How important was Doom II?

[june gloom]

We all know the original Doom pretty much upended the early FPS ecosystem. It was an undeniable juggernaut, with its shareware episode clogging corporate and university networks for quite some time. But where does Doom II fit in? While it was the first big-box-store retail product, predating both Ultimate Doom and Lost Episodes (if we want to include that) and it most certainly was not some throwaway cash grab map pack like Sandy Peterson claimed... what influence did it have on the industry and the community?

[LadyMistDragon]

The community would certainly not be as lasting as it has been. When one could make better and more realistic environments in Duke Nukem 3D, the community would probably something comparable to Quake 1's as a result, if that.

 

The industry perhaps not so much since it's not like Doom II added all that much that was new from the perspective of marketers and such people. Although this was the time when deathmatch really started to gain popularity, even though it was in Doom 1 of course.

[june gloom]

Hm, I wonder. I feel like some of Doom II's level design was at least somewhat an influence on the likes of Serious Sam, which in turn definitely has influenced games since.

[Cutman 999]

Most doom wads, even back then used doom 2 much, MUCH more than doom 1.

 

in case of the industry, xd

[LadyMistDragon]

13 minutes ago, june gloom said:

Hm, I wonder. I feel like some of Doom II's level design was at least somewhat an influence on the likes of Serious Sam, which in turn definitely has influenced games since.

Seeing as Serious Sam feels like it was taking cues from certain Doom II megawads, that's probably valid!

[roadworx]

ACKSHUALLY, doom 2 was fairly important. it was a far more versatile platform for making maps than the first doom, and as such a lot of people who started out making doom 2 stuff in the 90s went on to become fairly prolific figures in the video game industry. it's definitely far less important than doom 1, but it still left a pretty major impact considering how influential some of the early mappers went on to become. the casalis, matthias worch, iika keranen, and kenneth scott are prime examples of what i mean by this.

[GibFrag]

Very important, but that goes for Doom as a whole really. It left a major impact that is still felt today. So did Quake.

 

What is lost on most people these days is that Doom II was made as a retail product. Doom wasn’t released at retail until afterwards as Ultimate Doom. For many, Doom II was their first exposure to the series, and if not they may have only ever played the shareware to the first game. Id followed a similar approach with Wolfenstein 3D. It was originally not sold at retail, but Spear of Destiny was a retail product and sold poorly. It seems slapping a II to Doom was a lot smarter than just calling it Hell on Earth or something like that, which is likely the reason Spear of Destiny sold poorly. If you didn’t know it ahead of time you may have not realized it had anything to do with Wolfenstein 3D just by viewing the box art alone. So I’d say yeah, Doom II was a big deal. 

Edited January 21 by DNSKILL5

[LadyMistDragon]

35 minutes ago, roadworx said:

ACKSHUALLY, doom 2 was fairly important. it was a far more versatile platform for making maps than the first doom, and as such a lot of people who started out making doom 2 stuff in the 90s went on to become fairly prolific figures in the video game industry. it's definitely far less important than doom 1, but it still left a pretty major impact considering how influential some of the early mappers went on to become. the casalis, matthias worch, iika keranen, and kenneth scott are prime examples of what i mean by this.

I guess it's a question then of what would have happened if none of these people had entered the gaming industry. One could argue that the maps in subsequent FPS games would otherwise not have as much of a professional polish at first or at the very least, would be more hit and miss in quality. That's something that invites a deeper discussion and perhaps not immediately relevant to the topic at hand, but it is a good point to say that quite a few people started out making Doom II maps that would end up working on marquee FPS titles later.

[pcorf]

Doom II = 99% important.

 

Without Doom II, I doubt the community would be anywhere close to what it is today.

[Hunting4r2d2]

Doom II would lead to the development of TNT and Plutonia, which help bolster Dario Casali as a game developer, which helped him get hired by Valve, where he eventually acted as a level designer for TF2, which helped improve the games popularity leading to continued support and the eventual inclusion of loot boxes.

 

Thank you Doom II, because of you we now have loot boxes in gaming.

 

Spoiler

For those who can't tell, I'm making a joke.

 

[Devalaous]

Doom 2 was *everywhere* in my childhood, because it was a retail product. Doom 1, if it was ever present, was just episode 1, I dunno if we even had the ability to get the full game here.

 

This was part of why I was so excited to play PS1 Doom, as I'd never seen the original Doom, and why one of my first PC purchases was Doom Collectors Edition, so I could finally have PC Doom 1. If it was only the original game, I dont think I'd ever have seen Doom at all till I was an adult

[Xaser]

Somewhere between "quite" and "hella", I'd wager.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

1 minute ago, Xaser said:

Somewhere between "quite" and "hella", I'd wager.

