Doom vs Brutal Doom - DISCUSS!

[Luzur]

Looks nice

 

[Luzur]

No loading screen?

 

[udm]

 

[PeachPlumage]

Those levels look interesting. Amazing what can be achieved on doom engine source ports.

Siveon

 

[Siveon]

Those levels look interesting. Amazing what can be achieved on the doom engine.

*on Doom engine source ports.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Does brutal doom change the levels in any way now?
I recall seeing the Icon of Sin level being heavily altered, and I didn't like it that much.

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

Does brutal doom change the levels in any way now?
I recall seeing the Icon of Sin level being heavily altered, and I didn't like it that much.

It's supposed to make it more challenging, though many times that challenge is enemy blobs. Has some nice traps and detours on occasion and the reload system forces you to think about engagements in higher difficulties.

Good for what it is.

 

[shihonage]

The reload system makes it popamole.

 

[kangaroodev]

I have a confession to make....

Spoiler

I enjoy both vanilla doom and brutal doom

. I just don't care if the brutal doom creator is an asshole, because this is what I have read from a lot of people who dislike BD, I just enioy the increased difficulty and blood. It feels more meaty and satisfying to me.

 

[Durandal]

There's nothing inherently wrong with liking different WADs
It only pisses people off that one WAD is considered 'the way Doom should be played' by swathes of mouthbreathers whose only experience with Doom is Brutal Doom
There are other WADs out there, man

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I finally played Brutal Doom, and I gave the "default" campaign that's now bundled with it a run.

What I like about Brutal Doom are the weapon and monster changes, they add a new depth to the game and force Doomvets to come up with new strategies. I used the rifle + shotty for most of my kills, only pulling out the Minigun or dual Plasma Rifles when mobbed. I didn't use the Rocket Launcher nearly as much because of the 6-rocket clip. The 'new' weapons (Revenant Launcher and Mancubus gun) just didn't interest me.

What I don't like about Brutal Doom is the bundled campaign. A few levels are decent fun, like some of the urban landscapes and maps that are clearly inspired by the original Doom maps. But some of the maps are terribly bad. Map10 had me raging because it's just one zig-zagging corridor, culminating in a boss fight in far too small an environment. And there are several maps where the way forward is so obscure that you get on-screen prompts telling you what to do.

Here's a piece of advice for level builders - if your level needs an on-screen prompt so that players can beat them, You Have Failed. And that's BEFORE I count the levels where I got stuck and actually needed a prompt. Map16 requires me to get the Blue Keycard first...except I never figured out how to open the door leading to it. The number of levels with on-screen prompts and/or no clear path forward is about 7 or 8 (out of 32) and they're all in the midpart of the campaign. The Hell levels are probably the best levels overall.

The campaign introduces a few new monsters. The first boss fight pits you up against two heavy hitters that make Barons of Hell look weak by comparison, but they're even rarer than Cyberdemons. Then there are the tanks, which can liquefy you with just a grazing shot while you have to pump dozens of rockets into them to take them out. Although there are more boss fights, they all amount to "run-around-in-circles-from-the-big-baddie-and-keep-some-scenery-between-you-while-you-reload" - only the final boss fight isn't like that, but that's where the cheese gets turned up to 11. Which reminds me of the most annoying aspect of the campaign - the traps.

I know that Doom is supposed to have traps, but some of the traps in the BD campaign are cheesy as fuck. There are silent crushers, dart-belching wall shooters and platform segments that far too often require out-of-the-box thinking to get through alive, which did little else but annoy me. And once I figured out the secret to how to find most of the secrets (strafe-jumping) I simply stopped looking for them. I want to play Doom, not be parkour-jumping on balconies like an idiot.

Overall I recommend the mod for those wanting some fresh life in their Doom game - just don't play the campaign bundled with it.

 

[Baron Dupek]

If you liked BD for changes in gameplay and not more gore - try Project Brutality then.
Even more changes + toned down brutality = win.
I.Can't.Recommend.It.More.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

If you liked BD for changes in gameplay and not more gore - try Project Brutality then.
Even more changes + toned down brutality = win.
I.Can't.Recommend.It.More.

