Unpopular Doom Opinions

[Faceman2000]

7 minutes ago, Megalyth said:

 

What if I want to hide a secret in said pit? 

Make it a deadly and inescapable secret.

[Megalyth]

Just now, Faceman2000 said:

Make it a deadly and inescapable secret.

 

100% 4 lyfe

[Solmyr]

• Doom 64 should've had its own soundtrack rather than recycling Aubrey Hodge's PSX soundtrack.
• Heretic monsters and especially its bosses are more interesting and superior to Doom gameplay-wise, design-wise its the other way around.

[Thelokk]

3 hours ago, Megalyth said:

 

What if I want to hide a secret in said pit? 

 

May be allowed if the secret contains an archvile. 

[Doomkid]

On 6/6/2022 at 9:47 PM, Nefelibeta said:

I genuinely despise mapping rules and “Things in maps that annoy you” type of threads. Jesus Christ, there are countless maps that have inescapable pits, cryptic progressions, too many arch-viles and cyberdemons, 200 revenants in a tight arena, ledge walking and stuff, yet there are still fans of them. Are those people all retarded? Well absolutely no. Found it a bit weird if you can just ignore the map sets that you don’t like and stop complaining about them instead of ranting like a bitch. Nobody make maps just for you, dumb dumb.

On 6/9/2022 at 10:33 AM, baja blast rd. said:

I think too many players end up seeing design choices as "getting in the way of their fun" when those aspects might be positive elements of other people's fun. And the possible preference and design space is so big that it's impossible to please everyone at once, so you're going to have clashes like that all the time. People just have to understand how big Doom's design space is. A lot of critical discussion these days is self-centered and uncreative in its self-centeredness.

 

Respectfully, anyone who doesn't make Doom maps catered to my exact specific tastes is a smelly asshole who should be launched into the sun, PRONTO.

 

(Seriously though, telling newbie mappers to avoid cramming 999 Barons into a 64-wide hallway is nothing but good/friendly advice, and I won't stop doing it. They're free to ignore it, and I guess others are free to see me as shoving my elitist, wrote, played-out Doom mapping garbage sensibilities down their newbie throats, but whatchagonnado.)

 

On 6/19/2022 at 9:29 AM, baja blast rd. said:

It's sort of as if TV had no genres or sense of it whatsoever because the language and framework didn't exist, and you had people who were sports diehards complaining about how 95% of shows lack proper organized athletic physical activity. Which obviously sounds ridiculous, but a lot of Doom criticism reads as more or less like that to me. There's a lot of conflation of approach and quality, but not in a neat and tidy way where people reliably distinguish "this isn't my sort of thing" from "this isn't very good" (unless it's something super obvious, like, idk slaughter).  

 

And that's just...one example.

 

Ok, joking aside - LMFAO. This is so true. There's some critical feedback out there that strikes me as absurd and "missing the point", almost like someone sitting down to watch Cartoon Network with the expectation of seeing violent dramas and thrillers like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. It's just like.. Why are you downloading an oldschool-style, straight-outta-95 map, with screenshots and a description that makes it clear as day what the wad will be like, but complaining about it anyway even though you KNEW you wanted a highly-detailed UDMF map designed for GZDoom? It just never made sense to me.

 

I don't think it's overly common or an "epidemic" by any means, but I see it enough to think it warrants mention. At the same time though I don't like to complain about it too much (other than here) because I don't want someone to shy away from criticizing gameplay that doesn't click with them. If they "see potential" but have some ideas they want to share about how they think it could be better, I want to hear those ideas, even if I don't agree with them or think they'd be happier playing another wad. It can still be helpful to authors, and I wouldn't want to unintentionally discourage anything that's even "potentially" helpful for other Doom creators.

 

On 6/21/2022 at 1:21 AM, Average said:

I think I'll probably be ostracised from the village for this opinion but I don't think many music tracks made for maps actually suit the gameplay or the Doom 'world'.  That's not to say that I don't enjoy a lot of the MIDI's made as music in their own right but I just don't feel like a lot of the synthy or melodic stuff fits with a gun-wielding protagonist running through worlds overrun by the hordes of hell.

