Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Good Doom/Heretic/Hexen WADs

robinox

Educated
Joined
Mar 28, 2020
Messages
65
Ashes Afterglow is awesome. Really digging the central hub and more open style of objectives.

I enjoyed the original but this feels like an improvement in every way.
I agree, truly amazing.

I think that the increased weapon damage of Survival difficulty should be the default damage.
The shooting feels cowboy-ish and more distinct from the doom DNA: you face the badguy and *BANG* the quicker wins (you don't die ofc but you take significant damage).
Another example is the knife: you only need 1 hit (instead of 2) to drop a dude, which enables a brief stealth approach here and there.
 

Curratum

Guest
Afterglow is my GOTY.

Don't care if it is a mod, it's still better than 99% of commercial stuff released in 2021.

I kept trying to persuade Vostyok to clean up the assets, package 2063 and Afterglow together and release it as a full commercial game. He still insists that the two episodes so far are just "shareware" for Episode 3, which he says will be much bigger and more ambitious than even Afterglow, and might be / will probably be a full commercial game, one day.
 

Tacgnol

Shitlord
Patron
Joined
Oct 12, 2010
Messages
1,871,734
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Grab the Codex by the pussy RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
I didn't realise there was another massive hub after the subway. Even some fairly minor choice/consequence effects and pathing depending on how you handle things in the 2nd town.

As Curratum says, he really needs to consider commercialising Ashes. If he did all this for free, I can't imagine what he could make with more resources at his disposal.
 

toughasnails

Guest
I kept trying to persuade Vostyok to clean up the assets, package 2063 and Afterglow together and release it as a full commercial game. He still insists that the two episodes so far are just "shareware" for Episode 3, which he says will be much bigger and more ambitious than even Afterglow, and might be / will probably be a full commercial game, one day.
If that's true, I'm struggling to imagine what he intends the next step for e3 to be unless he plans to turn the game into something like Stalker. E2 is already en route to that sort of semi open world design.
 

Strig

Learned
Joined
Oct 29, 2021
Messages
861
Location
Between the pages of Potato's "Republic"
Afterglow is my GOTY.

Don't care if it is a mod, it's still better than 99% of commercial stuff released in 2021.

Absolutely. I'm on the verge of refusing to even call it a mod at this point, it's such a complete and different experience. The level design alone is excellent not only as world-building goes but also from a technical standpoint, I can't even count the times when I opened a door and it looped back to an earlier part of the level. The "huh, I'm really here" feeling is real.
 

Tacgnol

Shitlord
Patron
Joined
Oct 12, 2010
Messages
1,871,734
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Grab the Codex by the pussy RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
Afterglow is my GOTY.

Don't care if it is a mod, it's still better than 99% of commercial stuff released in 2021.

Absolutely. I'm on the verge of refusing to even call it a mod at this point, it's such a complete and different experience. The level design alone is excellent not only as world-building goes but also from a technical standpoint, I can't even count the times when I opened a door and it looped back to an earlier part of the level. The "huh, I'm really here" feeling is real.

The ending of Afterglow left me really wanting a sequel to advance the story. Been a while since a game has done that.

I was impressed that he'd done fallout style ending slides as well.
 

destinae vomitus

Educated
Joined
Apr 25, 2021
Messages
93
Ashes is great, though I think it would be even greater if at the end of the day you weren't just fighting reskinned zombiemen and what not. The combat is clearly meant to lean towards do-or-die lethality in the same vein as the stuff it has drawn influence from, but I find that the enemies make it miss the mark somewhat since most of them are ultimately still just Doom AI, i.e. not nuanced nor speedy enough to match what it's going for. At the very least that was my experience on apocalypse difficulty, it was fun but not as intense as I think it ought to be. I would hope to see the monster roster get a do-over of sorts if the inevitable follow-up is really gonna go all in and aspire to be more than just a mod.
 