Quella???

[Asphalt]

In terms of how much it cemented the status of id Software as one of the big deals of the nineties, making the guys millionaires and the figures of Carmack and Romero become the "game gods" they aspired to be, it had been ENORMOUSLY important.

 

In terms of actual gameplay and innovation it brought to the industry, I honestly think it had been fairly useless.

I myself have always considered it more of an expansion pack than a real game.

It's true that many of the best modders and creators in the community have started making maps for it, rather than Doom 1, but as others already pointed out, it's just because Doom 2 was a true commercial product you could find in stores, and extremely popular thanks to the success of the first game paired with massive word of mouth. I think if they'd decided to release Ultimate Doom in place of Doom 2, the outcome on the quality of the community-made content would have been exactly the same.

[fruity lerlups]

depends on which

20 minutes ago, Asphalt said:

I think if they'd decided to release Ultimate Doom in place of Doom 2, the outcome on the quality of the community-made content would have been exactly the same.

without the same monster roster and mechanics? also without final doom esp. plutonia being made which gave the casali brothers and teamTNT a huge boon?

i doubt it

anyway, I think Doom 2 and Final Doom (which wouldn't have existed without Doom 2) were absolutely critical in establishing the megawad format, and frankly, establishing Doom as a hardcore shooter rather than just a run n gun corridor shooter. The changes to the gameplay that the new additions add changes how the game plays so fundamentally it informs the idea of what Doom gameplay should be.

On the rest of the FPS world? Idunno, i mean, one of the Casali bros worked on Half Life, I was playing that today and I dunno what it would be like without him.

Edited January 21 by fruity lerlups

[Asphalt]

7 minutes ago, fruity lerlups said:

depends on which

without the same monster roster and mechanics? also without final doom esp. plutonia being made which gave the casali brothers and teamTNT a huge boon?

i doubt it

 

People would have made many more quality maps for Doom 1, and we could have had different fanmade-gone-retail "Final Dooms" for Doom 1. I don't think that adding some new monsters and a double barred shotgun had been such a game changer in the economy of the first person shooters world. Like Quake was.

[fruity lerlups]

Just now, Asphalt said:

I don't think that adding some new monsters and a double barred shotgun had been such a game changer in the economy of the first person shooters world.

they fundamentally changed the gameplay of doom though, to deny this is shallow, the game is fundamentally played in a different way with the addition of those elements.

[Asphalt]

13 minutes ago, fruity lerlups said:

they fundamentally changed the gameplay of doom though, to deny this is shallow, the game is fundamentally played in a different way with the addition of those elements.

 

Meh, I can agree, but "fundamentally" is a big word to me.

The only notable difference is that Doom 2 added pain elementals and arch-viles, that you have to kill instantly when they appear. 

Mancubi and arachnotrons are basically just annoyance, and chaingunners can be used for effective traps, which add even more annoyance, but in terms of gameplay, you face them and kill them exactly like you did with the monsters from Doom 1, and add no value to the formula. But it's my personal opinion. 

They could have easily made an addon instead of Doom 2, so I stand with what I wrote at the start.

 

Edit: Sorry, I was forgetting the revenants. More annoyance too. XD

[Dark Pulse]

To the community? Important as hell.

 

In a technical sense? Not very, compared to the original's breakthroughs.

[DreadWanderer]

As others have said above, Doom II had an absolutely huge impact on the community, giving the game much more longevity and opening up many more possibilities. Nowadays, most of the custom content produced is for Doom II and Final Doom, the latter being essentially the same in terms of gameplay. Now of course it is hard to speculate what kind of situation we would be in if it ended with UD - counterfactuals and "what ifs" are always tricky. But I am of the firm belief that the much more accelerated pace of Doom II cemented the survival of the community.

[TheHambourgeois]

I do not think even half as many people would still be making doom content in TYOOL 2024 if it was only Doom 1. It is probably a lot more impactful on the mapping/modding scene and the boomer shooter resurgence than it was on how FPS as a genre developed.

[Doomkid]

Doom 2's importance in the realm of multiplayer gaming is being seriously undersold here. Sure Doom technically started it, but despite being brilliant conceptually, Doom 1 deathmatch sucks balls because it takes way too long for enemies to die. The SSG was what gave "Doom deathmatch" as a concept a lot more spice, and this (small, but MASSIVE) gameplay changer got the world seriously excited for the concept of online/international multiplayer FPSes. When you look at all the DWANGO map packs from 1995-1996, they're for Doom 2, not Doom 1, again almost solely because of the crucial addition of the SSG.

