Unpopular Doom Opinions

I've just watched Doomkid's letsplay of Plutonia 3 by SilverMiner, and I think this wad is good in a hilarious way. It's so amateurish yet passionately made. I guess the author was very young when he made this? Because maps made by children are their own kind of art. I remember my very first maps (all of which are lost to time) were filled with all the coolest mapping tricks I could pull off, yet the actual level design was completely terrible and they had various out of place references.

maybe im a sadist but mappers should design maps with the intention that the player should die on the first time around, and have to retry a certain fight at least once, starting from map02 in a set at least. If I aint dyin', you ain't tryin'

Maybe I'm a sadist, but mappers should design maps with the intention that they player won't be able to beat them.

I think mappers should design maps

Doom is a game

doom

I really don't care for wads like Eviternity, Ancient Aliens, or BTSX, which pick a couple specific limitations to stick to and proceed to go absolutely maximalist ham in every other respect, especially in terms of map size and complexity, like they're rebelling against the very concept of restraint despite being inherently tied to it.

Gorgeous to look at, a tiresome chore to actually play.

Play Sunder, you'll definitely love it. (lol)

Seriously, though, I think you and I might be the ultimate opposites in terms of PWAD tastes...

On 1/4/2024 at 10:31 PM, NeoWorm said:

 

Vanilla HeXen as a whole game is kinda meh, I have no problem admitting it. Too few weapons, too obtuse levels, "one fifth of a puzzle finished somewhere maybe". But hell the game has a style...

You have solved 1/96th of the puzzle on the Constable's Gate.

19 hours ago, Li'l devil said:

Maybe I'm a sadist, but mappers should design maps with the intention that they player won't be able to beat them.

you cant deny that Halo Reach's ending is iconic

Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal 's graphical fidelty was way too high and an absolute waste of developer time and producer money. Doom Eternal is the greater sinner in this way because of how the gameplay evolved from 2016 to what it is today.

I sighed inwardly when the first trailers came out, literally facepalming at the design choice.

On 1/1/2024 at 3:32 AM, tamara mochaccina said:

The Hell Knight is husband material.
Nah, but really, the classic Hell Knight is my favourite Doom enemy.

Now we talkin'.

Because the Barons are my favorite enemies

3 hours ago, Gibbitudinous said:

I really don't care for wads like Eviternity, Ancient Aliens, or BTSX, which pick a couple specific limitations to stick to and proceed to go absolutely maximalist ham in every other respect, especially in terms of map size and complexity, like they're rebelling against the very concept of restraint despite being inherently tied to it.

 

Gorgeous to look at, a tiresome chore to actually play.

now that's a proper hot take. a rather bewildering one that's nigh incomprehensible, but still one hell of a hot take.

only one of the three wads you mentioned comes even remotely close to fitting that description. yes, btsx does in fact limit itself to vanilla and all of its ridiculous quirks, and then it does in fact pulverize those limitations into a fine powder before snorting them by making gargantuan maps (in e2 anyways) that have all sorts of technical fuckery. pushing vanilla to its breaking point is kinda the whole point of it.

the other two wads that you mentioned are the ones that i really scratch my head over - why eviternity and ancient aliens of all wads? i mean, eviternity does have some long maps in there, but there's really only one truly massive map in the main 30 maps. ancient aliens even less so, because the vast majority of maps in that set are of medium length, with only a few longer ones for some variety. i suppose you could say they're complex in architecture and some of their gimmicks, but it's nothing that actively hinders anything. i suppose you could call them "complex", but most of their complexity comes in the form of interesting ways of structuring their maps, like with leave your sol behind. i don't see why unique gimmicks or interesting progression would be a hindrance to anyone's playing experience, though?

and then there's the claim that these are all, in your words, "rebelling against the very concept of restraint despite being inherently tied to it".

in the context of doom, i would say that the only one truly doing that would be btsx. as stated previously, the entire point of it is to limit itself and then push those limits as far as they can be pushed. with ancient aliens and eviternity though...huh?? unless you consider targeting boom-based source ports to be tying yourself to restraint (which, when considering the small little itty bitty fact that they remove limits, would be a bit goofy), then i fail to see how they do that. everything that they do is pretty in line with boom and mbf, they just do it in unique ways that haven't been seen before their release is all.

also, why would you be in the doom community if you weren't okay with breaking down limits? we've been doing that for 30 years now lol

4 minutes ago, roadworx said:

everything that they do is pretty in line with boom and mbf, they just do it in unique ways that haven't been seen before their release is all.

Totally derailing, but what exactly do you mean here?

On 1/2/2024 at 10:32 PM, LightningBoltForever said:

 

Interesting, I was actually just in the middle of writing about this very thing for a video lol

Ooh nice.  Keep us (me) informed.  I'm intrigued to hear a different take from the usual "OMG B00by Pr!nz G0d" narrative.

