Mr. Duk

I just finished The Ancient Gods, and although I liked a lot of the Blood Swamps, overall I really didn't like this DLC at all. It was tedious and annoying. I feel like the nu-Doom is fully going in the wrong direction right now. So you know where I stand, Ultimate Doom/Doom 2 are my favorite games ever, or at least top 3. (And they'll always be in my top 3.) I wasn't really looking forward to Doom 2016, and I didn't even buy it on release. When I finally played it later that summer, it instantly became my favorite shooter of the 2010s. I think Doom 2016 is a masterpiece, and it was better than anything I ever could have expected. I'd still rank the original Dooms above it (partly because of all the custom modded content), but still, Doom 2016 absolutely was a worthy modern version of the game. I've played it start to finish 4 times. It's still fun to play in 2020. Then comes Doom Eternal. I felt like Eternal was one step forward, two steps back. I still liked the game, but I didn't LOVE it. Ironically I actually liked the addition of the Marauder, I thought he was a modern day version of the arch-vile in that he completely changes the way you have to play. As long as he isn't overused, I think he's a good addition to the bestiary. However, I **HATED** the jumping puzzles. They were tedious, and the mechanics for jumping just aren't very good in my opinion. The jumping puzzles really hurt replayability, too. I don't mind that Eternal tried to make the game more vertical. In fact, I actually think that was a good design choice (one step forward). However, putting in so many tedious jumping puzzles was so unnecessary and laborious (two steps back). I liked the dash mechanic, but overall I still felt that Doom 2016 was a bit better balanced, and I much preferred the vibe of Doom 2016; dark and mysterious and truly Hellish. Eternal was a bit too arcade-y for my tastes, and I wish the Hell levels had that darker more foreboding vibe of Doom 2016. The other thing I've always loved about Doom is that it gives you player freedom in how you want to play it. I felt like Eternal was pushing too far into "you have to fight like this if you want to win", even though their dance of death had a lot to like about it. It just went a littttllleeee too far in that direction for my tastes. So... with ALL OF THAT SAID... this DLC takes Eternal to 11 and I think it's just tedious at this point. They have more and more enemies, now in more and more cramped spaces. They've added new enemies that you can only defeat in one way (like the Spirit... cool idea, but tedious in execution). The Marauder is now overused and too common, though I did like the fight between two of them. The Blood Swamps I do think is a neat level, and I loved the mechanic with the guardian dogs (and I thought that was a better way to try and put you in a confined space with demons than narrow hallways). However, the other two levels were tedious. There was no rhythm to them. It was just, "here we'll spawn these enemies in bunches of 2s and 4s and you fight them." The boss with the box and the eye was extremely boring. You beat it. Then there's another box. Then there's two more. All the time you are running around to avoid the Pinky and Hell Knights. It's just like, "I did this, why am I still doing this now...? How long until I can move on?" And the first level had probably some of the most annoying jumping puzzles of the entire game, including two that bugged me out and sent me flying off into the sea with no death (requiring a restart). BEYOND tedious. I realize some people are really enjoying this DLC, and I'm glad! But for me this isn't what I like about Doom. It's gotten so fast and so frantic that it's lost a sense of rhythm and pacing. If everything is set to 11, then it ceases to have any real stakes or sense of progression. Yes, it's difficult, but playing on HMP I only died once (minus falling deaths). I just got bored. After you kill your fourth Baron in a row it's like... ok, I get it, I get it! Now, to be fair, I'm not a big fan of slaughter wads, and this is basically a modern day slaughter wad. I like a bit of that, but I'm a big fan of ebbs and flows and pacing things so it ramps up and ramps down and then ramps up again. Knee-Deep in the Dead *still* does this perfectly, as did SIGIL, and as do a bunch of recent wads like Akeldama. Ancient Gods to me just became noise, and I can't see myself ever wanting to play through it again on a higher difficulty like I did with the base game (HMP and then Nightmare). In my ideal world, a potential Doom 3 (if there is a nu-Doom 3) would be a mix of Eternal and Doom 2016 mechanics, and it would abandon arena focused combat for fully open levels like the original 90s games. It'd add back in monster infighting that isn't scripted, so that can become a part of the strategy. I'd also love to see them go a bit God of War and have these massive demons doing battle in the background, and maybe you even have combat sections on one of them or one of the temples being carried by a large demon. I still liked Eternal, but I feel like the game has decided to go a certain route (dance of death where you HAVE to fight demons in certain ways, jumping puzzles, arcade-y arena action) and I'd rather the series goes in the other direction. Anyway, my two cents. I see a lot of people here *LOVE* the new DLC, and I'm glad y'all like it, but I wanted to offer a counter opinion. I'd give Ultimate Doom / Doom 2 an A++, Doom 2016 a solid A, Eternal a solid B, and this new DLC a C or C-. Blood Swamps saved it from being a complete let down.

