What is Doom doing better than Duke Nukem 3D?

[Orchid87]

8 hours ago, Sergeant_Mark_IV said:

Duke 3D outsold both Quake and Quake 2. If id's gameplay and level design were better, people would have preferred Quake over Duke. This is nonsense.

Quake left a far bigger legacy multiplayer wise though.

5 hours ago, I Drink Lava said:

occasional pipe bombs around corners that slow momentum to a halt.

Hey, fooling around with pipebombs is one of the best things to do in Duke 3D!

[ketmar]

3 hours ago, xdarkmasterx said:

enemies have to rotate towards you, rather than just instantly locking on and aiming perfectly like they do in Doom

em... but they have to rotate (they cannot shoot if they cannot see you), their shots are not accurate, and they also using the same autoaim as you, so you can use other enemies as "meat shields".

[xX_Lol6_Xx]

Well, in my opinion, what made Doom awesome was the engine, the mods and the multiplayer, also the fact that hitscanners aren't that deadly (but in plutonia). In Duke Nukem 3D the hitscanners are annoying as fuck, and I hadn't seen as many mods for the game as Doom. The engine is fine though. I also heard, I don't know if it's true, that the multiplayer in Duke 3D is dead or broken or something like that. I cannot remember.

[rzh]

The biggest thing for me is just how tight Doom's gameplay is. Everything feels right, the way it's supposed to. Duke and Blood are the only games on the Build engine I can tolerate but even them feel janky and sometimes they frustrate me more than anything. I still like them both. They can do more impressive stuff, sure, but they sacrifice a lot more and all those things it had over doom became obsolete in what, like 2 years? Then it basically comes down to core gameplay and Doom really shines here.

Doom feels really smooth even today, or rather, especially today - it takes basically 0 space (my Crispy Doom folder with all of the IWADS and some WADS is around 100MB), runs on anything, you can start a level in less than a second and from the moment you do it's like you're playing the chess of FPS games, it's easy to learn, hard to master, deceptively simple mechanics that actually hide a well-balanced, fun and complex gameplay.

Edited March 26, 2021 by rzh

[ketmar]

20 minutes ago, Lol 6 said:

I also heard, I don't know if it's true, that the multiplayer in Duke 3D is dead or broken or something like that. I cannot remember.

it was ok in original DOS Duke3D. we had alot of fun playing LAN deathmatches back then. dunno about EDuke, tho.

[holaareola]

13 hours ago, I Drink Lava said:

but rather gimmicks that seemed cool at the time.

Insightful post all through, but yes, that bit. There was a ton of frontier exploration in Duke3d in terms of tech and interactivity, but those novelties count for little returning to it from a world in which those things have become commonplace.

 

I remember most of my friends as a kid all switching to Duke. 'You can play pool!' 'It's true 3d' 'You can shrink enemies and then just STEP on them!' 'You can pee!' 'You can kick monsters in the face!' 'There's a porn cinema' 'There's a jetpack!'

 

I was also pretty dazzled by that stuff at the time, but coming back to the game a couple of years ago I found the core extremely dull. For all the inventiveness of the level design, the enemy set is just so shit - you have setpiece levels, but no setpiece encounters.

 

For all that, I reckon the shotgun is superb! I find the build engine movement delightfully bouncy too, no quibbles there.

[xX_Lol6_Xx]

7 hours ago, ketmar said:

it was ok in original DOS Duke3D. we had alot of fun playing LAN deathmatches back then. dunno about EDuke, tho.

I remember downloading an older version of EDuke only for the multiplayer. If I remember correctly, the web says you shouldn't use the port for singleplayer

 

Here it is if you're interested

 

[Maes]

Well, the case with Duke 3D just proves that it's not enough to have a more capable 3D engine and a few cool gimmicks here and there to make a memorable game. Besides, to appreciate the original Duke 3D today, you really have to know what to look for/compare it with the original Doom as they would have appeared to the average player back then. Without that knowledge, well, you're left with two 1990s FPS games that both look like crap but one of them happens to be "Doom, The One The Started It All (TM)". No contest. And no awards for third place, I'm afraid. Not even second (Heretic, Hexen, Quake, Descent, whathaveyou...)

 

Another underrated game from that era was the original Dark Forces: it not only had a RoR/FreeLook-enabled engine, but it played just as smooth or even smoother than Doom. The potential was there, it coulda been a contender, but who even remembers that one? The fact that it was a Star Wars-themed game didn't help popularize it outside fans of the franchise, probably.

 

Now that I think about it, the only other FPS that has had such a long run (and is, unlike the original Doom, still actively developed and supported by its original creators) is, of all things, Postal 2, still using its original Unreal Engine 2 but kept up to date with a continuous stream of expansion, patches, new weapons etc.