1 hour ago, Ravendesk said:

Totally derailing, but what exactly do you mean here?

i mean, this can be interesting to discuss and is a nice reprieve from all the terrible opinions in this thread, so i doubt anyone will mind :p

what i mean by that is that all the aspects that people typically associate with the wads are composed of elements that have been done a million times before in both boom as well as in some vanilla wads. it's just that they've been arranged in a way that was new at the time. take the ufos from ancient aliens for example: they're an iconic part of the wad that, when ancient aliens first released, blew people's freakin minds (i would know, i was there!! *shakes fist at cloud*). while there was definitely an aspect of "omg how did they do that aaaaAAAA" to it all, i think that a larger part of it was that it was something completely different, something that none of us had ever seen done before in the game. it's creative usage of midtextures, ceilings, and teleporters, something that has been done loads in the past and doesn't push any limits, done in a new way.

plus, we had already seen flying ships and gone into them before as well. equinox would be a prime example of that, and that's a vanilla wad. if vanilla can do it, then boom can absolutely do it with not a single limit pushed. now, you absolutely could argue that they helped push the limits of what people thought could be done in the medium...buuut that involves historical context of the time of their release, which i have a strong feeling that @Gibbitudinous is not, in fact, talking about :p

23 hours ago, Li'l devil said:

Maybe I'm a sadist, but mappers should design maps with the intention that they player won't be able to beat them.

3 hours ago, fruity lerlups said:

you cant deny that Halo Reach's ending is iconic

noescape.wad by El Inferno is of interest to both of you, maybe some others as well.

Episode 1 is boring, me hear all time about how "yo dude episode 1 is the most well crafted doom level set ever, I think it's the most balanced" but the levels feel samey with the limited weapons, textures and enemies" Me prefer episode 2, since it's a mix of hell and techbase

^ I read more or less this exact piece of advice when it was posted elsewhere a little while ago, and it is a huge part of why I'm still trying to map at all in 2024. Thank you. Some people become incredibly critical and harsh when it comes to individual maps, especially ones that don't stand out much on their own, which in turn makes me overly self-conscious and steers me away from creating. Slowly learning to consider the greater whole, as opposed to seeing each new map in isolation and straining to make it the best it can be, has been seriously beneficial.

Judging by the ratings, this doesn't seem to be an unpopular opinion at all.

that's like half the opinions in here

How about this hot take, to bring the thread back on track. I completely avoid wads that play like doom, but deviate too far from what I personally consider the doom vibe in looks and atmosphere. Total conversions are fine by me, but the same doom gameplay without the familiar doom atmosphere does not appeal to me.

15 hours ago, baja blast rd. said:

The experience of a mapset as a whole is as important as the individual maps in isolation. Think of a novel: it's a story that is divided into chapters, but the chapters are mostly units to aid organization. Mapsets can be thought of in a broadly similar way. (Even grab-bag community projects and anthologies, where every map is only loosely related, are ultimately about the whole experience if you're going to play them start to finish.)  

People naturally get this when they're playing through wads to play them, because they're experiencing mapsets as an unbroken chain without fixating too much on any individual map. But some critical formats (like the map-a-day pace of the DWMC, or placing a megawad's maps individually on tier lists like I noticed today in one Discord server) sometimes cause people to hyperfocus too much on whether single maps, in isolation, are as good and interesting as they can possibly be, rather than thinking about how they tie into the whole. Sometimes a small nondescript pacer map (rather than even a small pacer map with a unique hook or concept) is exactly what a mapset needs most at a particular point. 

 

One way to be better at thinking about the whole in "single map" critical formats is to devote space to both individual-map commentary and "how this meshes and ties into the rest" commentary. And even in a first playthrough, you can comment on how a map relates to what came before. 

Every one complains about megawads being "everyone just makes magnum opuses" then turn around and complain that one map isn't as grand or as creative as this other well known/seasoned mapper's contribution a few maps back. Not everything needs to reinvent the wheel to be good.

2 hours ago, treulosetomate said:

Judging by the ratings, this doesn't seem to be an unpopular opinion at all.

Well that's not a good way to do it lol.

Me personally, my unpopular DOOM opinion is that I find Duke Nukem to be a more fun game.

2 minutes ago, Smith Weston said:

Me personally, my unpopular DOOM opinion is that I find Duke Nukem to be a more fun game.

Why it's always the users with a wario pfp the most based humans on earth?

Just now, DankMetal said:

Why it's always the users with a wario pfp the most based humans on earth?

I'm just keeping the bastards honest, that's all.

10 minutes ago, Smith Weston said:

Me personally, my unpopular DOOM opinion is that I find Duke Nukem to be a more fun game.

Finally a real unpopular opinion

people praised hazmat hazama and then ignored it. should've been like a cultural reset with major effects on mapping tendencies imo