Matt Mello

More specifically, Dr. Sleep's Dante's Inferno-themed levels (Virgil, Geryon, Minos Judgment, Nessus, Vesperas) from The Master Levels could've made for a great MegaWAD release for Final Doom and it was going to be a MegaWAD that eventually got abandoned but then parts of it got added into The Master Levels.

Aside from the obvious choice of Perdition's Gate, I'm not sure. If anything, I could see id commissioning four IWAD's for this hypothetical iteration of Final Doom. The obvious ones would be TNT, Plutonia, and Perdition's Gate and the fourth one would be an entirely new expansion. Maybe a full version of John Anderson's Dante's Inferno MegaWAD? We got to see a few levels from that in The Master Levels and they are generally considered among the better levels in that expansion.

Gothic themes above all else. Eviternity and Scythe II's first acts are the prime examples of that. Egyptian maps are great too, as are the jungle maps (Plutonia's first act, the penultimate act of Scythe II, "Caribbean" from TNT) I also like the scenic and picturesque theme that Lost Civilization has in general. Not sure what to call it. "Northern European Countryside"? "Walter Wick Photo"?, "Scenic Landscape"? I have no idea what you'd call those maps but they're great.

Usually, I just call him Doomguy.

The Jungle Base in Plutonia is located on an island in the Caribbean. MAP32 in TNT is a warped spectral mockery of the jungle base located in Hell, much like MAP31 is a spectral mockery of an Egyptian Pyramid

I love both of those ideas in all honesty, especially Plutonia. It always kinda stood out to me as odd that Plutonia supposedly goes to Hell right around the start of the second act and then the Devil Hive in the third act is just supposed to be a very powerful hell base. On the one hand, the fact that one of the platforms at the end of Hunted will kill the player "Phobos Anomaly" style can lend a bit of credence to Act 2 being in an outer part of Hell, but the sky just being a clear red sky could also just be a sunset or early night sky in the jungle that's red solely due to hell corruption. Act 3 with the Devil Hive is something where I can view it as either the outermost part of Hell with the blood-red fleshy sky or maybe it's a living base that slowly supplants the jungle base, a sort of biomechanical mix of forward operating base and inner portal. When the Gatekeeper is killed, the rest of the base is destroyed with it. I also consider Final Doom to be the canonical third entry in the original Doom saga. Plutonia takes place a few years after Doom II with the same Doomguy from the first two games while TNT Evilution takes place around the same time with a different marine. Doom 64 (and by extension, Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal) are instead the canonical sequels to the PS1 version of Doom, which is like a slightly altered take on the events of the first two games. Sort of like Ultimate Marvel or the New World of Darkness.

Okay, here's my own personal take on the idea of a "Boomer Shooter", they come in two variants: Classics and Throwbacks and the first variant actually is divided into two subgroups. Throwback shooters are games like Ion Fury or DUSK where they aim to replicate the feeling of older FPS games from the pre-Halo and pre-HL2 eras. Classic Shooters are pretty much any FPS before Half-Life 2. The original Halo was the big turning point for FPS games but you still had a handful of "classic shooters" come out in 2002 and 2003. The release of Half-Life 2 (and also Halo 2 that same year) along with Doom 3's release more or less ended the era of Classic Shooters. With Classic Shooters, I'm gonna divide them into two subgroups and yeah, I'm gonna have to use insufferable generation-based terminology for it too. I call these two subgroups Boomer Shooters and Gen X Shooters. Boomer Shooters are the real OG's. Wolfenstein 3D, the Doom IWAD's, the Raven games, all the original games that were made with the Build Engine, the various and sundry Wolf3D engine games like Rise of the Triad or the Capstone shovelware titles like Operation Body Count or Corridor 7, Alien Trilogy, Jaguar AVP, as well as whatever the fuck Isle of the Dead and Island Peril were supposed to be. If it's a 2.5D or sprite-based 3D shooter released before 2001, it's an authentic Boomer Shooter, IMHO. Gen X Shooters are the classic FPS games that are definitely old but not as old as the "true" Boomer Shooters. The leap to 3D polygons was a big deal, and that's the main thing separating the Boomer Shooters from the Gen X Shooters. Quake is the main flagship for this era much like how Doom was for the previous one. Some of the "Gen X" Classic Shooters worth mentioning include Quake, Quake II, Quake III, GoldenEye 64, Half-Life 1, the PS1-era Medal of Honor games, Kingpin: Life of Crime, Soldier of Fortune, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Aces and Eights, the two Alien vs. Predator PC FPS games, and the first Unreal game.

Doom 64 is overrated and both halves of Final Doom are exponentially better than it. Also, I'm sick to death of so many WAD's nowadays ending with a slaughter map. Everyone talks shit about Icon of Sin maps and how every WAD back in the 90's and early 2000's ended with an IoS battle, but nowadays the Map 30 slot is always just an over the top slaughterfest instead. It feels a lot more overdone, IMHO. Also, I've mentioned it before but I like the Icon of Sin as a concept and I even like a lot of Icon of Sin maps themselves. I really do think the reason they get such a bad rep is because the very first IoS map from Doom II actually did kinda suck. Doom II made a bad first impression and everyone now just dismisses the Icon of Sin automatically. Even within the four core IWAD's, both TNT and Plutonia have much better IoS maps. TNT has the platform puzzle challenge and the short map before the fight with the Demon-Spitter and Plutonia's final map really feels like "Icon of Sin: Good Version" with its more manageable platform to take down the Gatekeeper with and also having a Cyberdemon boss battle as well.

Seconding this notion. Would also love some more zombie enemies in the original IWADs in general, like the teal-clad Commando from Eviternity. You could have melee-based former humans armed with chainsaws that are basically a "glass cannon" approach to the same niche Pinky demons fulfill, Does far more damage than Pinkies or Spectres but have less HP.

Odyssey of Noises, Mount Pain (not a city map but it's kinda sandboxy/large), Suburbs, and Citadel from the IWAD's From the PWAD's, I'm just gonna go ahead and say every map from Lost Civilization. Lost Civilization has not only the best city and town maps but also the best countryside maps too.

Said it before and I will say it again. I unironically like the Icon of Sin and I think the only reason Icon of Sin maps get such a bad rep is because Doom II botched it and made a bad first impression.

Doom Eternal sucks Doom 64 also is highly overrated. PS1 Doom strikes the perfect balance between horror and action for the Classic Doom games and keeps the iconic monster designs from the PC version while still having the colored lighting effect and dark ambient soundtrack.

Been writing up a concept outline for a vampire-themed TC. I'll admit I don't have anywhere near the amount of proper experience and knowhow to pull off a WAD like that anytime soon, but at least having it written down would be good for later. I might post the outline as a "concept thread" but I'm not sure if that would go in this sub-forum or in the general Classic Doom subforum?

I wonder if we'll see Doom Zero on Dean of Doom this season or if we'll have to wait until Season 4 or later. I have no doubt he's gotten a lot of requests for that one.

Honestly, this could be a good MIDI for a WAD