Thanks for that, except...I never said I didn't like the gore.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Interesting bug I've found with Brutal Doom - sometimes you can find and free fellow marines for some valued assistance, and far too often they meet an untimely end.

Well, if the marine's death results in a smouldering corpse, you can just Use the corpse to 'revive' the Marine. I haven't every tried every possible corpse left behind, but Marines gunned down by bullets can't be revived, it seems.

Also, telefragging an enemy in Brutal Doom makes one GIGANTIC mess.

EDIT: Found something that lags the hell out of Brutal Doom: Shooting a cluster of exploding barrels that stand in liquid. Try it.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I have a confession to make....

Spoiler

I enjoy both vanilla doom and brutal doom

. I just don't care if the brutal doom creator is an asshole, because this is what I have read from a lot of people who dislike BD, I just enioy the increased difficulty and blood. It feels more meaty and satisfying to me.

Yeah, I never understood the whole "this guy is an asshole, therefore everything he makes is shit!" line of thinking.
Do you know who else were assholes (apparently)? Kubrick, Lovecraft, Dr Seuss, Ozzy Osbourne, Dickens, Harlan Ellison, Michelangelo and the list goes on.
And guess what? They made good stuff. You don't have to be nice to be talented.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Nice strawman there m8. My dislike of BD has shit to do Sgt Mark's views and his general attitude, and it has everything to with the fucking mod itself, and with my reasons for enjoying Doom and constantly returning to it in the first place. And I reckon that it is the same for quite a few folks here that play Doom on regular basis and have expressed their dislike for BD either here, or in wad thread, or in DUUM thread.

Explanations were offered again and again, wall of text were written, but you folks will still claim that, if someone here writes how he doesn't enjoy BD, he is either trying to be edgy and contrarian or 'tis just that DAT BAD BRAZILIAN MAN HURT ME FEELIES!

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Are you referring to me? Because I wasn't referring to you. I was just agreeing that the fact that the creator is an asshole is irrelevant.
If you have issues with the mod itself that's fine. I for one found the execution mechanic unnecessary and damaging to the pace of the game.

 

[kangaroodev]

I have a confession to make....

Spoiler

I enjoy both vanilla doom and brutal doom

. I just don't care if the brutal doom creator is an asshole, because this is what I have read from a lot of people who dislike BD, I just enioy the increased difficulty and blood. It feels more meaty and satisfying to me.

Yeah, I never understood the whole "this guy is an asshole, therefore everything he makes is shit!" line of thinking.
Do you know who else were assholes (apparently)? Kubrick, Lovecraft, Dr Seuss, Ozzy Osbourne, Dickens, Harlan Ellison, Michelangelo and the list goes on.
And guess what? They made good stuff. You don't have to be nice to be talented.

Exactly, if I were to cut off every piece of media that I like because I don't agree or like the creator I'd have almost nothing to enjoy. I'm not saying people should like brutal doom but most of the time when people don't bash the mod itself they just bash the creator instead as a reason to stop playing it. I enjoy it for what it is when I'm not playing regular doom, more blood, explosions and a bit of edgyness aren't bad in a video game.

 

[tormund]

I don't rememberer last time I saw someone honestly writing how he hates BD because of its author... But I keep seeing people, even older members on Doomworld, pulling off that shit about people hating BD because of its author and how they themselves are better than that. So in hindsight, in a weird way him being a racist and a typical spoiled modder primadonna provided a nice defense from criticism of his mod.:D

 

[Lyric Suite]

As it has been said a million times already, the issue with BD is the morons who argue that it is more Doomy than Doom itself, and therefore better. As a total conversion it is fine for what it is and if anyone likes it better than the original so be it. I just can't stands the retards that look at the gore or the clusterfuckery and think, this is just like Doom, except better lol. No you try hard faggit. There is more to Doom than that shit.

 

[Akratus]

"Modders are hard at work reviving this old game nobody plays it any more, with a ton of parts ripped out and modern streamlined design thrown in, we'll finally be able to handle it and we'll have the totally definitive version of this game!"

