I can only imagine what Sandy Petersen's house must be like. Petersen's wife: Honey, why won't the blender turn on? Sandy: You have to turn on the Christmas lights in the basement, then ring the doorbell hidden in the crawl space in the attic. Once you do that, the garage door will open, giving you access to the breaker that powers the blender.
Well, I don't think Doom II kinda sucks at all. yeah there are some bad maps and when they're bad they're really bad, but for me the good parts overshadow the bad. Half Life is considered a masterpiece but yet there are still some really bad parts in there, But I'll never say "damn, half life kinda sucks". Idk maybe I'm just glazing doom ii but thats how I feel
The worst part was the ending which they couldn't play test, so they really wanted to make it good, and I believe there is a better fan made version to give that part the same care that the beginning and middle had.
@@FoxUnitNellhalf life's xen levels were extremely frustrating. It being rushed toward the end of development was an issue. But yeah fans have fixed a lot of the problems with mods.
I think we're mostly in agreement, although I think Half-Life's campaign as a whole holds up better than Doom II's. The video has space for nuance that the title does not, unfortunately.
@@TheRetroSofa I think it's unfair to compare doom 2 to half life, campaign wise. Doom 2 was HEAVILY gameplay focused. And on that front, it holds up extremely well. Half life was almost entirely story focused with pretty janky mechanics.
12:25 This is a misconception. The renderer is fully 2D, but there is a y axis on the backend, it's how the positions of flying enemies and projectiles are determined-- every entity is on a 3d axis. Enemies were deliberately given infinitely tall hitboxes because doomguy is unable to aim up and down. When enemies are standing on platforms above doomguy's y axis, hitscans, rockets, and plasma shots will autoaim upwards towards the enemy, but if the enemy is absent, this will not happen. Doom is, for all intents and purposes, a 3D engine on a 2D map, full of 3D nodes, being rendered in 2D.
That's a good explanation, thanks. The end result is still the same (you can't walk under an enemy flying above you) but it does display objects and projectiles in 3D.
@@TheRetroSofa No. An imp can throw fireball over or under you and it will not hit you. Same with flying rockets. The engine supports walking over monsters but it was turned off back in the day to speed up collision checks. Modern source ports can toggle that on and allow you to walk over monsters.
This is kind of a half-truth. Unlike Wolfenstein 3D, Doom has a Z-axis, but it only has it some of the time. It's truly an in-between step between the "fake" 3D of Wolf and the full 3D of Quake.
Doom 2 has areas where you just die also. Traps you can't foresee. I save 4 or 5 times a level . Beating it on hard. Like one area you are lowerd into a pit full of shotgunners. If you don't know they sre there they kill you offscreen. Or enemies higher above out of your field of vision
The main problem that I have with this game is that it feels like an expansion pack rather than an actual sequel. The level design isn't helping as well. I admire Sandy's Peterson dedication and work on them since he made most of them, but it doesn't change the fact that, at least for me, more often than not, Doom 2 is just exhausting for me. I prefer Plutonia much more and even TNT despite it's issues. I still like Doom 2, but it's my least played campaign out of all official Doom releases.
I'm in two minds on that. Doom was awesome and it's great to get more of it and because of how delicately balanced it was, that means not messing with the formula too much. I don't think they got the balance quite right here because they kept it mostly the same but just upset the balance a little bit, but that's still upsetting the balance just you've less to show for it. I don't know what the "best" solution would have been. I think they could have gone further with the changes, like replacing some weapons and enemies entirely, and maybe that'd make it easier to balance the super shotgun. I don't know. But yeah definitely more work on designing a coherent campaign would have been good.
Honestly, I would've had more fun with the game if they had still used the episodic format of the previous game. 32 levels back to back is an exhausting prospect, but four 8 level episodes is alot easier to digest.
Doom 1 is probably a better game. Levels flow a lot better. But it really suffers from not having the extended monster roster, and the super shotgun changes the whole balance of the game. Enemies that were originally higher tier now move to mid tier, like the cacodemon. Doom 1's roster just really missed the mid tier monsters, like the revenant or mancubus. So basically, doom 1 had better levels, but doom 2 expanded the meta
Those mid-tier monsters are great additions definitely. I should give the PlayStation port a proper go at some point because that brings some Doom II enemies into Doom.
@@TheRetroSofa PS1 DOOM is the best console port IMO. Definitely give it a try. It's got a darker more horror like aesthetic to it and there are DOOM II monsters in the DOOM I campaign and it it makes for an interesting experience for veterans of this series.
@TheRetroSofa it doesn't end up being as many as you'd think. I played through a pc port of psx doom, it was only a handful throughout the entire game.
Industrial Zone is the one that actually secures Romero's brilliance as a level designer to me. Despite working with a 2D level editor (and at a time when the editor itself didn't have a 3D mode, so he'd have needed to actually boot the game to playtest or see what needed tweaking), Romero creates this landscape of verticality with criss-crossing areas and lots of nooks. Either he playtested it a lot, or else he'd gotten really, really good at working with DoomEd's limitations, but that the finished map feels so intricate is a testament to him and his skills.
Agreed. I'm honest in the video about my feelings on this map and why I'm kind of biased against it as an experience but I can't deny it's an incredible feat of design within Doom's limitations.
Personally, I loved Doom 2. The levels had a very different flavor than Doom, and I appreciated the oddities. I wasn't playing it for a story. I wanted to mow down demons in unique situations. And while the Earth levels look uninspired now, then I thought it was awesome. We didn't have anything better back then. And the levels really shined with deathmatches. Well tuned single player levels didn't play well for DM. Whereas Doom 2 levels were way better than Doom.
Yeah that's reasonable. I'm coming at it with hindsight definitely but I also loved it uncritically in the 90's and I love it critically 30 years later. Although I played it around the same time I played Duke Nukem 3D which definitely took the shine off some of Doom II's Earth maps. Agree on Deathmatch. I think I'd have still preferred it without the super shotgun but the more open maps were great for multiplayer.
There's a great bit in The Chasm that always puts me in mind of Sandy Petersen's cheeky side. You fall down a hole where there's an Invulnerability power up. The hole then sloooowly raises a platform back up to ground level. The platform takes exactly as long to raise as the power up lasts for. The net gain of going down there and picking up the power up is exactly nothing. 😂
I fell for that one on the stream. It's cool definitely but I think I would enjoy that trick more if it wasn't on The Chasm. 😉 Mind you maybe that makes it funnier.
I remember In the 80s and 90s I considered computers as something for businesses or research because they were ridiculously expensive. Doom and Diablo changed that mentality, especially since, around this time, PC prices slowly started to become affordable.
Started to but they were still a long way from affordable which is why the inferior 90's console ports were such a huge deal. Gaming on the PC definitely became more of a thing but it was a while before it'd become accessible to people who didn't have PC's for other reasons.
Anyone that feels disappointed with Doom II should give "Doom II: Reloaded" a shot. It aims to give a more realistic Hell on Earth experience and does quite well for the most part.
I could not disagree more. Aside from a cpouple of uncontroversial points like Downtown and Icon of Sin kind of sucking, Doom 2 is a clear upgrade. The super shotgun fills a clear hole in the Doom arsenal; nothing fills that spot between shotgun and rocket launcher. Chaingun is off to the side, on a separate track. And Tricks and Traps and Barrels of Fun are two of my favourite levels. Coming back to the game a couple of years ago after not playing it for 20 odd years, those levels were pure joy to experience. Like, lol, you got me. Let's go again and see what's next. And then new enemies are great. A fucking hate revenants, but in that way where I see what you're doing and I respect you for it but fuck you. Archviles are really interesting when you know how they work. Chaingunners provide an actual threat from a "weak" enemy - shoot first or suffer. Pain Elementals promote aggression as they can't attack at melee range. And of course Hell Knights are just fixed Barons. Doom 2 is Doom but with the benefirt of hindsight.
See I think the super shotgun reduces your options. Playing original Doom I'm always switching between shotgun, chaingun and rocket launcher. Doom II gives you a default. It's like this is the gun to use and only in specific situations do you switch. Same with the new monsters requiring specific focus. For me I always thought the fun in Doom was thinking on your feet, reacting to the situation you're in, using whatever tool you want to use to get the job done. By otherwise keeping the same enemies and weapons but bringing in these slightly power-crept new ones, it warps the existing formula to make it slightly worse where I think they could have done more to create a new formula. But that's a difference in how you and I play I think and what priorities we have. Also the gimmick levels are fun in a vacuum. I just don't like them in the campaign. Arch Viles are interesting but they feel like a missed opportunity. It always pops up at the business-end of the super shotgun and dies too quickly to do anything fun. If they were bosses with more health and AI more focussed on resurrecting enemies, maybe if their own attack was much weaker, they'd be really cool. Thanks for the comment. I really appreciate a polite disagreement and being challenged to think about my opinions. It's good stuff.
Maps were 2D with height values, but verticality was real. Projectiles can pass above a player or monster. The engine could only render geometry from a two-point perspective for performance reasons, however, so vertical auto-aim was implemented instead of the ability to look up and down. Duke Nukem 3D is an example of a game with 2PP and vertical aiming, and it looks absolutely terrible for it.
True. I much prefer Doom's implementation of pseudo-3D to Duke's. It is just projectiles though, right? Objects placed in the map are solid at any height.
@@TheRetroSofa For some reason, they chose to ignore monster height when checking for collision with other actors. I think it's been stated that it was performance reasons. The default behavior for monsters being forced to occupy the same space as each other (or solid walls, or cliff edges) is already "stuck in idle state", so it's possible they just didn't want to code all the extra behaviors needed, like for actors standing on other actors, or monster melee attacks with height differences.
Verticality is kinda real. There _is_ a Z axis, but it is only considered some of the time, so it's a sort of 2.7D not-quite-full 3D. Even in Duke 3D, despite pushing it even further than Doom, the 3D calculations are kinda hacky and fakeish. Vertical aim in Duke 3D works mostly fine though IMO (depending on the situation and how far you look).
@@todesziege Personally, I can't even play Duke 3D unless I'm using the Raze source port, which implements 3-point perspective for the rendering engine. The 2-point warping when aiming up and down bothered the crap out of me even back in the mid-90s, and with modern mouse-look controls it only gets worse.
@@JediMB I wasn't even talking about the rendering (which definitely is hacky and fakeish), but under-the-hood things like collision detection. A lot of it is more akin to 2D+ calculations than fully 3D.
What is this sorcery? A nuanced critique? With a bit of sarcasm thrown into the mix? As it happens to be, I only just recently got past the downtown map after several hours spent roaming about. It reminds me of why I generally don’t like Quake 1 episode four as much as the other episodes. But my hat’s off to you, sir, for being able to summarise the experience in such a respectful way. And by the way, I’m that one player who doesn’t know where the secret map is.
It's in the castle level, which you can get by secret hunting. A door opens in the key part of the castle. One secret is BROKEN because it requires abusing a pain elemental, but that's unnecessary. I think you activate the lava switch, find a lava secret, which opens the secret level. The video creator is clearly too unskilled to enjoy this game, he doesn't understand basic mechanics like monster infighting and strafing increases speed, or pain states. Which BTW EXISTED IN DESCENT. This game is NOT meant for OLD PEOPLE playing on Wii nunchucks using the original engine. You play it on the modern Xbox port, or PC. BTW, I played the WHOLE GAME ON GAMEBOY ADVANCE. I can cross the tight rope level side strafing. The complaints are 100% all based on having NO SKILL, which is obvious to anyone with skill, exacerbated by using the Wii. Use a PC, like carmack intended with a mouse. Waaah DOS. NO DUDE, DOS SUPPORTED THE MOUSE. Use a modern port with mouse look. The complaints about level design are completely insane considering technological limitations, and doom 2 was more about fun than story or realism. Surrealism maybe. Old man yelling at clouds, and here I am being his equally old neighbor yelling back to stop being a crazy nuisance. BTW quake 1 had garbage doom keybinds, and no mouse look. You HAD to rebind wasd and manually enable mouse look. All these old games REQUIRED a level of user troubleshooting, and basic IQ unlike today. So if you're dumb, you CAN'T enjoy them, and complaining is outing yourself to everyone who knows better. It's just that the games are too old for young people to get context, and thus the history is lost, and we have these people attempting to revise history. Disgusting.
Just a quick question for everyone. Do people just ignore episode 4 of Doom 1 levels when they say it has better level design than 2? I know it was part of the ultimate doom expansion but I'm just curious.
I am in this video and also generally because the last Doom I played was SNES Doom, which just has the three episodes. I think most people would more likely compare it to Ultimate Doom though.
Doom was only sold by mail. Doom 2 was the first retail release. Ultimate Doom was released with episode 4 after Doom 2 to give the original a retail release. For me it's unfair to compare the pinnacle of Id's level design to what came before it.
