Doom 1 or 2?

[VGamingJunkie]

So why didn't they just give Doom 2 enemies and weapons to Thy Flesh Consumed? It would actually make perfect sense since it's supposed to take place on Earth, during the initial stages leading up to Doom 2. Would have probably made it better if they didn't constrain themselves to Doom 1 limits. Heck, maybe even take a twist like a couple of console ports where Doom 2 elements are spliced into the original levels to breath new life into them. Just a thought. Would have been the best of both worlds since the general consensus is that Doom has better levels but Doom 2 has the edge in content. Had Ultimate Doom been spliced with Doom 2 elements, its advantage would be dissolved.

[Da Werecat]

I remember reading somewhere that since TFC was supposed to be an expansion of the first game, they didn't want to spoil the sequel's features in it.

[ranhcase]

Doom I for me, Doom II gets a little bit boring after a while, this doesn't happen in Doom I, and i like E2 as much as i like E1, although i think that E3 was made poorly and i didn't played enough of E4

[Agentbromsnor]

MetroidJunkie said:

So why didn't they just give Doom 2 enemies and weapons to Thy Flesh Consumed? It would actually make perfect sense since it's supposed to take place on Earth, during the initial stages leading up to Doom 2. Would have probably made it better if they didn't constrain themselves to Doom 1 limits. Heck, maybe even take a twist like a couple of console ports where Doom 2 elements are spliced into the original levels to breath new life into them. Just a thought. Would have been the best of both worlds since the general consensus is that Doom has better levels but Doom 2 has the edge in content. Had Ultimate Doom been spliced with Doom 2 elements, its advantage would be dissolved.

Having the SSG in Thy Flesh Consumed would be pretty cool to me, though they can leave the chain-gunner out for obvious reasons.

[drygnfyre]

MetroidJunkie said:

So why didn't they just give Doom 2 enemies and weapons to Thy Flesh Consumed? It would actually make perfect sense since it's supposed to take place on Earth, during the initial stages leading up to Doom 2. Would have probably made it better if they didn't constrain themselves to Doom 1 limits. Heck, maybe even take a twist like a couple of console ports where Doom 2 elements are spliced into the original levels to breath new life into them. Just a thought. Would have been the best of both worlds since the general consensus is that Doom has better levels but Doom 2 has the edge in content. Had Ultimate Doom been spliced with Doom 2 elements, its advantage would be dissolved.

I would have liked to see the hell knight and pain elemental in Episode 4, but no super shotgun. I do think barons were a bit overused in E4, and pain elementals would make sense with the many lost souls already floating around.

[Capellan]

RexFesto696 said:

all fan-made mods to DOOM do NOT count.

See this is an issue for me, because what makes me like Doom 2 better than Doom 1 is that it's a more robust base from which to make add on content, mostly thanks to having more enemies with more varied attacks.

If PWADs didn't exists and I had to choose between only ever playing Doom 1 or Doom 2, I'd probably choose Doom 1, but I wouldn't still be playing either of them today.

[Maes]

MetroidJunkie said:

So why didn't they just give Doom 2 enemies and weapons to Thy Flesh Consumed?

Because that would mean making a Doom/Doom 2 hybrid in terms of resources, and in the way IWADs and game mode selection/behavior was handled as well (e.g. episode structure, level naming, special flags, texture lumps etc.). The effort required to do that would be well beyond the level of adding a single extra episode.

Quite problematic, considering that they also offered the Ultimate Doom as a free upgrade to regular Doom users. Such a hybrid would effectively be a free upgrade to Doom II, minus the levels.

Now, of course, any source port author will tell you that it's possible to selectively keep the episode format, ExMy level numbering, special end-episode actions, intermission screens etc. and enable Doom II monsters, weapons and items with a bunch of #ifdefs during build or a few runtime checks, but given the minimum effort policy that id seems to have put into Doom after Doom II was released, that just wasn't going to happen.

[NightmareZer0]

Man this is such a hard question for me.


Doom:
-Better Level Structure/Design
-Better Boss Fights
-Better Map Flow (Less where the fuck do I go moments)

Doom II:
-Super Shotgun
-More Enemies (But the enemies they added can be quite annoying sometimes. But I like most of them)
-Icon of Sin was such a lame Boss Fight to me. Huge letdown.
-The map design feels so rushed. A lot of the levels are given names like "The Factory" and look nothing like a Factory.


