be more dangerous for quality players than my Doom 2 maps. I guess I just have an affinity for it. ;)

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i have to say, it is a hard decision, but i prefer doom II, have more maps, more monsters, more guns and the monsters teleportation, and the maps are harder.
But Doom I have better soundtrack and the final bosses stages are greats.
In Doom II u dont fight one on one with cyberdemon or spidermastermind and that is a great disadvantage.
So i dont like criticize Doom but to answer this question i must see this points objectively.

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I like Ultimate Doom the most, because I actually have a lot of good memories playing Thy Flesh Consumed back in the day. I like Doom 2 as well, but in a lot of ways it's a step backwards for me (even if it's just a small step). Even though it has some good maps (and the super-shotgun), Sandy's typical maps are a real eye-sore to me. I prefer the more straight-forward style of the first Doom, whereas some of Doom 2's levels feel a bit too open for their own good and just make me feel bored and quit the game.

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I think D2 is slightly better than D1 for several reasons, but I might be still a bit biased here. ;)
However, combined it seems to me that it doesn´t take itself so serious anymore, maybe done rather "quick N dirty" with all that drawbacks of course but on the other hand done with more freedom and less pressure - giving a better general feeling when playing over a long time...

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Well, in all honesty, Doom II came with a better engine (v1.666 from the start), slightly higher static limits, more defined objects/monsters/linedef actoins, etc. all of which made for a better modding base (and, as time has proven, much better replay and expansion value. Can you imagine e.g. HR, AV or Kama Sutra made within the constraints of Doom I?).

Some of that dribbled down to "Doom I" via Ultimate Doom (v1.9 engine, Doom II codepointers, even the SSG functionality is hidden in there!), but, in the end, having 20 vs the original 10 monster slots and a much better spectrum of monsters won the day.

The Doom II maps, OTOH, were almost an afterthought. Final Doom's maps gave a better insight on what Doom II could have been from the start.

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