I love DOOM II. That being said I agree that it's not as great overall as some make it out to be. Given more time and polish it could of very well been a great overall experience but the final product was a mixed bag with slightly more bad and mediocre than there should have been. It's all subjective at the end of the day though, so for the guys and gals that think it's great overall, more power to you, to each his/her own. I just feel the original DOOM is a vastly superior game overall, whereas DOOM II fees like a glorified map pack with some great maps, but most of them are experimental, rushed, or just kind of missed the mark so to speak. Appreciate the honest opinion brother. DOOM II has it's legacy and will continue to be enjoyed (I play it all the time) but there's nothing wrong with objectively pointing out it's flaws.
That's it. This is my opinion and other people feel differently and that's cool. I think we can all agree it was rushed though and I really don't know why. I couldn't find an answer to that. They were pretty much masters of their own destiny at this point, Romero cut the deal with GT Interactive that suited them with Doom's success giving them all the leverage they needed, so why did they give themselves such a short time to make the game? As I said, I wouldn't spend so long thinking about and critiquing the game if I didn't love it. To me part of engaging with the media we care most about involves being critical about it.
Doom 2 also suffers from having very little feeling of progression since the game no longer uses the episode format. You'll most likely get all of the weapons before map 10. In Doom 1 you didn't get the BFG until around E3M3.
I think it would have benefitted from being episodic honestly. I know why it isn't but the shareware format really worked in Doom's favour. It's also why the trope of taking away all the player's weapons half way through the game is a thing.
@@TheRetroSofa Funny thing is people would discover a way to remove the player's weapons by exploiting the game. If you rig the player to die at the exit (Like with barrels) while simultaneously making Romero's Icon of Sin head die, you progress the level but it forces a pistol start.
@@TheRetroSofa Yeah. Later shooters like Duke Nukem 3D, Blood or Quake retained the episode structure and it benefitted their flow. Hell, Left 4 Dead even uses a very similar thing and I'd argue it plays a part in that game's longevity.
@@todesziege Plus Duke Nukem 3D had an in-engine way to start a map without any weapons. If you make a map with the player starting in a sector where the floor damages them, they start with just the boot. Not even a pistol. Doom II could have done with something like that at least.
@@TheRetroSofa Yeah, it's even used in the campaign. I guess they didn't implement anything of the sort in Doom II because they didn't make us of it themselves. Well, you can always kill yourself to get a clean slate (although I guess many modern ports implement auto-saves that circumvent this mechanic).
I agree that Doom II isn’t remotely as good as a lot of fans of it say it is, so many weird levels. However, without the new enemy roster, level layouts + themes and the Super Shotgun, we would not have Doom 64, 2016, Eternal, Plutonia, No Rest for the Living and Legacy of Rust. I do enjoy it for the fantastic levels it does have. And I loved the video as well!
What came out of it is awesome, no doubt, but I wanted to look at it in isolation as a complete single-player campaign on its own merits because that's still how most people will experience it. Thanks!
I always preferred the levels on the first Doom game, I don't really now why, but I think it is because they were more constrained, simple but refined and clearly much more iterated and specially they are claustrophobic.
I cannot really consider them separate games by now. I mean by having modern source ports, as GZDoom the borders between the Doom games are blured. Basically Doom 2 can “play” Doom 1, but not vica versa.
Also Doom + Doom II is the version we're all playing now, of course so that's a fine way to look at them. However my recent experiences are Doom II on the Wii and Doom on the SNES so I guess it was easier for me to see them as separate games for this video and that's how they were seen at the time. If only because of Doom 2 having so many more mods which were incompatible with Doom / Ultimate Doom and we were launching them from separate executables. At least until Doom95.
Some of Doom2's levels were a little sloppy, but IMO the low-point for the series was Episode 3 of the original Doom. * The starting level is the weakest one out of all three episodes, is extremely linear and involves mindlessly shooting pinkies whose only purpose is to block your path * The levels were butt-ugly, often with nonsensical theming. Many rooms had things like hellish green brick walls with office lights overhead * Many of the levels were cramped and sucked to move around in * E3M7 was large, empty, and desolate, and the only challenge was figuring out which of the gazillions of teleporters you were supposed to go in next. * The existence of the BFG made the final boss fight a complete joke IMO the commercially released mapset with the best (and most consistent) quality was Plutonia.
Okay let's go. * Hell Keep is awesome because Warrens exists. E3M9 fixes everything about that first level. Going back to that row of demons once you've got the chainsaw is super-satisfying. E3M1 on its own is fine, in my opinion, decent little simple level. Where it becomes great is when the secret map upends it. * Yeah probably. SNES Doom doesn't have ceiling textures anyway. * Pandemonium is that but I still found it really tense and fun to play. Plus you've got Mt. Erebus. Those are great maps. Slough of Despair is bad. * I spent a long time in Limbo and I feel like that's kind of the point. The map does have some interesting arenas and setpieces but yeah it's not one of my favourites. I think it's fine though. * Agreed. It's a shame because Dis with no starting weapons can be really interesting on ultra violence where you get the Spider Mastermind to fight all the other monsters while you sneak aronud and gather up resources. If Doom had a way to remove weapons from the player, this map would have been way more fun. It's not perfect but I will defend episode 3. I had a lot of fun last time I played through it.
I'll figure out a way to cover Duke at some point. It's one of those where I want to have something unique to say, you know? I've got stories to tell but I don't know if that's enough.
The bestiary makes it a huge leap over 1. There are a lot more threats, much more challenging. And because some are hitscan and some aren't, you deal with them differently. The SSG makes the combat less tedious as well, when you fight Barons or Cacos or large groups of weaker enemies. These really shine through in user content which is outside of the scope of the base game. But ultimately I am not sure what you could really compare it to in late 1994. It doesn't have the mechanic (or aesthetic) jump from, say, Mario 1 to Mario 2 USA (but bigger than 1 to 2 JP), but it was still best in class. I would say that people overrate the later Doom 1 episodes. Interesting video.
Thanks. Good points well made and I agree completely about user content often making better use of the expanded roster. The Arch Vile wants to be placed in specific situations that make the best use of its abilities but I often ran into it on its own or mostly on its own and killed it before it could do anything interesting at all. Just imagine it coming at you from a distance following you over a battlefield you've just conquered resurrecting enemies as it goes. Stuff like that never happens in the base game as far as I could see. It just pops up occasionally, too close to the business-end of the super shotgun to have any impact.
During the stream, I did criticise the cryptic progression of a lot of Sandy's levels, but I guess in fairness to Sandy, it was 1994. By that, I don't mean "it was old and we didn't know how to make games back then", but if you look at the games that came before, there was a lot of cryptic progression, even in some 2D side-scrollers. Shadow of the Beast I think it was had you break the already established convention of go right at the very start of the game, and if you don't go left at the start of the game, you can play through the whole game and end up with it uncompletable at the end, because you're missing an item. In Castlevania 2, you have to hold a particular item and find a certain dead end cliff and crouch next to it to progress. The idea that you might be stuck in a game until you pick up an issue of a magazine where someone has written into the letters section and gotten an answer to it, or a magazine gives you the solution in a secrets or hints section towards the back, wasn't so uncommon. I'm not saying that's good game design, and when you compare it to Doom 1, it's particularly inexcusable because they'd shown they know how to NOT stump the player with cryptic progression, but I can see why Sandy might have wanted to put some mystery and some water-cooler discussion back into the game, in his levels. The problem is it just wasn't particularly _good_ mystery. I've described his levels as "wander around until something happens" design, and that's still true. Sandy Petersen didn't really do what Romero liked to do and give you goals. In a Romero level, for example, you might encounter a locked door, then you might see a key through a window and know "great, that's my goal", and you try to find your way around to that. You don't really get any of that goal-oriented gameplay in a Sandy Petersen level.
I was thinking Castlevania 2 when I started reading your comment. 😉 I think that's largely what I'm talking about in the video when I talk about "flow", at least as applies to individual maps. John Romero guides the player (visible goals is one way he does that) and Sandy Petersen puts the player in a place and goes "you figure it out". John Romero's approach is the one that's won out in the end and there's a reason for that, you know? It's like the yellow paint discussion. If designers don't put the yellow paint there, people get stuck and have a bad time. Progression is fun and feels good and wandering aimlessly does not. That said, Sandy's approach wasn't wrong. As you say it was just one viable design approach used in games at the time, although I feel like in 1994 developers were already kind of at the tail end of that era. 1994's Super Metroid guides you a lot more than 1986's Metroid did. Particularly in the PC space though the Ultima games were still very popular and Sandy's kind of an old-school gamer so maybe he was inspired more by that kind of experience? I don't know. Either way though it's clear that these designers had different goals for what they wanted their maps to be and that's part of what leads to Doom II's campaign feeling so disjointed as a whole.
@@TheRetroSofa I just wish Sandy's mysteries were a little better constructed, or maybe in some way taught early on. The standard move in maps these days to indicate that shootable switches or wall textures are being used, or that you have to use the jump or crouch features in modern source ports, is to start you in a room where you have to do this. Things like the shootable or fake walls in The Spirit World, or the notch in the wall you have to fall down, could have been sign-posted somehow early on, and then you could be expected to figure it out without just getting frustrated and shooting every wall in sight. Some consistency in his rules might have gone a long way to helping everything work together, like if we were trained in an early level to expect shootable walls.
So many people struggle with trying to get DOOM to play on their wii. If you could make a video or a quick post on how you did it, that would be awesome!
I did it so long ago! My Wii actually has a mod chip in it because when I hacked it, that's what you did. Now it's way easier. Search up the Wii hacks guide, follow it exactly, then go download Wii Doom onto your SD card and add your WAD files from your Steam copy. That's basically it and I wouldn't do that as a video because I don't know how to make it interesting and I don't want to un-hack my Wii (or buy a new Wii) just to go through that process again for a video. That said it might be fun to talk about my Wii hacks sometime (it's the second-best emulation device for your CRT TV!) but not so much a walkthrough.
I’m glad you could take me out of my “Doom II is amazing” echo chamber. Its legacy stands on the might of the modding community and how its monsters were used by clever level designers over the 30 years since, and thus it’s refreshing to have a more objective opinion on the game. Brave to criticise the SSG, it is unbalanced to be honest, but fortunately it is not a drop from enemies (in vanilla), so level designers can omit this overpowered weapon. Downtown is a confusing mess.
Both "Tricks and Traps" and "Barrels o' Fun" more fits for the secret level slot. Actually I think guys from Midway did a better job regarding this part when they ported the game to PlayStation. At least "The Mansion" and "Club Doom" stick to the "Hell on Earth" theme.
I might've missed the explanation but why did Doom 2 have to come out so soon after Doom? They'd made their money, the pressure was off. Surely they could've gone full on Valve and taken an eternity to do the next one.
Probably just passion and desire to keep making new Doom maps. Back then in the early 90s, game developers generally had a lot of fun working their jobs. Game studios back then functioned more like a group of buddies that got together to do what they love to do. It wasn't like nowadays where game development is a grueling, miserable, and stressful job in which devs are beholden to greedy shareholders and corporate asshats.
I find D2 better then the first strictly because of the crazy new enemies. I still get terrified when I turn the corner just to encounter Vile already with hands in the air.
It's a spooky guy. Thing is it usually spawns pretty close to the business-end of the super shotgun. It'd be much more devastating and scary if it came at you from further away I think.
@@TheRetroSofa Plutonia's Hunted is probably the most dreaded official map at the time with them in it, just a giant maze full of them. You don't know where they are, you just know they're out there because you saw them at the beginning right before they teleported.
When I replayed Doom II for the first time in like 20+ years on the Switch recently, I actually stumbled into the Secret Level completely by mistake. It was really surprising and funny at the time, since I didn't really remember the layouts of most the game's maps.
That's cool! Great that it can still surprise you. I've started going through Doom in co-op on Switch with a buddy and we're having a great time. The Doom + Doom II re-release is a fantastic package.
@@TheRetroSofa True! And for me, my enjoyment of the games is helped by that I just find the maps (good or bad) extremely interesting as subjects of analysis. They're artifacts of level design from before the industry really knew anything about it (especially in 3D). I loved that I could get to The Inmost Dens for the first time in decades and go "oh, this is really interesting... It's an American McGee map, isn't it?" But as fascinating as Sandy's gimmicky designs could be, I do have full DISrespect for him as a person, given his dabbling in and doubling-down on transphobia.