 

The game feel of Doom 2 deathmatch had a massive impact on Quake's deathmatch. If you play a common/oldschool Doom 2 DM wad from the 90s then play Quake DM the influence/connection is undeniable due to the super-fast frag turnover rate, and the SSG is one of the main reasons for that. So, in addition to the points others have made about Casali (and several others) getting into the gaming industry thanks to their Doom 2 mapping, it had a huge hand in introducing the world to multiplayer FPS gaming, and the influence it in turn had on Quake had a huge roll-on effect for other FPSes released in that era.

 

I can definitely see the argument that being the first boxed Doom sold (officially) in stores also meant a good 40-50% of players started with Doom2 rather than Doom1 shareware, and so despite being kind of an "artificial" reason / not based on the merit of Doom 2 itself, this also definitely factors into how influential the game was near release time.

 

 

11 hours ago, Asphalt said:

People would have made many more quality maps for Doom 1, and we could have had different fanmade-gone-retail "Final Dooms" for Doom 1. I don't think that adding some new monsters and a double barred shotgun had been such a game changer in the economy of the first person shooters world. Like Quake was.

In the economy of the FPS world? Doom 2's gameplay differences certainly had an impact, but not as big as Doom 1 in its entirety, sure. Maybe only mappers consciously realize this, but it takes substantially less effort to make an actually-engaging Doom 2 map than a Doom 1 map because of the SSG and extra enemies. While Doom is always "baseline fun" in a competently-designed map, there's absolutely a higher thrill potential in Doom 2 thanks to the new enemies, which tend to make up the majority of the opposition in huge, grand, sweeping wads these days anyway.

 

Doom 1 still would have been very influential all the same, but it most likely would have halved the number of wads people made, particularly after the mid 90s. Given the quickly-apparent lack of variety in the Doom 1 enemies, it's no stretch at all to think mappers may have needed extra variety for truly engaging gameplay and turned to Duke 3D (or otherwise), or perhaps they just wouldn't have been "gripped" enough to get into it in the first place - shy of modern solutions with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, Doom 1 wads are pretty roundly less engaging on the gameplay front than Doom 2 wads.

 

I'd be really wary of underselling the impact that had on not only the broader industry, but particularly in Doom's staying power - a ton of mappers stayed around (or joined up) in the 30 years after release because the built-in variety of Doom 2 is enough to carry the experience for a long time. I genuinely do not believe the same could be said of Doom 1, much as I love it. The wadmaking economy stayed healthy the whole way through with nearly no dips largely thanks to the Doom 2 roster's inherent fun-factor, which directly paved the path for Doom 4 and Eternal to be developed. I think this further cements the massive impact on the industry in a long-term sense.

 

The timeline of Doom itself and the greater industry would be substantially altered without the existence of Doom 2. Maybe not beyond recognition as other games would have stepped up to the plate and filled that niche, but the Doom franchise would be taking home a noticeably smaller piece of the "long term influence" pie, for sure.

[Clippy]

It was good I like it

[Maximum Matt]

If it wasn't for Doom II, Doom I would never be a prequel to it

[Asphalt]

6 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Doom 2's importance in the realm of multiplayer gaming is being seriously undersold here. Sure Doom technically started it, but despite being brilliant conceptually, Doom 1 deathmatch sucks balls because it takes way too long for enemies to die. The SSG was what gave "Doom deathmatch" as a concept a lot more spice, and this (small, but MASSIVE) gameplay changer got the world seriously excited for the concept of online/international multiplayer FPSes. When you look at all the DWANGO map packs from 1995-1996, they're for Doom 2, not Doom 1, again almost solely because of the crucial addition of the SSG.

 

The game feel of Doom 2 deathmatch had a massive impact on Quake's deathmatch. If you play a common/oldschool Doom 2 DM wad from the 90s then play Quake DM the influence/connection is undeniable due to the super-fast frag turnover rate, and the SSG is one of the main reasons for that. So, in addition to the points others have made about Casali (and several others) getting into the gaming industry thanks to their Doom 2 mapping, it had a huge hand in introducing the world to multiplayer FPS gaming, and the influence it in turn had on Quake had a huge roll-on effect for other FPSes released in that era.

 

After your analysis, now I realize that I had absolutely underestimated the aspect of multiplayer gaming, which is actually a very important component of what made Doom 2 superior to the first, and most certainly influential on subsequent genre-defining titles like Quake 3 and the Unreal Tournament series, that in turn influenced a lot of the new generation of shooters we have nowadays. So yeah, spot on. 

 

I'm still not too convinced about the rest, because I think that new monsters and weapons could have also been easily added to Doom 1 with mods, and the fact that the added enemies make for "better" gameplay is true but not that "crucial" in my opinion. I mean, there's still plenty of great map packs / episode replacements for Doom 1 that I would hardly say that lack variety or engaging gameplay, even with limited monsters. If hypothetically Doom 2 hadn't been made, mappers would have stuck with the Doom 1 formula, or at least this is what I believe.

