Unpopular Doom Opinions

Wads in the xxx files replacing the cacodemon with fire breathing lady's is probably the best thing I've seen since BD.

Posting meta: Longposts and videos benefit from having clear focuses. Not from getting bogged down in superficially "mentioning" lots of peripheral minutia. 

There's this very annoying type of reply/comment that misses this, where people will be like "you didn't mention this or that" (often some point that is irrelevant or out of the topic's scope) or "you forgot to say blahblahblah" (often some inane point that no one forgot to say).

The framing is still annoying even when the point is relevant, in-scope, and not inane. Right mindset: If you want to add to the discussion, do that and figure out how to segue into your own points, instead of framing it as someone not having made your point for you already.

All the weird "I can't believe no one has posted this" posts (which are shockingly common in recommendation threads that are still on page one lmao) are another example of this. Just post it. That's why more than one person is allowed to post. 

42 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

All the weird "I can't believe no one has posted this" posts (which shockingly common in recommendation threads that are still on page one lmao) are another example of this. Just post it. That's why more than one person is allowed to post.

This is one of my bigger pet peeves online. My stock reply to "surprised no one mentioned [x]" is "we were all waiting for you to say it", though it usually elicits no more than an eye-roll or head shake as I read on. At the very worst I imagine saying to them, "Are you really that surprised, or are you just trying to appear more insightful than the rest of us?"

It's just another way of saying "I believe this is a popular choice that is relevant to the thread," no need to read into it. People complaining about it, or other things they take too literally, irritates me far more than the thing itself does.

To play devil's advocate a bit, the worst reaction a post or video can receive is indifference. In the Youtube algorithm even the most pointless comments will keep a video recommended to broader audiences for a longer period of time. So even completely off topic responses are more effective promotion in the long run than considering it a compete and well formed piece of content and giving it a like. Especially so in the more active forums, though they use a recent posts feed instead of a complex discoverability algorithm like YT and other platforms. Unfortunately though I appreciate good content it's a lot less common than the other sort.

Sometimes good posts will sink like a stone if the OP's work is thorough and streamlined enough to stand up on its own. There's nothing to say except a generic "good job OP" which doesn't really contribute any kind of conversation. A half assed info post that leaves a lot to add or gets things wrong will unfairly stay afloat for much longer upon the tide of scorn generated by readers. Cunningham's law comes into play too. A post that states incorrect facts will get corrected whether it's intentional trolling or just lack of research. So if your goal is to keep your thread alive, it might be better to state that the SSG has a 50% chance of stunning archviles rather than 47% (and also blockmap, etc). That's a guaranteed couple of bumps right there.

A possible "solution" to this kind of issue would be to filter and sort responses to the thread like Youtube and some other platforms do, by popularity (although this probably wouldn't be preferable as a default for all threads, where responses often are meant to proceed in order). So instead of a typical thread you might be able to make a blog post format as an alternative if the intent is to be informative and complete. Then the funniest and most highly liked (hopefully any that are meaningful) comments would appear first. I'm aware this has been done in some form before such as the news posts tab but it seems like it's gone to seed over time. Half the users are treating the forums like Twitter, half are posting long format stuff, half are lurking and half just weigh in on discussions and polls. And the other half have been sitting on #37b out of "101 Obsure Archvile Facts" and waiting in vain to slip them into a conversation.

I think the popular posts tab is a decent help for this across various forums, though it's still very much a recency bias. We could maybe have mods start to sticky these kinds of well written and interesting posts to another subforum that features high quality, if not open ended posts. Or some kind of medal on the post for recognition of the work that went into them.

It's very easy to get likes en masse by being a dipshit but if you spend 100 hours making a college level lecture about Doom it often goes underappreciated.

Nostalgia is just as valid for Doom95 as it is for any other early Doom experience. No one should be playing it for the first time *now*, outside of curiosity, but if it was something you played growing up it's totally reasonable to want to play that way again.

I wish it had a high powered rifle with a different ammo type.  Doesn't even need a scope.  Just a high caliber rifle. 

The chain gun uses pistol ammo, so it's not even a proper machine gun.  It's a sub machine gun. 

idk if that's unpopular, but it's my opinion. 

freelook makes combat better, I'd much rather have my rockets go where I want them to, thank you!