You're definitely right (at least in my case) regarding people not playing through the whole campaign of Doom 2. I loved the first 1/3 of the game, then meh, and I usually just used to stop playing. About 1,5 years ago, I played through the whole Doom 2 campaign for the very first time. That was with the source port GZDoom, using the Voxel Doom 2 mod (all the enemies redrawn in 3D Voxels instead of 2D Sprites, while looking identical to the untrained eye but in full 3D). Not many days ago me & a friend played through the Doom 2 campain again with GZDoom and Voxel Doom 2. I also installed some mods for the playthrough; no multiplayer monsters (no extra multiplayer monsters because of playing in co-op), revealed secrets shown on all players minimap, no player collision (no more accidentally telefragging once entering teleporters) and also a Revive mod, in which the alive players can revive the dead ones (set the revive HP to be 40HP instead of the default 1HP). Also with the Revive mod, if both players died, we had to restart the map. Once restarting a map, we activated cheats to add 50 pistol bullets and 50 shotgun bullets if we had less than that, since we played on hardcore difficulty. I also disabled multiplayer weapons, so no more BFG and such on the very first map in co-op. It was a very fun experience, the downside being if one player fell into a pit of lava or acid with no way to return to the surface. Sadly map hacks is not supported in GZDoom as of now, if it were, map hacks could function as an overlay of the original maps and add teleporters or lifts to the inescapable lava and acid pits.
That sounds like a really cool way to play Doom. I started playing co-op with a buddy recently on Switch and we're having a blast and playing with the revive mode where if you both die you have to restart gives it some tension and encourages working together ("okay so I'm gonna run in here but I'm taking a risk so you hang back to revive" etc.). That's just standard on Switch though. The mods you've put together sound like they make for a great experience.
It's fun to imagine what could have been if they spent more time in development and made Doom II into a Build engine style game. Something akin to Hollywood Holocaust (first level of Duke Nukem 3D) with id Software's flavour would have been amazing, and really delivered on the promise of "Hell on Earth".
Excellent analysis! Loved your comment on how the concept of "Hell on Earth" was implemented. I always wished they Brought back for doom 2 intermission screens between levels like Doom 1, that went a long way into making the levels feel connected and purposeful. That lack of cohesion seems to be one of the worst parts in this game. I'm wondering if you would consider doing Plutonia, as that map expansion is a much better use of the Super Shotgun and the new monsters. They are cool concepts, but were only used in their fullest in Plutonia and other fan made maps.
Thanks! You're very kind. I do want to give some time to Final Doom at some point. I remember having the most fun with TNT but it's been a while since I played it. Maybe I'd feel differently about it now.
I never got into Doom II. Ultimate Doom was my favorite, never really saw what was better about DOOM II. It didn't seem like Earth at all imo. It just seemed like random shit to me. It just seemed like more maps at retail price. Although the double barrel shot gun was awesome I'll give it that for sure.
I mean free speech something something but yeah, I get what you're saying. I wish more positive titles were more successful than the negative ones. As it stands though your channel won't get seen if you don't play the game.
I find Doom and Doom 2 are best enjoyed as simple time killers and not a long form epic gaming experience. Just pick a random level, play it for an hour or two when you're bored, and then move on to something else.
Glad you have made this video. Thank you. I never understood the love for Doom II over the first Doom. The crazy technological and art direction jump that the first Doom game represents is insane. There is a care there, indeed, that you just don't see on Doom II. The sequel feels more like a couple of teenager modders decided to go crazy at Doom. You know "That would be cool" "It needs to be bigger!" "It's MY map, MY enemy.. it needs to be the hardest, the biggest, etc"...
Yes. It does capture the negative side of the 90's, when it comes to certain aspects of entertainment and art. "Less is more" wasn't exactly the norm lol.
I thought the title was clickbait (I mean, who really thinks Doom 2 sucks?) and I went into this video ready to defend this beloved game. But I gotta admit, this review is spot on. Doom 2 does have some weaknesses. Well done with your argument 👍
There are definitely some 3D calculations done, but it's inconsistent and an only-sometimes thing. It's not entirely faked like it was in Wolfenstein 3D, but it's not entirely 3D either.
I love Sandy and he's a visionary, but he was overworked in this project while Romero was slacking off. The levels are wildly varied and incredibly experimental. I think we have to get into the gaming landscape of the day. Doom was groundbreaking, but rivals were in the way. Romero knew Heretic was coming and much more thematic with amazing level designs. You couldn't just recreate Doom, you had to push the limits. Id did that and it was revolutionary. I dont care what critics say of Downtown, it prove the genre could do big city set pieces. But I also agree with a quote i heard. Id makes tech demos, Raven makes games. Doom and Doom 2 definitely feel like glorified tech demos. Episode 1 is a masterpiece, but the rest is far too experimental and appears to be trying to define the genre instead of picking a style and sticking to it.
"Slacking off" or "incredibly busy doing other things". Or maybe somewhere in-between. I think that's a good point you make though. Id cared about their games but they cared about tech and spectacle more than game design I guess. Meanwhile Raven had only the design to be concerning themselves with and made some great games and it wouldn't surprise me if at the time Romero found himself more enthusiastic for Heretic than for Doom 2.
@@TheRetroSofa Romero was slacking off. I know he was busy with other projects as well, but he wasn't putting the work in at Id. It's ultimately why he ended up leaving too. The stories are there that he was more interested in playing the games than anything else. Carmack cared about Tech more than anything, but the rest wanted good games. I've listened to some Sandy conversations where he talks about trying new things. I don't hate Chasm as a map as much as most people. It's not great. I also understand that it was an experimental time for FPS games and Id wanted to prove what was possible. Downtown is epic for 1994 and I refuse to hear otherwise. When you realize that Wolfenstein, Spear of Destiny, Doom, and Doom 2 all released before Heretic and Rise of the Triad, you realize how far ahead of the curve Id really was. They really hadn't made any mistakes, but no one else had either so there was nothing to learn from yet. And the "contemporaries" to Doom before Doom 2 were made on the Wolf3d engine. And we cannot forget Doom 2 was hard. Many believed it was impossible on Nightmare. Many struggled with Hurt Me Plenty. When you don't have perfect knowledge and you are trying to puzzle it out, it's a long game. It pushes you to the limits. The down time in certain areas with invulnerability or searching through open levels is a welcome reprieve from the soul-crushing difficulty. I think we look at this from a modern perspective far too often. The game isn't perfect, but it made some of the first missteps in FPS history. PS. I defend the Doom 1 boss fights to the bitter end. They were incredibly challenging for 1993, on original hardware and having never seen anything like it before.
@@riffbw I need to read the rest of Doom Guy, really. You're right about it being an experimental time and a lot of Doom II was indeed very experimental. But if your goal is experimenting with the engine and with the player you're probably not making a well-designed campaign. And y'know that's fine if that's not your goal. In terms of the context of when it was released, Doom II is incredible. I'm mostly looking at it in the context of what's come since. Mind you the fact I can do that at all is testament to the enduring design of these games both technically and in gameplay terms. I think there is merit in looking at these games in the context of where we are now as opposed to where we were then as long as we're clear about what we're doing and how we're evaluating these games and why, you know? All I will say on the Doom 1 boss fights is Dis is infinitely better when you don't have the BFG and if they'd had a way to take it away from the player it would have been an awesome closer to the first game.
@TheRetroSofa Dis is the worst of the three, but if we look at Doom in the context of 1993 we see a different than game. Circle strafing isn't a thing yet, especially for a keyboard only player. We don't know the weapon balances or that getting up super close makes the BFG more effective against boss monsters. It takes 3-4 shots at distance minimum. That's a lot of cells. We also don't all know about BFG pre-firing. If you take all of thst away, you are trying to peekaboo shoot with other weapons or exposing yourself to a triple chain chaingun while the BFG charges. Dis was HARD! I wouldn't say Doom 2 was experimenting with the players. I'd say they were using a shotgun approach trying to expand on what Doom 1 provided. They had some tight levels, they had some puzzles, they messed with outdoor spaces, they tried some large maps, they tried to emulate real places, and they tried to make things better. Nobody knew what would be good and what wouldn't so they tried it all. Ultimate Doom's Episode 4 and Quake really refined on what was learned from Doom 2. Someone had to make the mistakes and Id was first to market. If you consider other games to be refining on what we learned from Doom and Doom 2, it only improves the legacy of Doom 2. Id pioneered the genre and I think fans often forget that Doom 2 beat Heretic and any other Id Tech 1 derivatives to market. It's remarkable we got two games that epic within a year and they had 0 influence from competitors. There may also be some urging from Romero to get Downtown, Factory, and Sandy's house in there because he knew Heretic was make real to life map with Docks, a village, and more.
Doom could've had vertical aim, as proven in Duke 3D another software renderer as well as ZDoom (Not GZDoom). The only issue is doing so causes warping because the edges of the walls have to be going straight down, they can't be angled. Supposedly, going auto-aim was done for simplicity, rather than so much limitations of the engine. They even initially did so with Quake, despite being fully polygonal.
The looking in Duke 3D was janky enough to be pointless though IMO. I don't think Doom needed vertical aim, it just needed level design that didn't make the player wish for it.
@@TheRetroSofa Yeah, that's fair, I've found myself lamenting auto-aim in some levels where the enemies are either high enough or far enough away that the auto-aim doesn't want to actually work. It's to the point that some people think using GZDoom's free aim is cheating and I'm not just talking about the Icon of Sin.
There is also a Portal vs BSP difference. Duke 3D has a Portal-Engine like Descent, that allowes perfect visibility calculation. With that you end up drawing whole Polygons, wich allow for some optimisation. Doom and Quake on the other Hand use a BSP-Engine, wich has fairly complex per-scanline operations (Doom uses vertical scanlines in the first step). The Doom-Engines Graphical limitaions are build on the Idea, to keep scanlines in the same Z-Distance. (Note the Drawback of Portal-Engines is the akward level design.)
Heretic had vertical look. If you read Doomguy you'll see everyone at ID was *mystified* about how to do vertical look controls in Quake. Sticking it on mouse was apparently non intuitive, which is something I find amazing, given that they all already used the mouse to play Doom internally
@@iwantagoodnameplease Reminds me of a journalist reviewer who infamously complained about a Ps1 game using dual analog controls, which is now the standard for consoles.
Very much agree with your conclusion, even it being not a very popular one. Actually dont want to hate Peter for the levels.. Probably would have been much better if they had more time for polishing it up and re-iterate their designs some more. Its a great sequel in everything except the levels. I assume its because they were also busy experimenting with early 3d environments back then.. Afaik McGee did alot of the pioneer work in terms of QUAKES level art and design.. These games made me fall in love with game, art and level design. Seeing what magical experiences (for me) iD and 3D Realms have created back then..And Lucas Arts Games.. 42 now and still love to create levels for their games from back then.. Level Design was peak in creating and playing it back then.
I loved making levels for the Build engine. To me it felt like it had just the right amount of restriction like you could pretty much do what you needed to do but it still had interesting limitations to work around. I never had any interest in making levels for Quake but I made some maps for Duke Nukem 3D and Blood back in the day and it was a great time with a great community around it.
Cool video and fun about DOOM II!!👌🏻 My gut feeling is that DOOM 2 was released way too soon they should have spent more time on it and maybe tweaked or upgraded the engine. Some levels are damn good while other levels my 14 year old kid can make better maps. But overall DOOM 2 has the best enemy roster and DOOM has the best level design.
It's a lot more uneven than the first game, but when replaying it in its entirety recently I found myself actually enjoying and appreciationg levels I previously disliked (including Downtown and even the Chasm, to my own surprise).
I still had a bad time on those but I also think I went at it with a bit too much cynicism. I'm sure it won't be the last time I play through it though!
HOT TAKE: Doom 1 and 2 had a poor and clunky design philosophy, i mean, the art design is very inconsistent, i know the limitations of the time but i will put this example: The player hands changing between hand-drawn gloves and then a when you change to the fist is a sprite copied directly from a photograph of a barehand fists lol, also a lot of textures in nonsense places, weridly designed (and iconic ikr) monsters, the nonsense of the cover art and finally a music copied directly from metal bands (iconic, but not original lol)
Yeah game development was a bit janky back then for sure, especially in the wild west of PC gaming. And yet the original Doom still pulled togeher a more consistent and coherent single-player campaign in my opinion.
As much as I absolutely love classic Doom, I can't argue against your points. Very true. There is tons and tons of 'jank' in classic Doom if a player is looking for it.
Not even all Latin nouns ending in US pluralise with an I. Octopuses is apparently correct, not octopi, but cactuses is not correct, so unless a Latin linguist wants to come in and explain exactly which declension the totally made up word "mancubus" is, and argue for either mancubi or mancubuses, I say call your video game monster whatever you want.
Octopus has its root in Greek I think so that'd be "octopodes" (or, as you say, "octopuses"). Do you not say cactuses? I feel like it should be cactuses but our language isn't one of those with a committee overseeing it or anything. English is organic rather than consistent. I used to be one of those people who was always correcting people but since moving to a new country where I don't really speak the language I've come to appreciate how language isn't something to get strictly right or wrong, it's a tool for communication. My view on it now is that as long as we understand one another, the language has done its job. The rest doesn't matter so now I don't correct people unless they want to be corrected. My little crack about the Mancubus plural in this video isn't me telling other people what language to use but pre-emptively defending the language I chose to use, if that makes sense. I'm still quietly hoping someone's going to come in here and make a convincing case for "Mancubodes" though.
