Good Doom/Heretic/Hexen WADs

I maybe played Doom once as a kid then never go around playing it or any other 90's fps games. This week I just finished Ultimate Doom, Doom 2 and No Rest for the Living. About to finish act 3 of Heretic. These games are fucking fun. I love how you run around like a maniac and how the levels actually have something else than just run from A to B.

Next up I have Dark Forces, Hexen, Duke 3D, Blood, Strife and Shadow Warrior. Then I can get into custom wads. Project Brutality looks great for a start. So weird how I missed all of this stuff for so many years. That's what I get for playing WOW and DOTA.

 

Your ability to enjoy modern shooters will soon be damaged beyond repair.

 

Played Jenesis, amazing wad:

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New Final Boss:

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I was playing Rage and Advanced Warfare at the same time and you aren't kidding. Both games were a chore to get through. Honestly they might as well be rail shooters with tons of shit cutscenes in between.

The amount of wads to choose from is pretty insane. I was surprised that a game from 1993 still has such an active community. But after playing it I underatand why.

Currently on Act 5 of Heretic. Act 4 was a pretty huge leap in difficulty. Was just like when I played Act 4 of Doom and was shellshocked. Heretic has some pretty great levels too.

 

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/v-z/zaero
Solid 3-map mini episode for Zdoom, apparently based on some obscure unofficial expansion for Q2. Pretty large maps with some excellent detailing, mayhaps a bit dull and samey at times due to choice of textures. Maps mostly comprise of gloomy, rusty tech/industrial indoor environments, with a couple of outdoor sections. Difficulty is somewhat on the easy side, despite 200+ monster count for each map - stronger enemies are used sparingly, placement of enemies is generally well-balanced, and ammo is in ample supply.
Maps can get a bit too backtracky due to their size and somewhat open design. Author at least tried to ease this, by placing a couple of Duke 3D-style security screens around each maps and by trying to "nudge" player in the right direction with monster spawns. Still, be ready for a bit of aimless wandering. Maps are at least relatively rich in secrets (10 in the first one, no less than five for each of the following maps) so there is some use for careful exploration.

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21 years of killing alien scum and still counting.

Thank you ID


John Romero (‏@romero)


October 10, 1994 - New York at the Limelight - the release event for DOOM II. Can’t believe I wore white!

 

There was another progress update on Total Chaos site few days ago
https://wadaholic.wordpress.com/2015/10/06/the-shadow-crawler/

At least this means that he is still working on the project. he went from promising public beta back in spring to being completely silent for several months...

 

Anyone here bothered with DoomRPG?
Played it for some time and want to do some longer playthrough using WAD with large amount of maps, like Valiant or else.
There is nice set combination known from Fallout2 - Advanced Power Armor (here called Nuclear Power Armor) + Gauss Rifle, but for some reason I can't buy them.
Have enough credits, but there is some sort of requirements, that I can't find.
Tested all 6 classess, boosted my stats, and bought some stuff - same result.
Googled and checked some forums + Kyle's GitHub project site, found nothing about armor&guns requirements.

And yeah, Project Brutality is only good version of that overrated BD, that everyone want to merge with everything (yuck).
Played few maps with it, gameplay improvement is more than noticable without "lol ketchup overdose on the screen" thing.
If you never liked gameplay mods - you know the rest.

 

I tried to, but it was a mess to configure and I am too lazy.

I played a lot of Doom Roguelike Arsenal until some time ago, afaik it is one of mods that are often bundled with Doom RPG. I liked it because it added a sense of progression to larger and harder megawads. Finding new weapons, upgrading them, collecting armor pieces, it also had a feature where specific combination of upgrades transforms weapon into much more powerful unique one... Big problem with it was that any decent armor and powerful weapons made even tough as nails megawads like Speed of Doom too easy. There is also additional mod that added custom monsters based on those from Doom Roguelike, but that one had exact opposite effect and could turn even early maps of some megawads into mess that required loads of savescumming. One of my last experiences with RL Arsenal was trying to play Going Down with it and monster pack. I think that fourth or fifth map was already filled with OP new monsters to I point where I just gave up on it...

 

Today is John Romero’s birthday. Happy birthday John!


Or should I say , HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA



PY BIRTHDAY!

 

Guy decided to make a total conversion based on this:


http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=49581&sid=84ee9e5b6b3c6495de5ef745886b1704
Good news is that his TC looks nothing like the game it was based on, other than premise and some enemies...

 

That's the same dude that made Strange Aeons TC I've mentioned few pages ago. This seems to have that same early TC charm.

 

This looks interesting:

 

New release of Crispy Doom, bringing the version to 3.2. I missed it from a few days ago because it is only a bugfix release without any new features, but it’s worth upgrading anyway.

