Good Doom/Heretic/Hexen WADs

[Matador]

No mention of Zeppelin Armada.

The Cacoward creator has openly admitted that they are excluding DBPs from the award because of the lax moderation policy on the doomer boards. In other words, the quality of gameplay is at best a second-tier factor in the assesment. And even without woke nonsense, the Cacowards have always felt a bit strange to me. Some of the winners are truly great, of course, but overall the selection looks like the jurors are playing favorites with their forum buddies.

Well, at least he's honest about it. Just sucks for the average Doom enjoyer (me) who just wants to find more good wads to play and doesn't care about forum drama. Well done.

That´s what happen when normal people let these lunatics to infiltrate cool communities. Neutrality it´s not an option if you value your hobby.
All trannies, pedos and leftist activists should be purged from the communities.

 

[Gostak]

A new awesome map for the most awesome Aliens Eradication:
https://www.moddb.com/games/doom-ii/news/aliens-thedus-beta-release

This is pure gold!

 

[lightbane]

That's it then. No more Cacoawards for me, not worth it. I found this one deranged wad hidden in that POS webpage, might be worth a watch. Seems to be a parody of MyHouse-style mods.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/138890-ismos-quest/

There's a walkthrough in youtube if you don't want/can't play it. Basically it combines horror with action with batshit insanity, not taking itself too seriously.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Heard that them and other Doom wads awards banned a bunch of competent folks from the events - guess I'll have to wander randomly or find better sources then...

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Gave a couple of classic WADs a go:

Remember when you were a kid and you were drawing a house, and it would be disproportionally huge? Eternal Doom is like that. Long-ass corridors and huge chambers, but then an almost anal approach to key- and switch-hunting. While there are some clever sections here, I gave up at about Map08 or something, I just wasn't having fun with this one.

Requiem is considered a classic because it did some truly neat things with the Doom engine back in the 'early days'. Unfortunately it has aged badly. The order of levels is completely out of whack, The build-up in enemy and weapon progression is too slow, and what at first appears to be connective levels (the start of the next level sharing traits with the end of the previous one) quickly falls apart. I use a teleport to end one hell-ish level, only to find myself standing on a toilet in the next one! The only challenge brought forth by the maps is having to force the player to look up a walkthrough to progress through the levels.

You want to create a convoluted series of events so that players progress through your creation? That's nice, but check to see if you're in the right game first. Doom is not the venue for hunting for hidden buttons... even if you have to shoot it on a pillar across a room.

And ironically enough, the only time I was short on ammo was during Map29 - and when I progress to Map30 with my low ammo supplies, I'm greeted by a Super Shotgun and little more before being pitted against the Icon of Sin in a funnel-esque design - meaning that all the monsters it spawns are placed between it and you in a cramped space. Interesting challenge, but by this point I just wasn't having it.

I don't recommend either WAD for playing, but both WADs are almost quintessential resources for budding level designers looking to pick up a few tips and tricks, so there's that.

The above quote is from December 2017. A small update is that I gave Doom Eternal another go, and this time got much further.

Unfortunately it doesn't change, it only gets worse. Much worse, in fact. You need a walkthrough to get through some of the maps, they are so bizarrely designed. My words still stand.

 

[Sjukob]

The above quote is from December 2017. A small update is that I gave Doom Eternal another go, and this time got much further.

Unfortunately it doesn't change, it only gets worse. Much worse, in fact. You need a walkthrough to get through some of the maps, they are so bizarrely designed. My words still stand.

Eternal Doom has some good soundtrack though.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I'm gonna be labeled a heretic for this one - I play Doom with the music turned off.

 

[Sjukob]

I'm gonna be labeled a heretic for this one - I play Doom with the music turned off.

You miss out on good stuff.

 

[Average Manatee]

The above quote is from December 2017. A small update is that I gave Doom Eternal another go, and this time got much further.

Unfortunately it doesn't change, it only gets worse. Much worse, in fact. You need a walkthrough to get through some of the maps, they are so bizarrely designed. My words still stand.

He's not kidding. Just warped to some random maps to see the wad and its true.

Map 12, you have to raise a bridge almost immediately. The switch is hidden in a corner and is small and looks like decoration, taking me about 10 minutes to find because there's other stuff you can do further in the level that distracts you from the bridge. Meanwhile you're running back and forth across a huge courtyard with chaingunners who are so far up you basically can't shoot back (I was able to hit them once but not any more, had to stop to avoid wasting ammo). Then there's a part where you have to find a hidden elevator behind a stained glass window. Then after that I gave up because I hit another roadblock I couldn't progress past.