@@TheRetroSofa I used to correct people all the time until I did a couple of semesters of linguistics at university. Most of what I'd been taught, and repeatedly corrected to, was wrong. It did enable me to level up my extreme pedantry for situations that need it, but mostly I just embraced the hopelessness of a world where an accepted definition of the word "literally" is "figuratively".
Well, it's amazing how Doom/Doom II can still be fun even without nostalgia factor involved. I've played the source ports after Doom 3 and it was not bad mostly. But yeah, they aren't perfect, and yeah, while the original Doom was a breakthrough, Doom II was more of the same mostly. Also I'm not a fan of the gimmicky level design. We shouldn't deny cultural context and Doom's influence on the industry, but also shouldn't look at it through rose-tinted glasses
I loved Doom 2, but I always felt that there were just levels randomly put one after another, despite the three parts it lacks the consistency and the experience design of the Doom 1 episodes, and beside this the levels somehow don't "flow" like the Doom 1 ones, they were more "clunky" in some sense. Despite this, the new enemies and the sheer amount of levels make it worth it. Levels like Dead Simple or Tricks and Traps were a game changer.
@@weon_penca That's a good point! I live and work in Germany so I know what it's like to communicate in a second language! You do what you need to do. Also the point in the video was more about defending my chosen language than telling anyone else what to do. I think as long as we understand one another you should use language however suits you.
Loved doom 2 more than the first simply because of the double shotty but it's impossible to play vanilla Doom nowadays Brutal Doom absolutely destroys it. I could never go back ever again
I respect Brutal Doom but it's not for me. It feels like Doom for people who grew up with Call of Duty rather than for people like me who grew up with Doom, you know? Just having reloading changes the pace and feel of the game so much. It's a completely different game. It's still very cool though and I understand its appeal. I've enjoyed playing around with it but I much prefer vanilla. Neither of us is right or wrong though. It's just opinion and I think it depends on what got you into first person shooters in the first place. What was the first FPS you really got into?
I liked Doom 2 because of the new enemies. I understand the passion of purists for the original, but the limited enemy roster and texture variety tends to become somewhat tedious. Tricks and Traps was my most favorite Doom level.😂 I liked its playful, trolling nature. You are raising valid points, though.
Thanks. Tricks and Traps is cool, don't get me wrong, but much cooler in isolation than as part of a story campaign. At least as it's presented in game. With a few tweaks it could have been a good story map with the demons trying to trap Doom Guy but it'd have to be later in the campaign and not have the Cyber Demon standing around like a lemon.
Doom 1 is one of my favourite games of all time. Doom 2 is a good, but I don't think it adds enough to "matter". However I like it as a base for all of the mods. I just finished John Romero's book "doom guy", it gives a very different perspective on that spat with Sandy!
That's interesting. I bought Doom Guy to research Doom 2's development for this video but I haven't read all of it yet. Just picked out a few interesting facts. I'll have to give it a bit more time.
I believe Sandy Peterson over John Romero in this instance. id Software spent a few months cobbling together a bunch of rushed maps, most of which are gimmick maps that don't even make sense in the context of the story/lore (what little there is). Whether Doom II is even canon or not is still a subject of debate for some. Doom II was most definitely a quick cash-grab. It is not a true sequel in any sense of the word.
Could be. I don't think either of them was lying; if you look at the tweets they're saying different things. Sandy is saying they rushed it. John was saying they cared about it. It can absolutely be both and they probably just saw it differently.
The thing is, Doom 2 is incredible... But no one said it was perfect. It have some problems, like a couple of annoying bad levels for example. But that doesnt mean it sucks. Its just not perfect.
Kind of. RUclips algorithm being what it is I have to lead with the negative, which I'm not super comfortable about. I hope in the video I was able to be more nuanced about it than the title lets on.
@@TheRetroSofaOk, I finished The video. I still think Doom 2 Is good, but I agree with a Lot of your criticism. Especially One of The lasts ones: I don't remember The last Time I finish Doom 2. I always get tired Half way throught, I think a couple of levels after downtown. My idea, and it's just a theory I have isnthat they use The Shareware mentallity so normal at The Time. With that I mean, developers Made a cool fun first free episode, and pump up The dificulty of The other Two, because they tought people would be experta of The first free One before buying The others. Maybe Sandy and Romero tought people would be experta of Doom 1 when 2 reléase, so they don't give a crap about balancing The Game, The enemies or The levels. They just use The Time doing fun gimmicks they could think of. Maybe thats Why The balance feel so diferent from The first Game. Good video, man. You Made a Lot of valid criticism.
@@lordcabrito Thanks! Yeah you make some interesting points there. Id always had a pattern where they'd do a shareware game and then a retail sequel so they knew they were doing that from the start with Doom II but maybe the design mentality is still somewhat stuck in the shareware way of doing things. We're just guessing of course. Still though all of this could have been avoided if they'd spent some more time at the start of development mapping out what they wanted the game to be and what each map along the journey needs to accomplish to aid the flow of the campaign. Then maybe a little longer to polish and tweak at the end so every part of the design is pulling towards the same goal rather than the mish-mash of experimental (and less-experimental) maps we ultimately got.
I think like most people i appreciate the new rosta of enemies but the levels, texture art and music were lacking compared to the original. I actually played the SNES version of Doom 1 first and moved on to Doom 64 next, so that game always felt like the proper sequel to Doom for me.
I love it and that's why I wanted to explore it further and take a critical eye to it. Do you not think "masterpiece" is kind of a stretch though, at least considering the single player campaign?
@@TheRetroSofa OG doom1-doom2 are my first mind blowing PC experiences. I think they are both masterpieces, but the first one was a masterpiece when it came out and is still my goto for relaxing demon slaying. I can't say that for ANY other game for my self.
Ok. You need to be a madman to release video titled like this. I belive first frames of the video is for "oh my dog, look at my cat! How can you be mad at me if i have such a cat?" and you won't be able to convince me otherwise 🤣
Doom 2 looks stunning with the new fall path ray tracing implemented to it along with the voxel mod that came out recently. Shame it just didn't have a proper denoiser with it as i want to play it but fed up with the artifacting and smearing that happens to it . Maybe when we get the new rtx update that coming to all rtx cards might sort this problem out then i will go back and play it along with the modded doom 1 i have . You have to focus too on doom eternal with some enemies so i guess you think that game sucks as well. I don't like it along with doom 2016 i just found them to boring to play just fed up with the gameplay mechanics and what you have to do just to kill a enemies and the tedious side missions and task you have to do just to get upgrades.
I actually do think Doom Eternal sucks. I loved Doom 2016 but I could not get into Doom Eternal and the reason is that it's too prescriptive. I want to run into an arena and figure out the approach I want to make with the weapons or other tools that I like to use. What Doom Eternal does is every time you get a new monster you get a little tutorial which is like "hit this guy here with this specific weapon" and it's like there's an objectively "best" way to approach each situation, or at least to start every fight, and the fun of Doom (original and 2016) for me was thinking on my feet. A lot of people love Doom Eternal and that's cool have fun but it doesn't feel like it's made for how I want to play. Doom 2016 to me doesn't have the same problems. It doesn't overcomplicate things, it doesn't make you memorise stuff, you just get to do what you came to do.
It sucks so much that much that many many games copied the weapons and enemies that were introduced in Doom 2. And yet he makes it a point of critique. I'd call this review out of touch, it's embarrassing.
For me Doom 2 is the Robocop 2 of games. Not a patch on the pretty much perfect original game/movie but still great and highly entertaining. Kinda sucks… no, I can’t agree on that.
I love this game but I agree that some levels are confusing. Being that I must play it on ultra-violence I did need a RUclips walkthrough on my first go. I know that's a very polarizing idea but walkthroughs aren't cheating and they help me find secrets. Honestly I couldn't imagine beating this in 1994 😅
I've come to prefer streaming to walkthroughs but you need to be lucky enough to have a couple of people watching who know the game for that to work. My Zelda video is really about finding a middle ground between walkthrough and going in blind and streaming's the best solution I've found for me. Ultimately though you should play the game how you get the most enjoyment out of it and feel no shame for doing so! Playing it in the 90's was great in a way because we had that middle ground where we could pick up hints and tips from magazines but most of the game was still open to discover.
@@TheRetroSofa I remember the magazines...especially with mortal Kombat moves. I gotta admit I've become almost dependent on walkthroughs. Recently I played through (the original) Deus ex, thief gold, and thief 2. All 3 quickly got onto my top ten favorite games list. I'm not sure if that would be the case if I didn't have RUclips by my side.
Sometimes, but I still think largely because he churned out 17 maps in roughly 9 months. Sandy Petersen is one of the best to ever do it. I just wish for Doom II he could have done fewer maps, just his best ideas, and given them a bit more polish. You can be critical of his work while still giving him the respect and the credit he deserves for the huge contribution he made to Doom.
Not as such. It had a lot of bits where you had to fling yourself off ledges and land somewhere. I call those jumps but it's not like having a literal jump button.
Other than the super shotgun and the new monsters, I honestly agree that doom 2 is kind of disappointing. For me the real doom 2 is the "Nobody Told me About iD" mod.
I can only imagine what Sandy Petersen's house must be like. Petersen's wife: Honey, why won't the blender turn on? Sandy: You have to turn on the Christmas lights in the basement, then ring the doorbell hidden in the crawl space in the attic. Once you do that, the garage door will open, giving you access to the breaker that powers the blender.
why is sandy petersen reviewing doom 2
I was gonna ask the same thing 😂
Sandy Peterson reviews doom 2 himself and he thought we wouldn't notice.
LOL. Love these jokes.
He really thought he was slick, huh?
Well, I don't think Doom II kinda sucks at all. yeah there are some bad maps and when they're bad they're really bad, but for me the good parts overshadow the bad. Half Life is considered a masterpiece but yet there are still some really bad parts in there, But I'll never say "damn, half life kinda sucks". Idk maybe I'm just glazing doom ii but thats how I feel
The worst part was the ending which they couldn't play test, so they really wanted to make it good, and I believe there is a better fan made version to give that part the same care that the beginning and middle had.
@@FoxUnitNellhalf life's xen levels were extremely frustrating. It being rushed toward the end of development was an issue. But yeah fans have fixed a lot of the problems with mods.
I think we're mostly in agreement, although I think Half-Life's campaign as a whole holds up better than Doom II's. The video has space for nuance that the title does not, unfortunately.
@@TheRetroSofa I think it's unfair to compare doom 2 to half life, campaign wise. Doom 2 was HEAVILY gameplay focused. And on that front, it holds up extremely well. Half life was almost entirely story focused with pretty janky mechanics.
The Flood levels from Halo 1-3 were kind of crap too
12:25 This is a misconception. The renderer is fully 2D, but there is a y axis on the backend, it's how the positions of flying enemies and projectiles are determined-- every entity is on a 3d axis. Enemies were deliberately given infinitely tall hitboxes because doomguy is unable to aim up and down. When enemies are standing on platforms above doomguy's y axis, hitscans, rockets, and plasma shots will autoaim upwards towards the enemy, but if the enemy is absent, this will not happen. Doom is, for all intents and purposes, a 3D engine on a 2D map, full of 3D nodes, being rendered in 2D.
That's a good explanation, thanks. The end result is still the same (you can't walk under an enemy flying above you) but it does display objects and projectiles in 3D.
Now tell that to Civvie11.
@@TheRetroSofa No. An imp can throw fireball over or under you and it will not hit you. Same with flying rockets. The engine supports walking over monsters but it was turned off back in the day to speed up collision checks. Modern source ports can toggle that on and allow you to walk over monsters.
This is kind of a half-truth. Unlike Wolfenstein 3D, Doom has a Z-axis, but it only has it some of the time. It's truly an in-between step between the "fake" 3D of Wolf and the full 3D of Quake.
Why do people feel the need to spew nonsense with an autoritative look?
Doom 2 is a lot more experimental with its map design for better or worse. The best part of Doom 2 is the expanded enemy line up.
Yeah, but I wish they could have been used better. In the campaign I mostly find them kind of annoying. Except the Mancubus who is bae.
Doom 2 has areas where you just die also. Traps you can't foresee. I save 4 or 5 times a level . Beating it on hard. Like one area you are lowerd into a pit full of shotgunners. If you don't know they sre there they kill you offscreen. Or enemies higher above out of your field of vision
The main problem that I have with this game is that it feels like an expansion pack rather than an actual sequel. The level design isn't helping as well. I admire Sandy's Peterson dedication and work on them since he made most of them, but it doesn't change the fact that, at least for me, more often than not, Doom 2 is just exhausting for me. I prefer Plutonia much more and even TNT despite it's issues. I still like Doom 2, but it's my least played campaign out of all official Doom releases.