When you say that people probably would have shifted their interest to other games like Duke 3D, I think you are glissing on the fact that Duke 3D has a very differently balanced gameplay, completely different weapons and enemy roster, which make the game less suitable for pure fun. There's a lot of hitscanners, lots of monsters with very quick missles, and very few enemies that work as good as cannon fodders as the Doom monsters. And I think that in terms of replayability that is a HUGE factor in determining why the Doom community has always been far more prolific than the others. As I said before, Doom had a really perfect balance of challenge and satisfaction, that none of the other games I can think of had, not even Duke Nukem or Quake.

 

But anyways, strong points. 

 

[,,,]

49 minutes ago, Asphalt said:

I'm still not too convinced about the rest, because I think that new monsters and weapons could have also been easily added to Doom 1 with mods

Not before the source code release. The only way was through DeHackEd, which came after Doom 2, and without Doom 2's codepointers DeHackEd would have been very limited (remember DeHackEd for Doom 1 can use Doom 2's codepointers, allowing for things like homing projectiles in Doom 1. without Doom 2 this wouldn't have been possible)

[prfunky]

On 1/20/2024 at 10:27 PM, pcorf said:

Doom II = 99% important.

Without Doom II, I doubt the community would be anywhere close to what it is today.

 

23 hours ago, Asphalt said:

... I myself have always considered it more of an expansion pack than a real game.

It's true that many of the best modders and creators in the community have started making maps for it, rather than Doom 1, but as others already pointed out, it's just because Doom 2 was a true commercial product you could find in stores, and extremely popular thanks to the success of the first game paired with massive word of mouth. I think if they'd decided to release Ultimate Doom in place of Doom 2, the outcome on the quality of the community-made content would have been exactly the same.

 

I disagree with almost everything you say Asphalt.

 

20 hours ago, DreadWanderer said:

As others have said above, Doom II had an absolutely huge impact on the community, giving the game much more longevity and opening up many more possibilities. Nowadays, most of the custom content produced is for Doom II and Final Doom, the latter being essentially the same in terms of gameplay. Now of course it is hard to speculate what kind of situation we would be in if it ended with UD - counterfactuals and "what ifs" are always tricky. But I am of the firm belief that the much more accelerated pace of Doom II cemented the survival of the community.

 

IDCLEV!!!

It is so much easier to count from 1 to 30 (or 32) than M1E8... or is it E1M8? Do you get my point?

Calling it MAP is important! Map01!! Easy = GENIUS!!

Don't believe me? What's the numbering scheme for maps in Quake? I think the simplified format

of the map numbering scheme was partially instrumental in the explosion of user made content.

Doom as in "classic Doom" exists as an ecosystem today because of the user-generated content.

Now it's 1995 or 1996 and you want to make Doom maps. You weigh the pros and cons of which

Doom you want to map for; lessee...

Doom                    Doom II

M2E4                    Map24

less weapons        more weapons

less monsters       more monsters

What also helps is that it wasn't long after Doom that there was Doom II. Doom II opened up the

world = see all the sky in so many of the maps. Downtown is a great example. Don't give me this

crap about the SSG ruining the balance of the game. Doomkid's right about the DM scene totally

100% but blasting pinkies in one shot of the SSG is so satisfying it has to be better than the

practice of multiple shots from the regular shotgun. The SSG is balanced in the game because

of the extra monsters! And if you're going to harp about "this monster annoys me... and so does

this one," etc., wanna know what annoys me? Fargin' Lost Souls!! And what satisfaction I derive

from blasting their out-of-proportion-with-the-rest-of-Doom's-monsters asses with, yep, you guessed it:

SSG!!!

 

Personally, I started with Doom II. In fact, I didn't purchase and play Doom until the early 2000s.

I like it. But it has a different quality to its play. I think some of the MIDI tunes are actually better than

most of Doom II's. But coming from starting with Doom II, I find Doom to be a slightly inferior product.

Actually, that might not be it... more like Doom is an unfinished product without the additions

encapsulated in Doom II. Not that I would ever accuse Doom's original developers of getting

something to market to generate revenue and keep the lights on *cough-cough*...

Yes, I read Kushner's book... a long time ago!

 

 

 

4 hours ago, Individualised said:

Not before the source code release. The only way was through DeHackEd, which came after Doom 2, and without Doom 2's codepointers DeHackEd would have been very limited (remember DeHackEd for Doom 1 can use Doom 2's codepointers, allowing for things like homing projectiles in Doom 1. without Doom 2 this wouldn't have been possible)

Smart!