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

[janiform]

Imagine you've traveled in time back to mid-1993 and id has asked for your feedback on an essentially complete build of Doom. What small tweaks would you suggest to them? Examples would be things like reducing lost soul health or giving the chaingun a unique sound effect - easily achievable changes within the restrictions of the time.

 

EDIT: Tweaks for Doom 2 are also acceptable.

Edited April 14 by janiform

[Devalaous]

Removal of the nonsensical 'leaky rad suit' thing thats not documented in manuals

[dasho]

Not tracking percentages of kills, items, or secrets

[xdarkmasterx]

Ditch the RNG damage. Horrible mechanic

[Novaseer]

shrink the spider mastermind's hitbox to 192x192 so they're less likely to get blockmapped/paralysed and can fit into narrower spaces

[Trigsy]

Make berserk affect the chainsaw, too.

[Faceman2000]

• Remove the leaky radsuit
• Reduce the Caco health slightly so it can be reliably two-shotted with the SSG
• Not touch the Lost Souls cuz they’re perfect as-is

[The Royal We]

[GibFrag]

Make spidermastetmind use the spread attack of the SSG for its shots instead of just being a regular chaingun.

[Explorer of Time]

Either make Radsuits only wear off if you actually spend time on a damaging floor, or make it so they don't wear off at all like the Berserk Pack. You shouldn't have to go drop everything and quickly explore a nearby damaging floor if you accidentally pick up a radsuit at the wrong time. And remove the leaky radsuit, of course.

 

Don't reduce the player's armor absorption back to 33% if they get a green armor to refill their armor back to 100% after already having gotten a blue armor or megasphere.

 

Use an indicator for powerups that doesn't tint the whole screen a single color. Tinting the edges of the screen and having them fade out to normal colors further from the edge would work just as well. Whatever you do, make the Berserk's fade out quickly so that people aren't misled into thinking it's a timed powerup.

 

Reduce Cyberdemon damage by about half to make it more usable in regular maps, especially on lower difficulties, but keep its health as-is. Remove the Megaarmor from E2M8 to compensate for the Cyberdemon's use as a boss battle there.

 

Make the Chaingunner take a little bit longer to start shooting at you once it sees you, but otherwise keep it as is.

 

Other than these, I have no complaints whatsoever about Doom's gameplay.

[Kroc]

Honestly, just tell them to make all the variables in the game data-driven by the WAD and not hard-coded in the binary. If DeHacked wasn't needed and WADs could redefine enemies, weapons and all the variables then we wouldn't have had to go through so much pain with DeHacked and so forth in the early days.

 

So long as modders could redefine the game without patching the binary then as far as I'm concerned, nothing about DOOM needs changing.

[DoomGappy]

Do to Tim Willits in real life what you did to Romero in Doom 2. 

Edit: Oh, it's a gameplay thing. Nevermind then. Maybe make the pistol less useless by buffing it up a bit, but that's all. 

Edited April 14 by DoomGappy

[plums]

Proper z-height checking so you can have things over things.

 

Leaky radsuit is great btw, maybe give it a chance to leak on all levels of damaging floors instead of just the heaviest one.

[ebartleby]

That the chainsaw should either do more damage, or benefit from berserk. Preferably the latter.

 

Had that been the case, the chainsaw would be as iconic today as the SSG is.

[Plerb]

-Have a timer on the screen showing how much time you have left with your current powerup(s)

-Make it so powerup timers stack instead of being reset, e.g. when you pick up a radsuit when you already have one with 30 seconds left, the timer becomes 90 seconds

-Remove the red tint from getting a berzerk, and instead make Doomguy's fist sprite change (maybe tint it red or something)

[OpenRift]

Gameplay tweaks: give the lost soul less health (like Doom 64)

 

Technical tweaks: change the texture tiling code and code for midtextures so that tutti-frutti and the medusa effects no longer exist. I genuinely don't know if those are a byproduct of optimization or coding errors, but if it's the former, I can't imagine it having optimized the engine that much for 486 PCs.

[Ravendesk]

add two more pellets to a single shotgun 

[Bald Cyberdemon]

Disable that random chance of bumping off of the wall whenever you run at one

[CacoKnight]

Disable infinitely tall actors.

[Lucius Wooding]

-Give the chainsaw the ability to parry projectiles with perfect timing.

 

-Give corpses a height value and allow the player to pile and climb them and build shit like Minecraft.

 

-Make hitscan attacks give you a warning animation like the archviles before dealing damage.

 

-Make monster melee knock your equipped weapon out of your hand.

 

-If you step into hurtfloors, you take damage for the rest of the level. However monsters also take damage from hazards.

 

-All the gib decorations, such as the heart on a pillar and brain with spinal cord should be health pickups.

 

-Instead of the red tint upon picking up berserk, turn every sprite and texture in the game into FIREBLU for the rest of the level.

 

-Archviles will automatically target another monster if you swap to the fist in time.

 

-Include arm pumping like Super Metroid by mashing the USE key.

 

-You should be able to grab lost souls and pinkies from behind like koopa shells and yeet them at enemies.

[Maximum Matt]

Fully polygonal enemies and vehicles 

[Bald Cyberdemon]

6 minutes ago, Lucius Wooding said:

-snip-

I need this mod in my life and I want it now

[8088mph]

give doom that more arcade-y gameplay that I enjoyed plenty in catacomb and wolfenstein.

[Chezza]

Replace starting pistol with revolver with slightly lower rate of fire but much higher damage.

[Ozcar]

-Switching weapons a little fast

[Stupid Bunny]

• Spider masterminds are 48 times bigger
• Pain elementals can be resurrected by lost souls
• Every time Doomguy picks up a new suit of armor the game cuts away for a Sailor Moon style transformation scene of him putting it on
• Plasma rifle sound is much louder and the sound effect is 20 seconds long
• Barons of hell are actually capable of opening doors
• Replace the secret levels with videos of Sandy Petersen eating breakfast and reading a newspaper
• Keep and improve the early special colormap for the lite-amp goggles instead of just making everything fullbright--oh no, I made a real suggestion by mistake

[Chezza]

1 minute ago, Stupid Bunny said:

• Pain elementals can be resurrected by lost souls

Amazing suggestion. Also, every 10 seconds the pain elemental is in alert mode it splits and duplicates itself.

[Snaxalotl]

I'm still mad that doom 2 doesn't support episode selections inherently and has locked skies for each level. Yes I understand that mapinfo exists and that's not the point, I'd want it for pure vanilla.

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.



 

[Artman2004]

Make the pistol able to be tap-fired, similar to the Half-Life 2 one.

[MundyC]

Reduce the revenant tracer damage from 10 - 80 to 8 - 64, like the Baron and Mancubus projectiles.

 

There is no reason why those shits need to do so much damage.