Post Your Opinions About Doom (Whether Controversial or Not)

Episodes 2 and 4 are the most enjoyable episodes of Ultimate Doom.

don't shure is this controversial or just what id got wrong, but I think they pretty much fucked up when they thought, that making different weapons use the same ammo is a good idea. fuuuuuuuuuuk why? they did that in wolf 3d, doom, doom2, quake and quake 2. so why? why they want make many guns and then render weapons useless?

in wolf3d there is almost no point in using old weapons if there is a new. in doom pistol and PG almost never used when you have chaingun and bfg and in doom2 the same goes with a shotgun. only rocket launcher had it's own ammo, greate! well, not in our next game, since in quake rockets is multiweapon ammo too! well, to be honest, both grenade and rocket launcher are very useful and not conflict with each other with the first one even had a larger damage especially against shamblers. but you just cant fire all of your arsenal in rocket launcher and then switch to GL. and then q2 which actually has separate rockets and grenades but again fails on sg/ssg, mg/cg and plasmagun/bfg +grenades/gl usability.

When I play Heretic for example it's far more pleasant. you can fire whatever you want and then switch to previous weapon and it will also come in handy.

When the same shit happens in other games it's actually not always that bad. in HL pistol is much more accurate and powerful then MG, but MG is alot faster, instead of two shotguns you have one with both fire mods and tau cannon/gluon gun both very powerful and used

so, my opinnion is that - id didn't realy know what the heck they are doing

ABRACADABRA said:

don't shure is this controversial or just what id got wrong, but I think they pretty much fucked up when they thought, that making different weapons use the same ammo is a good idea.

I personally think it is actually a good idea. It has potential to allow the player doing tradeoffs between using different combat strategies supported by different weapons. The twist is: As he strategically uses a particular weapon, then by consuming the weapon's ammo, he not only depletes the time for how long he can use this strategy (before he runs out of the ammo for this weapon), but also he depletes the time for how long he can use some other strategy (since the other strategy's primary weapon shares ammo with the player's current weapon, and so it runs out of ammo right now too).

Doom's default weapons don't take advantage of this concept up to its maximum potential, but there are moments when it manifests itself. SSG is good at short range and primarily against powerful enemies, while SG is good at medium range and primarily against weak enemies. BFG is good at short range and primarily against powerful enemies or hordes of enemies, while Plasmagun is good at long range against enemies who manage to be threatening despite this long range. And well, Chaingun is rather universally good, but Pistol is good when you only need to fire 1 bullet and want to save the 2nd one.

ABRACADABRA said:

in doom pistol and PG almost never used when you have chaingun and bfg and in doom2 the same goes with a shotgun.

You clearly haven't learned to use the weapons properly then.

I'd agree for the pistol, but the regular shotgun is significantly better at larger distances and the BFG is a specialty weapon that during normal fights won't get used at all. So where to burn all the excess energy? Right: With the Plasmagun!

I absolutely love E3M7.
Also MAP19 is my favorite Doom 2 map.

ABRACADABRA said:

in wolf3d there is almost no point in using old weapons if there is a new.

I agree for the pistol; but I tend to play Wolf3D mostly with the SMG, keeping the chaingun for bosses and thick crowds. You've only got a max of 99 bullets, and the chaingun tears through them too fast to waste it on the occasional wandering guard.

Graf Zahl said:

You clearly haven't learned to use the weapons properly then.

nah. in IWADs there is just no point in all that quirky strtegies - just grab a bigger gun and you pretty much alive and well. there is plenty of shells, chaingun is good for sniping too and plasmagun is good, but it's often better to save some cells for bfg.

Personally I just love plasmagun - it's so satisfying to kill with and animation is awesome. but it is just too expensive to use. by the way in q2 both hyperblaster and bfg are expensive since you need cells to power up your power shield

@ABRACADABRA

Weapons in Wolf3D, Doom, Quake etc. weren't intended to be so realistic, weren't they? They also don't have recoil and reload animations (aside from SSG).
You would appreciate these guns more if you would do pistol start on every level :)
You don't have BFG on every map, so you have to rely mostly on Plasma Gun, when it goes for cell ammo.

As a fun fact, in Brutal Doom assault rifle (pistol's counterpart) and minigun still share the same ammo.

ABRACADABRA said:

nah. in IWADs there is just no point in all that quirky strtegies - just grab a bigger gun and you pretty much alive and well. there is plenty of shells, chaingun is good for sniping too and plasmagun is good, but it's often better to save some cells for bfg.