 

DISCLAIMER:  I mean no offense to any Doom MIDI composer.  Like I said, I like to listen to the music on its own, that's all. :)  

 

I totally agree, but I don't think this opinion is exactly "uncommon". I think it's more that people are afraid to say "hey buddy, your MIDI belongs in Final Fantasy, the fuck is it doing in my Doom wad" for fear that it will be misunderstood as a critique of the musician themselves. To avoid shitting on someone who made genuinely great art, I think most people just avoid the conversation altogether.

 

There are subgenres of Doom mapping where rock, metal and "classically ambient Bobby Prince-style pieces" (for lack of a better word) would be equally unfitting, but a 1996 Startan Base™ with a MIDI that sounds like it came from the year 3003 is always kinda odd and jarring.

[Thelokk]

39 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

cramming 999 Barons into a 64-wide hallway

 

That's not a newbie mistake, that's 2022 challenge slaughter mapping. Get on with the times, mah boi.

[baja blast rd.]

The idea that 'gauntlet maps / slaughter maps' (Sunlust, Stardates, Abandon, etc.) are restrictive in their approaches, and regularly feature fights with only one best "solution," is a really big misconception.  

 

Any Doom fight of any complexity (even a few elements) is a ridiculously complex system, so it's generally inconceivable that it'll only have one approach, unless the fight has trivially few elements (like one baron in tiny space -- even then that might have many options :P). 

 

If you look at highly played wads (Sunlust is a good example), you'll find that just about every major fight has had many different very good strategies found for it by the many people ho have run it, which backs that up. Tbh my experience with playing these wads and watching playthroughs for them is mostly a long chain of "oh cool you can do this too!" 

 

Some reasons for why people end up thinking that these fights are very restrictive: 

 

- One person will probably only have the energy to find one approach in a casual playthrough. Once they've found that solution they'll think of it as The Solution and not look for any more. There's also some natural priming effects there -- like, if you've found one approach, the elements of it will stick in your mind and you might not easily find a very different approach (unless you're used to just finding lots of stuff, or finding a given approach is not difficult for you so you can find many easily....). 

 

- Different approaches can work well or work badly for different people's skillsets. If you have a certain skillset, one approach might seem very indicated, and another approach might seem insane; but someone with another skillset might have the opposite impression. 

 

- People tend to understand approaches as linear sequences of actions that you rehearse/memorize, like do A, do B, do C, etc. but many approaches are more "gameplans," where you're following a certain script, but there's also conditionals ("if this happens, do that"; "if this happens here, do that instead of what we've planned"; "if this other thing happens, we're fucked so just uh pray") and other aspects like that. So even when approaches are similar in form they might have marked differences. 

 

- People tend to understand "strategy" on occurring on a high level of abstraction and lump everything on a lower level into "execution," when strategy can be defined very precisely and execution is just "whether you do something well or not." Sunlust 29's circle fight is a good example of this phenomenon because it looks so god damn "on rails." Here's me playing it: 

 

 

Someone watching this might assume, for the imps, "clear the imps" is what's going on, but there are many different precise schemes for clearing the imps. For example the approach I've settled on is, when the imps start to pile into the lane, to fire rockets while slightly turning rightwards, which kind of spreads out splash damage against the imps in a good way and helps prevent the disaster scenario of one imp being there to block you or get in your face -- and I do that for a mostly constant number of rockets (it's a tacit/rhythm-based fight so I actually don't actually know this off hand even if it's in muscle memory lmao), and then turn back and focus down the teleporting ones while looking back, and then repeat. And this minimizes the chance of imps being in your "way." But someone else might focus down the group teleporting in and try to poke holes through the main lane and slip through imps if needed. (I'm just kind of winging that description because I don't play the fight that way.) But the point is those are two very distinct strategies, and there are many more. And that's just the imp part of it. When do you switch between RL/BFG? I like rocket-punching early HKs if I can and then saving BFG for the last parts, which is neat because it uses fewer cells, but also harder up-front, but you can also use BFG shots at different points of the cycle. (My "gameplan" if I screw up the cybs and take too much damage would be to play more cautiously and shift to a more BFG-heavy approach.) Some people might use a really BFG-heavy approach to this fight as a default (the map's resource balance can support it) but it's also possible to beat the fight with 0-2 BFG shots. So despite all the approaches in this fight being visually similar, there is actually a lot going on that is materially different! And I haven't even gotten to movement strategies here! I can tap-move on autopilot pretty effectively but some people might push more ahead of the barrier to introduce some movement slack against the viles at the risk of making the imps/HKs more dangerous towards them and needing a slightly more BFG-heavy approach. Consciously exploiting the archvile attack delay to build up that slack might be part of some people's gameplans, whereas others might focus more on being really damn good at the fundamental movement scheme. (Where good means "being able to autopilot it with minimal effort," rather than precision.)