20 hours ago, plums said:

Nostalgia is just as valid for Doom95 as it is for any other early Doom experience. No one should be playing it for the first time *now*, outside of curiosity, but if it was something you played growing up it's totally reasonable to want to play that way again.

I have fond memories of playing my very first megawad on Doom 95, and later *attempting* to play AV on HNTR on it. I never noticed any of the issues with the port, as I didnt know anything else!

Random theory. The RNG of SWTW map03 BFG fight in casual play is probably overstated (by which I mean even good players have felt it's RNG-heavy, but I'm not sure about that). In casual play you probably should kill a cyberdemon, which is hard to do but if you do that the encounter becomes easy. You can afford the cell use and you don't need all four cybs for infighting the balcony enemies. (In a fast maxrun you don't want to spend any cells here at all, but a casual pace of 35+ minutes can afford that.)

Bonus three consecutive survivals. Only the third goes "cleanly" lol, but you don't really need attempts to be clean, and I have not really practiced this enough to feel "good" at it. Wouldn't surprise me if practice would make this 95%+ consistent with the safer approach of using some BFG, and going full pacifist feels like it could be 80%+. The skill ceiling of this encounter has likely not been reached by anyone yet. Kinetic and mhrz might be able to make it look easy. A lot of the real difficulty is probably mental.

Never really liked Ultimate DOOM. Ugly TITLEPIC with DOOM logo ruined by "THE ULTIMATE", and all that Daisy stuff feels like it's pulled out of thin air. And now we have DOOM(C)(R)(TM) where it's now "canon".

No, thanks. 

DOOM Registered --> DOOM 2 --> DOOM 64 .

Lost Souls are over exaggerated as being hard to deal with and they clearly were not designed to be super weak cannon fodder either, so their HP being what it is makes sense. 

The chasm is not that annoying.

Also the cyberdemon and spider mastermind are not bad bosses, for the time they couldn't do anything better.

(The spider mastermind needs a lot more health).

I don't care for E1. The tech base aesthetic bores me pretty easily by around E1M4, and everything after that is a slog. I much prefer the hellish influence of a tech base in E2. E3 is a fun frag fest (except Unholy Cathedral). Hell, I even like Limbo. I know the route to the keys by heart, and the throne room always got a chuckle out of me because it reminds me of a giant toilet and going down into the lava maze is like a sewer system.

Limiting yourself to just one source port, or just vanilla DOS .exe, or whatever, is robbing yourself of the plethora of great Doom content out there. I've played fun, quality mods on GZDoom, Doom Retro, 3DGE, Crispy Doom, and Boom-family ports. I feel like my experience has been richer for doing so.

For level design and for playing: "master the fundamentals" is a pretty useless idea for beginner- and intermediate-level improvement, because most people don't have a good sense of what the fundamentals are even if they think they might -- because these are not obvious and are often very misleading.

Imagine how hopeless someone would be at ever playing difficult wads if they hold on to the idea that the fundamentals are concepts like: using the right weapon for each monster, saving ammo (lol), target prioritization, and circle-strafing. But that set probably sounds logical to many people. A level design equivalent of an unhelpful ontology of "fundamentals" would be ammo balance, weapon progression (start with SG, work up to BFG), Romero's Rules, and understanding each enemy's (singular) role -- which would probably cap people to making maps that are mediocre by their own standards.  

In fact knowing how to abstract knowledge into a useful set of fundamentals and do that well probably means you're an expert already, so it's circular.  

With level design it's even more overwhelming because every niche can have its own underlying fundamentals.

Much better when possible is to emulate experts and try to remake what they have made, or design heavily in their style. Choose a broad selection of experts and you'll end up learning a lot without aping one person too much. With level design that is how some of fastest learners seem to have improved. (For playing this would be watching demos and trying to do what you see, or to beat times, or to just get reasonably decent times. Speedrunning is the easiest way to improve a lot partly because the "study->emulate" loop that happens to be great for learning is literally what speedrunning to beat times is.) This doesn't require any theoretical know-how going in, and you'll end up picking up a lot of 'tacit' lessons that are not obvious just from looking, by actually trying to do stuff.

