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[Spehss _]

Guys. GUYS. Try the Sunder mappack wad.

If you're feeling especially doomed, try it with Brutal Doom. If you're suicidal, try it on Black Metal difficulty. It's cray.

[Robsoie]

Some bumps for interesting stuff as it looks like the most recent doom thread.

A couple of years ago, John Romero created 2 good remakes of some old levels ( E1M4b and E1M8b that replace the regular versions if you replay the 1st Doom episode ).

Since then he got the old Doom mindset back, grew his legendary hairs again and announced that he's working on a complete new episode for Doom named Sigil.
https://www.romerogames.ie/sigil/

It's going to be released for free around february 2019 , but you'll be able to buy some package of it with goodies too

Meanwhile, the release candidate 4 of Brutal Doom v21 has been released for more carnage, compatible with Zandronum, GZDoom and the still maintained ZDoom

[ChairmanPoo]

I think he lives in Galway now?

[Robsoie]

I had no idea where Romero is living nowadays, but quickly checking he's indeed living and working his company in Ireland now.

That said, another good gameplay Doom mod to play with is Complex Doom when you have enough of the Brutal Doom mod.
https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?t=58535
It brings some level of randomness to the enemies (as each monsters have several variants now) you'll run into, making it more fun to replay old levels you know like your pockets.

There's an extension to Complex Doom named Legendary but it's not compatible anymore with the latest version of Complex Doom, you can find it and the older version of the main mod here if interested :
https://zandronum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7406
haven't tried this one yet, the latest Complex Doom is already excellent.

[Kagus]

Funny, I was kinda expecting people to talk about DOOM 2016 after it came out, and see how it lived up to expectations. Instead this thread's just a bunch of hype and antihype, and then silence once the game actually dropped...

The soundtrack is pretty kickin', at least.

[SalmonGod]

I thought the single player campaign was the best AAA content to come out in a long time.  The soundtrack is the best part, and I'm not without my criticisms.  But it was overall damn solid, and respectful of the source material (except in regards to the creature designs, imo).

Unfortunately... it was sort of a once-and-done kind of game for me.  Maybe it's better 2 years later... but a couple months after game release, SnapMap seemed like a failure to me.  And aside from a handful of nice extended battles set up in interesting arena-style chunks of level, there wasn't much reason to play through the base game again.  And the multiplayer was a joke.

I don't have a good feeling about Eternal.  I'm expecting it will try too hard to out-do 2016, and end up breaking the design sensibility.  But even if that happens, I'm really looking forward to another soundtrack.

[Persus13]

I remember people talking about DOOM 2016 being good, but it probably was the Sales thread and not this one.

[George_Chickens]

I found the soundtrack of Doom 2016 to be very boring. Trying to remember a single song from it is difficult, because most of them use the same cookie cutter metalcore chug over and over. The remakes of older songs were pretty good, though, but IMO the fanbase had already done many of them better. The gameplay was also a bit iffy to me. The first half of the game was great with difficulty, the second half was laughably easy, and after completing it I really saw little reason to go again beyond Ultra Violence, because I had seen everything it could give me and wasn't particularly impressed.

It was a fun game, especially in the sea of grey, cloned AAA titles, but it wasn't worth sacrificing mod support, decent multiplayer, replayability and ethical integrity (Zenimax uses threats of lawsuit to sanitize search results, with DoomRL and Prey for the Gods being targeted) for.

[Rex_Nex]

I think that they just went a little overboard with the soundtrack theme; individually a lot of Doom 2016's tracks are great, but when there's just so much of the same thing it starts blending together after a few hours. John Prince's work on the original two games' soundtracks wasn't perfect, but hitting so many different themes that all felt like they belonged in Doom while under the limitations of the MIDI format is very impressive.

The game itself I felt was pretty good, but using the "get locked in a square room while monsters spawn" formula gets tired after a while, and so the level design is something I once again have to hand to the original games. Still a good game, though, and definitely much better than I expected it would be before release.