Edited March 26, 2021 by Maes

[ketmar]

43 minutes ago, Maes said:

Another underrated game from that era was the original Dark Forces: it not only had a RoR/FreeLook-enabled engine, but it played just as smooth or even smoother than Doom. The potential was there, it coulda been a contender, but who even remembers that one?

ME! i absolutely love Dark Forces! it's really sad that we never got its sources published. maybe i'd be coding DF sourceport at this time... ;-)

[ReaperAA]

52 minutes ago, ketmar said:

ME! i absolutely love Dark Forces! it's really sad that we never got its sources published. maybe i'd be coding DF sourceport at this time... ;-)

 

Lucius is working on The Force Engine. Maybe you can start a fork of it once it is released :)

[ketmar]

sadly, it's not fun for me to work on some recreation. i want the original sources! ;-)

[Gez]

On jeudi 25 mars 2021 at 9:00 AM, Hisymak said:

The two most important things Duke3D is better at are more map geometry possibilities (room-over-room, sloped floors and ceilings etc.) and lots of interactivity with environment (destroying things, using toilets, talking etc etc.).

The thing is, that's not necessarily an advantage. Things like playing on a pool table by shooting the balls is fun for the novelty factor when it's novel. Ten minutes later, it's just pointless. Twenty-five years later, it's still pointless.

 

Technical superiority means zilch in the long term because even better engines will be released in the meanwhile. So we gotta focus on what really matters to make a game keep an enduring replay value even long after its code becomes hopelessly obsolete. Doom is more arcade-like in both gameplay and environment, this is what gives it some timelessness. Duke attempted to be more realistic, but perhaps the reason people play games is not to experience reality?

 

That said, Duke has its strong points, too, compared to Doom. Projectile collision code is much better in Duke, and the music is also better overall -- I don't think I could get tired of "Stalker" like I get tired of "Running from Evil".

 

1 hour ago, ketmar said:

sadly, it's not fun for me to work on some recreation. i want the original sources! ;-)

Isn't Vavoom largely a recreation, given all the fundamental changes the engine got? :p

[ketmar]

17 minutes ago, Gez said:

Isn't Vavoom largely a recreation, given all the fundamental changes the engine got? :p

sure. ;-) in some sense it's not even idTech1 anymore. yet it still can be traced back to the original code, and it's quite interesting to look how it was changed over the time. this is part of what makes it interesting for me: to compare it with the original code. but with DF there is nothing to compare the recreation with... so it is boring.

[Gez]

36 minutes ago, ketmar said:

but with DF there is nothing to compare the recreation with... so it is boring. 

Not entirely fair, given how the recreation is largely built out of reverse engineering. It's not the original source code, since it wasn't released, but it's functionally equivalent, using the same algorithms and the same function flow.

[Koko Ricky]

Doom/Doom 2's enemy roster is more diverse than Duke's, and there are more non-linear pathways in its mapsets. If you value those characteristics, Doom trumps Duke. However, I would argue that Duke's attempt at exploratory, brutalist realism is very effective, and makes the world feel more grounded and relatable.

[ReaperAA]

1 hour ago, Gez said:

Duke attempted to be more realistic, but perhaps the reason people play games is not to experience reality?

 

Not necessarily true. I, for one, actually prefer the semi-realistic environments of build engine games over the abstractness of vanilla Doom 1/2 maps. I wish there were more maps like that for Doom.

 

 

[Pirx]

19 hours ago, Sergeant_Mark_IV said:

I believe this has to do with Duke's bullet spongy and low pain chance enemies.
The pistol in Duke sounds and looks more powerful than the Chaingun in Doom.
But in Doom the pistol can stagger even a pinky demon.
You fire a barrage of bullets into a Pig Cop or Enforcer, they don't even flinch, they just shoot unavoidable untelegraphed hitscans at you and there's nothing you can do besides continuing to fire until they decide to have an existential crisis and drop dead.

 

 

yeah, that's a really frustrating experience.

[Lizardcommando]

The weapons in Doom sound and feel more destructive than the weapons in Duke 3D. Also, Duke Nukem dies much faster than Doomguy. The enemies in Duke 3D don't die as fast as the Doom enemies. The only thing Duke 3D has an advantage over Doom is the level design. Duke 3D's level design is slightly better, but that probably has to do more with the fact that the Build Engine is obviously more advanced compared to Doom's engine.

[Piranha Fang UGC]

On 3/25/2021 at 2:05 PM, LUISDooM said:

Despite being played DN3D before Doom (both on the PSX), Doom always was more interesting and fun. Mod support and map editors aside, I think Doom's simple gameplay mechanics are part of it's charm, the classic "Easy to learn but hard to master" phrase fits it perfectly. 