23 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

Much better when possible is to emulate experts and try to remake what they have made, or design heavily in their style. Choose a broad selection of experts and you'll end up learning a lot without aping one person too much. With level design that is how some of fastest learners seem to have improved. (For playing this would be watching demos and trying to do what you see, or beat times. Speedrunning is the easiest way to improve a lot partly because the "study->emulate" loop that happens to be great for learning is literally what speedrunning to beat times is.) This doesn't require any theoretical know-how going in, and you'll end up picking up a lot of 'tacit' lessons that are not obvious just from looking, by actually trying to do stuff.

Were the Casali Brothers experts in making Doom maps ?

1 hour ago, baja blast rd. said:

Much better when possible is to emulate experts and try to remake what they have made, or design heavily in their style. Choose a broad selection of experts and you'll end up learning a lot without aping one person too much.

Agreed, and this is literally true for basically all art btw.

Playing continuously is more fun than pistol starting. Pistol starting can be a fun challenge, but I much prefer playing a full run keeping my guns as I go.

"Whether I agree with it or not" is by far the least interesting lens through which to engage with a review of something. 

5 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

"Whether I agree with it or not" is by far the least interesting lens through which to engage with a review of something. 

i agree with your review of using the lens of "whether i agree with it or not" to engage with a review; therefore i liked it

<3

On 8/21/2023 at 8:43 AM, Lippeth said:

 

This is one of my bigger pet peeves online. My stock reply to "surprised no one mentioned [x]" is "we were all waiting for you to say it", though it usually elicits no more than an eye-roll or head shake as I read on. At the very worst I imagine saying to them, "Are you really that surprised, or are you just trying to appear more insightful than the rest of us?"

The good old "finally someone said it"/"Is no one gonna mention..."

I.e. "why are people so dumb to see what my infinite wisdom can see"

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.

I personally enjoy Master Levels and don't think that it deserves so much hate in community.

These may not be the very great maps, of course it's not, but, c'mon, for the 90s it was pretty decent, that's my opinion.

47 minutes ago, Vanilla+Unicorn said:

These may not be the very great maps, of course it's not, but, c'mon, for the 90s it was pretty decent, that's my opinion.

They were decent for 1995. The stuff that came out later in the decade blows them out of the water.

On 7/17/2020 at 1:02 AM, Disgruntled Caco said:

Pain Elementals are considerably worse than Revenants.

FACTS! ABSOLUTE FACTS!

- I hate perfect hatred and against thee wickedly, also consider them the worst maps romero did in doom.

- I think the pain elemental is fundamentally a flawed monster

- I despise memento mori 1 and 2, weird considering i played most of requiem, a considerably less consistent wad

- Having played speed of doom recently, i think his "extreme difficulty" is a bit overestimated by the community, if we compare it to monstrosities present in scythe2 and AV

- I consider doom 3 objectively bad.

On 7/16/2020 at 11:02 PM, Disgruntled Caco said:

Pain Elementals are considerably worse than Revenants.

Actually, this is quite a popular opinion. Pain Elementals are a Pain in the Ass.

The main problem with those Master Levels is that they're not good value for money if you had internet, BBS or computer party access back in the days. Id had a great idea, having some of the better people in the community make a very nice standalone map. The map quality of the finished product is a bit variable. It's also questionable if it was any better than the best shovelware cds.

Id probably could have gotten better ML by simply having it as an open competition. Specify 3 themes and let people enter into one of the three categories. From that they could have compiled a quite coherent and interesting map set. If it was a success, then do another competition, ML2, with new themes. The themes would have had to be somewhat broad, "wood and stone" "marble hell", "city maps", and so on. Make a version of Doom 2 that has Doom style episodes, have it be 10 maps per episode, with two of them being secret maps or something like that. You'd have to tell the mappers to send two versions of the map if it had a secret exit, one with it and one without it.

Another thing they could have done was to add a few of their back catalogue games as a 'free' bonus. Include Spear of Destiny and some Keen games?

To me Maximum Doom was a bit meh, I don't think I ever saw it in shops here in Norway. It's not as bad as Final Doom is, value for money wise, but it's still fairly meh. I'd say Final Doom is id's worst game, and I think more highly of Doom 3. FD isn't that bad, but it is not worth the money. Doom 3 was an ok game, but it had the wrong name and the better maps came late in the game. It would have done better if it had a new name, but people saw it as a spiritual successor to the Doom games.

Id were basically shit at product names after Quake.