Defaulting to Ultra Violence is terrible, and here's why

I've always played every game, since the 90s, on Medium difficulties first.  The Hard difficulties always seemed to be made for "when you've got a handle on the gameplay and some familiarization of the maps".  Lately I sometimes go for the Easy/Story modes, as I'm usually more interested in lore & stories, particularly when playing RPGs.

In Doom, if someone wants to flex their ego or whatever their reason, just play on Nightmare -- it was literally added to Doom specifically to be challenging.  How many UV-only lovers should be playing Nightmare-only?

In Doom these days, I also don't play with autorun turned on. Imagine not running around at top speed. (I loathe 2016 & Eternal's constant "locked in an arena running around non-stop like a chicken with its head cut off, mandatory kill everything before you can go to the next arena for the same thing" gameplay design. That's not Doom to me, and I don't like that gameplay anywhere.)

WASD+mouse with autorun on accounts for a lot of the difference in original and modern port Doom playing skills for players.

4 hours ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

So why, why are people doing this? And most importantly, what can we do to stop this madness? Why is UV seen as the one and only difficulty by just about everyone here? I have that backed up with data btw. The number of people who gave me feedback on anything else than UV could be counted on fingers of one hand. And I've been doing this for a while. 

Why should mappers even bother balancing for difficulties so few people consider viable? 

Really it's not the mapper's fault, it's the players. It's their fault for getting shit in their eye for playing on UV. Mappers should probably just stop thinking about it because none of it is their fault. If a player thinks the difficulty is too high and they didn't turn down the difficulty, their thought probably should just be discarded. The difficulty balancing for HNTR/HMP is for the people who are smart enough to turn it down when it's too hard for them. I had to play Abandon MAP04 on HMP because that shit was unreal for me at the time. If you want feedback on lower difficulties, get your playtesters to play HNTR/HMP.

TLDR: Stop caring about players hitting themselves in the face

Since I care so much about the experiences I'm crafting for my maps, I think my best option in light of these comments is to continue to focus my efforts on HMP being the best experience... and for UV I should over-stuff the levels with more & higher ranked monsters. Then be very clear that HMP is the intended difficulty, and let logic take over from there. =)

24 minutes ago, Stabbey said:

There are thousands of maps designed for different skill levels, and millions of players who have differing skill levels. The only way for a player to know whether their skill level matches the mappers skill is what other people say about the map, and by playing it for themselves. There is no way for players to know with 100% certainty which difficulty is the right one in advance. 

This, and addendum - it's easier to adjust difficulty down for the willing, as being above your skill grade has telltale signs (dying a lot). In contrast, being able to complete a map comfortably on a lower difficulty says exactly not a damn thing about what the higher difficulty experience may or may not be like.

Those unwilling to adequately gauge their skill relative to the level and adjust difficulty are not a problem for anyone else to deal with.

Doom has always been about encouraging the "hardcore" audience, as early on as the first game with ID software adding Nightmare! in response to those saying UV wasn't challenging enough for them. This has had a ripple effect on the community, causing problems like skill elitism, perfectionism, and a general masochistic attitude towards difficulty in WADs. As a natural result, the highest fair difficulty available has become the "gentlemen's way to play Doom"(quote, various youtubers).

As a mapper and a player, I tend to favor HMP as the best difficulty for blind playthroughs, where as a mapper I balance my levels to be as smooth and fair as possible and giving the player plenty of breathing room, with the easiest difficulties giving the player the freedom to make mistakes and fumble some encounters they couldn't anticipate. UV is reserved for people seeking a challenge, wanting an ass-kicking, or just play at a higher skill level and need to constantly berserk punch archviles in order to stay awake.

I feel as though this isn't a sentiment widely shared or communicated well throughout the community. Mappers and especially players view UV as the "one true way" to experience a WAD, and due to the aforementioned collective encouragement of being "hardcore", most authors miss the mark on balancing their maps, typically in the form of "babyproofing" HMP or even UV instead of balancing HMP as the "normal" skill level, of which that is exactly what it's there for. This is something that I am definitely guilty of with past work.