Also while DN3D has a more advanced engine compared to Doom, I always found it really glitchy to the point that, sometimes, the map itself can deadlier that the monters and kill Duke on lots of amusing ways:

  Hide contents

 

 

Heh... reminds me when i played megaton edition, I got squished in a place where i thought i wont get killed, died, and instantly showed me the level completed screen. That happened in E2L4, checked the replay later just to discover the clip got corrupted

[Doom64hunter]

4 hours ago, Gez said:

Duke attempted to be more realistic, but perhaps the reason people play games is not to experience reality?

The overwhelming majority of recent shooters being set in realistic environments would suggest otherwise. Besides, you can't exactly call maps like Lunatic Fringe or Tier Drops overly realistic when their entire gimmick is to rely on non-euclidean geometry.

 

3 hours ago, GoatLord said:

and there are more non-linear pathways in its mapsets.

Disagree heavily on this, Duke may even allow for an additional degree of non-linearity and exploration with the addition of vertical movement. But ultimately it really depends on the level designer's imagination. Neither Duke nor Doom are really very limited here.

 

On 3/25/2021 at 8:00 PM, Sergeant_Mark_IV said:

Mapster is an atrocity. I can't believe how Ion Fury devs made these amazing maps on that hideous thing.

To me, Mapster32 is very much like the Vim editor. In the beginning, it requires a cheat-sheet to use, but if you master it, you are more efficient than you would be with a GUI. As such it isn't any surprise to me that it is possible to create beautiful maps with it. But it comes at the cost of less accessibility.

 

As for the topic itself, I think both Doom and Duke have their merits, and I find comparing them to be a bit of an apples/oranges deal. Doom offers gameplay that focuses more on being an intricate combat puzzle (the first two Serious Sam games also do this), while Duke, Shadow Warrior and Blood focus more on being a spectacle, an action movie in game form essentially. This is also very much apparent in the way they present themselves and their protagonists.

 

Ironically I think it is actually the latter kind of game that has seen more representation over the years. I would also categorize shooter series like Half Life and Halo to be more focused on the overall package and the spectacle, rather than the core gameplay.

[Gez]

6 minutes ago, Doom64hunter said:

Besides, you can't exactly call maps like Lunatic Fringe or Tier Drops overly realistic when their entire gimmick is to rely on non-euclidean geometry.

Both are secret levels, though, which hardly makes them the best counter-examples.

[DSC]

Also, non-euclidian is a big misnomer. Escherian is a much more appropriate term.

[Gokuma]

Duke's monsters seem less life-like.   Even though they actually have more points of view, they seem flatter with less lively animation.   Never noticed them infighting either.   People make a recent Doom conversion in Duke and they still don't seem as lively as in Doom.

 

Multiplayer was less reliable with more frequent consistency errors.

 

And freaking TWENTY YEARS LATER the official version STILL has instigib clipping errors.   Definitely use Raze instead of their exe.

[I Drink Lava]

11 hours ago, holaareola said:

For all that, I reckon the shotgun is superb!

Duke Nukem 3D's shotgun is an odd case where the weapon's animation and sound design are well done, it's just how the enemies react to it that make it feel so weak. I would almost have preferred it not to have its legendary range just so it could be able to kill Pigcops and Assault Troopers in 1 shot up-close if all the tracers hit.

[roadworx]

2 hours ago, Doom64hunter said:

To me, Mapster32 is very much like the Vim editor. In the beginning, it requires a cheat-sheet to use, but if you master it, you are more efficient than you would be with a GUI. As such it isn't any surprise to me that it is possible to create beautiful maps with it. But it comes at the cost of less accessibility.

considering the stuff people have made in old doom editors like deepsea, deth, or deu...yeah, no. you can make just as pretty maps without sacrificing any and all user accessibility

[ketmar]

8 hours ago, Gez said:

Not entirely fair, given how the recreation is largely built out of reverse engineering. It's not the original source code, since it wasn't released, but it's functionally equivalent, using the same algorithms and the same function flow.

still not the same! cheap replica! ;-)

 

joking aside, there are no Secret Algorithms anyway. i prolly can recreate it with current k8vavoom codebase (the only really missing part was rotating sectors). but i want to see original source code, because it often gives interesting insights. code style, variable and function names, how it was split to source files, etc. that's what i am interested in. the painting itself is not really interesting, i want to grok the master who created it. ;-)

[Doom-X-Machina]

Doomguy is silent. Duke Nukem talks too much.

[seed]

9 hours ago, Doom-X-Machina said:

Doomguy is silent. Duke Nukem talks too much.

 

Wang would like to have a word with you.

[DavitW]

Being able to open doors without being killed by them.

[ketmar]

25 minutes ago, DavitW said:

Being able to open doors without being killed by them.

that's why Duke is much superior to DoomGuy: Duke afraid no doors!