A little off topic, but I just realized in the OG Doom that pinky demons make a very distinct thump sound when they land. How did I never notice that before????

Ugh he's such an angry Internet person. He's spewed bile on other forums. This settles it. I will never buy another Night Dive product ever again. The Blood remaster wasn't good anyway, and it looks like they've majorly screwed up Blade Runner with all of that weirdo smoothing. I'll just buy the original from GOG. DONE with Night Dive (fyi it's not "Nightdrive").

I've played through about half of this. It's FANTASTIC. I like it better than the first one, too (which I also liked). I have noticed some odd visual quirks, like a clipping error in Map 02 in that early room with the Arch-Vile, or a Revenant being cut in half in Map 13 when you first go underwater. I'm playing with the latest GZDoom using Software Rendering. I also checked out the later levels (which are usually the most slaughter map-y) and Map 28 was giving me major performance grief. I have a good card (RTX Super 2070) so it should be able to handle 1000+ monsters in Doom. Everything else appeared to play perfectly well. Eviternity also gave me some grief in the last couple of levels, both Software and Hardware, so sometimes I guess it is what it is.

Actually, he has the right to look at it whichever way he pleases. Believe it or not, you don't know everything, and other people may not share your opinion. Is this 4Chan or Doomworld?

@Crunchynut44 I think this is a FANTASTIC megawad. Very much on par with other "vanilla" greats like Jenesis and (more recently) Moonblood. One odd thing I've noticed... decals are left on pretty much everything, including waterfalls and other animated backgrounds. So you can literally leave bullet holes on a waterfall. Anyone have any idea why this would happen? I tried other megawads in the same sourceport (GZDoom with software rendering) with the same settings and didn't have this issue. Very bizarre! I wonder if it has to do with the re-colorings you've done (on blood, liquids, etc)? Great work, though. I can't wait for the final version to come out!

That would be clever except it's this way for ALL enemies, even the zombie soldiers. But definitely would be cool if it did nothing (or even strengthened) Barons but could kill zombies and the shield guys and so forth.

Yeah, I think it's a balancing act and Eternal just goes a liiittttllleeee too far in one direction. I really hate that you literally can't kill enemies with the flame belch. It just makes no sense.

I *do* completely agree with you on this! I still think upgrades are cool for a major campaign, but maybe they go a littttllleeee too far with it. It's nice to start a game where you don't feel under-powered and the difficulty escalates through encounters, kinda like classic Doom.

Urdak BY FAR because of that stupid jumping bit where you have to shoot the green thing in mid-air. Final Sin probably has the most intense combat, but you're also pretty well-equipped at that point. So probably Cultist Base combat-wise, but Urdak overall. I overall liked DOOM Eternal as a game, but I *loathed* Urdak as a level. Super Gore Nest was my favorite level, and the middle of the game was my favorite chunk of Eternal.

