Good Doom/Heretic/Hexen WADs

[Gragt]

They're jelly as fuck because he could do what they didn't - put together a mod that made Doom worth playing again.

Doom has always been worth playing.

 

[Jazz_]

I don't care for the gore in Brutal Doom but boy do I love those exploding barrels.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I don't care for the gore in Brutal Doom but boy do I love those exploding barrels.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Brutal Doom allows you to not only kick barrels around to "reposition" them, but also to pick them up and throw them at enemies.

Doom has always been worth playing.

Can't speak for everyone, but Doom grew kinda old for me when jumping and z-axis aiming became a possibility.

 

[Gragt]

Can't speak for everyone, but Doom grew kinda old for me when jumping and z-axis aiming became a possibility.

It’s rather interesting we’ve gone full circle because many modern FPS do not allow the player to jump at all.

Anyway, stuff like jumping is mostly a question of preference. I remember leaving Doom behind when I discovered Duke3D, Quake, and others, but in the end I went back to Doom. The appeal was the type of gameplay it offered that, while similar, was never really reproduced in the same way. I always found the movement-based gameplay, the ever-changing levels, the bestiary and how your arsenal relates to them to be fascinating, which is something that modders have run with for decades now. I can understand some people expect something else, but vanilla Doom still attracts people, and one only needs to look at the efforts of people behind Chocolate Doom, Crispy Doom, or Doom Retro, to name a few, to see it.

I’ve said it before: I have nothing against Brutal Doom and the likes, and if anything they are very much part of the Doom legacy, but I find ideas such as that they are the only way to play Doom, or the way Id intended Doom to be played, or that Doom is boring without them, to be silly. Doom has been attracting people since the moment it came out for various reasons, and a mod like Brutal Doom only emphasises part of it but not the whole, and there is still quite a lot to be found. It’s one way to play Doom but not the only one.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I have nothing against Brutal Doom and the likes, and if anything they are very much part of the Doom legacy, but I find ideas such as that they are the only way to play Doom, or the way Id intended Doom to be played, or that Doom is boring without them, to be silly. Doom has been attracting people since the moment it came out for various reasons, and a mod like Brutal Doom only emphasises part of it but not the whole, and there is still quite a lot to be found. It’s one way to play Doom but not the only one.

Exactly. The only time I have issues with Doom is when I'm playing wads which force a certain style of gameplay, based on Doom's shortcomings. The lack of jumping, for example, should not be combined with platforming segments, at least not multiple such sections where too much time is spent finding the right path on which to RUN LIKE A MADMAN, otherwise it's impossible to cross... and that's before you factor in any and all enemy presence. A "great" example of this is the Hell Awakened wad, which combines platforming with cheesy traps, invisible switches and far too many Arch-Viles.

 

[lightbane]

It takes a bit to get used to, since it has many new enemies and new weapons. It feels a bit like doom64. Apart from a retardedly frustrating slaughterfest in level 2 or 3 it flows nicely

Darn, I remember this one, I played it LOONG ago. I remember dropping precisely because of what you mention.

I don't even try to understand them, the "reasoning" they provide is insane.

Aaah, modder drama. The Doom community is volatile as always, although they're right that BD shouldn't be the "Best mod ever". That being said, I love how they don't care whenever their butthurt behavior harms third parties (ie: Trying to play DemonSteele with the Ketchup minimod from BD).

 

[Sjukob]

I love how they don't care whenever their butthurt behavior harms third parties (ie: Trying to play DemonSteele with the Ketchup minimod from BD)

What happens ? Does it crash the game ?

 

[lightbane]

Posting this again to preserve it for posterity.

Spoiler

And now, for something different, High Noon Drifter got patched with new stuff! However, the modder is still human, and with human I mean a petty dramawhore capable of doing this:

Spoiler

; ;

Nothing remotely related to Brutal Doom works, from the Ketchup mini-mod or even Project Brutality, with Terminus' stuff.

 

[Sjukob]

Might be that somebody brought him to his senses. Not long ago a made a post about finishing Scythe 2, I beat it with high noon drifter + ketchup mods and didn't encounter a single issue. Can't say anything about demon steele never liked the idea of that mod.

 

[Alex]

Posting this again to preserve it for posterity.

Spoiler

And now, for something different, High Noon Drifter got patched with new stuff! However, the modder is still human, and with human I mean a petty dramawhore capable of doing this:

Spoiler

; ;

Nothing remotely related to Brutal Doom works, from the Ketchup mini-mod or even Project Brutality, with Terminus' stuff.