 

[Unkillable Cat]

If anyone wants to play a Megawad that works well with Brutal Doom - go play Alien Vendetta. I just finished Map13 and I'm exhausted. Lots of swarms of weak monsters is where Brutal Doom excels, and this map delivers those in spades.

I used the opportunity and started using the 'new' weapons more. The Revenant Launcher fires semi-homing missiles at the nearest possible target - the problem with that is that corpses are possible targets. A very situational weapon that's rarely worth bothering with. The Mancubus gun, however, is a whole different story. I LOVE IT. Primary fire is a short-ranged flamethrower, while Alt-Fire fires a standard Mancubus blast. Brutal Doom pays a lot of attention to monsters on fire. Once on fire they run around screaming, setting others on fire and generally causing mass panic. This is an awesome crowd control weapon, though with two shortcomings...it's not that effective against the big monsters, and both getting the gun and then ammo for it requires gibbing a Mancubus - that means Rocket Launcher/Grenades.

Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention the grenades - they really tear up the place. A grenade is more powerful than a rocket and with about three times the blast radius. With good throwing you can place a grenade right where you want it. One grenade gibs everything weaker than a Baron of Hell and they're perfect for scouting out suspicious-looking elevator shafts.

In the aforementioned Map13 there's a S-like corridor filled with zombie grunts - I unleashed a 1-second burt of flamethrower in there, let the door close to keep them contained and waited as the burning, screaming and firing went on for two whole minutes. There were no survivors.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Finished Alien Vendetta last night on UV in BD. This has got to be one of the best Megawads out there. The map I disliked the most was MAP20 (the pyramid) because it felt completely out of place. It does have that pretty cool mountain climb, though. There is one glaring fault with AV though, and that's the inability to determine whether a liquid surface is hazardous or not except by stepping in it. Some toxic waste, blood and lava is perfectly safe to walk on - in fact the levels require so more often than not.

The highpoint has got to be MAP25 through MAP27. MAP25 is a slaughterfest of epic proportions - to the point that sometimes it's better not to trigger some spawns. One key point of advice that saved my skin - don't open the yellow gate. You can jump over it if you need to get past it, and it fences in any and all monsters that appear beyond it. You can then go up on the balcony where the blue key was and kill with impunity. I got 8 Cyberdemons this way and countless Revenants/Barons of Hell.

For MAP26, I started by heading northwest, then south along the narrow passage on the far west side. It's easy to take out most monsters there, and you're shielded from the clusterfuck that's taking place in the center area. Even the Spiderdemon in the room south of here can't touch you. Once I had a foothold, I moved south, circled around the center area, then moved north on the eastern border of the map. This gave me freedom of movement plus access to lots of supplies. Don't push any buttons unless you're absolutely certain what they do - there are 14 Cyberdemons in this map alone, and they tend to pop up at the worst times.

MAP27 has a section I just adored: A large room with steps, and each step filled with Chaingunners while Mancubi and other monsters are placed right in between you and the Chaingunners. Redefines the term "infighting".

Sadly the last three maps just bored me. They look nice and all, but they offer absolutely nothing after the triple fragfest of the previous maps. Seeing yet another Cyberdemon plonked in front of me had lost its charm by this point. MAP30 was anticlimatic, I just rode up on the platform, aimed and emptied a Rocket Launcher clip into the Icon of Sin before any monsters even spawned.

I wish I could say I beat Alien Vendetta fair and square, but there were two instances where I couldn't survive. The first was in the 'red' section of MAP31, where two mobs of Revenants are spawned in a small room. While I probably could have used the two teleporters (in the pools) to help me out, I didn't think of that until long after I'd IDDQD'd myself through it. The second one is the crescent-like canyon in MAP29. Even with a Megasphere and plenty of Energy cells lying around, this proved impossible to beat. Running down the canyon only spawns MORE Revenants and then some Arch-Viles, so the trick seems to be confining yourself to a tiny area, while killing two dozen Revenants in a matter of seconds. Nope, not happening. This is Brutal Doom's biggest shortcoming when it comes to the monsters - Revenants are OP.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/04/29/brutal-doom-gore/

How Brutal Doom’s Gore Works

“Saved my hide, it did. The alien’s broad back shielded me as its brethren flung their fiery mucus wads; the fireballs burst, spraying flaming, red liquid that dribbled down my dance partner’s legs to pool on the ground, lighting the room with a hellish, red glaze. I fired nine or ten times, finally blowing a hole clean through the alien … a gory loophole through which I turned on the rest.”