Super hyped for Romero's work on a new megawad!

[Dorsidwarf]

I think that they just went a little overboard with the soundtrack theme; individually a lot of Doom 2016's tracks are great, but when there's just so much of the same thing it starts blending together after a few hours. John Prince's work on the original two games' soundtracks wasn't perfect, but hitting so many different themes that all felt like they belonged in Doom while under the limitations of the MIDI format is very impressive.

The game itself I felt was pretty good, but using the "get locked in a square room while monsters spawn" formula gets tired after a while, and so the level design is something I once again have to hand to the original games. Still a good game, though, and definitely much better than I expected it would be before release.

Super hyped for Romero's work on a new megawad!

I heard that a lot of the music/melodies from the original DOOM was flat-out stolen from popular metal bands.

[Teneb]

I think that they just went a little overboard with the soundtrack theme; individually a lot of Doom 2016's tracks are great, but when there's just so much of the same thing it starts blending together after a few hours. John Prince's work on the original two games' soundtracks wasn't perfect, but hitting so many different themes that all felt like they belonged in Doom while under the limitations of the MIDI format is very impressive.

The game itself I felt was pretty good, but using the "get locked in a square room while monsters spawn" formula gets tired after a while, and so the level design is something I once again have to hand to the original games. Still a good game, though, and definitely much better than I expected it would be before release.

Super hyped for Romero's work on a new megawad!

I heard that a lot of the music/melodies from the original DOOM was flat-out stolen from popular metal bands.

Not a lot, but a few were. The rest were just inspired by them.

EDIT: Just compared it now and At Doom's Gate (E1M1) sounds similar very similar to parts of Metallica's No Remorse.

[George_Chickens]

The game itself I felt was pretty good, but using the "get locked in a square room while monsters spawn" formula gets tired after a while, and so the level design is something I once again have to hand to the original games. Still a good game, though, and definitely much better than I expected it would be before release.

From what I understand, the engine can't handle more than sixteen enemies active at the same time. Which is part of the reason for the "spawning in behind objects in boxy rooms" level design. On this topic, if you're looking for a game that feels a bit like the original Dooms, try Dusk. Episode 2 and 3 had some input from a few original Doom devs.

I think that they just went a little overboard with the soundtrack theme; individually a lot of Doom 2016's tracks are great, but when there's just so much of the same thing it starts blending together after a few hours. John Prince's work on the original two games' soundtracks wasn't perfect, but hitting so many different themes that all felt like they belonged in Doom while under the limitations of the MIDI format is very impressive.

The game itself I felt was pretty good, but using the "get locked in a square room while monsters spawn" formula gets tired after a while, and so the level design is something I once again have to hand to the original games. Still a good game, though, and definitely much better than I expected it would be before release.
Super hyped for Romero's work on a new megawad!

I heard that a lot of the music/melodies from the original DOOM was flat-out stolen from popular metal bands.

Not a lot, but a few were. The rest were just inspired by them.
EDIT: Just compared it now and At Doom's Gate (E1M1) sounds similar very similar to parts of Metallica's No Remorse.

It's actually a coincidence. Bobby Prince spoke on the topic; he hadn't been forced to listen to metal albums by the team yet, and it wasn't even intended to be a metal midi. It's probably something he picked up from occasionally hearing the music the team metalheads played, A LOT of 80s metal songs sound like that.

[Robsoie]

Speaking about music, here's the website from the guy that made some (as the other are from Bobby Prince) of the soundtrack from DoomRL you can listen them there, rather nice mix of rework from original and "inspired by" Doom musics.
https://simonvolpert.com/drla/

[nenjin]

I got Doom 2016 on sale. And I'm glad.

Was it fun? Sure. Was it fast? Sure. Were the kills satisfying? Sure. Was the DOOMGUY stylings fresh and amusing? Sure.

But it was an arcade game, plain and simple. The whole "Lock you in an arena to fight some d00ds" wrecked the illusion for me. Doom was not a horror game, but it had that tension. Where are the guys going to come from. What walls are going to open up and vomit monsters at me. I can hear some fucking guy breathing WHERE IS HE.