Map 28. This map literally has text scroll by when you start the level taunting me about it being a "Schmitz" level. Sorry, I don't know this guy. His name does not inspire fear in me, you need to go for something like Casali or Ribbiks for that. In any case its really quite easy. Have to figure out that you need to punch through glass and flip DN3D switches to lower forcefields. There's a cyberdemon that you fight while locked in the room with it, an invulnerability sphere, and a plasma, so kind of a joke. Then another one that couldn't shoot me through a fence but I could shoot it with hitscan attacks (this is possibly an engine issue with GZDoom though). Got stuck with 100% of the kills looking around for what button to press to get past the blue keycard door and gave up. Level also seems to require you to make a jump that really doesn't look like it should be possible

 

[Baron Dupek]

From the creator(s) of Total Chaos a new picture was released

which looks almost exactly like an old game

 

[Avonaeon]

That pallet looks like it's made by someone who's never seen a pallet.

 

[Baron Dupek]

You mean someone who never worked blue collar in his life? figures

Unreal remake

why

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I sometimes go several years without checking out the CacaAwards. That's what it means to me. Even the banner art for it this year looks cheap and amateurish. I only wish the Quake mapping community was as large and active as that for Doom's. That's where it's at for me after playing Arcane Dimensions.

 

[Average Manatee]

I've never found cacowards stuff to be outright bad, if its praised for good gameplay. I also don't know where else you'd go to find lists of prominent recent wads aside from forums which require more time and effort to parse though than I'm willing to put in.

 

[Sceptic]

I also don't know where else you'd go to find lists of prominent recent wads aside from forums which require more time and effort to parse though than I'm willing to put in.

This is really the problem, there are no alternatives, the latest attempt (Doom Awards or whatever it was called) was a hilarious clusterfuck of a fiasco. It's pretty rare that they pick truly bad wads but there have been some awful ones occasionally, and my bigger issue is that the writing is often overly verbose with lots of pretty words that say very little (a couple of the current judges are particularly guilty of this, I can immediately tell it's them from the first sentence of a section).

 

[Average Manatee]

There's a few lists on the doom wiki, e.g. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Top_100_Most_Memorable_Maps. I assume there's not too much bias when people are voting for their favorite map and usually if one map is great the rest of the wad is at least above average. Though some maps on that list are there because they are memeably bad.

Otherwise I think you either are best off checking the authors of doom maps you love on the doom wiki to see what else they have made (and everyone tends to contribute to wads with multiple authors so if you like their maps you can broaden your search). Or go to idgames and order by best rated. Problem there though is 1. Ratings seem to be fairly loosely correlated to quality (e.g. I found Hellbound to be fairly average but its apparently the 3 highest rated megawad of all time), and 2. there's no advanced search features to do something like "order by highest rated wads in the last 2 years". Which is what I think most people would be interested in.

 

[Sceptic]

The Top 100 list you linked was made by the same judges who did Cacowards 2018. It's not a bad list but it's rather predictable. I did like the Top 25 Missed Cacowards that came out at the same time, by its nature they're all good wads that went unrecognized, but it's nowhere near complete. Way I see it there are 2 issues, one with the older years' selections being very limited (not by numbers, but by the picks themselves), one that anyone a judge (read: Browning) doesn't like is automatically excluded (except in the cases when they are included, because he's a flake like that). As far popular votes, the Community Top Wads is pretty good, all the overrated wads are there obviously but there's a lot of good stuff too, I think the only problem with the list is that there aren't that many voters.

Agree with you aboutt idgames, and I think at some point a few years ago they disabled ranking/commenting (I don't think on purpose, IIRC they switched to an API that didn't allow it), but it's still a good way to find more by a mapper you like. As you saidl going through Doomwiki is also a good way, I found several mappers through community projects and then just went and played all their individual stuff. There's also the Wadazine, there's some overlap with the Cacowards but they also cover some gems that those miss, they don't seem to have any personal biases, and outside of the dozen or so select wads that get full coverage, each issue also has a big dump of wads with short descriptors, and I've picked up some real gems from there. Wads marked as "polarizing" are exactly that, but there are some really cool and unique ones in there, and anything marked "omnipotent" or "eminently enjoyable" is very likely to be quality.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

That's what I tend to do - if I really really like a wad, map or fan mission from a certain author, whether it's for Doom, Thief or Quake, I'll check out their other stuff. Same with movies, music or other art-forms. Relying on a yearly Best Of list or Annual Awards thingy seems like it could be too compromised or has a much higher chance of esoteric mods with themes or styles you're just not interested in. I see people raving above about the wad that seems to use Brutal Doom (or a similar gameplay mod) as a base and I'm not really into the whole ultra-splatterpunk approach in Doom wads.

 

[Gostak]

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/131698-lost-in-darkness-2014/

I can appreciate this mod to provide a change.
Dark, scarcity, weird monsters which you might better just try to avoid rather than kill,
Stalker like anomalies ...