I'm in two minds on that. Doom was awesome and it's great to get more of it and because of how delicately balanced it was, that means not messing with the formula too much. I don't think they got the balance quite right here because they kept it mostly the same but just upset the balance a little bit, but that's still upsetting the balance just you've less to show for it. I don't know what the "best" solution would have been. I think they could have gone further with the changes, like replacing some weapons and enemies entirely, and maybe that'd make it easier to balance the super shotgun. I don't know. But yeah definitely more work on designing a coherent campaign would have been good.
Honestly, I would've had more fun with the game if they had still used the episodic format of the previous game. 32 levels back to back is an exhausting prospect, but four 8 level episodes is alot easier to digest.
Doom 1 is probably a better game. Levels flow a lot better. But it really suffers from not having the extended monster roster, and the super shotgun changes the whole balance of the game. Enemies that were originally higher tier now move to mid tier, like the cacodemon. Doom 1's roster just really missed the mid tier monsters, like the revenant or mancubus. So basically, doom 1 had better levels, but doom 2 expanded the meta
Those mid-tier monsters are great additions definitely. I should give the PlayStation port a proper go at some point because that brings some Doom II enemies into Doom.
@@TheRetroSofahave you played Doom on the N64? Different mix there too.
@@TheRetroSofa PS1 DOOM is the best console port IMO. Definitely give it a try. It's got a darker more horror like aesthetic to it and there are DOOM II monsters in the DOOM I campaign and it it makes for an interesting experience for veterans of this series.
@TheRetroSofa it doesn't end up being as many as you'd think. I played through a pc port of psx doom, it was only a handful throughout the entire game.
Anytime I play Doom 1 I used mods to put the Super Shotgun in the game.
Industrial Zone is the one that actually secures Romero's brilliance as a level designer to me. Despite working with a 2D level editor (and at a time when the editor itself didn't have a 3D mode, so he'd have needed to actually boot the game to playtest or see what needed tweaking), Romero creates this landscape of verticality with criss-crossing areas and lots of nooks. Either he playtested it a lot, or else he'd gotten really, really good at working with DoomEd's limitations, but that the finished map feels so intricate is a testament to him and his skills.
Looking at how he made the Sigil levels, I'll guess he constantly booted the game up to test it out lol
Agreed. I'm honest in the video about my feelings on this map and why I'm kind of biased against it as an experience but I can't deny it's an incredible feat of design within Doom's limitations.
Tbh he’s not wrong. I finally sat down and beat it on UV earlier this year. It’s the level design. Not as fun as 1
Personally, I loved Doom 2.
The levels had a very different flavor than Doom, and I appreciated the oddities. I wasn't playing it for a story. I wanted to mow down demons in unique situations.
And while the Earth levels look uninspired now, then I thought it was awesome. We didn't have anything better back then.
And the levels really shined with deathmatches. Well tuned single player levels didn't play well for DM. Whereas Doom 2 levels were way better than Doom.
Yeah that's reasonable. I'm coming at it with hindsight definitely but I also loved it uncritically in the 90's and I love it critically 30 years later. Although I played it around the same time I played Duke Nukem 3D which definitely took the shine off some of Doom II's Earth maps. Agree on Deathmatch. I think I'd have still preferred it without the super shotgun but the more open maps were great for multiplayer.
There's a great bit in The Chasm that always puts me in mind of Sandy Petersen's cheeky side. You fall down a hole where there's an Invulnerability power up. The hole then sloooowly raises a platform back up to ground level. The platform takes exactly as long to raise as the power up lasts for. The net gain of going down there and picking up the power up is exactly nothing. 😂
I fell for that one on the stream. It's cool definitely but I think I would enjoy that trick more if it wasn't on The Chasm. 😉
Mind you maybe that makes it funnier.
I remember In the 80s and 90s I considered computers as something for businesses or research because they were ridiculously expensive. Doom and Diablo changed that mentality, especially since, around this time, PC prices slowly started to become affordable.
Started to but they were still a long way from affordable which is why the inferior 90's console ports were such a huge deal. Gaming on the PC definitely became more of a thing but it was a while before it'd become accessible to people who didn't have PC's for other reasons.
Sandy Peterson made a video talking about Sandy Peterson
"Can't use a mouse on the sofa"
Back when I didn't have a desk, I used my thigh as a mouse pad, anything is possible with enough patience.
Anyone that feels disappointed with Doom II should give "Doom II: Reloaded" a shot. It aims to give a more realistic Hell on Earth experience and does quite well for the most part.
I could not disagree more. Aside from a cpouple of uncontroversial points like Downtown and Icon of Sin kind of sucking, Doom 2 is a clear upgrade. The super shotgun fills a clear hole in the Doom arsenal; nothing fills that spot between shotgun and rocket launcher. Chaingun is off to the side, on a separate track. And Tricks and Traps and Barrels of Fun are two of my favourite levels. Coming back to the game a couple of years ago after not playing it for 20 odd years, those levels were pure joy to experience. Like, lol, you got me. Let's go again and see what's next. And then new enemies are great. A fucking hate revenants, but in that way where I see what you're doing and I respect you for it but fuck you. Archviles are really interesting when you know how they work. Chaingunners provide an actual threat from a "weak" enemy - shoot first or suffer. Pain Elementals promote aggression as they can't attack at melee range. And of course Hell Knights are just fixed Barons. Doom 2 is Doom but with the benefirt of hindsight.
See I think the super shotgun reduces your options. Playing original Doom I'm always switching between shotgun, chaingun and rocket launcher. Doom II gives you a default. It's like this is the gun to use and only in specific situations do you switch. Same with the new monsters requiring specific focus. For me I always thought the fun in Doom was thinking on your feet, reacting to the situation you're in, using whatever tool you want to use to get the job done. By otherwise keeping the same enemies and weapons but bringing in these slightly power-crept new ones, it warps the existing formula to make it slightly worse where I think they could have done more to create a new formula. But that's a difference in how you and I play I think and what priorities we have.
Also the gimmick levels are fun in a vacuum. I just don't like them in the campaign.
Arch Viles are interesting but they feel like a missed opportunity. It always pops up at the business-end of the super shotgun and dies too quickly to do anything fun. If they were bosses with more health and AI more focussed on resurrecting enemies, maybe if their own attack was much weaker, they'd be really cool.
Thanks for the comment. I really appreciate a polite disagreement and being challenged to think about my opinions. It's good stuff.
Maps were 2D with height values, but verticality was real. Projectiles can pass above a player or monster.
The engine could only render geometry from a two-point perspective for performance reasons, however, so vertical auto-aim was implemented instead of the ability to look up and down.
Duke Nukem 3D is an example of a game with 2PP and vertical aiming, and it looks absolutely terrible for it.
True. I much prefer Doom's implementation of pseudo-3D to Duke's. It is just projectiles though, right? Objects placed in the map are solid at any height.
@@TheRetroSofa For some reason, they chose to ignore monster height when checking for collision with other actors. I think it's been stated that it was performance reasons.
The default behavior for monsters being forced to occupy the same space as each other (or solid walls, or cliff edges) is already "stuck in idle state", so it's possible they just didn't want to code all the extra behaviors needed, like for actors standing on other actors, or monster melee attacks with height differences.
Verticality is kinda real. There _is_ a Z axis, but it is only considered some of the time, so it's a sort of 2.7D not-quite-full 3D. Even in Duke 3D, despite pushing it even further than Doom, the 3D calculations are kinda hacky and fakeish.
Vertical aim in Duke 3D works mostly fine though IMO (depending on the situation and how far you look).
@@todesziege Personally, I can't even play Duke 3D unless I'm using the Raze source port, which implements 3-point perspective for the rendering engine. The 2-point warping when aiming up and down bothered the crap out of me even back in the mid-90s, and with modern mouse-look controls it only gets worse.
@@JediMB I wasn't even talking about the rendering (which definitely is hacky and fakeish), but under-the-hood things like collision detection. A lot of it is more akin to 2D+ calculations than fully 3D.
What is this sorcery? A nuanced critique? With a bit of sarcasm thrown into the mix? As it happens to be, I only just recently got past the downtown map after several hours spent roaming about. It reminds me of why I generally don’t like Quake 1 episode four as much as the other episodes. But my hat’s off to you, sir, for being able to summarise the experience in such a respectful way. And by the way, I’m that one player who doesn’t know where the secret map is.
You're the third one! Maybe get a co-op game going and search for it together.
Thanks for the kind words. I really appreciate it. 🙂
It's in the castle level, which you can get by secret hunting. A door opens in the key part of the castle. One secret is BROKEN because it requires abusing a pain elemental, but that's unnecessary. I think you activate the lava switch, find a lava secret, which opens the secret level. The video creator is clearly too unskilled to enjoy this game, he doesn't understand basic mechanics like monster infighting and strafing increases speed, or pain states. Which BTW EXISTED IN DESCENT. This game is NOT meant for OLD PEOPLE playing on Wii nunchucks using the original engine. You play it on the modern Xbox port, or PC. BTW, I played the WHOLE GAME ON GAMEBOY ADVANCE. I can cross the tight rope level side strafing. The complaints are 100% all based on having NO SKILL, which is obvious to anyone with skill, exacerbated by using the Wii. Use a PC, like carmack intended with a mouse. Waaah DOS. NO DUDE, DOS SUPPORTED THE MOUSE. Use a modern port with mouse look. The complaints about level design are completely insane considering technological limitations, and doom 2 was more about fun than story or realism. Surrealism maybe. Old man yelling at clouds, and here I am being his equally old neighbor yelling back to stop being a crazy nuisance. BTW quake 1 had garbage doom keybinds, and no mouse look. You HAD to rebind wasd and manually enable mouse look. All these old games REQUIRED a level of user troubleshooting, and basic IQ unlike today. So if you're dumb, you CAN'T enjoy them, and complaining is outing yourself to everyone who knows better. It's just that the games are too old for young people to get context, and thus the history is lost, and we have these people attempting to revise history. Disgusting.
Just a quick question for everyone. Do people just ignore episode 4 of Doom 1 levels when they say it has better level design than 2? I know it was part of the ultimate doom expansion but I'm just curious.
I am in this video and also generally because the last Doom I played was SNES Doom, which just has the three episodes. I think most people would more likely compare it to Ultimate Doom though.
Episode 4 is awesome.
Doom was only sold by mail. Doom 2 was the first retail release. Ultimate Doom was released with episode 4 after Doom 2 to give the original a retail release.
For me it's unfair to compare the pinnacle of Id's level design to what came before it.
Episode 4 has some of the best levels.
@@kinganarkzie Glad you enjoyed them. Personally my least favorite part of Doom 1.
I love DOOM II. That being said I agree that it's not as great overall as some make it out to be. Given more time and polish it could of very well been a great overall experience but the final product was a mixed bag with slightly more bad and mediocre than there should have been. It's all subjective at the end of the day though, so for the guys and gals that think it's great overall, more power to you, to each his/her own. I just feel the original DOOM is a vastly superior game overall, whereas DOOM II fees like a glorified map pack with some great maps, but most of them are experimental, rushed, or just kind of missed the mark so to speak.
Appreciate the honest opinion brother. DOOM II has it's legacy and will continue to be enjoyed (I play it all the time) but there's nothing wrong with objectively pointing out it's flaws.
That's it. This is my opinion and other people feel differently and that's cool. I think we can all agree it was rushed though and I really don't know why. I couldn't find an answer to that. They were pretty much masters of their own destiny at this point, Romero cut the deal with GT Interactive that suited them with Doom's success giving them all the leverage they needed, so why did they give themselves such a short time to make the game?
As I said, I wouldn't spend so long thinking about and critiquing the game if I didn't love it. To me part of engaging with the media we care most about involves being critical about it.
Love your channel man, been sick the last few days binge watching your back catalogue and it’s helping me feel a bit better!
D00M 1 is better in my opinion.
Doom 2 also suffers from having very little feeling of progression since the game no longer uses the episode format. You'll most likely get all of the weapons before map 10. In Doom 1 you didn't get the BFG until around E3M3.
I think it would have benefitted from being episodic honestly. I know why it isn't but the shareware format really worked in Doom's favour. It's also why the trope of taking away all the player's weapons half way through the game is a thing.
@@TheRetroSofa Funny thing is people would discover a way to remove the player's weapons by exploiting the game. If you rig the player to die at the exit (Like with barrels) while simultaneously making Romero's Icon of Sin head die, you progress the level but it forces a pistol start.
@@TheRetroSofa Yeah. Later shooters like Duke Nukem 3D, Blood or Quake retained the episode structure and it benefitted their flow.
