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What difficulty do you usually play on?

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When playing PWADs, I mostly tend to this (bad) habit:

I always start playing on UV.
If too hard, I quit the game and say the wad is bad.
If too easy, I quit the game and say the wad is bad.

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Most usually i start even brand-new or even famously hard maps on UV.
Then i drop to HMP.
Then i drop to HNTR.
Then i drop to ITYTD.

Thats what happens when you decide to play your first run on TNT on UV.

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Been playing the same difficulty since I was around about 6, UV. I love my games to be hard and challenging but even after a few years of practice I'm still not an amazing player.

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ITYTD all the time, except for original IWADs and my own maps. Most of today maps have pretty higher difficulty than doom 2.

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Scypek2 said:

Most of today maps have pretty higher difficulty than doom 2.


This is why I'll use MAP01 as a trial-by-fire. It should be the easiest map, so if I try it on UV and it gives me trouble, down to HMP. To be honest, I've never had to go down lower than that; except on my old maps. I was a fucking sadist back in the early 2000s.

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Hey no too rough and Hurt me plenty. And sometimes Ultra-Violence. And Nightmare when i use hacks such as a SUPERWEP8.DEH or if i type SV_FASTWEAPONS 2 in ZDoom.

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UV for Doom 1 stuff, and usually HMP for Doom 2 stuff, except Plutonia, which I also play on UV.

I dunno why. Recently though I have done some Doom 2 UV though.

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Hurt Me Plenty is the map is too hard, otherwise Ultra Violence. I'm too young to die very rarely, only in really uber hard wads with big hordes of enemies and very few ammos.

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i think to already posted something, but...

Hurt me Pently, mostly.

When i record stuff for my youtube channel Ultra-Violence because i like to be a cool guy.

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-skill 4 -fast -record. I use for every map. If map seems impossible on -fast, Ill leave it off. Episode wads and megawads probably wont get recorded on -fast.

I take notes on wads I do not play in -fast so that I can go back and redemo them later with -fast.

Never on -skill 5 or -respawn. Not even once.

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Hurt Me Plenty, which seems to be a more common option that I thought it'd be. UV is usually a bit too challenging to be fun the first time through a level, so I usually save it for the second or third run-through.

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If I'm about to embark on a full playthrough of a WAD or whatever, then it's UV all the way.

If I'm just dicking around testing a new mod or whatever, then it's whatever the default difficulty is set to in that port (usually HMP, although Legacy shifted this to UV).

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I wish all maps were created with explicit instructions for gameplay.

- Should the map be played blind? Or is it a task for Muad'Dib?
- Is quicksaving considered cheating or unsporting?
- Is resource management a part of the game?
- Fastmonsters? Pistol start? Yes? No? What?
- What is the object of the map? To press the exit switch?

I think mappers generally assume that everyone plays the game more or less as they do. When I guess wrong, or insist otherwise, or simply don't LIKE the way the author meant for the map to be played, I stop having fun.

I mean, really, if I want to beat a given map, what I should do is first study it thoroughly in Doom Builder, then rehearse it meticulously on the lowest difficulty level and work my way up from there, buoyed by a library of quick saves.

And when I say "beat", I mean press the exit switch with as little trouble as possible. Unless you tell me otherwise, that is the goal of Doom.

This would eliminate any sense of surprise, danger or drama, and any real need to watch and react to the game as it evolves. The game would become totally routine and non-threatening. Doesn't that sound great?

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Macblain said:

stuff


Or you could just play it on whatever difficulty you think would be most comfortable judging from the description usually given with any WAD, without going through that autistic routine.

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Of course I wouldn't actually do that, but that's what the game-as-it-is would reward.

You are dismissing my point, but I positively disagree with you. Many maps change drastically whether you play them from pistol start, or whether you try to play them through without saving, or save and rehearse exhaustively. "I could have won that fight with less damage. Eff Nine!" Some maps are extremely fun to play blind, some maps are full of whoopie cushions.

My point is that difficulty (and fun factor) are largely a combination of the mapper's and player's assumptions about game design and game play.

Another example : Don't assume we are all completionists. I used to insist that if I didn't kill all the monsters, I hadn't really beaten the level. Nowadays I ignore cyberdemons who aren't bothering me. But if you are giving me resources according to the assumption that I need 100% kills, the game becomes rather easy.

And, importantly, I won't agree that "It's whatever your imagination wants it to be!" The game can't be equally fun for all imaginable approaches and I'm suggesting that it could be even MORE fun when carefully crafted for a particular approach.

Actually, that's why I like high-quality megawads so much. Even though I don't approve of mobs of revenants and perverse chaingunguy ambushes, good megawads establish a sort of language. They work in a certain way, you get used to it, and you can take it in stride. I would rather play without "save scumming" but I accepted early on that Epic 2 was just not going to work without the f6 key getting a lot of action.

I didn't even mention mouselook. Keyboard controls? Actually, I like to use a gamepad when the maps are suited to it.

To answer the OP more directly, UV-FM-PS-NS is my ideal difficulty, but map design often forces me to play differently.

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