Overall, I make my maps with the intended difficulty of HMP, and having UV be the goalpost skill level of those familiar with the level layouts and design philosophies (of which can be the topic of a whole new rant but I'll spare you all the wall of text).

24 minutes ago, DiavoJinx said:

Since I care so much about the experiences I'm crafting for my maps, I think my best option in light of these comments is to continue to focus my efforts on HMP being the best experience... and for UV I should over-stuff the levels with more & higher ranked monsters. Then be very clear that HMP is the intended difficulty, and let logic take over from there. =)

Anyone who stuffs in extra monsters and doesn't care about balance or spend time playtesting a higher difficulty is in my opinion a poor map designer. If a mapper has some kind of resentment for people playing on UV, and thinks no one should play higher than HMP, then they should just give their map no changes at all for UV.

1 hour ago, fruity lerlups said:

how dare you want to experience a wad full flavored with every intended topping? People like you make me sick, wanting to experience everything a wad has to offer, brainrot i say!! brainrot!!

see, this here is what i really dislike. i'll jokingly say that completionists have brainrot because i personally don't understand it, but it doesn't genuinely irritate me. saying that uv is the intended experience or that you're missing out by not playing uv, however, does.

if you're playing on a lower difficulty, you are not "missing out". you are not "playing in an unintended way". the author of the map deliberately made those difficulties to make the wad more accessible; if you are playing on hmp then you are playing the wad in an intended way and thus are not missing out on anything. all you're doing when you say these things is making people who play on lower difficulties feel like they're missing out or playing incorrectly, which, if they're easily impressionable, is just gonna lead to them miserably banging their head against a brick wall trying to play uv because they wanna fit in.

I'd say it boils down to four mayor reasons:

1. Nearly all speedruns are done on UV.
2. Mainstream doomtubers playing nothing but UV, and a certain someone portraying UV as 'The gentlemen's way to play Doom', .
3. Doom and Doom 2 aren't that challenging on UV, so people ramp up the difficulty for extra stuff to kill.
4. People seeking validation from random strangers on the internet for playing on the harder skill.

I would normaly include general elitism, but at least on doomworld I hadn't really seen any, personally.

Still, who cares if you play on anything outside UV, I myself only play on Hurt Me Plenty and so far I hadn't experienced any backlash for doing so.

I design for HMP, get people playing my maps on UV then complaining about health/ammo starvation when, yeah, I designed it that way on UV. Hard difficulty's supposed to be hard. You want a normal experience, play on normal.

I play on HMP personally. Everyone should do as I do, I'm correct and anybody who isn't doing what I do is therefore incorrect. ;) 

Here's my obligation to my player: setting appropriate expectations about difficulty before they play. Whatever happens beyond that is on the player. Unfortunately, Doom is balanced around monster composition and not damage numbers, otherwise this conversation would be very different. Yes I start with UV in mind when designing, but consider this: that's how the checkboxes are checked by default in UDB.

The other thing is, yes you are not getting the same experience on HMP as you are on UV. How can you expect to have your cake and eat it? What I DO try to achieve is maintaining the spirit of an encounter when I balance. I try to identify what elements of the monster composition make the encounter appropriately difficult for UV, and I adjust accordingly. If there's 3 AV snipers that keep you pinned in an area where pinkies and HKs are crowding you, maybe I remove one or two of them. This means the player has less tightrope decision making to be responsible for, less mental overhead to tax their faculties. It's easier, but it's not any less complete, it's just a dialed back version of the fight you'd get on UV.