Hell, Left 4 Dead even uses a very similar thing and I'd argue it plays a part in that game's longevity.
@@todesziege Plus Duke Nukem 3D had an in-engine way to start a map without any weapons. If you make a map with the player starting in a sector where the floor damages them, they start with just the boot. Not even a pistol. Doom II could have done with something like that at least.
@@TheRetroSofa Yeah, it's even used in the campaign. I guess they didn't implement anything of the sort in Doom II because they didn't make us of it themselves.
Well, you can always kill yourself to get a clean slate (although I guess many modern ports implement auto-saves that circumvent this mechanic).
I agree that Doom II isn’t remotely as good as a lot of fans of it say it is, so many weird levels.
However, without the new enemy roster, level layouts + themes and the Super Shotgun, we would not have Doom 64, 2016, Eternal, Plutonia, No Rest for the Living and Legacy of Rust.
I do enjoy it for the fantastic levels it does have. And I loved the video as well!
What came out of it is awesome, no doubt, but I wanted to look at it in isolation as a complete single-player campaign on its own merits because that's still how most people will experience it. Thanks!
I have to respect you for playing through the whole game with a wii remote, great video man! Would love to see you cover final doom too.
Thanks! It's on the cards, but probably not on the Wii. 😉
12:18 You're not wrong, but there are a few exceptions. I would suggest you watch the video "Doom engine - limited but still 3D".
This one? ruclips.net/video/ZYGJQqhMN1U/видео.html
I'll check it out. Thanks.
YOU TAKE THAT BACK! THIS GAME ROCKS!
Okay sorry. 😔
@@TheRetroSofa You're not sorry enough.
@@FINBoggit I'm sorry my lord I have sinned and will dedicate my life henceforth to spreading the good word of Doom II.
@@TheRetroSofa okay that's sorry enough, I think you're a good guy after all.
I always preferred the levels on the first Doom game, I don't really now why, but I think it is because they were more constrained, simple but refined and clearly much more iterated and specially they are claustrophobic.
I think you're right. It feels like the designs were more focussed overall too.
Never change this video's title, for anyone who truly appreciates Doom II knows damn well that you're right.
Thanks! And there's nothing wrong with loving something that kind of sucks.
I cannot really consider them separate games by now. I mean by having modern source ports, as GZDoom the borders between the Doom games are blured. Basically Doom 2 can “play” Doom 1, but not vica versa.
Also Doom + Doom II is the version we're all playing now, of course so that's a fine way to look at them. However my recent experiences are Doom II on the Wii and Doom on the SNES so I guess it was easier for me to see them as separate games for this video and that's how they were seen at the time. If only because of Doom 2 having so many more mods which were incompatible with Doom / Ultimate Doom and we were launching them from separate executables. At least until Doom95.
I mean, making your house in doom *used* *to* have a negative reputation until 2023....
Everyone did it though. And our workplaces. And... uh, our schools.
I didn't feel like playing that WAD myself but I enjoyed watching other people play it. Absolute masterpiece.
Some of Doom2's levels were a little sloppy, but IMO the low-point for the series was Episode 3 of the original Doom.
* The starting level is the weakest one out of all three episodes, is extremely linear and involves mindlessly shooting pinkies whose only purpose is to block your path
* The levels were butt-ugly, often with nonsensical theming. Many rooms had things like hellish green brick walls with office lights overhead
* Many of the levels were cramped and sucked to move around in
* E3M7 was large, empty, and desolate, and the only challenge was figuring out which of the gazillions of teleporters you were supposed to go in next.
* The existence of the BFG made the final boss fight a complete joke
IMO the commercially released mapset with the best (and most consistent) quality was Plutonia.
Okay let's go.
* Hell Keep is awesome because Warrens exists. E3M9 fixes everything about that first level. Going back to that row of demons once you've got the chainsaw is super-satisfying. E3M1 on its own is fine, in my opinion, decent little simple level. Where it becomes great is when the secret map upends it.
* Yeah probably. SNES Doom doesn't have ceiling textures anyway.
* Pandemonium is that but I still found it really tense and fun to play. Plus you've got Mt. Erebus. Those are great maps. Slough of Despair is bad.
* I spent a long time in Limbo and I feel like that's kind of the point. The map does have some interesting arenas and setpieces but yeah it's not one of my favourites. I think it's fine though.
* Agreed. It's a shame because Dis with no starting weapons can be really interesting on ultra violence where you get the Spider Mastermind to fight all the other monsters while you sneak aronud and gather up resources. If Doom had a way to remove weapons from the player, this map would have been way more fun.
It's not perfect but I will defend episode 3. I had a lot of fun last time I played through it.
22:00 - Yup.
I hope you do a Duke3D video, my fav.
I played Doom SNES briefly.
Then I properly played Duke3D for years before Mother got my Doom95.
I'll figure out a way to cover Duke at some point. It's one of those where I want to have something unique to say, you know? I've got stories to tell but I don't know if that's enough.
I thought I was the only one who liked Doom but couldn't get into Doom 2.
The bestiary makes it a huge leap over 1. There are a lot more threats, much more challenging. And because some are hitscan and some aren't, you deal with them differently.
The SSG makes the combat less tedious as well, when you fight Barons or Cacos or large groups of weaker enemies.
These really shine through in user content which is outside of the scope of the base game.
But ultimately I am not sure what you could really compare it to in late 1994. It doesn't have the mechanic (or aesthetic) jump from, say, Mario 1 to Mario 2 USA (but bigger than 1 to 2 JP), but it was still best in class. I would say that people overrate the later Doom 1 episodes.
Interesting video.
Thanks. Good points well made and I agree completely about user content often making better use of the expanded roster. The Arch Vile wants to be placed in specific situations that make the best use of its abilities but I often ran into it on its own or mostly on its own and killed it before it could do anything interesting at all. Just imagine it coming at you from a distance following you over a battlefield you've just conquered resurrecting enemies as it goes. Stuff like that never happens in the base game as far as I could see. It just pops up occasionally, too close to the business-end of the super shotgun to have any impact.
During the stream, I did criticise the cryptic progression of a lot of Sandy's levels, but I guess in fairness to Sandy, it was 1994. By that, I don't mean "it was old and we didn't know how to make games back then", but if you look at the games that came before, there was a lot of cryptic progression, even in some 2D side-scrollers. Shadow of the Beast I think it was had you break the already established convention of go right at the very start of the game, and if you don't go left at the start of the game, you can play through the whole game and end up with it uncompletable at the end, because you're missing an item. In Castlevania 2, you have to hold a particular item and find a certain dead end cliff and crouch next to it to progress. The idea that you might be stuck in a game until you pick up an issue of a magazine where someone has written into the letters section and gotten an answer to it, or a magazine gives you the solution in a secrets or hints section towards the back, wasn't so uncommon.
I'm not saying that's good game design, and when you compare it to Doom 1, it's particularly inexcusable because they'd shown they know how to NOT stump the player with cryptic progression, but I can see why Sandy might have wanted to put some mystery and some water-cooler discussion back into the game, in his levels. The problem is it just wasn't particularly _good_ mystery. I've described his levels as "wander around until something happens" design, and that's still true. Sandy Petersen didn't really do what Romero liked to do and give you goals. In a Romero level, for example, you might encounter a locked door, then you might see a key through a window and know "great, that's my goal", and you try to find your way around to that. You don't really get any of that goal-oriented gameplay in a Sandy Petersen level.
I was thinking Castlevania 2 when I started reading your comment. 😉
I think that's largely what I'm talking about in the video when I talk about "flow", at least as applies to individual maps. John Romero guides the player (visible goals is one way he does that) and Sandy Petersen puts the player in a place and goes "you figure it out". John Romero's approach is the one that's won out in the end and there's a reason for that, you know? It's like the yellow paint discussion. If designers don't put the yellow paint there, people get stuck and have a bad time. Progression is fun and feels good and wandering aimlessly does not.
That said, Sandy's approach wasn't wrong. As you say it was just one viable design approach used in games at the time, although I feel like in 1994 developers were already kind of at the tail end of that era. 1994's Super Metroid guides you a lot more than 1986's Metroid did. Particularly in the PC space though the Ultima games were still very popular and Sandy's kind of an old-school gamer so maybe he was inspired more by that kind of experience? I don't know. Either way though it's clear that these designers had different goals for what they wanted their maps to be and that's part of what leads to Doom II's campaign feeling so disjointed as a whole.
@@TheRetroSofa I just wish Sandy's mysteries were a little better constructed, or maybe in some way taught early on. The standard move in maps these days to indicate that shootable switches or wall textures are being used, or that you have to use the jump or crouch features in modern source ports, is to start you in a room where you have to do this. Things like the shootable or fake walls in The Spirit World, or the notch in the wall you have to fall down, could have been sign-posted somehow early on, and then you could be expected to figure it out without just getting frustrated and shooting every wall in sight.
Some consistency in his rules might have gone a long way to helping everything work together, like if we were trained in an early level to expect shootable walls.
So many people struggle with trying to get DOOM to play on their wii. If you could make a video or a quick post on how you did it, that would be awesome!
I did it so long ago! My Wii actually has a mod chip in it because when I hacked it, that's what you did. Now it's way easier. Search up the Wii hacks guide, follow it exactly, then go download Wii Doom onto your SD card and add your WAD files from your Steam copy. That's basically it and I wouldn't do that as a video because I don't know how to make it interesting and I don't want to un-hack my Wii (or buy a new Wii) just to go through that process again for a video. That said it might be fun to talk about my Wii hacks sometime (it's the second-best emulation device for your CRT TV!) but not so much a walkthrough.
I legit thought the guy in the thumbnail was Sandy Peterson uh
I’m glad you could take me out of my “Doom II is amazing” echo chamber. Its legacy stands on the might of the modding community and how its monsters were used by clever level designers over the 30 years since, and thus it’s refreshing to have a more objective opinion on the game. Brave to criticise the SSG, it is unbalanced to be honest, but fortunately it is not a drop from enemies (in vanilla), so level designers can omit this overpowered weapon. Downtown is a confusing mess.
Thanks. It's not often evaluated on its own merits as a single-player campaign even though that's how most people would likely experience it.
I don't know where the secret level is
Both "Tricks and Traps" and "Barrels o' Fun" more fits for the secret level slot. Actually I think guys from Midway did a better job regarding this part when they ported the game to PlayStation. At least "The Mansion" and "Club Doom" stick to the "Hell on Earth" theme.
Good point. I probably ought to give PlayStation Doom a proper try sometime.
I might've missed the explanation but why did Doom 2 have to come out so soon after Doom? They'd made their money, the pressure was off. Surely they could've gone full on Valve and taken an eternity to do the next one.
I looked for an explanation and found none, honestly. It makes no sense to me that they rushed it.
Probably just passion and desire to keep making new Doom maps. Back then in the early 90s, game developers generally had a lot of fun working their jobs. Game studios back then functioned more like a group of buddies that got together to do what they love to do. It wasn't like nowadays where game development is a grueling, miserable, and stressful job in which devs are beholden to greedy shareholders and corporate asshats.
Wow, you look like sandy (claws).
I'm new, I don't know what to do...
I think just do your best.
I believe in you. You can do it.
STUPID PENGUINS.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
I think its great you beat Doom 2 with the Wii Remote and also used a Guitar Hero controller.
Thanks! Shame the Guitar Hero controller didn't do anything though.
If you watch Sandy's videos, you will see that he was treating Doom II like a tabletop RPG experience.
I find D2 better then the first strictly because of the crazy new enemies. I still get terrified when I turn the corner just to encounter Vile already with hands in the air.
It's a spooky guy. Thing is it usually spawns pretty close to the business-end of the super shotgun. It'd be much more devastating and scary if it came at you from further away I think.
@@TheRetroSofa Plutonia's Hunted is probably the most dreaded official map at the time with them in it, just a giant maze full of them. You don't know where they are, you just know they're out there because you saw them at the beginning right before they teleported.
When I replayed Doom II for the first time in like 20+ years on the Switch recently, I actually stumbled into the Secret Level completely by mistake.
It was really surprising and funny at the time, since I didn't really remember the layouts of most the game's maps.
That's cool! Great that it can still surprise you. I've started going through Doom in co-op on Switch with a buddy and we're having a great time. The Doom + Doom II re-release is a fantastic package.
@@TheRetroSofa True! And for me, my enjoyment of the games is helped by that I just find the maps (good or bad) extremely interesting as subjects of analysis. They're artifacts of level design from before the industry really knew anything about it (especially in 3D).
I loved that I could get to The Inmost Dens for the first time in decades and go "oh, this is really interesting... It's an American McGee map, isn't it?"
But as fascinating as Sandy's gimmicky designs could be, I do have full DISrespect for him as a person, given his dabbling in and doubling-down on transphobia.