Yes, but many of us keep playing Doom for the PWADs moreso than the IWADs nowadays, and I personally think it's pretty awesome how not only today's players use advanced/quirky strategies, but how today's mappers make maps with those in mind. :)

If the maps ive played are any evidence, cc4-tex.wad seems to be too often misconstrued as a sort of catch-all solution for mappers in which not having a large enough pool of resources to properly articulate their style is actually the least of their problems.

^ The above statement's negations and (negated) implications made me lost. I'm not a native English speaker, and I tried to take this as a language exercise and put some effort to trying to decrypt the logic, but I still miss it. Would you rephrase it without any nested negations or implications, please?

think he might be saying that new textures are too easy a way to make a good looking map? not sure I quite agree but if you look at something like Epic 2, it has relatively simple Heretic-ish layouts but the new texture set makes it look stunning.

another controversial opinion, I guess - the environmental sounds from Doom, ie, lifts doors and moving scenery sound effects are all dull as heck. Any level set that replaces them with something more interesting to the ear has an advantage with me

scifista42 said:

^ The above statement's negations and (negated) implications made me lost. I'm not a native English speaker, and I tried to take this as a language exercise and put some effort to trying to decrypt the logic, but I still miss it. Would you rephrase it without any nested negations or implications, please?

He's saying that there's a ton of mappers who try to use cc4-tex as a crutch to create good looking maps, but whose style is bad enough in the first place that using cc4-tex isn't helping them any.

i think that when people find a weapon useless it is at least partially the mappers fault. this includes the pistol. graf is right that a lot of people dont know how to use the weapons properly tho

Well, here's my opinions:

1. EP1,EP2 from Doom are good. EP3, EP4 really suck.
2. Some Doom2 maps are good, some maps are poor (map 21, 14, 31, 32).
3. Id should have made Icon Of Sin more powerful. The IoS boss of BDv20b starter pack is one great example. IoS is badly used in many pwads, as well as TNT and Plutonia.
4. Some pwads are pretty darn cool, such as sodfinal (my favoutite one), hell revealed wads, holyhell, slaughterfest2012, dcv, hellbound, arxangels etc.
5. Doom 3 is an interesting creation of id, I really enjoy playing this game.

I love Doom games. But I say, id should have thought more about some Doom and Doom 2 maps.

Yousuf Anik said:

BDv20b

You lost me right there.

raymoohawk said:

i think that when people find a weapon useless it is at least partially the mappers fault. this includes the pistol. graf is right that a lot of people dont know how to use the weapons properly tho

the pistol is even more wank than the chainsaw, though. at least the chainsaw has a purpose, just that berserk fisting is infinitely more useful. the pistol is there so you can do something other than running around enemies.

The SSG should be left out of at least half the of DM maps out there, it's fun one-shotting people all day but sometimes you just want to have a bit of a battle.

id should have just made the upcoming Doom reboot as if it was a sequel to Doom II back in the day; same graphics style etc. Maybe use a 3d engine like the modern GL ports with mouselook, and maybe even simple 3d models if they aren't cheesy looking like all the amateur stuff. Everyone eats up retro stuff nowadays and I'm sure it would turn out more fun than Doom 4 looks like it's going to be.

Yousuf Anik said:

The IoS boss of BDv20b starter pack is one great example.

Oh god no, man. I absolutely despise the Doom 2 IOS with every fiber of my being but that boss is by far even worse just due to how unbalanced it is and how poorly structured its arena is.

RottingZombie said:

id should have just made the upcoming Doom reboot as if it was a sequel to Doom II back in the day; same graphics style etc. Maybe use a 3d engine like the modern GL ports with mouselook, and maybe even simple 3d models if they aren't cheesy looking like all the amateur stuff. Everyone eats up retro stuff nowadays and I'm sure it would turn out more fun than Doom 4 looks like it's going to be.

That's a terrible idea.
First of all, you can say goodbye to being a physical console game since no one in their right mind would publish something looking like the N64 on modern systems. Second of all, Doom 4's big appeal is that it is a return to form of an old genre and IP, and that there isn't anything in the AAA market that does what it does. Third, id has always been an engine-centric company, touting whatever new features or capabilities with a showcase game. Idtech 6's gimmick? The fastest, best-looking (so far) game you can get at 60fps 1080p across all devices.