True that. The 1080p is important to me. I love pixel art, but it doesn't need to be quite so... pixely. Classic Doom in 1080 is a work of art. The sprite clipping issues drive me up the wall, though you can use software settings in GZDoom (and I often do). Wads with big open spaces are better in hardware settings, but lots of tight hallways gets annoying real fast. I wish there was a way to have the best of both worlds, like a way to fake the software sprite settings with hardware lighting. I think it's complicated because the base idtech was fake 3D and doing a bunch of clever (for the time) stuff behind-the-scenes.

Yessir.

@Scorpinax I play with multiple different source ports depending on the wad/mod and my mood. However, I always like to have vanilla-ish options, and I play them frequently. So I'd say an 8. I don't like Crispy Doom, I prefer to have widescreen 1080p and an unlocked framerate. The 35fps hurts my eyes in 2020. Besides that, I play completely vanilla. No rocket trails, no decals, no mouselook (I do use the mouse, but no up and down aiming). I still prefer software rendering for the vanilla games or some vanilla wads or mods like Smooth Doom. Why software? 1) I like the look. 2) The clipping errors with hardware in tight hallways bother me. Especially in Knee-Deep in the Dead, I have to play that one on software. I play a lot of classic vanilla wads the same way, too. Arch-Viles in tight spaces with hardware rendering always end up being half of a sprite, for example, and it looks unprofessional to me. I wish there was a way to replicate the fake 3D sprites of software Doom with hardware rendering, but alas... first world problems. However, for mods like Beautiful Doom, Brutal Doom or Complex Doom, I *do* play hardware GZDoom. For more specialty wads I usually play with hardware settings in GZDoom as well. I typically use Z/Q/GZdoom or Zandronum. Each one has little pluses and minuses. GZDoom software gets ride of slime trails, but objects like torches have textures that quiver, etc. The new GZDoom also introduces some software problems with wads like TNT Revilution where you see lines floating in the middle of nowhere, so I use ZDoom 2.8.1 or QZDoom. Never really liked PrBoom+ personally.

I'm pretty sure Denmark usually ranks in the top 5 or even top 3 for "happiest" countries. Much higher than the USA, at least lately. The closest I've been is the Netherlands, which was wonderful. @thewormofautumn Random question: What is your profile pic?

Every culture/nation has its assholes, and there are intelligent, decent and rational people everywhere too. HOWEVER... the United States is filled with an arrogance you don't necessarily see everywhere else. I mean, I live in the US, and we constantly refer to ourselves as the "greatest country in the world" without any irony. We never apologize for our horrific blunders (Vietnam, Iraq). We don't even have universal healthcare, and people DIE from lack of access to healthcare. It's a problem.

SO much of online discussion these days is "toxic", aka mean-spirited, hateful, bigoted and/or filled with misinformation and blatant lies and personal attacks. I've actually found that these Doomworld forums are some of the most *sane* messageboards around these days. I think it helps that not everyone posting here is American, so even if people are angry they're angry about different things. Also DOOM... DOOM is great and we can all agree on that at least. EDIT: Also, I wrote a post criticizing the DLC and I listed out what I didn't like about it, and 85-90% of the comments were very reasonable, even those from people who loved the new DLC. Definitely a better ratio of "normal human response" vs. "insane anger response" that I'm used to seeing.

And that's a **major** part of the problem. Waaayyyyy too many people are out there spouting their opinions like they're facts. People get into these bubbles and they refuse to leave. "Mainstream" news has its problems (think about the NYT shilling for the Iraq invasion in 2002-03) but YouTube news is far, far worse. You should never just take in one source of information, regardless of where it comes from or how much you like it. If we abandon facts and evidence, we end up an ignorant and broken society. There are good and bad ways to debate an issue. Shouting and yelling about conspiracy theories is the bad way.

A fair criticism. Actually, I'd be curious to know how many nationalities visit Doomworld. I'd guess it's probably a pretty large amount. I know many mappers/modders are Australian, Swedish or Brazilian, and I'm guessing this site gets traffic from a ton of people from all over the world. (I was born in Yugoslavia, but raised in the US.)