Edit: there are actually a few changes that don’t qualify as bugfixes, though no new features were added. For exemple I noticed that if enabling coloured blood will also turn the blood pools left by squished monsters in the same colour as their blood (blue for Cacodemons and green for Hell Knights and Barons).

 

Why are there so man different source ports?

And why are the pixelated ones with vertical auto-aim more popular than good looking Doomsday with no auto-aim? Even when I played Doom 20 years ago I thought it was a bit lame with the vertical auto-aim. Maybe I'm not nostalgic enough?

 

I think octavius is posting drunk again

Doomsday:


You can't play Doom without vertical auto-aim for obvious reasons.

 

In most source ports you can set in the video settings what kind of scaling --if any-- and texture filering you want (ZDoom, GZDoom, Sculltag, Doomsday). Some pixel-fags prefer to have a pixelated look. Some HD-fags prefer high scaling filters and HD textures add-ons. Some prefer to emulate the exact experience they had in 1992 and (Chocholate Doom). They only thing Doomsday provides that others don't have is the optional 3D models, which are atrocious. There are also some other visual effects that IMO look weird. I've gotten better HD-fag visual results with GZDoom and Sculltag than Doomsday.



BTW, For anyone wanting some higher-res sprites look here : http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=30879&sid=d74ce8795ac64a33fe2499a5c31ddce8
Check also the whole thread, there some nice things to be found.

 

3D model packs look atrocious by rule.

On a related note, voxel packs for Zdoom are sort of nice. One I used for some time replaced all of weapon, ammo, health... pick-ups and most decorations with voxels.


I liked the way it looked, like in some Build engine games.
It had its issues however. Most of all voxels could rape framerate in maps that used lots of decorations. I remember having 10-20 fps most of the time in those japanese themed maps from Deus Vult 2.

 

Huh???
That's not how Doomsday looks. It looks this this:



Still some pixelation on the sprites, but better than other versions I've seen.

EDIT: I see you are talking about the optional 3D models. Now why would I use them? They look atricious.

Again, huh? What obvious reason? I've completed Doom 1-2, Final, Ultimate and hundreds of WADs without vertical auto-aim. It makes things a bit harder, which I thought hard core gamers prefered.
Yey in all Doom videos I've seen the experts use vertical auto-aim.

 

Doom was designed with auto-aim in mind, since there wasn't something like freelook with mouse help. You can turn it off in every source port, but I really don't see the point.

 

It's impossible to kill all enemies without using Doom's default vertical auto-aim feature enabled. Unless of course you use freelook which wasn't even a twinkle in Carmack's eye when the original Doom games were released.

Doomsday looks ok without those polygonal nightmares but I much prefer my Doom to have that nice, crispy software-rendered look. I'm an old fashioned square pixel-fag and I'm proud of it


Some wads I played and attempted to play recently:

Innocence: The New Technology: solid 9 level wad, some new enemy types, first few maps are a little on the easy side.

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Zaero: Episode 1: great Quake 2 inspired mini episode with nice new enemies, textures and music, impressive maps with lots of secrets. I'm still waiting for the next episode...

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Doom II In Name Only RDC : this highly detailed wad starts out excellent but some of the later maps are huge, over-the-top, confusing monstrosities. Can't recommend this one in good conscience, what a shame.

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Ol' No Name: screens looked nice but it turned out to be an over-the-top slaughter BS wad, deleted.

 

The source port does more than just rendering the video: it also defines how the game will behave. Many source ports fix bugs that were left in the original code, which cleans up the code but in turn changes the way the game behaves. This shouldn’t be a concern most of the time but some WADs make use of these bugs (a practice frowned upon in the Doom community nowadays but quite common some years ago) and fixing them may result in unintended behaviour. Many source ports, like ZDoom, have some compatibility options that recreate these bugs when the appropriate WAD is detected though. There are also other things that source ports change, like the number of tics which results in different monsters movements—Chocolate Doom is the only one that got this right if I’m not mistaken, and this applies to its derivatives like Crispy Doom. Because of all this many source ports break compatibility with demos and the like.

Source ports mostly depend on the focus. ZDoom is pretty much its own thing nowadays and many modern ports are based on it. I went for Crispy Doom since it is built on Chocolate Doom but adds various enhancements like limit removal, increased resolution, and some other nifty cosmetic changes like the coloured blood (I miss that one in other ports) and the pitch-changing of the sound effects (a feature present in the initial release of Doom but that got broken somewhere down the patch line).

 

Myopic doomguy mod?

 

Well, maybe I was "tainted" by playing the great shooters of the Unreal/Half-Life era, but I prefer Doom with freelook and aiming. Even though I've been stuck in the 80s and 90s gamewise the past five or so years, and "everything was better before", I think some things progressed since Doom.