A thing that is a bit annoying is the item selection not saying what stuff is (take a guess from the small icon lol, trial & error).

I recommend you use it together with https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?t=77625
and also https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/good-doom-heretic-hexen-wads.78193/post-8791284
and possibly NO brightmaps nor EXTRA dynamiclights.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Tried out "Resurgence", which is a re-hash/remake of "Surge" I think. Basically it's just a 32-map slaughterwad.

Way too hard for casual DoomGuys, but the twitchy autistic ones should find something here worth their while. Works fine with the Aeons of Death-mod, though.

The only map I recollect was Map22 (Mt. Katoomba) as there are some crazy-ass distances there for projectiles to cover.

(Map32 also has 1200+ Imps in it, for some reason or other.)

 

[Gostak]

Cacowars 2023 have arrived:

Doom Infinite scoring one is more than deserved and was to be expected.

I just looked yesterday and still was shocked: Maybe this will finally change soon, then?
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...e-named-once-in-dat-zdoom-forum-thread.148030

DOS (?) made a faux SNES style manual scan for his outstanding creation, it seems. xD
https://www.moddb.com/mods/doom-infinite/downloads/doom-infinite-demo-companion-book

Also, at least the first two maps and partly the third map of dbp23 play well with Aliens: Eradication as well.

 

[Average Manatee]

Tried out "Resurgence", which is a re-hash/remake of "Surge" I think. Basically it's just a 32-map slaughterwad.

Way too hard for casual DoomGuys, but the twitchy autistic ones should find something here worth their while. Works fine with the Aeons of Death-mod, though.

The only map I recollect was Map22 (Mt. Katoomba) as there are some crazy-ass distances there for projectiles to cover.

(Map32 also has 1200+ Imps in it, for some reason or other.)

Tried this (up to level 18 now) and I actually quite like it. The maps have some interesting designs that stay fresh. So far only 1 true slaughtermap level (the readme specifically notes which ones those are, 5 of them).

I will say that the balancing for a number of levels feels quite off in terms of how much health you get. Like, as someone who plays a lot of doom there's a specific amount of health per enemy I kind of expect and it feels like a lot of these maps have 33-50% less than that. Basically add up all the damage you kind of have to take from hitscanners if you haven't played the map before and that's how much health you get, if a baron or caco or other projectile enemy hits you you're gonna be one hit away from death for the rest of the level. I get that there are true doomgods who can fight an infinite hallway of revenants with just an SSG and take zero damage but for the rest of us a mistake once in a while is expected. Ultimately the maps don't really feel that hard, they just are hard through lack of HP. Which is kind of oxymoronic I know but that's how it is.

A lot of maps are also a little bit trial-and-error-y at the start, it likes to drop you into very hot areas where clearing out the first few rooms is half the difficulty of the level. I feel like some of these levels will feel good to replay in a year when I can kind of remember them.

I guess I'd recommend trying HMP/HNSR difficulty if the level of challenge isn't your thing.

 

[Average Manatee]

Could see something good coming in a few years. Or maybe a way to play normal doom wads in iso.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Is there anything you can't do in Doom now? You can sort of do room-over-room, it can do RPGs, fighting games, and I'm sure you could make an adventure game or a strategy game using the engine. Imagine if you told Carmack what people would get out of this engine 30 years after its release.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

I finished the Tenebrum megawad for Heretic.

As usual I've included Walpurgis mod to spice up the vanilla gameplay. Which made some . It start really well - a rather small or middle sized maps combined with a moderate number of enemies. Apart from the usual ones, we meet some additional foes, which make the whole experience more interesting.

But after we reach the second half of it (there is 32 levels overall), I've noticed two issues. First, is that some levels (like for example forest) are really hard to navigate due to the trees. It's really tiresome, and what makes it even worse, we have another forest level right after that. The second problem is the key hunting. Original Heretic mimics Doom and keeps reasonable number of keys per level. But in Tenebrum we are introduced to white,black,purple,orange,red along with the vanilla ones. I could understand something like that for penultimate map, but this is just obsessive and isn't a good level design for me. Even if you make breaks playing the campaign, it will make you exhausted.

We also have boss fights - Walpurgis mod made the minotaur boss immortal. Since I didn't want to start from scratch after bombarding him for minutes, I've noped and used noclip to finish the level. The same situation happened later on. The last boss fight has gigantic hp pool. Out of curiosity I've checked the longplay on yt, and the problem wasn't only on my part.

It would really help, if the author cut some levels entirely and make Tenebrum smaller. There is no episodes here, only one long campaign like in Doom 2. And keep the number of keys on normal level. Still the first half of the campaign is really good, if you liked original Heretic.