Those are hilarious, especially the midget skeletons.

 

[ghostdog]

It takes a bit to get used to, since it has many new enemies and new weapons. It feels a bit like doom64. Apart from a retardedly frustrating slaughterfest in level 2 or 3 it flows nicely

Darn, I remember this one, I played it LOONG ago. I remember dropping precisely because of what you mention.

Yeah, I almost quit there too. I don't know what the hell the author was thinking. Luckily I soldiered on and the game became much better and thankfully something like that never came up again.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Stopped playing "Hell Awakened", mostly because I seem to have run into a bug regarding Brutal Doom where MAP20 refused to end for some reason. Either that or I'm missing something obvious.

Anyway, that wad has the difficulty raised a notch without really raising anything else (like quality, though the halls of flesh are kinda cool) so I'd only recommend it to starved Doomers, but one map in there deserves mention for being really really good, and that's MAP31. I'm not gonna spoil it too much, but towards the end of it there's a section where you have to assault a heavily defended room full of crates and boxes and demons. Afterwards, as you pick through the carnage, you find a BFG-9000 way at the back. That's when the tables turn and you become the defender.

That was one of the most exhilirating fights I've had in Doom in years, I'd reckon.

 

[Gragt]

The Doom Sprites Fixing Project has been updated to 1.9! Very subtle changes but worth a download as always.

If you’re new to it, or missed previous versions in the thread, the goal of the mod is to fix some small sprites and animation mistakes left in vanilla files, and also to add extra things that never made it into the final product, such as sprites mirroring—these were added from sprites tables released by John Romero over the past few years.

It works well with vanilla and a wide variety of WADs, provided to follow the proper load order. There are also compatibility patches available in the project forum thread for specific WADs, such as Back to Saturn X.

Edit: Back to Saturn X Episode 1 implemented the specific fixes in the latest version.

Edit2: Crispy Doom has been updated to 5.1! A few tweaks, improvements, and fixes here and there. There is an option for brightmaps that may not be very vanilla but improves the look and atmosphere in a subtle way.

 

[Astral Rag]

id Software co-founders confirm that its biggest games’ heroes are all related
Turns out BJ Blazkowicz, Commander Keen, and "Doomguy" could all go to the same family reunion.
Sam Machkovech - 1/30/2018, 8:07 PM

Of all the innovations id Software delivered to the video game industry in the '90s, plot certainly wasn't one of them. Still, the company managed to create a few iconic heroes in its PC-action heyday, and decades after their creation, the company's former bigwigs let loose a fun bit of trivia on Tuesday: many of id's biggest heroes are all related.

As spotted by ResetERA, a Twitter conversation unfolded on Tuesday that had been set into motion weeks earlier. A seeming throwaway December post from former id Software designer John Romero included an interesting note: that the long-running Wolfenstein series' hero, BJ Blazkowicz, was "based on" the company's early side-scrolling action series Commander Keen. A fan picked up on this and sent a question to id co-founder Tom Hall: are these two characters related, and is Doom's "Doomguy" hero also part of a genetic lineage?

Hall minced no words in his Tuesday reply: "The lineage isn't a theory. Fact." Longtime id fans might have already suspected this, based on information in a long-ago Wolfenstein hint manual, but this is the first time someone from id has gone to the trouble of confirming that idea. What's more, Romero piped up to clarify the exact makeup of the Blazkowicz clan: the Wolfenstein hero is Commander Keen's grandfather, while Keen is Doomguy's dad. The duo had a bit of a back-and-forth joke chain from there, asking why there was a missing generational badass between Wolfenstein and Keen. Hall claimed that Keen's father was "an awesome, heroic... newscaster" with the stage name of "Blaze," which is where Keen's legal name of "Billy Blaze" came from.

This adds a bit of a macabre angle to the fact that Keen-related Easter eggs could be found in the Doom series, particularly a secret room in Doom II that required you to gorily kill four hanging versions of the original Keen sprite.

Tuesday's trivia tidbit comes after Romero’s admission in July 2017 that he played a key role in the iconic cover art for the first Doom game. That standing-on-corpses, aiming-a-gun pose came because Romero himself jumped into a photo shoot and posed the way he wanted the cover to look. (Doesn’t that kind of make Romero a member of the Blazkowicz clan, then?)