I want to say Doom is better because it was more enjoyable. But Doom II adds all that new shit in. Doom II's strongest feature is being the primary IWad.

[Koko Ricky]

Imp said:

-The map design feels so rushed. A lot of the levels are given names like "The Factory" and look nothing like a Factory.

It was the mid 90s. Not much chance of any level in an FPS looking like anything representational. Did "Hangar" actually resemble a hangar? Did "Nuclear Plant" look like a nuclear plant?

[Blastfrog]

Doom 1 was more cohesive and had better atmosphere. Doom 2 is a really mixed bag IMO. I massively prefer 1.

[Maes]

GoatLord said:

It was the mid 90s. Not much chance of any level in an FPS looking like anything representational. Did "Hangar" actually resemble a hangar? Did "Nuclear Plant" look like a nuclear plant?

I don't think anybody ever seriously argued that the levels in Doom 1 looked like what their name suggested, either (besides, esp. starting from Doom II, the names were more metaphorical than literal, e.g. "Nirvana", "Gotcha!", "Paradox" etc. or focused on one element of the level e.g. "The Crusher", "Hunted", "O' Of Destruction" etc.

With that being said, Doom 1 had far more complex and detailed level design (E1 at least. We all know that's one big can of worms in its own right).

If anything, I've never seen some kind of stat, e.g. linedefs + sectors and their relative density per map area. I wouldn't be surprised if Doom 1, at least in E1, was more "detail dense", in that sense.

[Rathori]

GoatLord said:

Did "Hangar" actually resemble a hangar? Did "Nuclear Plant" look like a nuclear plant?

Actually, I always thought of it as of some of star port, or something. The outdoor area with blue armor kinda looks like a place where a small vessel could land. Not exactly a Hangar, but close enough. And Nuclear Plant - yes, it does look like one. Why not? How about Computer Station? Looks exactly like what it says it is.

My point is, while Doom I maps weren't exactly good representations of some realistic environments, you could still walk around the level and say "Yeah, it kinda does look like a Toxic Refinery (or a Nuclear Plant, or whatever) if I use a bit of imagination here and there". Doom II maps, on the other hand, look like the devs just gone wild with ideas and didn't think about what the maps are supposed to represent, and the names were just an afterthought (especially those that Maes mentioned in his post).

GoatLord said:

It was the mid 90s. Not much chance of any level in an FPS looking like anything representational.

Not much, but it did happen: System Shock came out in 1994 and its levels were barely abstract. They were quite concrete, actually. Also Strife and pretty much every Build engine game had non-abstract levels, but these came out several years later.

[Maes]

There have been many threads on Doom II's looks, but here's my take anyway: it looks as if it was designed with a weird medieval/occultist/NWO look, and most of the stages looks very weird indeed for real locations (lots of stone + wood), almost as if they were designing Heretic levels or for a completely different game. There are plenty of PWADs which manage to pull a "real city" look quite convincingly, using only stock textures (Doom 1 textures, at that), so if we rule out inability/sloppiness by part of the mappers, there might have been something else at play here.

[Da Werecat]

Here's an old post I made on the subject:
https://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1661657

Maybe the same applies to the levels as well?

[jazzmaster9]

Rathori said:

My point is, while Doom I maps weren't exactly good representations of some realistic environments, you could still walk around the level and say "Yeah, it kinda does look like a Toxic Refinery (or a Nuclear Plant, or whatever) if I use a bit of imagination here and there". Doom II maps, on the other hand, look like the devs just gone wild with ideas and didn't think about what the maps are supposed to represent, and the names were just an afterthought.

Ehh idk, Doom 1's maps were just as wild as Doom 2's in terms of representing their map names.
even "A bit of Imagination here and there" is a real stretch, Nuclear Plant, Command Control and Hangar all super abstract to me and does not represent the map name.
Doom 2's city levels actually did look like city locations.

[Hauss]

Very cool thread for me.I prefer Doom ! Why ? Because its have more levels and level design is much better than Doom 2 =)

[Sallan]

Why so much people love DOOM II? it's 99,99% equal to DOOM, few new things and worse level design that doesn't look like earth.

"Hey guys, let's get more rich with DOOM, just a ok game is enough to win more dollar$ of our fans, gogogo. "

"But we have just one guy making the music"

"I dont giv a faek"

As a expasion pack or spin-off for me was going to be much better. (OBS: I don't hate the game, but it's meh for me).