Also, have you ever worked with these modern GL ports? The 3D model suport in all but one of them are atrocious: no vertex lighting, no bones, not even gauroud shading (PS1 had this!). They'd have to write an entirely new renderer to handle this, and likely a completely new level format to support any form of dynamic lighting (which 3DGE ended up doing), which by that point would negate the purpose of even using the original Doom engine in the first place since it'd just be something completely different again. Then they'd just go on to make a gimpy, ugly, watered-down version of what they were aiming for with Doom 4 anyways.

This probably isn't even that controversial, but I really hate the wallpaper-like use of STARTAN3 and STARG3 in E1. They're detail/transition textures, and they look much better used that way in Sandy's levels.

In regards to the Brutal Doom Icon of Sin, I think it would be by far the best of its kind if the map had more space for the player to run, the projectiles are nerfed to something more balanced, the scream animation returns (but keep it very limited, maybe just scripted after 50% health depletes) and no Archviles are spawned.

I really think it's onto something here. It just needs some proper adjustments.

Alien Vedetta sucks, never gets boring.

I'll jump on the Doom shared ammo balance sucks bandwagon. The truth is Doom simply isn't designed in a way the few supposed advantages of swapping weapons back to their "downgrades" come into play in most situations. Ie:

- ammo is never so low you're going to use the pistol over the chaingun to save that one bullet, and if you somehow got to that point you'd get more mileage out of infighting anyway; or heck, use the time you'd have wasted doing that to zip to the next room and grab those two box of bullets.
- Doomguy moves so fast yet changes weapons so slow relatively, closing the distance to deliver a mid-range shot is often faster than swapping to the shotgun for lower spread. In situations where enemies are unreachable and far enough to make a mid-range SSG shot worthless, you would still have better results by quicktapping chaingun, rockets, plasma. The fabled SG over SSG not only requires a very specific enemy position, but a player starved of any ammo save for shotgun shells as well.
- the BFG is so much more efficient on a damage per cell basis that you need to fight individual enemies for the plasma gun to be even worth equipping. Then, it begs the question why aren't you just using your SSG or rocket launcher to save the cells for room clearing or tough targets. Another advantage a plain dps calculation won't give you is the ability to blow up a tough target in a flash. I don't know about you, but I'd rather nuke that arch-vile instantly than save a hypothetical 10 cells (assuming my aim is perfect while our favorite yellow asshole is running left and right) and risk taking 80 damage.

Comparisons cannot be done in a vacuum where movement speed, infighting and all other weapons are forgotten. An overly theoretical view of weaponry coupled with an inability to see the big picture will never give you the right answer. Examine uvmax demos, arguably examples of the highest levels of optimization in Doom play when it comes to taking down monsters efficiently, and you can see all of this in practice. Players just don't switch from the SSG to the SG, or from the BFG to the PG, save for ridiculously specific situations. No data analysis is needed to see even the word anecdotal is an euphemism.

Finally, it's hard to ignore many of the pro lower tier weapons arguments reek of elitism more than actual points. "You don't get it", "heh, look at that newb using the SSG and BFG like every other plebeian", "it's a mistake of the player/mapper rather than the system", etc.. There is appeal in believing to be more enlightened than the other guy, as well as status signaling to fellow special snowflakes. No, this isn't all of you by any stretch of the imagination, but you'd have to be blind to ignore there is some of that around here; not to mention even those who genuinely believe in this SG+PG ">" SSG+BFG mantra may have been influenced by those who are only posturing; after all, we are naturally attracted to new, original things.

"Chaingun and RL > SG" assumes you have those two weapons in the first place; in a hitscan-heavy reaction-heavy situation where I don't have the Chaingun or RL, I'd much rather use the shotgun than the SSG.

The Plasma Rifle's entire purpose is different than the BFG's, although it becomes a lot less important when you already know a map.

.

I like to play tactically in a DooM game, paradoxially. Realism Mode in Brutal Doom scratches that itch particularly well.

There is only such thing as overdetailing if the rest of the map is underdetailed.

Cyanosis said:

just an early example of a QTE

Do people really not know what a QTE is?

dethtoll said:

Do people really not know what a QTE is?

actually he is right - you just have to press a button in the right moment, it's a classic QTE moment

That's the first and last QTE I've ever heard of that requires you to activate a big ass lift and then proceed to avoid fireballs and Archie flames while aiming at the correct spot with the correct timing with the correct weapon and nothing on screen tells you exactly when to press your 'fire' key.

Shit man, QTEs are more engaging than I realized.

Doomkid said:

nothing on screen tells you exactly when to press your 'fire' key.

aside from giant lava spot in the opened brain on the wall that said SHOOT ME