I think a big element to this is community projects with uneven difficulty or inconsistent expectations set. I fully believe it's on the participant of a CP to try to adhere closer to the median difficulty set in the WAD, whatever that is, than to expect people to just accept that their balls out outlier difficulty is something the players have to deal with or otherwise "play it on HMP." I think the WAD should PROBABLY balanced around all or nothing: you can either beat the whole thing on UV, or you have to dial back the difficulty for the whole thing. Having to change the difficulty for ONE map is a problem IMO...not saying there aren't exceptions, but this would be a good soft rule to start with, at the very least.

As a mapper myself it is hard to balance difficulty between HMP and UV. I try to make UV more like HMP in the aspect of "I want the player to fight for there life....but i want to keep it fair and balance as well". 

As a player i do HMP unless it calls for UV then i'll play on UV.

bottom line is who care what difficulty you play on, as long you're having fun with the map(s) and you're enjoying yourself in the end.

As a Doomtuber, I usually film my walkthroughs and misc videos on UV because with the help of them the player should be able to beat the map on whichever difficulty from ITYTD to UV — if you can beat it on Ultra-Violence, you should not have big issues on any lower difficulty either.

8 minutes ago, LVENdead said:

What I DO try to achieve is maintaining the spirit of an encounter when I balance. I try to identify what elements of the monster composition make the encounter appropriately difficult for UV, and I adjust accordingly. If there's 3 AV snipers that keep you pinned in an area where pinkies and HKs are crowding you, maybe I remove one or two of them. This means the player has less tightrope decision making to be responsible for, less mental overhead to tax their faculties. It's easier, but it's not any less complete, it's just a dialed back version of the fight you'd get on UV.

This is how I aim to design for lower difficulty levels as well. This post a few months back talks about the same general idea in more depth.

6 minutes ago, Plerb said:

This is how I aim to design for lower difficulty levels as well. This post a few months back talks about the same general idea in more depth.

 

You know, this all pretty well aligns with my general philosophy of gameplay design. Should have just quoted this post from the drop!

I do kind of agree with this sentiment because I am bad at games, too old to get good, and play with mouse as well as without interchangeably.
If I notice something is a trudge I won't finish it, if something requires quicksaves I will be annoyed, and if something basically can't be beaten without circle strafing it will be way less appealing.
It's difficult for me to find stuff I enjoy because of that. I feel like Episode 2 was a good degree of difficulty, and Sigil 1 was about as hard as I can deal with.

2 hours ago, Stabbey said:

Yet another "I am deeply concerned about how complete strangers choose to play" thread.

 

Mappers tend to balance for UV because they have to test their own maps, and making the "hard" difficulty harder than they can beat is going to produce a poorly balanced hard difficulty.

 

There are thousands of maps designed for different skill levels, and millions of players who have differing skill levels. The only way for a player to know whether their skill level matches the mappers skill is what other people say about the map, and by playing it for themselves. There is no way for players to know with 100% certainty which difficulty is the right one in advance.

 

Relax. This problem is completely unsolvable,  and obsessing about it is only going to drive you crazy. Stop.

 

 

 

I would actually defend the OP here. I think it's a completely legitimate topic to bring up. A lot of us are not only gamers, but also mappers, and I think these discussions are both interesting and helpful.

Reminder that the objectively best skill level is one that spawns all the things flagged for every skill level.

Time to tell people to make HNTR harder than UV again

1 hour ago, LouigiVerona said:

 

I would actually defend the OP here. I think it's a completely legitimate topic to bring up. A lot of us are not only gamers, but also mappers, and I think these discussions are both interesting and helpful.

Hard disagree. The OP's question is essentially "how can I make complete strangers brains work better," to which the answer is "you can't and it's futile to try."

The way Doom difficulty works, it makes most sense to have UV as a default experience and then uncheck some monsters for easier difficulty.

Beside that, the user maps will have widely different difficulty overall. Going HMP won't solve the issue of a map being too hard if you overshoot your difficulty. Something it just is.

I don't think I saw "This wad is too difficult" as a criticism often, if map is to difficulty, players will understand they need to come back later.

I've experienced the 'Getting my shit pushed in because it has to be UV' conundrum personally. 