Doom 2016 had very little of that. You knew where the fights were, when they were coming and gameplay basically became "GOTTA GO FAST" or you died.

It's a game I will likely never fire up again, because it just wasn't that interesting. It was a quality effort but in the end felt very surface level. The best part of the game was the protag giving the middle finger to the entire story.......but then they fucked that up by hyper-inflating DOOMGUY into some mythical fucking being. DOOMGUY was a guy, that's what made him special. The same way Imperial Guardsmen fighting off the worst of the 40k universe with just their sheer HUMANNESS is what made the old DOOM games work. But then they had to crawl up their own ass with it.

That part actually annoyed me the worst. "Oh look at us, we're so edgy, we punch our own talking heads in our own games." And then I had to sit through countless voice overs and audio logs about how DOOMGUY is so fucking amazing blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

So yeah. I've never agreed with the hype around Doom 2016 and after playing it, my mind was not changed. I actually PREFER Doom 3's staid and plodding gameplay because at least the atmosphere got me in to the game. Doom 2016 just bounced from set piece to set piece, punctuated by arena-based fight one after another, until I felt like beating the game was a job rather than a MISSION.

If they had:
a) had better monster designs that didn't look so cartoony to me
b) had an open level design for the combat rather than stuffing you into an arena
c) had interesting and creative level design (Doom 2016's hell was more or less a prettier looking version of Doom 3's hell....i.e. it was uncreative garbo.)
d) had toned down the whole "cock rock until your eyes bleed" soundtrack
e) had more satanic shit
f) tried to actually be spooky and tense

I would have enjoyed the game a lot more. But it was clearly made for a different audience. Perhaps one with a much lower attention span than mine. Because I honestly found myself bored about halfway through the game, and it was only the fact that combat was reasonably challenging and fun that I finished the game at all.

So yeah. Not exactly hyped for the next entry in the series.

Really I think my issue was this: Doom was a METAL game. It was rebellious. It was offensive. It was gritty.

Doom 3 and on are none of these things. They're METAL because they play HEAVY METAL MUSIC. It's rebellious because REMEMBER HOW COOL DOOM WAS?!?! It's offensive because they have some gore kills. It's gritty because.....no, it's not fucking gritty at all. It's so goddamn shiny you can see yourself reflected in every surface. Doom 2016 aped what it thought the Doom games were while missing a large chunk of its identity, and substituted in bland AAA game design and priorities instead.

[Starver]

I'm not so familiar with later versions of Doom (beyond "II", really), but the creativity that went into optimising the effort/experience ratio of the original maps was definitely interesting. It's nice to know there's still milage in the old format (or not too distant direct descendent?) and I'm tempted to dig up the old binaries or compatible derivatives again.

One thing I noticed when I tried out a few of them, some months ago, was that modern WAD editors seem to over-sanitise my attempts to be tricksy. Back in '93-4 I used to play dimensional tricks with overlapping-but-not-sight-connected zones that worked well enough (give or take strangeness with no-clipping activated - which gave it another use!), but it looks like modern (public use) editors want to stop me making 'mistakes'.

I was on the point of just writing .WADs by first principles (for one thing, it would have saved all that time calculating the geometries of points around a circle(ish) path towards a given aim then hand-adjusting node coordinates, vertex-linking, zoning and making the appropriate edge-to-edge zone-edge sharing, I could have just generated all the segments procedurally).

(The in-house WAD editors probably were designed around the core team's needs. Sanity checking that knows about some of the little tricks involved, because if it aint the same guys involved in both sides, they can shout to each other across the desk-detritus.)

Of course, this is the difference between a creative artist (which I am not) and someone with a few ideas that may (if lucky) be technically competent, but probably need touching up to make them look good. I always appreciate someone with a good eye for the aesthetics, and in this case they'd also be technically familiar with what ought to be possible, too.