Probably not, but... close enough! I've always considered The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Blood and Wine to be one of the best games of 2016, since it came out in 2016 and was a whole new world. It's all fairly arbitrary, to be fair. In many ways Cyberpunk 2077 will be a 2021 title since I'm sure it'll get major patches next year, plus the two DLCs.

@wheresthebeef I've been wanting to play Huntdown! I don't think it's on Steam yet. What specifically makes it so good in your opinion? There are a loootttttt of side scrolling platformers out there, and I find the quality is fairly mixed. Some are *incredible* but others are pretty so-so.

With all of my above post said, I think this is a good take from @Sunnyfruit...

There's a lot of misinformation being posted here, so if you're a random person reading through this, I would be careful taking any of it too seriously. I was going to write a big long post, but there's really no point. A few bullet points... 1) I'd avoid posting wikipedia articles as "proof" of your points. That's not to say wikipedia is all lies. In fact, it's often a good starting point if you're interested in something, but it's still wikipedia. 2) The major parties in America flipped. The Republicans of old are the Democrats of today and vice versa. The "radical Republicans" of the 1850s/60s would be the "Bernie Bros" of today. The Democratic Party was essentially founded by Andrew Jackson, who chose the jackass as its symbol as a joke in 1828. Remember: Donald Trump put up Andrew Jackson's portrait in the Oval Office at the suggestion of Steve Bannon. The parties started to switch sides with Teddy Roosevelt, who left the Republican Party and formed the Progressive "Bull Moose" Party and ran for office again in 1912 (he came in second place despite being a "third" party). The switching sides continued with FDR, and ended once LBJ helped push through the Civil and Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960s. The South didn't really change their views, but they did change parties. George Wallace was probably the last of the "old school" Democrats. Today someone like him would be considered alt right. That's not to say the switch was automatic. Woodrow Wilson was a huuugggeeeeee KKK-supporting racist, but he would be considered progressive by other metrics. Calvin Coolidge was very conservative, but he also spoke very eloquently about race and his views hold up pretty well by modern standards. By the end of the 1960s, though, the flipping of the party ideologies was pretty much complete. 3) Hitler was not the creator of nazi ideology, and in fact eugenics had a big hold in a lot of circles around that time (Teddy Roosevelt was a firm believer). However, Hitler was the fire that ignited from the spark, and it's very possible that without him we could have put an end to eugenics politics without a massive war. We cannot underestimate how much damage Hitler *himself* did, even if the tinder already existed in the hatreds and prejudices of people of the time. Hitler is perhaps the single most destructive person who ever existed in human history, partly because the nazis had tools of destruction and weapons of war that did not exist for earlier tyrants to use on people. (Side note: the nazis created the first ballistic missiles, and then a lot of those scientists helped America reach the moon a few decades later. It's called Operation Paperclip, if you're interested in learning more. I feel like I need a Starship Troopers style interlude right now.) 4) A lot of documents about JFK and that era have been unsealed in the last 20-25 years. They paint a very clear picture of what was happening behind the scenes, with the CIA basically making major foreign policy decisions by itself and acting as a rogue entity. Do not put the blood of their actions on the hands of JFK without real evidence. JFK was doing a lot behind the scenes to try and stop this warmongering, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis he had multiple people pushing him to make a first strike with nuclear warheads. In my opinion, JFK was one of our greatest presidents, and he's in fact quite underrated. He was only president for about 3 years and yet he did so much for this nation, from the Peace Corps to NASA. *No* president is perfect, of course... not Washington, Lincoln or FDR. 5) I would suggest that you try to take in a variety of news sources. NEVER rely on just one thing. I find that mainstream papers like the New York Times and Washington Post -- for ALL of their flaws -- are still better than the major networks (CNN, MSNBC, FOX News etc.) However, there are so many sources you should use, such as: https://foreignpolicy.com/ https://theintercept.com/ https://www.axios.com/ https://thehill.com/ https://reason.com/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/ https://www.democracynow.org/ https://www.currentaffairs.org/ https://www.americamagazine.org/ https://www.bbc.com/ https://www.npr.org/ https://www.aljazeera.com/ And many, many more. @RonnieJamesDiner Last but not least... 6) Watch out for misinformation. It's so easy for people to just post their opinions as "facts". Also do your own research. There aren't just "two" sides, there are hundreds of sides and hundreds of different opinions and political beliefs. Don't be fooled into thinking it's either A or B and there are no other opinions or nuances to people's POV. Capitalism comes in many different flavors, as well, so don't be fooled by people yelling "COMMUNIST!!!" at people who support capitalism but a different form of it. If you like chocolate ice cream but not vanilla, that doesn't mean you hate ice cream. EDIT: I guess this was a "big long post" anyway.