Curratum

Guest
If you open up the game's files, you'll see nothing is really reskinned and actors have been rewritten entirely. Just the basic pistol thug enemy is around 150 lines of behavior and animation code, so I'd be hard-pressed to call that a reskin.
 

lightbane

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,156
The Dynamite Duchess sequel is out! And it has a walkthrough LP to boot! The dev has a shit computer that goes slow with literal Doom mods, so the videos might look underwhelming.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/38aaw41mz9f2cn4/detention.zip/file

Example video.


Like the first game, it continues to (un)subtly criticize nowadays' insanity, this time focusing on the brainwashing of students with inane education turning them into literal monsters, encourages ratting out your friends that misbehave for course credits, and how being fair-skinned means you're likely to be a criminal and you must pay for your ancestors' heinous deeds. The protagonist answers in a reasonable way and decides to take down the insane staff.
 

destinae vomitus

Educated
Joined
Apr 25, 2021
Messages
93
If you open up the game's files, you'll see nothing is really reskinned and actors have been rewritten entirely. Just the basic pistol thug enemy is around 150 lines of behavior and animation code, so I'd be hard-pressed to call that a reskin.

Good to know. The mooks with guns and common mutants just gave me the impression that they were zombies, imps and such mildly retooled, that's what they were in practice to me. Wishing for them to be on par with Build game enemies might be too much to ask for, but that's what I'd hope to see if the third episode is meaning to be even more robust.
 

Curratum

Guest
If you open up the game's files, you'll see nothing is really reskinned and actors have been rewritten entirely. Just the basic pistol thug enemy is around 150 lines of behavior and animation code, so I'd be hard-pressed to call that a reskin.

Good to know. The mooks with guns and common mutants just gave me the impression that they were zombies, imps and such mildly retooled, that's what they were in practice to me. Wishing for them to be on par with Build game enemies might be too much to ask for, but that's what I'd hope to see if the third episode is meaning to be even more robust.

Well, yeah. On the topic of new enemies...

99% of what you see in any Doom mod inherits some level of behavior from an existing (GZ)Doom engine actor and either builds on it or modifies it until it's not recognizable.

Even if you open the files of a commercial game like Hedon and look at a monster definition, you're greeted with this:

ACTOR Golem //replaces Revenant

Not trying to belittle or diminish the work done on Hedon in the least. This line is followed by EIGHT FUCKING HUNDRED more likes with multiple death animation per damage type definitions, enemy projectile definitions and all that jazz. What I'm saying is, on some level, almost every enemy you will ever see in this engine inherits at least a little bit of its behavior from a vanilla enemy.

I imagine with ZScript you can make wilder stuff but I'm not familiar with how that works and 99% of all mods and commercial games on the engine, Hedon included, use DECORATE for enemy and item definitions.
 

Morpheus Kitami

Liturgist
Joined
May 14, 2020
Messages
2,476
I imagine with ZScript you can make wilder stuff but I'm not familiar with how that works and 99% of all mods and commercial games on the engine, Hedon included, use DECORATE for enemy and item definitions.
Pretty wild stuff. I wish I could find the mod now, but among other things, allowed you to duel wield pistols that functioned completely independently of each other. You could fire one and reload the other at the same time. All with stock Doom assets. I think you can also do pretty complex stuff with AI in ZScript, but I haven't actually seen it used in a mod yet.
 

Tacgnol

Shitlord
Patron
Joined
Oct 12, 2010
Messages
1,871,734
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Grab the Codex by the pussy RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth

Ol' Willy

Arcane
Zionist Agent Vatnik
Joined
May 3, 2020
Messages
24,574
Location
Reichskommissariat Russland ᛋᛋ
Pretty wild stuff. I wish I could find the mod now, but among other things, allowed you to duel wield pistols that functioned completely independently of each other. You could fire one and reload the other at the same time. All with stock Doom assets. I think you can also do pretty complex stuff with AI in ZScript, but I haven't actually seen it used in a mod yet.
Brutal Doom/Project Brutality has this duh
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom