Good Doom/Heretic/Hexen WADs

[Wunderbar]

So I was playing Ashes Hard Reset.

At a certain point in the story your main character gets brutally beaten by a mutant boss, and nearly dies in a scripted sequence. Then he wakes up in someones house. It's a typical le cozy apartment complete with cutesy stuffed toys and paintings everywhere.

Then you leave the room to see the person that saved your character... and it's a mutant w*mxn with an anime face.

There's a suspicious pink/blue/white painting standing nearby.

There's also a Selacko easter egg in one of the earlier maps.

Dooom community strikes again!

 

[Alphons]

Links for the drama?

Doomer Boards would be your best bet, ZDoom and Doomworld scrubbed everything.


https://doomer.boards.net/thread/383/ti-doom-community-happenings?page=73
https://doomer.boards.net/thread/3155/fun-police?page=3

 

[Dayyālu]

Dooom community strikes again!

I hope you're joking, as discussed previously Vost fucked off the GZDoom boards to avoid political inanity. Colours are now suspicious?

Also, Ashes had a shitton of other games as eastern eggs, from stuff like Hedon (here, that one is kinda degenerate) to Brigador. Selaco may be a kinda weak project, but c'mon. Also never check who voices Porcelain from Afterglow. Just don't.

 

[HansDampf]

There's a suspicious pink/blue/white painting standing nearby.

Oh, please...
The demon girl could just be his fetish. Some of you are way too easily triggered.

 

[Dayyālu]

I'm more curious about some reports that the end levels are a tad unfinished and the release is essentially a "demo" of sorts. I'd be glad to wait if it means... better polish. I know it's free stuff, but....

Oh, please...
The demon girl could just be his fetish. Some of you are way too easily triggered.

Hmm, demon girls fetishes in Ashes?

Spoiler

Can't think of any. Must be troon propaganda in my brain.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I'm more curious about some reports that the end levels are a tad unfinished and the release is essentially a "demo" of sorts. I'd be glad to wait if it means... better polish. I know it's free stuff, but....

A couple examples

I ran into trouble on the penultimate level towards the end, my passage onwards was blocked by allied forces. Had to jump over them, pretty certain I'm not supposed to have to do that.

The final level is entering the Spire, exploring a couple of rooms looking for some keycards, entering the generator room where there are the level's only batch of baddies, then heading back to the elevator and leaving everyone behind, boss battle outside. The End. Felt more like an epilogue than a final level.

 

[Wunderbar]

A couple examples

The final level is entering the Spire, exploring a couple of rooms looking for some keycards, entering the generator room where there are the level's only batch of baddies, then heading back to the elevator and leaving everyone behind, boss battle outside. The End.

Spoiler

it was so weird, I thought leaving all of your military buddies behind was an alternative bad ending. Pixel-hunted the entire level in search of some hidden key or a button that lets me join them, but no. You travelled that far, only to say 'fuck that' at the last possible moment.

 

[Wunderbar]

I'm more curious about some reports that the end levels are a tad unfinished and the release is essentially a "demo" of sorts.

it's pretty rough. Lots of misaligned textures or flat out untextured places, some iffy difficulty balancing in the early levels (wendigos have a fuckton of health and aren't very fun to fight against). The flashlight runs out of energy ridiculously fast too, I have managed to get myself stranded in a pitch darkness and had to use flashlight's on/off flash to see where I was going during the mission where you escort your dudes through the subway. I imagine the dev is going to address that in one of the patches.

There's also a huge glowing "v0.92" in the main menu.

 

[NecroLord]

There's a suspicious pink/blue/white painting standing nearby.

Oh, please...
The demon girl could just be his fetish. Some of you are way too easily triggered.

What the hell is with all those easter eggs?
Do modders cannot contain their annoying autism for just a bit?

 

[Baron Dupek]

I'm more curious about some reports that the end levels are a tad unfinished and the release is essentially a "demo" of sorts. I'd be glad to wait if it means... better polish. I know it's free stuff, but....

not surprising tbh - I've used "noclip" to fly around the maps and some of them contains whole rooms and sections from previous Ashes - they can't be reached in any other way.

 

[SilentMRG]

I'm currently playing this:



Although I played this a few months ago and stopped to play Brutal Wolfenstein 3D.

It's a shame that the author of Wolfenstein X - Hearts of Liberty disappeared and erased the mod from existence, luckily, another guy archived it here.

 

[HansDampf]

How is Brutal Wolfenstein, btw?

 

[NecroLord]

Getting kinda sick of these Brutal mods.
Just endless gore showers with little to no variation...

 

[SilentMRG]

How is Brutal Wolfenstein, btw?

Basically the vanilla episodes with brutality. Take a look...

 

[Sjukob]

I'm more curious about some reports that the end levels are a tad unfinished and the release is essentially a "demo" of sorts. I'd be glad to wait if it means... better polish. I know it's free stuff, but....

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2813092

 

[ghardy]

I've largely used the Woof! source port for Doom and WADS, with the occasional use of GZDoom for stuff that needs it.

I'm aware that vanilla or near-vanilla behavior is best handled with Crispy or Chocolate.

Does anyone use the other so-called advanced ports, such as EDGE-Classic, k8vavoom, Eternity or Doomsday?

 

[NecroLord]

I've largely used the Woof! source port for Doom and WADS, with the occasional use of GZDoom for stuff that needs it.

I'm aware that vanilla or near-vanilla behavior is best handled with Crispy or Chocolate.

Does anyone use the other so-called advanced ports, such as EDGE-Classic, k8vavoom, Eternity or Doomsday?

Have you tried Doom Retro?
Might be up your alley, cool little port that doesn't change all too much the way GZDoom does.
Also plain better if you ask me.

 

[Sceptic]

Does anyone use the other so-called advanced ports, such as EDGE-Classic, k8vavoom, Eternity or Doomsday?

Eternity is the odd one out here. It has advanced features, sure, but it can run vanilla and Boom wads pretty accurately (it's not demo-compatible like DSDA-Doom, but for non-demo playing you'll never notice differences), and it's the only one on your list that's on a variation of the original 8-bit renderer (other 3 are all hardware rendering). I like it, it's become one of my ports of choice in the last couple of years.

Doomsday used to be the Purty Lights port, and I used it extensively back in the day, but it has several deal-breakers, the biggest being that it's not Boom-compatible. So the only wads it'll run are those up to Crispy (and ones designed specifically for it, but there hasn't been one in like 20 years). I find it's gone way overboard with the fancy visual FX, and even on a decent PC with a GPU from like last year it lags into single-digit FPS if too many things are happening, even GZDoom which is notorious for this runs at like 100x the FPS.

K8 is basically the new Vavoom, there are a few wads for it and they tend to be pretty good (it has a unique way of doing 3D objects), but I see little point in using it for anything more vanilla, and it'll deviate from that even more than GZDoom (and I don't think it has anywhere near as many compatibility options).

EDGE-Classic is the closest of the hardware trio to a vanilla experience, but it'll still deviate significantly (and I don't remember if it supports Boom). It's reasonably backward compatible with older EDGE/3DGE wads, there are some gems among those. I like it the most of these 3, I find its hardware rendering looks the least eye-searing.

Considering what your post indicates I think you'll like Eternity, give it a shot. Though it won't replace Woof and GZDoom entirely (no MBF21). Retro as mentioned is a good one if you want something even more classic. Personally I have Eternity, DSDA-Doon and GZDoom set up and I can run 99% of the wads I run across, with only very rarely needing Doomsday, K8 or EDGE-Classic for very specific wads.

 

[ghardy]

Have you tried Doom Retro?

Thanks for mentioning it.

It says it needs Wine to work on Linux. And it doesn't support demos.

It does however support MBF21, which is nice. Looks like a good port.

 

[ghardy]

Thanks Sceptic, for detailing the ports. I'll look into Eternity and EDGE.

Some notes on K8Vavoom:

Building it from source makes it use colorful language when compiling with Clang.
"Only GNU C/C++ compilers are supported."
"Actually, GNU C/C++ compilers are REQUIRED."
"Your compiler is not GNU, please, don't report bugs."
"And, by the way. clang sux."

Then, on starting it for the first time, it enables lots of visual effects. Its configuration menus come with a huge number of options and settings.

 

[ghardy]

I forgot about this gem of a banner displayed on k8vavoom's launch:-

Init: ---------------------------------------------------------------
Init: k8vavoom Game Engine, (c) 1999-2023 Vavoom and k8vavoom devs
Init: project started by Janis Legzdinsh | Jul 4 2024
Init: also starring Francisco Ortega, and others (k8:drop me a note!)
Init: Ketmar Dark: improvements, bugfixes, new bugs, segfaults, etc.
Init: id0: support, testing, motivation for 88% of features.
Init: ---------------------------------------------------------------
Init: project site: http://ketmar.no-ip.org/fossil/k8vavoom/
Init: Ketmar Dark: ketmar@ketmar.no-ip.org
Init: id0: vasily.boytsov@proton.me
Init: ---------------------------------------------------------------
Init: REMEMBER: BY USING FOSS SOFTWARE, YOU ARE SUPPORTING COMMUNISM!
Init: ---------------------------------------------------------------

 

[NecroLord]