I also gave up halfway through Sunlust because of it, as my skill level was too low. Unfortunately I've never been back, so I probably ruined it for myself. 

However, this was not through ego (hence why I was able to stop playing Sunlust based on the fact I wasn't good enough), but through a desire to improve at a faster rate. 

Sure, Sunlust defeated me, but booting up Bougoise Deathmatch in UV was more manageable, and the increased difficulty vs. HMP helped me reach a much higher skill level in a much faster time frame than HMP, because the alternative was to die within seconds. 

I noticed my abilities soar compared to where they were when I booted up Sunlust as my first mapset in over 15years (poor choice of Wad for that really), eventually becoming quite competent at the game. 

I think this is another reason that may have been missed (haven't read every comment mind); playing UV allows you to git gud a hell of a lot faster than playing HMP. It just also requires you to be able to realise when you're beaten and play something less cripplingly sadistic without it destroying your self-worth in the process. Something an egomaniac may struggle to do. 

My seethe and ego helped me grow and become the Doom player, who can UV-max SWTW maps 2 and 3, I am today.

This is a true story, but this is also a facetious post. Please don't take it seriously.

8 hours ago, Perfect Bear said:

I think a large part of the "need" to play on UV is that it's the only skill level where all enemies spawn (intentionally-unwinnable joke difficulty notwithstanding). This leads to a worry that by playing a lower skill level, one "misses out" on content. Lowering the enemy count is a simple and perfectly functional way to make Doom easier, sure, but it also feels like some sacrifice is made at the expense of the player's fun.

This is probably the best description for why I play on UV, I want the full experience of what a WAD/level has to offer. Like if you wanna play on HMP, that's whatever, but anything lower than that, you start to do yourself and the level a disservice.

13 minutes ago, OpenRift said:

This is probably the best description for why I play on UV, I want the full experience of what a WAD/level has to offer. Like if you wanna play on HMP, that's whatever, but anything lower than that, you start to do yourself and the level a disservice.

Just curious, do you play other games this way? I mean more the base game rather than user-made stuff.

I am reminded of this thread, and I even see some of the same arguments being thrown around.

As already stated, Doom (and Quake) difficulties are designed in such a way that UV is the "complete" way to play Doom content, and it's a design baseline as a result. You can disagree with what id chose to do, but it will remain true regardless; there is no sort of misconception at play here. Indeed, an alarming number of posts right here in this thread treat this kind of thinking as "incorrect" somehow, which is rather mean-spirited by itself, but especially when it's clearly correct to some extent. This is very different from what many other video games do, where difficulty settings are often just a series of damage taken/dealt (or similar) modifiers, and whatever is called the "Medium" difficulty is treated as the baseline. This incredible discrepency should be respected, not ridiculed.

I'm not sure if there's a means to disable difficulties outright, but if there were, I imagine quite a few mods wouldn't have any difficulty settings at all, and they would simply advertise their mod as a UV-class challenge. There would be absolutely nothing wrong with this, of course. I seem to remember that a few mod devs actually do specify that certain difficulties (that aren't ITYTD or NM, which are weird and we are least... mostly... in agreement on this) were or weren't really intended to be played, but I can't remember one off-hand.

I'm sure someone will ask, so I should state how I play Doom and Quake content, as well as content for games with similar design philosophies. I always start on HNTR (because ITYTD is too weird) and work my way up to UV (because NM is too weird... yes, that also applies to Quake... yes, that also applies to Copper). I understand that 2/3s of this is an incomplete experience. If I were to design a game, I would encourage players to go through the same process, and I would try my best to make that process as interesting as I could. I understand that many players would realize that whatever the highest difficulty would be is either a baseline or the complete experience. I do not see anything wrong with this.

I do see something very wrong with treating this as a "misconception", borne out of "ego", for "masochists" only, treating this as a "problem" that needs to be solved somehow, and so on. Please, that really has to stop. Most of the posts in this thread contain some variant of this kind of thinking. Just because there's a lot of people saying the same thing does not mean that those people are right.