 

Now just imagine the nuance that in fights that actually aren't quite "on rails" in their structuring. :P

- Also people tend to use "intended strategy" as a concept, a term that in its very wording implies/reinforces that there is one true strategy or something, but the whole concept of "intended strategies" is misleading and a wild goose chase. Authors are far from clairvoyant and it's basically impossible to do better than 30-40 people playing your map with critical distance from it. Throw a lot of people at a map and they will come up with lots the author didn't see. (Also if you're trying to beat a fight, you probably should not fixate on what you think the author intends because authors will not intend for their fights to be way easier than they thought possible, so you'll be subconsciously shutting out a lot of the easier approaches.) 

 

Idk, I think "there might be multiple strategies, but I'll only ever realistically find/do one" is actually a fair take instead. But harder wads are not that restrictive and usually aren't about the author making you jump through one exact set of hoops. In fact you can do better by ignoring whatever the author's hoops are! 

[RandoBust]

Slaughter maps are tedious trash. 

[Thelokk]

Community music is too 'musical' and distracts from the maps themselves. I much prefer nonobtrusive, generic vg plunderphonics.

[aboyes1989]

On 6/24/2022 at 4:34 AM, Solmyr said:

• Doom 64 should've had its own soundtrack rather than recycling Aubrey Hodge's PSX soundtrack.
• Heretic monsters and especially its bosses are more interesting and superior to Doom gameplay-wise, design-wise its the other way around.

 

It's soundtrack is different, though a similar style to PSX Doom. From what I've heard none of the tracks are reused.

[Dusty_Rhodes]

32 minutes ago, Thelokk said:

Community music is too 'musical' and distracts from the maps themselves. I much prefer nonobtrusive, generic vg plunderphonics.

I absolutely agree. People are making really great music for wads these days but sometimes they are just too musical. They carve your attention away from the map instead of enhancing it. This isn't always true and I love the Doomworld composers but I think this is a great point.

[Unregistered User]

31 minutes ago, Dusty_Rhodes said:

I absolutely agree. People are making really great music for wads these days but sometimes they are just too musical. They carve your attention away from the map instead of enhancing it. This isn't always true and I love the Doomworld composers but I think this is a great point.

Note taken, going forward, I will keep music simple enough to serve as pleasant accompaniment.

[The Doommer]

I don't like The Final Doom having the same boss as Doom II

Also I don't really love Icon of Sin on Doom II

I get that he was a product of limitations but idk it just feels super simple these days

[Dusty_Rhodes]

1 hour ago, Cacodreamin' said:

Note taken, going forward, I will keep music simple enough to serve as pleasant accompaniment.

Woah woah woah, you make music you want to make! I simply agreed that sometimes it can get overbearing but don't let some rando on Doomworld dictate how you make music. It's important to take feedback but also make something you're happy with. I really can't critique your music if I haven't heard it either.

[Unregistered User]

9 hours ago, Dusty_Rhodes said:

I really can't critique your music if I haven't heard it either.

You can hear it now if you'd like, I'm streaming. 

I'm collaborating with some member on projects that are not close to being finished. I hope the soundtracks will be well received.

Edited July 3, 2022 by Cacodreamin'

[Doomkid]

13 hours ago, Thelokk said:

generic vg plunderphonics.

Hooray, a fan of my MIDIing style!

[aboyes1989]

16 hours ago, The Doommer said:

I don't like The Final Doom having the same boss as Doom II

Also I don't really love Icon of Sin on Doom II

I get that he was a product of limitations but idk it just feels super simple these days

 

I've never liked Icon of Sin. Limitations or not, a more straightforward, massive bullet sponge would have been better. Something with certain movement and firing patterns making you need to use the environment more. Hell, something that was a mix of Archville and Revenant and twice the size of the Cyberdemon would have been epic. I'm sure that could have been done.

[The Doommer]

1 minute ago, aboyes1989 said:

Limitations or not, a more straightforward, massive bullet sponge would have been better.

IoS is way too straightforward tho, you see a hole in the head and immediately know that's a weak point

 

1 minute ago, aboyes1989 said:

Something with certain movement and firing patterns making you need to use the environment more.

