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SIGIL - 5th episode of Doom by John Romero

Joined
Oct 1, 2018
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Illinois
Maybe I should try Doom 64. Thought it was just a shitty port that people loved because it's the only Doom they played.
Well it is kind of shitty if you were playing it on a N64 and you were playing with a controller, but since that's no longer the case you absolutely should. It stacks up pretty well with Doom 1 and 2 even though it goes for a more brown Quake-like appearance and there isn't much soundtrack to speak of other than just atmosphere. The level design is probably better than Doom 2 though, I don't remember getting annoyed much in 64 even though 2 can still irritate me on occasion.
 
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Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
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Mancubuses are high-damage enemies with slow, damaging projectiles, rather satisfying to fight particularly in groups

You forgot to mention the most important thing. Their fire is erratic, which means you cannot easily strafe around their line of fire, especially when they are in a group. Epic attempted to replicate this in Unreal with the Lesser Brute, but the Mancubus was better.

All the new monsters are designed to present new challenges, they aren't just there to add volume for no reason. The Revenant has homing missiles. The Pain Elemental can spawn Lost Souls indefinitely so they need to be put down as quickly as possible. The Arch Vile resurrects and has a nasty attack that can't be dodged (you have to brake line of sight). You go out in the open with a room full of those and you are royally fucked. Doom requires actual strategy and planning because of all the novel ways id software came up with to make straightforward gun and running NOT easy.

And the formula never gets tiring, which is the mark of a classic game. I must have played hundreds of wads at this point and i still periodically launch the game to play more.
 

Dayyālu

Arcane
Joined
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Shaper Crypt
The Pain Elemental has a spamming limit, though (21 Lost Souls per level, to avoid overcrowding).

I do agree, however. Most of Doom's bestiary (and by extension, Doom2 critters) are very well designed in giving you problems to deal with, forcing the player to employ quick thinking, movement, target prioritization and proper weapon choice, with good sound design alerting the player of what he's going to fight rather quickly.

I'd legit admit that I find the bosses the weakest part of Doom's model, particularly in their original maps. Without talking about the Icon (a fairly... boring design, even if I get what they were trying to do) one has to admit that E3M8 is a tad uncreative.

I liked a lot how Doom the Way Id Did approached the thing.

 

Kutulu

Arcane
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ger
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex
Romero just made me his bitch. :negative:

TzGrk6O.png

same ... .. .

Ft5JxHO.jpg
 
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LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
https://rome.ro/news/2018/12/10/reflections-on-dooms-development

Reflections on DOOM's Development

IMG_3749.JPG



The year of 1993 was a magical one, more so than any other. It was the only time we challenged ourselves as a group to create a game that was as good as anything we could have imagined at the time. We didn’t challenge ourselves like that before DOOM, nor after it. It was the right time to shoot for the stars.

Incredibly, and perhaps a bit naively, we made a list of the technological wizardry we planned to create, and boldly stated in a press release in January 1993, that DOOM would be a major source of productivity loss around the world. We truly believed it, and worked hard that year to make it happen. I don’t recommend writing a press release at the start of your project, especially one like that.

We did so many new things while creating DOOM. It was our first 3D game to use an engine that broke away from the 2D paradigm we were in from the start of the company, and even stayed in with Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny, at least for the map layouts. We wanted to use a video camera to scan in our weapons and monsters because we were using real workstations this time around – the mighty NeXTSTEP computers and operating system of Steve Jobs.

Making DOOM was difficult. We were creating a darker-themed game with our creative director Tom Hall who is an absolutely positive guy, and it was anathema to his design ethos. He laid the initial design groundwork by creating the DOOM Bible which outlined several design concepts we never implemented, some of which were included in 2016’s reboot.

The engine was revolutionary in that it represented a type of world that no one had seen on a computer screen before. Angled walls and halls that darken in the distance. A high-framerate nightmare some would call it, but it was a high octane blastfest that opened everyone’s eyes to the potential of the PC’s gaming future. Today’s first-person shooters trace their lineage back to this game that bears the distilled essence of what a shooter should be: balanced weapons, insidious level design, a complementary enemy menagerie, and lots of fast action.