Ultimately, with so little sensible plot connecting these games, the information is more of a fun way to look at those series' connections than a major concept-explaining revelation. It's all much less complicated than, say, the Zelda series chronology, which splits into three discrete timelines after the events of Ocarina of Time.

 

[Astral Rag]

http://www.wolfensteingoodies.com/w...ual_for_Wolfenstein_3d_-_Id_Software_1992.pdf

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I wonder if DoomGuy was born before or after Keen's "mid-life crisis"?

 

[lightbane]

That the heroes were related is old news. This is also yet another thing Wolfystein II the SJWlosus broke, by having the main character suddenly become half-jew and his parent a walking "evil stepdad" cliché.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Rip and Tear!

 

[Bigg Boss]

The world of custom action figures is a deep rabbit hole my friends. Mixing and matching parts and doing sculpts and paint jobs can be lucrative. Those are custom I assume. I didn't somehow miss a really awesome toyline I don't think...

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I still think the archies are the greatest monster in the history of gaming in a game (Doom 2) that is the greatest game in the history of gaming. You truly haven't lived until you play a wad where you just spent a fair amount of time killing the biggest and the baddest Doom baddies in an area that you need to backtrack from only to realize that an archie was hiding in the cubbies somewhere and resurrected your entire slaughter fodder that you need to progress through again. The Japanese Doom community did a highly regarded wad similar to this premise last year where the Sandy Petersenian hellspawn just kept coming, over and over again, down the corridor and straight to your ass, and would never ever stop, until your dumb ass figured out that somewhere beyond that darkened corridor hiding in some cunt-mouth of a hole in the wall was an arch-vile sneering, and snickering, and smiling, and snorting in derision at your poor pathetic doomed Doom dupe.

 

[mogwaimon]

Been playing a lot of Doom lately and it's fucking great. All the new gameplay mods that they have out now are fun as hell, I've always favored Brutal Doom because that mod got me back into the game after like 15 years (Had PC version as a kid, of course, and even Doom 64) but High Noon Drifter, Guncaster, and Russian Overkill are good fun. I did try Aeons of Death because of a lot of mentions throughout the thread, but I just don't get the appeal? It has like zero polish and it's just copy/pasting a bunch of stuff from other games into Doom with varying results. What am I missing with that one? Beautiful Doom, though, that's a pretty great mod I hadn't heard about until this thread so thanks for that.

Bit of trivia, since there's been a lot of comments about the Brutal Doom author and the modding drama in this thread. I recall one particular thread some years ago on the Zdoom forums that I found when I had first learned of Brutal Doom and was looking for news on it and other mods for Doom, and at that point in time SgtMarkIV had been kicked off the Zdoom forums. Why? Because someone looked at his source code and he made the sin of dropping n-bombs all throughout his code for, I believe, some of the fire damage effects. That kicked off a whole thing, of course, and SgtMark was banned from the Zdoom forums and the thread scrubbed. So there's another piece of the puzzle for anyone who wonders just why he gets so much flak from the rest of the community. Of course this was years ago so my memory might be a bit faulty, but that's the gist of it.

Anyhoo, I'm gonna get back to getting my ass kicked by TNT.wad with Project Brutality 3.0. Yea I get the OP dragonsbreath shotgun shells and all that stuff but in return I get tons of chaingunners nearly insta-killing me if I make a wrong move and it's still great fun, I forgot how great these levels were. Just wanted to provide that bit of modder drama trivia as well as ask about AeoD.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Is there a mod that makes the game harder (without adding monster respawn. I hate that shit) that doesn't alter any of the assets AND is compatible with all wads? Frankly i can play this game with my hands tied on my dick at this point.

 

[Gragt]

I find that, playing vanilla at least, the game is as challenging as the map designer decided to make it and some of them can be quite tricky. What types of WADs have you been playing lately?

 

[Ash]

Is there a mod that makes the game harder (without adding monster respawn. I hate that shit) that doesn't alter any of the assets AND is compatible with all wads? Frankly i can play this game with my hands tied on my dick at this point.

Brutal Doom

Spoiler

on the optional purist mode

Spoiler

*insert purist rage regardless*

Spoiler

Yes it also alters assets. Not really in any divergent way though.
BD has very notable AI improvements, that's a big point of interest for me.

 

[Lyric Suite]

A couple years ago i downloaded every single cacoward or recommended wad out there. I'm still going through them to this day.

Yes, the game is as hard as the wad maker makes it, but i think i just got too gud at this game at this point. I need to spice it up a bit.