I always play on UV out of habit... Not really any other reason behind it. If a wad is easy it's easy and if it's hard it's hard, if it is too hard I will come back to it later and that's it. If someone complains about something being too hard on UV, that's their problem, simple as that. Not really a problem.

If it should be a concern in any way, just recommend a given difficulty in your post. If someone doesn't read it, again, their fault. Should pay a bit more attention I guess. If that is STILL a concern, just make HMP and change nothing for UV. Much more reasonable solutions.

3 hours ago, Stabbey said:

 

Hard disagree. The OP's question is essentially "how can I make complete strangers brains work better," to which the answer is "you can't and it's futile to try."

I hard disagree on your summary of the post. It's actually a fairly well written post that asks questions. Yes, the OP has their own opinion, but they actually asked questions - and we're all responding to them.

And note that in my several responses I am disagreeing with the OP. Yet, I find the discussion interesting.

Having said that, I think whenever we try to convince people, we try to change how they think. It might be difficult, but not futile.

13 hours ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

 

I make maps, and seeing somebody struggling and having a terrible time with my map kinda sucks. But that's fine, that's why i balance all the difficulties. When it gets frustrating is when people struggle and have a terrible time but insist on playing ultra violence. That makes me want to scream. 

Hey it's my entire doom mappying career! 😂

I was gonna type a big thing about my experiences with this mindset, the literal "fuck you fonze!"s I've heard while people play my maps on their hardest difficulties and parrot that I don't make difficulty settings despite the fact that I actually always put a lot of effort into each difficulty setting (and that by that logic they could get the same experience but easier on ITYTD anyway...), how that's soured my experiences with the hobby to the point that I started putting in quick exits to my maps and making more and more areas optional, or that it's among the things that has driven me away from mapping for doom... but I think that's been done to death already so instead I'll type a big thing addressing more the larger picture.

I think we must consider the room with hopes like this. That attitude seems at least to my observations to be most prevalent with newer and younger doomers, in large part because that's what the iwads teach us difficulty settings are, and that's what introduces most of us to the game in the first place. Additionally, we've all played wads without difficulty settings and one oopsie takes away 10 atta bois, as the saying goes. Plus, doom is an old game; nostalgia and stubbornness to resist change go hand-in-hand. Given all these, it's no surprise that even some older doomers hold the traditional fomo reasonings behind the uv-or-bust mindset given that they may have been burned in the past before. Or even just that they believe in their reductionist view that "mappers generally only ever remove the hardest monsters for the lower settings." Carrying on the thought, the doom mapping scene is very much one of following favored authors and being unfamiliar with many others, so it's additionally not totally unreasonable to see people give into the fear of the unknown wrt new mappers (to them) and difficulty settings. And of course all the macho bullshit and e-peen measuring... again, more likely to be prevalent among young men who don't know any better yet.

That all said, idk how one would go about combating such a mindset. It will never die out. I suppose half-jokingly, I like the idea of reversing the difficulties. Let HNTR be the new UV with ITYTD as a medium, then make HMP a more toned down or just differently-experienced medium and UV easy 😋 Then we could have more pwad nightmare demos! Joking aside and more realistically, it would take a concerted effort from most of the varried, fragmented and often opposing communities to fight against it and it would only ever barely hold its ground, as can be seen by the number of people who have agreed for a long time that it's wrong and yet the thought survives; thrives even. I guess all we can do is just vent occasionally and let the echo chamber work to feel better about the perpetual situation 😉

In the end, from my limited perspective of niche-ness, it's better to have a small few people who appreciate your maps than to try to appease a bunch of people who can't even utilize the tools you've already given them to have fun. Just try not to take the "fuck you's" and "this map sux" to heart. Maybe it's silly to do so, but if it helps, wear reviews like this as a badge of honor 🎖 🙃