Agreed, the only reason you need to use the environment most of the time is to get to the top, lower the platform, jump on it and spam rockets

Yeah there is a sense of urgency since if you get archviles you're pretty much screwed, but it's an RNG thing rather than a threat from the boss

 

3 minutes ago, aboyes1989 said:

Hell, something that was a mix of Archville and Revenant and twice the size of the Cyberdemon would have been epic. I'm sure that could have been done.

A mix of Cyberdemon/Spider MM (like how in Wolfenstein 3D the final boss has both a rocket launcher and a chaingun. Hell I loved the design of the Death Knight from the Expansion) would be more epic

Tho a better pattern that Wolf 3D's attacks since having the final boss do one Chaingun spin and switch to rocket launcher is rather too easy?

 

[resle]

E4 should not exist.

 

E2M2 is one of the best maps ever.

[Solmyr]

18 hours ago, aboyes1989 said:

 

It's soundtrack is different, though a similar style to PSX Doom. From what I've heard none of the tracks are reused.

You're right, athough the intro is probably the only track reused and some tracks sounds like they have remixed parts of PSX Doom tracks on them.

[resle]

On 7/2/2022 at 8:01 PM, baja blast rd. said:

- People tend to understand "strategy" on occurring on a high level of abstraction and lump everything on a lower level into "execution," when strategy can be defined very precisely and execution is just "whether you do something well or not." Sunlust 29's circle fight is a good example of this phenomenon because it looks so god damn "on rails." Here's me playing it: 

 

 

 

To your point: being too bad a player to beat this the right way, I ended up developing this workaround -

 

I get to the room while still under the effect of the secret invulnerability, activate the switch, run back to the point where you drop from,

and with some luck and backpedaling the combined archvile zaps will make me jump back.

 

And then I cowardly clean the room from that vantage point, hiding and peeking as needed.

 

[Anarkzie]

I think people need to use difficulty levels more. You get players that will only play Doom on its hardest setting and then complain that a wad is too hard. I'm reminded of some of the Sigil reviews. 

 

I think Revenants are too tough for how they look. Random complaint I know, but I cannot imagine a real life skeleton man taking a rocket to the face(skull) and walking it off. I think Brutal Doom fixed this.

 

Doom 64 fixed Pain Elementals, I don't think they work well in Doom 2. I find it's better to just place L.Souls in groups on the map.

 

I liked Doom 1 for it's story and wished that this element had been flushed out. Doom 3 had lots of cut scenes but no real story or characters and the new Dooms Slayer stuff is cringy. I guess I want the story that I imagined I was playing as a kid, which is probably something more like the first season of Stranger Things just with adults on a Mars base. You fill in lots of blanks as a kid 

 

[TasAcri]

On 7/19/2020 at 5:58 PM, famicommander said:

Doom 3 is a ridiculously terrible game in every facet. The only things it ever had going for it were impressive graphics and sound design, and that doesn't really ring true so many years later.

 

Sound design was awful. The weapons sounded awful. The shotgun sounded like a toy. Explosions sounded like... something. Most monster screeches were annoying and forgettable.

 

Sound was actually good at some point. The Alpha E3 build sounds much better, for instance. That's probably because Trent Reznor was still in charge i think. But after he left, they were probably left with a bunch of placeholder sounds and they kept them as is.

[Ozcar]

Gzdoom feel more than doom and i dont like it.

 

[heliumlamb]

i adore and welcome any and all switch puzzles

[Cruduxy Pegg]

6 hours ago, heliumlamb said:

i adore and welcome any and all switch puzzles

You'd love Blasphemous as much as I hated it.

[The Doommer]

On 7/4/2022 at 5:37 PM, Anarkzie said:

I think Revenants are too tough for how they look.

Considering that Revenants are fallen demons that are thrown back into the battle I'd say it'd kinda make sense for them to be strong. (I got that from the Doom II manual)

 

[sophsoph316]

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

Pain Elementals are considerably worse than Revenants.

that's not an unpopular opinion, that's just correct

[baja blast rd.]

"Mobility as defense" needs to be reframed in more difficult wads or setups. 

 

It's usually ideal to be moving at some speed lower than full (but higher than walking), which is done by "tapping" moving keys. 

 

Cyb in cramped space is a really basic example of a fight where you want to smolmove a bunch, so I'll start with that.