Throughout the year we tweaked, and added, and removed elements of the game to make it just right. Gone were the score and lives, remnants of the arcades we grew up in. The items that supported a score were removed. The game was far better for it, and those choices influenced our future designs.

The application of Bruce Naylor’s binary space partition was a huge advance for 3D rendering speed, and the abstract level design style broke games out of the 90-degree maze wall design rut they had been in for 20 years. This was something new, with textured floors and ceilings, stairs, platforms, doors, and blinking lights. We loved having this design palette to work with, and it fit well with the subject matter we based the game upon: Hell.

As a group, we played Dungeons & Dragons for years. Our main campaign was destroyed by demons teleporting onto the material plane and destroying everything in it. This gave us the idea of a demonic invasion, but we decided to base it in the future where we could have some really powerful weapons. Besides, the combination of Hell and science fiction was too great to ignore. We felt even the storyline was slightly new because of it.

Writing the DoomEd map editor to create levels was a dream. I was finally using a real operating system with an incredible programming language, Objective-C, and getting to program in a way I had never known. The fact that we had monitors at 1024x768 let us see our game in a way we couldn’t under DOS. Using these tools of the future helped us immensely.

There was so much we did that was new, it was a little mind-boggling. We were using high-end workstations, a brand-new 3D engine that allowed for incredible graphics and design expression, graphical scanning of our game sprites, and for the first time we were putting multiplayer into our game with a mode I called Deathmatch because that name just made sense.

The inclusion of multiplayer co-op and deathmatch modes changed everything about games. We knew that playing a game as fast and over-the-top as DOOM would signal a new era. I visualized what E1M7 would look like with two players shooting rockets at each other over a large room and it got me more excited than I had been since Wolfenstein 3D’s chaingun audio.

We couldn’t wait to see what players would do with our game, so we made sure it was open and available to modify all the data we had. We had hoped people would change textures, sounds, and make lots of new levels. We were enabling players to let us play their creations finally. It was a major move that would eventually end up with us releasing the source code. Open your game and your fans will own it, and keep it alive after you’re gone.

For our small team, we took these huge changes in stride and tried to use them to the edge of their capabilities. The technical stretches we made matched the design stretches we were exploring. I felt that we hit a lot of walls and climbed right over them. When Tom Hall left in August 1993, we quickly hired Sandy Petersen to help us in the final stretch. Dave Taylor came aboard to help us fill out the game.

At six developers, we were a tight team. Adrian and Kevin held down the art side confidently, while John Carmack handled the meat of the code. I loved being able to play with all of their output, and added a lot of my own code into the game’s environments to support my level designs and Sandy’s. When we were finished, we knew that we made something pretty great. We couldn’t wait for everyone else to see it.

It’s been an amazing 25 years, and I must first and foremost thank the fans that made it possible and kept it alive all this time as well as the game press who have always supported DOOM through its may iterations. Your appreciation of our work means everything. I also must thank John, Adrian, Tom, Sandy, Dave and Kevin. It was our crazy dream that made DOOM possible. Lastly, I want to thank the current DOOM team for their great work on the latest DOOM (I’m not at all involved in it, except as a player). Like everyone else, I am super excited for DOOM Eternal.

Then, here’s to a quarter century of Rip and Tear!
 

Darth Roxor

Royal Dongsmith
Staff Member
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Just imagine having such bad taste and parading it around

doom 2 is a game where you spend 95% of the time one- or two-hit-killing everything with the super shotgun, the remaining 5% being cases where you have to put a rocket into a chaingunner who is 5km away or taking out the bfg for bigger hordes

the ssg might as well be an assault rifle and the monsters russian terrorists
 

Dayyālu

Arcane
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doom 2 is a game where you spend 95% of the time one- or two-hit-killing everything with the super shotgun, the remaining 5% being cases where you have to put a rocket into a chaingunner who is 5km away or taking out the bfg for bigger hordes

the ssg might as well be an assault rifle and the monsters russian terrorists

"I have no idea of what I am talking about" the post the movie the sequel

just stop huh yer embarassing yourself

EDIT: I'd truly like to avoid going level by level on Doom2's design just to prove you wrong, it's not worth the time and the effort