You're definitely right (at least in my case) regarding people not playing through the whole campaign of Doom 2. I loved the first 1/3 of the game, then meh, and I usually just used to stop playing. About 1,5 years ago, I played through the whole Doom 2 campaign for the very first time. That was with the source port GZDoom, using the Voxel Doom 2 mod (all the enemies redrawn in 3D Voxels instead of 2D Sprites, while looking identical to the untrained eye but in full 3D).
Not many days ago me & a friend played through the Doom 2 campain again with GZDoom and Voxel Doom 2. I also installed some mods for the playthrough; no multiplayer monsters (no extra multiplayer monsters because of playing in co-op), revealed secrets shown on all players minimap, no player collision (no more accidentally telefragging once entering teleporters) and also a Revive mod, in which the alive players can revive the dead ones (set the revive HP to be 40HP instead of the default 1HP).
Also with the Revive mod, if both players died, we had to restart the map. Once restarting a map, we activated cheats to add 50 pistol bullets and 50 shotgun bullets if we had less than that, since we played on hardcore difficulty. I also disabled multiplayer weapons, so no more BFG and such on the very first map in co-op. It was a very fun experience, the downside being if one player fell into a pit of lava or acid with no way to return to the surface. Sadly map hacks is not supported in GZDoom as of now, if it were, map hacks could function as an overlay of the original maps and add teleporters or lifts to the inescapable lava and acid pits.
That sounds like a really cool way to play Doom. I started playing co-op with a buddy recently on Switch and we're having a blast and playing with the revive mode where if you both die you have to restart gives it some tension and encourages working together ("okay so I'm gonna run in here but I'm taking a risk so you hang back to revive" etc.). That's just standard on Switch though. The mods you've put together sound like they make for a great experience.
It's fun to imagine what could have been if they spent more time in development and made Doom II into a Build engine style game. Something akin to Hollywood Holocaust (first level of Duke Nukem 3D) with id Software's flavour would have been amazing, and really delivered on the promise of "Hell on Earth".
Excellent analysis! Loved your comment on how the concept of "Hell on Earth" was implemented. I always wished they Brought back for doom 2 intermission screens between levels like Doom 1, that went a long way into making the levels feel connected and purposeful. That lack of cohesion seems to be one of the worst parts in this game.
I'm wondering if you would consider doing Plutonia, as that map expansion is a much better use of the Super Shotgun and the new monsters. They are cool concepts, but were only used in their fullest in Plutonia and other fan made maps.
Thanks! You're very kind. I do want to give some time to Final Doom at some point. I remember having the most fun with TNT but it's been a while since I played it. Maybe I'd feel differently about it now.
I never got into Doom II. Ultimate Doom was my favorite, never really saw what was better about DOOM II. It didn't seem like Earth at all imo. It just seemed like random shit to me. It just seemed like more maps at retail price. Although the double barrel shot gun was awesome I'll give it that for sure.
I actually prefer FInal Doom's TNT Evilution, even if it has its own assortment of flaws and problems.
I haven't played it for a few years but I remember I loved TNT Evilution.
Obviously obvious engagement bait is obvious and should not be permitted on RUclips tbh
I mean free speech something something but yeah, I get what you're saying. I wish more positive titles were more successful than the negative ones. As it stands though your channel won't get seen if you don't play the game.
@TheRetroSofa true I suppose you didn't start the trend or code the algorithm
DOOM 1993 is the goat
Doom 64 is the best doom hands down.
I like what I've seen of it. I'm definitely going to spend some more time with it at some point and get a video out.
I find Doom and Doom 2 are best enjoyed as simple time killers and not a long form epic gaming experience. Just pick a random level, play it for an hour or two when you're bored, and then move on to something else.
Nothing wrong with that and it's exactly how I used to enjoy them. Still do, occasionally.
Glad you have made this video. Thank you. I never understood the love for Doom II over the first Doom. The crazy technological and art direction jump that the first Doom game represents is insane. There is a care there, indeed, that you just don't see on Doom II. The sequel feels more like a couple of teenager modders decided to go crazy at Doom. You know "That would be cool" "It needs to be bigger!" "It's MY map, MY enemy.. it needs to be the hardest, the biggest, etc"...
Yes. It does capture the negative side of the 90's, when it comes to certain aspects of entertainment and art. "Less is more" wasn't exactly the norm lol.
That's an interesting point. The mid-90's was not about subtlety, least of all in gaming.
I thought the title was clickbait (I mean, who really thinks Doom 2 sucks?) and I went into this video ready to defend this beloved game. But I gotta admit, this review is spot on. Doom 2 does have some weaknesses. Well done with your argument 👍
Thanks! And hey, I love it too. 🙂
Doom not being 3d is open for discussion because projectiles are able to fly above or below you (or monsters).
There are definitely some 3D calculations done, but it's inconsistent and an only-sometimes thing. It's not entirely faked like it was in Wolfenstein 3D, but it's not entirely 3D either.
Good game, but no doubt, it felt weird when first playing it due to some of the level layouts and general vibe when compared to Doom.
I love Sandy and he's a visionary, but he was overworked in this project while Romero was slacking off. The levels are wildly varied and incredibly experimental.
I think we have to get into the gaming landscape of the day. Doom was groundbreaking, but rivals were in the way. Romero knew Heretic was coming and much more thematic with amazing level designs. You couldn't just recreate Doom, you had to push the limits. Id did that and it was revolutionary. I dont care what critics say of Downtown, it prove the genre could do big city set pieces.
But I also agree with a quote i heard. Id makes tech demos, Raven makes games. Doom and Doom 2 definitely feel like glorified tech demos. Episode 1 is a masterpiece, but the rest is far too experimental and appears to be trying to define the genre instead of picking a style and sticking to it.
"Slacking off" or "incredibly busy doing other things". Or maybe somewhere in-between. I think that's a good point you make though. Id cared about their games but they cared about tech and spectacle more than game design I guess. Meanwhile Raven had only the design to be concerning themselves with and made some great games and it wouldn't surprise me if at the time Romero found himself more enthusiastic for Heretic than for Doom 2.
@@TheRetroSofa Romero was slacking off. I know he was busy with other projects as well, but he wasn't putting the work in at Id. It's ultimately why he ended up leaving too. The stories are there that he was more interested in playing the games than anything else.
Carmack cared about Tech more than anything, but the rest wanted good games. I've listened to some Sandy conversations where he talks about trying new things.
I don't hate Chasm as a map as much as most people. It's not great. I also understand that it was an experimental time for FPS games and Id wanted to prove what was possible. Downtown is epic for 1994 and I refuse to hear otherwise.
When you realize that Wolfenstein, Spear of Destiny, Doom, and Doom 2 all released before Heretic and Rise of the Triad, you realize how far ahead of the curve Id really was. They really hadn't made any mistakes, but no one else had either so there was nothing to learn from yet. And the "contemporaries" to Doom before Doom 2 were made on the Wolf3d engine.
And we cannot forget Doom 2 was hard. Many believed it was impossible on Nightmare. Many struggled with Hurt Me Plenty. When you don't have perfect knowledge and you are trying to puzzle it out, it's a long game. It pushes you to the limits. The down time in certain areas with invulnerability or searching through open levels is a welcome reprieve from the soul-crushing difficulty.
I think we look at this from a modern perspective far too often. The game isn't perfect, but it made some of the first missteps in FPS history.
PS. I defend the Doom 1 boss fights to the bitter end. They were incredibly challenging for 1993, on original hardware and having never seen anything like it before.
@@riffbw I need to read the rest of Doom Guy, really.
You're right about it being an experimental time and a lot of Doom II was indeed very experimental. But if your goal is experimenting with the engine and with the player you're probably not making a well-designed campaign. And y'know that's fine if that's not your goal.
In terms of the context of when it was released, Doom II is incredible. I'm mostly looking at it in the context of what's come since. Mind you the fact I can do that at all is testament to the enduring design of these games both technically and in gameplay terms. I think there is merit in looking at these games in the context of where we are now as opposed to where we were then as long as we're clear about what we're doing and how we're evaluating these games and why, you know?
All I will say on the Doom 1 boss fights is Dis is infinitely better when you don't have the BFG and if they'd had a way to take it away from the player it would have been an awesome closer to the first game.
@TheRetroSofa Dis is the worst of the three, but if we look at Doom in the context of 1993 we see a different than game. Circle strafing isn't a thing yet, especially for a keyboard only player. We don't know the weapon balances or that getting up super close makes the BFG more effective against boss monsters. It takes 3-4 shots at distance minimum. That's a lot of cells. We also don't all know about BFG pre-firing. If you take all of thst away, you are trying to peekaboo shoot with other weapons or exposing yourself to a triple chain chaingun while the BFG charges.
Dis was HARD!
I wouldn't say Doom 2 was experimenting with the players. I'd say they were using a shotgun approach trying to expand on what Doom 1 provided. They had some tight levels, they had some puzzles, they messed with outdoor spaces, they tried some large maps, they tried to emulate real places, and they tried to make things better. Nobody knew what would be good and what wouldn't so they tried it all. Ultimate Doom's Episode 4 and Quake really refined on what was learned from Doom 2.
Someone had to make the mistakes and Id was first to market. If you consider other games to be refining on what we learned from Doom and Doom 2, it only improves the legacy of Doom 2. Id pioneered the genre and I think fans often forget that Doom 2 beat Heretic and any other Id Tech 1 derivatives to market. It's remarkable we got two games that epic within a year and they had 0 influence from competitors.
There may also be some urging from Romero to get Downtown, Factory, and Sandy's house in there because he knew Heretic was make real to life map with Docks, a village, and more.
It's funny how beautiful the original Wolf3D levels are, more primitive engine but more realistic environments like Duke3D.
Doom could've had vertical aim, as proven in Duke 3D another software renderer as well as ZDoom (Not GZDoom). The only issue is doing so causes warping because the edges of the walls have to be going straight down, they can't be angled. Supposedly, going auto-aim was done for simplicity, rather than so much limitations of the engine. They even initially did so with Quake, despite being fully polygonal.
The looking in Duke 3D was janky enough to be pointless though IMO. I don't think Doom needed vertical aim, it just needed level design that didn't make the player wish for it.
@@TheRetroSofa Yeah, that's fair, I've found myself lamenting auto-aim in some levels where the enemies are either high enough or far enough away that the auto-aim doesn't want to actually work. It's to the point that some people think using GZDoom's free aim is cheating and I'm not just talking about the Icon of Sin.
There is also a Portal vs BSP difference. Duke 3D has a Portal-Engine like Descent, that allowes perfect visibility calculation. With that you end up drawing whole Polygons, wich allow for some optimisation. Doom and Quake on the other Hand use a BSP-Engine, wich has fairly complex per-scanline operations (Doom uses vertical scanlines in the first step). The Doom-Engines Graphical limitaions are build on the Idea, to keep scanlines in the same Z-Distance.
(Note the Drawback of Portal-Engines is the akward level design.)
Heretic had vertical look.
If you read Doomguy you'll see everyone at ID was *mystified* about how to do vertical look controls in Quake. Sticking it on mouse was apparently non intuitive, which is something I find amazing, given that they all already used the mouse to play Doom internally
@@iwantagoodnameplease Reminds me of a journalist reviewer who infamously complained about a Ps1 game using dual analog controls, which is now the standard for consoles.
Very much agree with your conclusion, even it being not a very popular one.
Actually dont want to hate Peter for the levels.. Probably would have been much better if they had more time for polishing it up and re-iterate their designs some more.
Its a great sequel in everything except the levels. I assume its because they were also busy experimenting with early 3d environments back then.. Afaik McGee did alot of the pioneer work in terms of QUAKES level art and design..
These games made me fall in love with game, art and level design. Seeing what magical experiences (for me) iD and 3D Realms have created back then..And Lucas Arts Games..
42 now and still love to create levels for their games from back then.. Level Design was peak in creating and playing it back then.
I loved making levels for the Build engine. To me it felt like it had just the right amount of restriction like you could pretty much do what you needed to do but it still had interesting limitations to work around. I never had any interest in making levels for Quake but I made some maps for Duke Nukem 3D and Blood back in the day and it was a great time with a great community around it.
Aaaand here I go subscribing to another cool Doom videos making channel! lol
Cool video and fun about DOOM II!!👌🏻
My gut feeling is that DOOM 2 was released way too soon they should have spent more time on it and maybe tweaked or upgraded the engine. Some levels are damn good while other levels my 14 year old kid can make better maps. But overall DOOM 2 has the best enemy roster and DOOM has the best level design.
Thanks! It really feels likes it would have benefitted from some planning time and some polishing time either side of its development for sure.
It's a lot more uneven than the first game, but when replaying it in its entirety recently I found myself actually enjoying and appreciationg levels I previously disliked (including Downtown and even the Chasm, to my own surprise).
I still had a bad time on those but I also think I went at it with a bit too much cynicism. I'm sure it won't be the last time I play through it though!
