What small tweaks to Doom's gameplay would you have suggested to id?

Lost souls not counting towards kill% in Doom 1 bothers me to an irrational degree. 
I'd propose making lost souls spawned by pain elementals a separate entity from the ones placed initially on a level, a simple recolor of the lost soul sprite, with whatever different properties those may need, like the hard-coded 21 per map limit and not counting for kills. Maybe those could also be a bit weaker, die off on their own after some time or something like that.

Some Small tweaks I would suggest

force pistol starts on every level: I get why the player can keep there weapons from level to level for the sake of narrative continuity of a space marine going from building to building on a mars base. But why would you restart level 17 when you could just load a save and keep all your weapons. Would also make the final boss harder cuz most of us BFG the spider mastermind playing continuous. 

Get rid of infinitely tall monsters: it's just not fun trying to jump off a high platform to be blocked by imps on the ground far bellow, better to jump over those imps then get killed by them instead of running into invisible walls

Have berserk run out when the screen is no longer red: I know Romero is bummed that he couldn't punch things into pink mist after 30 seconds, but its going to add a whole level of excitement and thrill to know it's a temporary increase in strength instead of just, you're now Superman, also to make it so you could add multiple berserks to levels and they would all be meaningful. 

Increase the fire rate of the pistol: it's far to leasurly given the context it's mostly used in. 

Simplify the armor system: make it so that green and blue armor block the same percentage of damage, just make one of them give you 100 points of armor and the other is 200. The idea that it's sometimes advantageous to keep low amount of blue armor instead of picking up a new green armor requires lots of inside knowledge of doom and quick math in your head, and considering the RNG nature of doom and the fact the interface doesn't tell you what the last armor you picked up it seems like this could be simplified and not lose much gameplay nuance. 

Larger tweaks I would suggest:

Change the Rad suits to be durability based and not time based: it's would still be 30seconds but they could track if player is on damaging floor and decrease the 30 seconds only if the suit is "in use" getting another suit would reset durability to 30 seconds of use. If they had even extra time they could make it so the suit became more leaky towards the end until is just wore off completely by constantly increasing  the probability of player will take damage the longer the suit is in use. 

Bind a key to activate the light amplification goggles: player gets 30 seconds of seeing in the dark but they can press the f key to turn it on or off, that's what you could find the goggles and the other side of the map and then use it in a cave far away, it would make most of the maps look not terrible cuz the removed the shadow effects when in use could be turned off at will by the player, also I would swap the Photo negative visual effect the invulnerability sphere gives you and use that for the goggles the way it was I think originally intended by the development team, the green tint can be for invulnerability sphere,  which is green anyway. 

Cut the lost soul's health in half. It's mostly used as a disctraction or something that blocks your space, it makes sense to have it die quickly.

Do something interesting to with barons. This is more of a Doom 2 stuff, but I don't think baron is an interesting enemy - it's very tanky but not that dangerous. He does work to block doors, but more often than not, he's a grindy waste of time. I feel like a "mini-cyberdemon" would be the best replacement, see the annihilator from Eviternity (with a bonus chaingun, making him great in infighting) or cybruiser from Valiant and Heartland.

Bring back the episodic format from Doom 1. There's just so many reason why it works better than a continuous progression of Doom 2. It allows for gradually introducing new weapons and enemies (you can find all guns by MAP08 and encounter all enemy types by MAP11), improves pacing (see the recent post about "difficulty saw") and makes exploration more rewarding when you have to restart from scratch from time to time. I know this can be achieved with death exits or MAPINFO nowadays, but this is one change Doom 2's campaigh would benefit from.

Archviles revive pain elementals, cyberdemons. masterminds and other archviles (I don't want to change doom much tbh. Let the gameplay stay the same like chess has for hundreds of years)

Scale the damage enemies do based on difficulty. A former sergeant shouldn't be able to nearly 1-shot the player on I'm Too Young To Die. Nightmare? Sure! >:)

Some minor tweaks :

- You can collect as many computer maps as you like, just as you can with other power-ups. This will make 100% items possible on some maps.

- Pain elementals can spit out an infinite number of lost souls by removing the 20 lost souls limit in vanilla mode.

- The berserk pack will last 5 years instead of 4.

1 hour ago, DynamiteKaitorn said:

Scale the damage enemies do based on difficulty. A former sergeant shouldn't be able to nearly 1-shot the player on I'm Too Young To Die. Nightmare? Sure! >:)

I thought shotgun guy could only do an absolute max of 45 damage, which would mean 23 on ITYTD?

1 hour ago, DynamiteKaitorn said:

Scale the damage enemies do based on difficulty. A former sergeant shouldn't be able to nearly 1-shot the player on I'm Too Young To Die. Nightmare? Sure! >:)

Damage is already scaled down for ITYTD, and there's no difficulty where the seargent can come even close to 1-shotting a player.