Hell, even weirdo levels like Tricks And Traps prove you utterly wrong, giving the player challenges by creative monster use, typical of what mods would have done in the decades after and starting to dump the pseudo "realistic" approach of Doom1's first levels towards pure gameplay focus
 

Darth Roxor

Royal Dongsmith
Staff Member
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Messages
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doom 2 is a game where you spend 95% of the time one- or two-hit-killing everything with the super shotgun, the remaining 5% being cases where you have to put a rocket into a chaingunner who is 5km away or taking out the bfg for bigger hordes

the ssg might as well be an assault rifle and the monsters russian terrorists

"I have no idea of what I am talking about" the post the movie the sequel

just stop huh yer embarassing yourself

you're entitled to your incorrect opiniouns
2mr9tg1.jpg
 

Venser

Erudite
Joined
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dm6
The box looks pretty badass but I noticed it's a bit too plain satanistic, lacking the cyber elements of Doom. Also it says "artwork subject to change".
 

iqzulk

Augur
Joined
Apr 24, 2012
Messages
294
one has to admit that E3M8 is a tad uncreative
It makes sense when pistolstarting. You show up, infight the spider with all of the barons, this gives you time to collect rockets from the outer rim (which you would otherwise be unable to due to having been hitscanned to death in seconds). Then you descend again, pick up the plasma rifle from the central building, plasma and rockets combined give you enough ammunition to safely down the spider. Which you proceed to doing, by means of targeting creature's legs while behind the cover in the center of the room. This is a properly thought out puzzle level, although a fairly easy one. Maybe it isn't fit to be the last fight in the original version of the game, as it doesn't represent the ENTIRETY of the game before it (namely, ep1) in terms of its playstyle, but, by itself, it is absolutely fine.
Tower of Babel is also interesting from pistolstart, but less so, as it is essentially a troll level. You only have the rocket launcher, but there is a metric ton of lost souls trying to get right into your face just as you are firing at cyberdemon with said rocket launcher. And, from what I recall, there isn't enough pistol ammo to safely down all the lost souls first without the usage of explosives. So, cyberdemon isn't even an issue (and, paradoxically, could even be called a red herring to an extent), the real issue is how to safely dispose of all the lost souls - using rocket launcher - first (because without that, you'll be effectively relying on pure luck).
 
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Durandal

Arcane
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New Eden
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Chaingunners would have been much more tolerable if you replaced them with Arachnotrons, shrunk them down to half their size, renamed them to Enforcers, and replaced their sprites with
30681.png
 

schru

Arcane
Joined
Feb 27, 2015
Messages
1,131
I find Doom II to be less enjoyable than the original, more of an elaboration of some possibilities the latter had that diverge in some ways from the core that made it so great. Of the new enemies, chaingunners, revenants, pain elementals, and arch-viles create interesting tricky situations, but they also significantly slow down the flow of the game, as they require much more care to deal with. The maps are likewise more experimental and based around specific concepts and tricks that don't always lend themselves to very smooth game-play. It doesn't help that the attempt to give them a more earthly and urban style meant the use of a fairly drab colour palette, which made them visually less interesting.

All in all though, I consider it to be an enjoyable expansion of the first game, but one that's more to the side of it rather than a direct improvement and necessary development in every respect.
 
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Elevator Of Love
Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Great news, his maps were really fun to play so a new episode is always welcomed.

Looks like I have another steamy co-op session with Astral Rag

After Sigil, Romero should make a 32 megawad for Doom 2 with some guest modders.




:yeah:
 

Tehdagah

Arcane
Joined
Feb 27, 2012
Messages
9,235
Chaingunners would have been much more tolerable if you replaced them with Arachnotrons, shrunk them down to half their size, renamed them to Enforcers, and replaced their sprites with
30681.png
Chaingunners would have been much better if you removed them
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Where's my Commander Keen, John? I don't give the slightest fuck about your edgy-boi Satan goat FPS bullshit. I want my final Keen trilogy.

The Keys of Krodacia:
The_Keys_of_Krodacia.png


Dead in the Desert:
Dead_in_the_Desert.png


Battle of the Brains:
Battle_of_the_Brains.png


You've missed out on a lot, because here are the latest two Keens:

Episode_58_-_The_Ruin_of_Roib.png


Episode_59_-_Underworld_Ultimate%21.png
 

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