HOT TAKE: Doom 1 and 2 had a poor and clunky design philosophy, i mean, the art design is very inconsistent, i know the limitations of the time but i will put this example: The player hands changing between hand-drawn gloves and then a when you change to the fist is a sprite copied directly from a photograph of a barehand fists lol, also a lot of textures in nonsense places, weridly designed (and iconic ikr) monsters, the nonsense of the cover art and finally a music copied directly from metal bands (iconic, but not original lol)
Yeah game development was a bit janky back then for sure, especially in the wild west of PC gaming. And yet the original Doom still pulled togeher a more consistent and coherent single-player campaign in my opinion.
As much as I absolutely love classic Doom, I can't argue against your points. Very true. There is tons and tons of 'jank' in classic Doom if a player is looking for it.
@@TheRetroSofa yes, the episodic thing was pretty well made in comparison of the rushed doom 2 storytelling
Not even all Latin nouns ending in US pluralise with an I. Octopuses is apparently correct, not octopi, but cactuses is not correct, so unless a Latin linguist wants to come in and explain exactly which declension the totally made up word "mancubus" is, and argue for either mancubi or mancubuses, I say call your video game monster whatever you want.
Octopus has its root in Greek I think so that'd be "octopodes" (or, as you say, "octopuses"). Do you not say cactuses? I feel like it should be cactuses but our language isn't one of those with a committee overseeing it or anything. English is organic rather than consistent.
I used to be one of those people who was always correcting people but since moving to a new country where I don't really speak the language I've come to appreciate how language isn't something to get strictly right or wrong, it's a tool for communication. My view on it now is that as long as we understand one another, the language has done its job. The rest doesn't matter so now I don't correct people unless they want to be corrected. My little crack about the Mancubus plural in this video isn't me telling other people what language to use but pre-emptively defending the language I chose to use, if that makes sense.
I'm still quietly hoping someone's going to come in here and make a convincing case for "Mancubodes" though.
@@TheRetroSofa I used to correct people all the time until I did a couple of semesters of linguistics at university. Most of what I'd been taught, and repeatedly corrected to, was wrong. It did enable me to level up my extreme pedantry for situations that need it, but mostly I just embraced the hopelessness of a world where an accepted definition of the word "literally" is "figuratively".
Well, it's amazing how Doom/Doom II can still be fun even without nostalgia factor involved. I've played the source ports after Doom 3 and it was not bad mostly. But yeah, they aren't perfect, and yeah, while the original Doom was a breakthrough, Doom II was more of the same mostly. Also I'm not a fan of the gimmicky level design. We shouldn't deny cultural context and Doom's influence on the industry, but also shouldn't look at it through rose-tinted glasses
Agree with all that.
I loved Doom 2, but I always felt that there were just levels randomly put one after another, despite the three parts it lacks the consistency and the experience design of the Doom 1 episodes, and beside this the levels somehow don't "flow" like the Doom 1 ones, they were more "clunky" in some sense. Despite this, the new enemies and the sheer amount of levels make it worth it. Levels like Dead Simple or Tricks and Traps were a game changer.
Yeah. A bunch of levels were fun in a vacuum but the campaign didn't really flow.
@@TheRetroSofa oh, and "Mancubi" is easier to pronounce than "Mancubuses" to non-english speakers like me, ok?
@@weon_penca That's a good point! I live and work in Germany so I know what it's like to communicate in a second language! You do what you need to do. Also the point in the video was more about defending my chosen language than telling anyone else what to do. I think as long as we understand one another you should use language however suits you.
I like doom 1 episode 1 the most. It's a more convincing environment. Doom 2 is to random and weird. Ofcourse loved it as a kid.
Loved doom 2 more than the first simply because of the double shotty but it's impossible to play vanilla Doom nowadays
Brutal Doom absolutely destroys it.
I could never go back ever again
I respect Brutal Doom but it's not for me. It feels like Doom for people who grew up with Call of Duty rather than for people like me who grew up with Doom, you know? Just having reloading changes the pace and feel of the game so much. It's a completely different game. It's still very cool though and I understand its appeal. I've enjoyed playing around with it but I much prefer vanilla. Neither of us is right or wrong though. It's just opinion and I think it depends on what got you into first person shooters in the first place. What was the first FPS you really got into?
I liked Doom 2 because of the new enemies. I understand the passion of purists for the original, but the limited enemy roster and texture variety tends to become somewhat tedious. Tricks and Traps was my most favorite Doom level.😂 I liked its playful, trolling nature. You are raising valid points, though.
Thanks. Tricks and Traps is cool, don't get me wrong, but much cooler in isolation than as part of a story campaign. At least as it's presented in game. With a few tweaks it could have been a good story map with the demons trying to trap Doom Guy but it'd have to be later in the campaign and not have the Cyber Demon standing around like a lemon.
Doom 1 is one of my favourite games of all time. Doom 2 is a good, but I don't think it adds enough to "matter". However I like it as a base for all of the mods.
I just finished John Romero's book "doom guy", it gives a very different perspective on that spat with Sandy!
That's interesting. I bought Doom Guy to research Doom 2's development for this video but I haven't read all of it yet. Just picked out a few interesting facts. I'll have to give it a bit more time.
I believe Sandy Peterson over John Romero in this instance. id Software spent a few months cobbling together a bunch of rushed maps, most of which are gimmick maps that don't even make sense in the context of the story/lore (what little there is). Whether Doom II is even canon or not is still a subject of debate for some. Doom II was most definitely a quick cash-grab. It is not a true sequel in any sense of the word.
Could be. I don't think either of them was lying; if you look at the tweets they're saying different things. Sandy is saying they rushed it. John was saying they cared about it. It can absolutely be both and they probably just saw it differently.
@@TheRetroSofa That's true! Good point.
Been playing Doom since 1996. In my opinion, Doom II is the best installment in the franchise.
The thing is, Doom 2 is incredible... But no one said it was perfect. It have some problems, like a couple of annoying bad levels for example. But that doesnt mean it sucks.
Its just not perfect.
Kind of. RUclips algorithm being what it is I have to lead with the negative, which I'm not super comfortable about. I hope in the video I was able to be more nuanced about it than the title lets on.
@TheRetroSofa I was just giving My opinión if hownai SEE it. I download The video to watch later. If You change My mind, I'll let You know!
@@lordcabrito Thanks. I'll be interested to know your thoughts on it!
@@TheRetroSofaOk, I finished The video. I still think Doom 2 Is good, but I agree with a Lot of your criticism. Especially One of The lasts ones: I don't remember The last Time I finish Doom 2.
I always get tired Half way throught, I think a couple of levels after downtown.
My idea, and it's just a theory I have isnthat they use The Shareware mentallity so normal at The Time.
With that I mean, developers Made a cool fun first free episode, and pump up The dificulty of The other Two, because they tought people would be experta of The first free One before buying The others.
Maybe Sandy and Romero tought people would be experta of Doom 1 when 2 reléase, so they don't give a crap about balancing The Game, The enemies or The levels. They just use The Time doing fun gimmicks they could think of.
Maybe thats Why The balance feel so diferent from The first Game.
Good video, man. You Made a Lot of valid criticism.
@@lordcabrito Thanks! Yeah you make some interesting points there. Id always had a pattern where they'd do a shareware game and then a retail sequel so they knew they were doing that from the start with Doom II but maybe the design mentality is still somewhat stuck in the shareware way of doing things. We're just guessing of course. Still though all of this could have been avoided if they'd spent some more time at the start of development mapping out what they wanted the game to be and what each map along the journey needs to accomplish to aid the flow of the campaign. Then maybe a little longer to polish and tweak at the end so every part of the design is pulling towards the same goal rather than the mish-mash of experimental (and less-experimental) maps we ultimately got.
I think like most people i appreciate the new rosta of enemies but the levels, texture art and music were lacking compared to the original.
I actually played the SNES version of Doom 1 first and moved on to Doom 64 next, so that game always felt like the proper sequel to Doom for me.
I'll tackle Doom 64 at some point. Got the cartridge on my shelf ready to go.
It is hard and long... But I like it. Still a masterpiece.
I love it and that's why I wanted to explore it further and take a critical eye to it. Do you not think "masterpiece" is kind of a stretch though, at least considering the single player campaign?
@@TheRetroSofa OG doom1-doom2 are my first mind blowing PC experiences. I think they are both masterpieces, but the first one was a masterpiece when it came out and is still my goto for relaxing demon slaying. I can't say that for ANY other game for my self.
Was that song called them bones
Ok. You need to be a madman to release video titled like this. I belive first frames of the video is for "oh my dog, look at my cat! How can you be mad at me if i have such a cat?" and you won't be able to convince me otherwise 🤣
Not even gonna try. 😅
ngl, I thought you were Sandy in the thumb nail lol
Doom 2 looks stunning with the new fall path ray tracing implemented to it along with the voxel mod that came out recently. Shame it just didn't have a proper denoiser with it as i want to play it but fed up with the artifacting and smearing that happens to it . Maybe when we get the new rtx update that coming to all rtx cards might sort this problem out then i will go back and play it along with the modded doom 1 i have . You have to focus too on doom eternal with some enemies so i guess you think that game sucks as well.
I don't like it along with doom 2016 i just found them to boring to play just fed up with the gameplay mechanics and what you have to do just to kill a enemies and the tedious side missions and task you have to do just to get upgrades.
I actually do think Doom Eternal sucks. I loved Doom 2016 but I could not get into Doom Eternal and the reason is that it's too prescriptive. I want to run into an arena and figure out the approach I want to make with the weapons or other tools that I like to use. What Doom Eternal does is every time you get a new monster you get a little tutorial which is like "hit this guy here with this specific weapon" and it's like there's an objectively "best" way to approach each situation, or at least to start every fight, and the fun of Doom (original and 2016) for me was thinking on my feet. A lot of people love Doom Eternal and that's cool have fun but it doesn't feel like it's made for how I want to play. Doom 2016 to me doesn't have the same problems. It doesn't overcomplicate things, it doesn't make you memorise stuff, you just get to do what you came to do.
It sucks so much that much that many many games copied the weapons and enemies that were introduced in Doom 2. And yet he makes it a point of critique. I'd call this review out of touch, it's embarrassing.
For me Doom 2 is the Robocop 2 of games. Not a patch on the pretty much perfect original game/movie but still great and highly entertaining. Kinda sucks… no, I can’t agree on that.
That's fine. I think it kind of sucks but it is also a lot of fun. You summarised it pretty well there I think.
But it features THE SUPER SHOTGUN!!!!!!!!
I love this game but I agree that some levels are confusing. Being that I must play it on ultra-violence I did need a RUclips walkthrough on my first go. I know that's a very polarizing idea but walkthroughs aren't cheating and they help me find secrets. Honestly I couldn't imagine beating this in 1994 😅
I've come to prefer streaming to walkthroughs but you need to be lucky enough to have a couple of people watching who know the game for that to work. My Zelda video is really about finding a middle ground between walkthrough and going in blind and streaming's the best solution I've found for me. Ultimately though you should play the game how you get the most enjoyment out of it and feel no shame for doing so! Playing it in the 90's was great in a way because we had that middle ground where we could pick up hints and tips from magazines but most of the game was still open to discover.
@@TheRetroSofa I remember the magazines...especially with mortal Kombat moves. I gotta admit I've become almost dependent on walkthroughs. Recently I played through (the original) Deus ex, thief gold, and thief 2. All 3 quickly got onto my top ten favorite games list. I'm not sure if that would be the case if I didn't have RUclips by my side.
My take away from this?
Sandy Peterson sucks
Sometimes, but I still think largely because he churned out 17 maps in roughly 9 months. Sandy Petersen is one of the best to ever do it. I just wish for Doom II he could have done fewer maps, just his best ideas, and given them a bit more polish. You can be critical of his work while still giving him the respect and the credit he deserves for the huge contribution he made to Doom.
LOOOOOOOOOL.
I personally was never a fan of D2 over D1. I felt the maps and design were much weaker with regardless to whatever Romero wants to say about it.
holy shit you look like sandy petersen!
Doom 2 didn't have jumping, ... did it??
Not as such. It had a lot of bits where you had to fling yourself off ledges and land somewhere. I call those jumps but it's not like having a literal jump button.
You could run over gaps and off ledges to "jump" over things, but you couldn't actually jump upward.
I love doom 2
But the city levels...
Other than the super shotgun and the new monsters, I honestly agree that doom 2 is kind of disappointing. For me the real doom 2 is the "Nobody Told me About iD" mod.
I always hated Doom 2. Even as a kid. Shit just didn’t feel the same
Alright. Thank you for sharing your honest opinion.
Any time, Doctor Krüger. Thanks for stopping by.
35:45 - Yes! I love everything but the levels!
Sorry no buddy.