For me, my top 5 are: 1. Ori and the Will of the Wisps (easily top 20 all time for me) 2. Ghost of Tsushima 3. Doom Eternal 4. Final Fantasy VII Remake 5. Control Ultimate Edition (I know it's really a 2019 title) Haven't played Half-Life: Alyx, and I *loathed* The Last of Us: Part II (but maybe not for the reasons you think). I also want to give a shout out to Black Mesa for getting a sort of 'real' release. If Cyberpunk 2077 even half lives up to the hype, though...

There will always be extremism, but it used to be more around the edges. It was NOT always this bad. We didn't used to have a major political party sympathetic to neo nazis and groups like Q that are convinced their political opponents are drinking the blood of children. It's so absurd that it almost defies belief. We haven't had a president behave like Trump in 150 years, since Andrew Johnson. And we've had some *bad* presidents in the last century, but we're at 19th century levels of absurdity and madness right now. You're also dead wrong about JFK, ChopBlock. He was one of our best presidents. He kept us out of war with Cuba, helped us avoid nuclear holocaust in October 1962, and he was trying to get us out of Vietnam when he was assassinated. The 1960s was a very different era than now, the CIA was basically a rogue entity and even Eisenhower warned about the military–industrial complex in 1961. Read about Lyman Lemnitzer and Operation Northwoods if you don't believe me. JFK was surrounded by vipers and he was doing everything in his power to push the country forward and also away from war. JFK also served in WW2 and put his life on the line to fight the nazis. The only legitimate criticism of JFK is that he was, uh, not a faithful husband. He made some questionable votes as a senator but the actual reasons for those votes is a little more complex, and as president he easily righted any wrongs from earlier. From my view, JFK is the last truly great president the United States has seen. Eisenhower, Truman (for all of his flaws) and FDR was the greatest run of presidents this nation ever had, too, and they're a big reason why the USA was in waayyyyyy better shape in 1963 than it was in 1933. I'm glad that at least some people online are still willing to call Hitler pure evil. I am seeing too many people who are sympathetic to Hitler these days, believing that he was "misunderstood" or that his crimes are "exaggerated" (if anything they are under-exaggerated). The nazi genocide didn't kill 6 million people, it killed 17 million. Nearly 50 million died in Europe during World War II. There's a brilliant 1985 film called COME AND SEE that recently got a Criterion release, and it shows the nazis for what they were. I highly recommend it. The Eastern Front was a bloodbath. Also look at what happened in Wola in Poland, or with the Ustaše in Croatia. However, with that said, real history is messy and complex, and most historical events do NOT break down into pure heroes and villains. Before Game of Thrones went off the rails, that fantasy show was actually pretty good at depicting the way real history unfolds. It is not simply about heroes and villains... even though we often try to turn it into that with hindsight. There are complex things motivating people, and there are good people caught on the wrong side of history and bad people on the right side of it. Trump might be an absurd figure, but we've had bad presidents who weren't so openly villainous as well. There were even "good" nazis, like John Rabe, who saved tens of thousands of lives (if not more) and also eventually turned against nazi ideology.

I've been searching for any map replacements for Doom II of *just* the two secret levels. I can't find anything. Does anyone know if such a thing exists? I can find a lot of individual levels but usually it's Map 01 or the Icon of Sin battle or a random bunch of maps.