 

 

(The exact movement plan in a broad sense is:

- move slowly, laterally to cybs to preemptively dodge rockets (if you're ever having to reactively dodge this gets rough);
- avoid impulsive and erratic crossovers when the cyb is not firing (that's how the cyb bonks you randomly);
- actively reposition yourself relative to the cyb -- like if it waltzes into you, you might have to bolt away) 

 

Here's a hectic slaughter scenario that might be thought of as RNG-ish :P. First is an improvised try without too much method and second is a cleaner attempt with somewhat more intentionality to it (but still a lot of improv).  I thought the first one looked too messy so I did another video but that looks too clean so I'm posting both. :D 

 

 

 

There's a big mix of speed modulation (moving faster to get from A to B, moving slowly to "hover" in one pocket of space safely -- while still dodging projectiles -- and generally slowing down when I'm going from A to B when I want to be able to 'react' well to something). 

 

The issue with straferunning all over the place in encounters like this is that the arena gets effectively "tiny"; walls are closer (in terms of time) to bump into and force you to change direction again, projectiles are too, you can't stand your ground in most spots anywhere, and reaction time becomes so tight because you're essentially running into stuff that will hurt/kill you faster). And your constant motion also disperses projectiles more making it harder to dodge. (Also as a side note, reaction time is very overrated in importance in games; if you check out something like top CSGO pros, even the top players still have human-speed in reaction tests. Reactions is more: playing in a way that increases your reaction windows; understanding what info to pay attention to and what is irrelevant so there isn't an extra "buffer" where you're mentally processing unnecessary info; having "cached" actions sometimes so that you don't have to think of what to do from scratch.)

 

Being able to do that well as part of your generic strat (meaning what you do without a plan) will allow you to survive "harder" encounters that seem like they'll kill you without foreknowledge more often. A lot of "needs foreknowledge otherwise you're definitely dead" fights shift more to the "still hard and I'll die more often than not but I felt like I could reliably survive this on the first attempt!" range because of this alone.

 

Walking-only actually isn't better because you lose the quick position changes you need. 

 

But the model of movement becomes sort of like ~50-80% speed a bunch while sometimes using afterburners and sometimes slowing to a crawl.

 

It's not indiscriminate slow motion either, they have distinct intentionality behind them. I don't want to make this sound easy lol. It's not a "just do this and you're set" sort of thing -- calculating proper movement paths and speed on the fly requires a lot of comfort with that and practice doing it in maps for the choices to reliably make sense. 

 

Also about commentary videos: The two most instructive aspects for harder maps would probably be movement schemes (and why) and the approach that someone found a strategy (like comparing early attempts/failures and what they were doing, to how they figured out what to do in the "successful" run and what their process was). But those are the aspects that commentary videos would struggle to convey  most (and that demos leave out entirely). Because you might need a map overlay with prepared arrows and curves, for the movement scheme part, like it was sports play-by-play. And the "evolution of approach" would be a really long video with lots of editing if done literally (but you can sneak in comments about what you learned about the fight as you worked towards a successful strategy I guess). It's surprisingly easy for important bits of info to be not obvious in playthroughs. I watched a stx-Vile demo recently where he was diagonal-aiming to increase the likelihood of a rocket hitting a skinny target during this one (literally one) moment, which would have gone over my head entirely in like 2017 but was able to spot it immediately only because I knew the concept. In commentary videos, there's a lot more emphasis on "okay I'm targetting this chaingunner"-type ideas -- the bits that convey well in speech -- but sometimes those are low-priority tactics that don't explain why the player is doing so well. 

 

These are not really meant to be "unpopular opinions" lol...more like, "I have thoughts on something and am putting them here because I don't want to make this a thread." :P 

[Shikamaze]

I really dislike secrets in general. I feel they break the balance of the level, since a extra megasphere, more ammo or new gun can make a hard map a joke.

There is also this really bad habit of mappers hiding secrets that break the balance so much that it's impossible (or way, way harder) to complete a level without them.

They break the pacing of the level too. "Let's stop those epic back to back fights to do a switch hunt so you can backtrack and get a power-up!".

Secrets work best in short maps where you can acess them in the middle of the action, Plutonia map 15 is a good example of that, even though there are too many secrets there.

I *REALLY* hate when mappers hide secret fights on the level too, and i can't see any reason why anyone would like that.