Knee Deep in the Dead, Dafydd Ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver’s novelisation of Doom, is perhaps a little more theatrical than the Doom that played in my head during the summer of 1994. It features a sidekick and talking demons, and dramatised sequences in which protagonist Corporal Flynn Taggart finds ammo and bumps up against walls to find secrets. But it captures something of Doom’s intensely graphic nature. Doom was the first game I played that felt truly fluid and direct.

Playing Brutal Doom [official site] today feels like Doom always did, despite its custom levels and gouts of blood and gore, death animations and chugging live versions of Doom’s MUS originals. It overhauls pretty much every element of the original, and yet it’s the Doom that plays in my memory, amplifying the original’s gore and immediacy to suit a post-COD, Gears of War – heck, Soldier of Fortune – world. For me, the latest version, v20b, reaches a state of the sublime. But while the blood that drips from ceilings and screen-filling viscera are its obvious achievements, something far more prosaic lies at the root of how it works so well.

THE MECHANIC: Hitboxes.

Sergeant_Mark_IV never planned to make a mod as focused as Brutal Doom. A veteran of Warcraft 3 map making (“I had the terrible habit of attempting to make maps that had nothing to do with Warcraft itself, with themes such as World War III and the first Gulf War”), he originally set out to make a crazily ambitious total conversion calledArmageDoom. An unofficial sequel to Doom 2, it was meant to have a campaign representing Earth’s last stand against the demons, 20 weapons, 40 new enemies, drivable vehicles and it got as far as a beta, albeit bug-ridden and with only eight maps and a fraction of the planned features.

It was proving too much to handle, so Sergeant_Mark_IV decided to step back and look at one challenge he was facing: introducing a sniper rifle. “It was a completely redundant weapon, since the firefights usually happens at either close or mid range, and the lack of a headshot system made the accurate shoots have no real use,” he says. But it lodged an idea, that of developing for Doom a hit detection system so enemies would receive different damage values depending on where they were hit.

At the same time, he had a hankering to create a new blood system. Like many Doom mods, ArmageDoom was built on ZDoom, an enhanced port of the original Doom engine to Windows which among many other things adds mouselook, and its gore system borrowed from two gore-producing mods, Nashgore and Ultragore. The Doom engine cannot natively draw decals on floors and ceilings, since floors and ceilings don’t technically exist, but Sergeant_Mark_IV developed a way of simulating decals using flat 3D models.

With the ability to shoot a zombie’s head off and paint the room with explosions of blood, Brutal Doom was born. Testers loved the extra feedback Sergeant_Mark_IV’s prototype gave. Encouraged, he started to pile in more and more features – smoke and fire, reloading, light flares. “It became my obsession,” he says. “I started to add everything that I used to imagine should be in a sequel to Doom 2. It went from ‘student project to learn how to use the engine’ to ‘how I wish Doom 3 was’.”

Brutal Doom’s gore system is built on a single function from Heretic’s source code called A_TossGib. It randomly throws things in random directions and was frequently used by other mods as a way of spawning particles. Over time it was steadily refined to add more control over the properties of these particles, and so in Brutal Doom, every gib, splatter of blood, flame or puff of smoke is a projectile with gravity and ability to bounce so that it interacts with the environment.

As a way of illustrating just how deep Brutal Doom’s gore system goes, and how Sergeant_Mark_IV hacked a hardcoded form of physics into a 23-year-old game, we can look at what happens when you kill an imp with a shotgun. When you click the mouse button, the game sends out a hitscan – traced lines between the player and where they’re facing – to see if it intersects with an object. So far, so vanilla Doom. But when a vanilla Doom monster is just one big rectangular hitbox, Brutal Doom’s have three, the body joined to smaller boxes at the head and legs.