[Marcaek]

Compare any doom 2 map to any map in doom e3 and tell me that's a downgrade.

also "few new things" is a pretty severe understatement considering the bulk of the bestiary was added in doom 2: beforehand the only higher tier monster youd have to fight were the awful and unfun baron of hell.

[Sick Bow]

I agree most Doom 2 maps are severely lacking in comparison. However, the new enemies and weapons are fantastic, and give the community so much more room to work with. I've always seen Doom 2 as more of a standalone expansion. For the mod/WAD community though, it's a tool that I couldn't see the DOOM community doing without.

[Agentbromsnor]

I agree that Doom 2 definitely doesn't hold a candle to the first game. It does start out great though, and I would say that the first six maps or so are on par with the quality of the first Doom.

For me, it starts to go down-hill as soon as the maps get bigger and bigger. I usually stop playing around that point.

The new enemies are okay, though I can't say I like the archvile much.

I guess I appreciate Doom 2 more as the most up to date vanilla Doom experience.

[jazzmaster9]

Doom 1 had the better level design
Doom 2 had the better gameplay with the fact that there are more enemy types than just Doom 1's Imp, Imp with more health and flying imp slightly more health.

[Darch]

jazzmaster9 said:

Doom 1 had the better level design
Doom 2 had the better gameplay with the fact that there are more enemy types than just Doom 1's Imp, Imp with more health and flying imp slightly more health.

And fast imp that doesn't shoot fireballs

[Deleted_Account]

I like the additions to the monster roster and the super shotgun, but I never really enjoyed the levels themselves with the exception of a few.

[grommile]

Pinkies aren't monsters. They're terrain that bleeds.

[Doomkid]

Doom 2 has bigger, more open, more challenging maps, twice as much monster variety, the SSG, and a final boss that's actually challenging rather than "circle strafe til it dies". Oh, the secret maps are actually neat little Easter eggs too, rather than "lol have some reject maps" like we got with D1. (Fear is a great map admittedly, but still)

Doom 1 maps have better texturing, better skies and better music, I'll concede that much. Plays like a glorified Wolf3D in comparison to Doom 2 though, mainly due to a lot of the maps doing that "hallway shooter" thing with their design. Also I've made this exact post so many times before, rofl

I wonder if anyone has the patience to dig up the last 3-4 threads that compared D1 and D2?

[Marcaek]

grommile said:

Pinkies aren't monsters. They're terrain that bleeds.

Pinkies really work as a passive obstacle, keeping you from dodging out of the way of other monsters.

which is why i like mixing them with archviles :^)

[LexiMax]

I actually played Doom Shareware, then Doom 2, then Ultimate Doom in that order.

From a look-and-feel point of view, I thought that Doom 2 was a significant downgrade from Doom E1 - the skies were darker, some nice textures were taken out, and the new textures were all muddy, brown and weird looking. But the bestiary, SSG, and bigger more sophisticated level design made up for it.

Going to Doom E2 and E3 afterwards was...weird. They both looked...spartan compared to Doom 2 - the texturing, though brighter, was not as sophisticated, and I felt like the actual level designs were even more hit and miss than Doom 2. Visually, E3 pulled off the Hell look better than anything in Doom 2, but I simply could not help but miss the SSG and the expanded bestiary.

I don't really care for E4, as it had the drab looks of Doom 2 combined with the lacking bestiary of Doom 1. I put it in the same "fan-expansion" category that I put TNT and Plutonia.

[fraggle]

Sallan said:

As a expasion pack or spin-off for me was going to be much better.

Feel free to think of Doom 2 as an expansion pack then. I'm not sure the difference to be honest.

[baja blast rd.]

grommile said:

Pinkies aren't monsters. They're terrain that bleeds.

Pinkies can play many roles:

- eaters of space
- strategic meat shields
- fodder for fun weapons like the SSG, berserk fist, rocket launcher, and BFG
- threats against a weakly armed player in tight spaces
- in mobs, threats against a well armed player in tight or even not-so-tight spaces
- rocket magnets in pits (worst)
- boss monsters (best)

[HavoX]

okay so maybe Doom II was rushed compared to Doom 1

But you have to understand that back in 1994, things were different.