Halve lost soul HP

Picking up a bunch of health/armor bonuses shouldn't stack the amount of time it takes for the yellow tint to wear off and reduce the opacity of the red tint when you take damage because being completely blinded by it is the reason I die like 90% of the time after taking massive damage from a rocket or something. Also, the light amplification goggles shouldn't turn every sector to full bright, maybe just raise every sector's brightness by like 32 or something so you can still have lighting effects and the map doesn't turn ugly as ass all of a sudden.

REMOVE THE FUCKING LOST SOULS AND PAIN ELEMENTALS

Have more playable characters, to be chosen at the start after picking episode and difficulty, with their stats and a big stylized photo of them - including a plucky female and a half-imp dude 

1 hour ago, ALilGrayBoi said:

REMOVE THE FUCKING LOST SOULS AND PAIN ELEMENTALS

Okay I know that we hate them with a passion but there is in-fact a point to them! A stupid annoying point but it’s still a point none the less!

Remove the level Slough of despair so that Doom can be a masterpiece

Halve the rocket launcher fire-rate
Make the chaingun shoot every 3 tics instead of 4
Make cacodemons overall three times as fast including their projectiles
Halve lost soul health but twice as fast and aggressive
Make plasma gun shoot at the same rate of the arachnotrons, but twice normal damage
Make the pistol shoot once per mouse-click with a limited fire-rate (probably of 6 or 7 tics)
Max bullets: 320 (or 640)
Max rockets: 24 (or 48)
Max plasma: 160 (or 320)

Make the Pain Elemental spit out Archviles.

And every enemy the Archvile resurrects turns into a ghost cyberdemon.

umm...

1. remove the [icon of sin].
2. add many crosshair types to the [hud] and make the position adjustable. i had to make my own "up chevron" crosshair via [mspaint] for [gzdoom] :P
3. [automap] with overlay like [gzdoom], but unlike [gzdoom] the player can specify the area size + center position of the [automap] in the [hud].
4. make [former humans] move faster.
5. [lost souls] have half their health, but they could move around corners faster.
6. the [hud] have an indicator if a blue or green armour was being worn.
7. only the [pistol] has a zoom feature to shoot far away switches/monsters and to make it more relevant after the player gets the chaingun.
8. have a cheatcode for developers (eg. idmapper) which makes player invincible, have infinite ammo, and sets the health, armor, all ammo to 0 and could have negative values. when the player shoot monsters, the ammo counters decreases with negative values. the same as if the player receives damage, the health counter is decreased also with negative values. this way, the mapper could quickly gauge the amount of health+ammo+etc needed for balancing in a map section.

that's all i can think of at the moment :P

Thanks for the thoughtful responses, everyone. Once I get a chance I'll try to tally up the suggestions to see which are most popular. I'm guessing it will be halving lost soul health and making the radsuit non-leaky.

All you RNG haters should check out Deterministic Doom!

On 4/15/2024 at 8:19 AM, yakfak said:

potion/armour pick ups count for 3%

This is similar to console Doom behavior, where each pickup is worth 2%.

On 4/15/2024 at 9:36 AM, Yagacaw said:

 

Simplify the armor system: make it so that green and blue armor block the same percentage of damage

This is an interesting idea. What percent should they block, though - 1/3 or 1/2 of incoming damage? I could see the merits of either.

On 4/14/2024 at 5:04 PM, Snaxalotl said:

Also there are enough zombie sounds to give all three variants their own custom sounds, zombiemen and chaingunners are wildly different enemies and deserve separate sounds imo.

This is a really good point - there are already three versions of each sound in the game files.

9 hours ago, Maximum Matt said:

And every enemy the Archvile resurrects turns into a ghost cyberdemon.

... but instead of firing rockets it fires pain elementals.

3 hours ago, janiform said:

All you RNG haters should check out Deterministic Doom!

Goes to show that removing RNG from Doom would make it far worse.

On topic:

• Each backpack picked up should increase ammo capacity.
• BFG shouldn't consume cells but rather a charge, like in nu-Doom.

3 hours ago, rita remton said:

have a cheatcode for developers (eg. idmapper) which makes player invincible, have infinite ammo, and sets the health, armor, all ammo to 0 and could have negative values. when the player shoot monsters, the ammo counters decreases with negative values. the same as if the player receives damage, the health counter is decreased also with negative values. this way, the mapper could quickly gauge the amount of health+ammo+etc needed for balancing in a map section.

This one could be really useful if someone made a mod like that.

GREEN KEYCARDS

1 hour ago, Geniraul said:

[Video]

Glorious.

- make it so that respawned enemies on nightmare dont count towards the kill count

- make the red tint when you take damage a bit more subtle so that it doesnt completely block your vision off when you take a lot of damage

- give the cyberdemon bigger ass cheeks

• Give the pistol a teensy bit more dmg
• Make hell-knights a little faster, differentiating them from barons a little more, and making them an actual threat even when you have an ssg

Also I second chomorkuz's last one

I third it.

And yeah, make the hell knight look a little bit more differenter, more than just a recoloring.  This ain't Street Fighter II: Hyper Fight

On 4/16/2024 at 1:58 PM, janiform said:

 

 

The monsters move like they're in Fallout 2 lol

Make Reventants less horrible (like PSX Doom did).

Increased usage of Fireblu.