So let’s imagine the shotgun has hit the imp’s legs. The imp’s hitbox spawns small explosions, which are set to only harm the monster that spawns them. The resulting damage is calculated and applied to the imp. If it’s enough to kill it, and the blast is from short enough range, it will jump to an animation frame in which one of its legs is cut off, and then randomly to one of various different sets of frames which include dropping to the floor dead, hopping on one leg for a few seconds before collapsing, or kneeling in agony until it either bleeds out or the player finishes it off.

A torso hit that’s strong enough to kill the imp triggers different responses. If the imp is more than 200 in-game pixels away, it simply dies. Closer hits will push the imp backwards, usually triggering one of two the animations. The first has it flipping through the air and rolling on the ground until it loses momentum (it will therefore continue to roll if on stairs). The second violently throws it backwards; if it hits a wall, it will display a frame of the imp sat on the ground with its back to the wall. More rarely, two alternative animations may be displayed in which the imp loses a limb, or its guts are sent flying out of a hole in its stomach. Going back to our dead imp sitting against the wall, if the wall is a door and it’s opened, the imp will slump to a lying position. Moreover, sitting imp retains its hitboxes, so it can be further mangled if the player keeps shooting it.

Headshot kills do much the same thing. The imp’s jaw might be destroyed, launching jaw and teeth sprites in random directions. Or its forehead might be shown pierced by a bullet and the back of its head given a large exit hole, with brain and blood launched out from it. If they strike a wall, they will slide down it. If the player causes enough damage to push its health to -60 points, the imp’s head will explode, Scanners-style, spawning and launching blood and various bits of skull, brain, teeth and jawbone in all directions.

Hitting a zombie with a rocket leads to yet more scenarios. If the blast lands far enough away that it isn’t killed, it will be knocked out for two seconds. If the zombie should fall more than five metres as a result of a rocket’s concussive blast, it will die on hitting the ground. If the rocket hits the ground close enough to kill the zombie, it will push it up and over obstacles (its sprite shows it burned by the blast, and its eyes will pop out). “It causes a very nice effect when you fire a rocket or grenade inside a bunker-like structure full of humanoid enemies, as they are sent flying away from the windows,” says Sergeant_Mark_IV.

A direct hit will simply blow the zombie apart. Distinguishable gibs are spawned and launched at random directions, including its head and limbs, which can be shot or kicked into smaller pieces. Gibs are set not to bounce, so they stick to walls, and then a second gib replaces them that is launched at a slowly accelerating rate so it slides down.

Sergeant_Mark_IV also controls the amount of blood that sprays around. Severed limbs spawn more than bullet impacts. “Others required deeper investigation of human anatomy,” he says. “Like trying to guess how much blood would fly away if you directly hit humanoid creatures with anti-materiel weaponry.” Only some specific death animations, such as point-blank double blasts with the super shotgun, will send out blood and gibs in specific directions; they otherwise fan out. He has also refined the puddles of blood on the ground, which were larger and denser in early versions than they are in v20b. “I made them look sharper and have a more stained look in favour of improving realism, satisfactory feedback, and improving performance.”

In fact, he’s been doing a lot to tone down the gore since Brutal Doom first appeared. As much as it looks the opposite, the philosophy underlying it is one of balance and restraint; Sergeant_Mark_IV feels Brutal Doom’s success is down to being neither too over-the-top, nor too realistic. “They are a mix of both, an equilibrium between cartoonish violence and gruesome horrors of war. In early versions of Brutal Doom, everything was over the top. Firing a bullet into an zombie’s chest would spawn a fountain of blood, firing at the head would paint the entire room red. It was tasteless, overdone, and got boring fast.”

One could argue that Brutal Doom is tasteless in its entirety. Sergeant_Mark_IV’s apparent enthusiasm for researching real injuries has landed him in some controversy. Then again, Doom was a model of tastelessness before it, and used similar source material. But within all the excess of both Doom and Brutal Doom lies deep rigour, rigour that you can feel in how good they are to play. So, why Doom? “Why not Doom?” says Sergeant_Mark_IV, detailing the ease with which it can be edited and modded. “It’s the greatest game ever made.”