I forgot about this gem of a banner displayed on k8vavoom's launch:-

Init: ---------------------------------------------------------------
Init: k8vavoom Game Engine, (c) 1999-2023 Vavoom and k8vavoom devs
Init: project started by Janis Legzdinsh | Jul 4 2024
Init: also starring Francisco Ortega, and others (k8:drop me a note!)
Init: Ketmar Dark: improvements, bugfixes, new bugs, segfaults, etc.
Init: id0: support, testing, motivation for 88% of features.
Init: ---------------------------------------------------------------
Init: project site: http://ketmar.no-ip.org/fossil/k8vavoom/
Init: Ketmar Dark: ketmar@ketmar.no-ip.org
Init: id0: vasily.boytsov@proton.me
Init: ---------------------------------------------------------------
Init: REMEMBER: BY USING FOSS SOFTWARE, YOU ARE SUPPORTING COMMUNISM!
Init: ---------------------------------------------------------------

Such wonderful autism...

 

[Average Manatee]

Played Dominus Diabolicus

6/10. Let me start by quoting this paragraph from the readme:

Difficulty starts off fairly standard. By the end
of Episode 1, things get a little spicy. By the
end, things are a considerable challenge but fair
for the average Doomer. Super secret levels,
however, are incredibly difficult and long.

Everything you have just read is a huge fucking lie. This is possibly the most unfair wad I have played. Maybe people have a different definition of fair than me. My definition is that unfairness is when an encounter is almost impossible to win on your first try due to some unexpected spawn, which then is fairly easy (or at least vastly easier) to win on your second or third attempt once you've figured out "the archvile spawns here and if you don't have your rocket launcher ready you'll die because there's no cover" or "there's gonna be a single revenant silently spawned in 50 feet behind you in a hallway while you're fighting stuff in front of you, eat 80 damage rocket scrub", or "here's a dark area with a bunch of hitscan and spectres, hope you know when to blindly fire at what you can't see", or "you just used most of your rockets in that hard fight which gave you the rocket launcher? Guess what there's two archviles that spawned in behind a hallway of corpses and with only shotgun ammo you're screwed, so you better know that you have to rush backwards through the hallway before its filled with stuff to pick up 20 rockets in a room that just opened up". It feels like a huge numbers of encounters in this wad are like this.

My normal way of playing is to always try minimal save/load spam, but this is a wad that requires you to bind these actions to your left and right mouse button to make progress. Maybe I suck, but I can comfortably beat the vast majority of "hard" doom wads with like 5 that I've tried and had to give up on, so I think I'm at least qualified to the skill level of an "average doomer", yet I don't think I managed to do any map past 1/3rd of the way in without multiple deaths.

Making this worse are the new enemies. The new double shotgun zombie is really annoying. This guy is a menace, he'll basically kill you in one shot at close range, is a smaller target and has more health than a chaingunner so that a single shotgun shot won't take him down, and he's used frequently. Chaingunners feel merciful in comparison. Thankfully he at least has a unique aggro sound unlike the chaingunner (I'll defend the chaingunner's design to the death but the lack of a unique sound to differentiate him from the other zombies is awful). There's also a new archvile that just continually spawns enemies rather than resurrecting them, and does so 3 at a time. Seriously fuck these guys they suck, but are fortunately rare. Then there's a stronger mancubus which really doesn't do much different except his shots leave an acid pool for like 5s that does 1 or 2 damage if you step on it.

Altogether, not recommended unless you are a masochist. If you just want a challenge there's wads that do it more fairly.

 

[dutchwench]

American McGee might no longer be with us as a developer but he's still with us in spirit.

 

[HansDampf]

I also played Dominus Diabolicus recently, and I disagree. I had a lot of fun with it, more than I expected because I'm normally not a huge fan of the vanilla textures with lots of browns and green marble. But I binged through the WAD very quickly. There are lots of cute details, fun fights and traps everywhere that keep you on your toes. But they never felt unfair. When I died it was usually because I made a clear mistake, let myself get cornered, or didn't dodge as well as I could have. I remember one random fight at the end of map 21 that took me a few attempts and could be considered unfair. The only other exceptions are the secret maps 32 and 33 which are supposed to be extra hard where most fights kill you the first time. But those maps have hidden exits at the start that let you skip them (because some people are too stubborn to idclev).
I also liked how the Summoner was used as a boss monster (better than Eviternity 2's Necromenace), usually placed in a position that is hard to reach instead of just dumping him into the horde where you could easily focus on him or make him infight.

It's true though that DD is pretty hard on UV. I'd rate the difficulty somewhere above Ancient Aliens, for sure, but it's not Sunlust. Playing the maps blind without saves is not recommended. And if it's still too much, I mean... there are other difficulty settings besides UV.

Really cool WAD.