Good Doom/Heretic/Hexen WADs

[Ninja Destroyer]

On a side note I recommend "The Dark Side of Phobos", which is a 2 disc set of remixes of Doom tracks. I use it in addition to metal albums, to add variety.

 

[Average Manatee]

Finished Going Down

10/10. Great gameplay all around. Very encounter based (e.g. you do something that triggers enemies to be revealed or spawn in and you have to figure out how to deal with them, as opposed to exploring a level and mainly encountering enemies as you go). Mostly small and usually quick levels. High difficulty but you can find strategies that consistently win in most levels (I think it was only Map7 where I basically just got lucky). Not much more to say, play it.

Also finished Hellbound

6/10. The opposite kind of wad, very adventure based with large levels and an emphasis on architecture that resembles somewhat realistic areas. Mid level of difficulty which is normal for these kinds of wads since you can almost always back up to get some space and don't have to deal with traps being sprung on you. Some problems I had with it:

- I'd say around 1/4th of the maps in the first half of the wad had multiple dark areas with hitscanners, especially chaingunners and shotgunners. Major sin in my book. Map4 was almost entirely this.
- A few early levels had fairly important weapons like Supershotgun hidden in secrets. Others were not particularly well balanced for pistol start, with finding weapons and ammo requiring some trial and error exploration. Map10 was especially bad for this. Map27 was also notably annoying in that its so open that I only stumbled across the rocket launcher after already acquiring like 80 rockets.
- Due to how I said there's an architecture focus, there tends to be a lot of mirrored areas, which also have mirrored enemies and item pickups. In a few levels it can get old basically fighting the same fight multiple times. The 2nd to last level in particular has a bunch of corridors as you go up the sides of a pyramid with fairly similar spawns in them.
- The final level was horrendous. It's an Icon of sin that shoots 5 or 6 cubes each time. Issue is, it's a fairly giant and complex level you have to get through to fight him. Doom is just not balanced for this. Large, long maps need to be balanced by the map maker with intentional monster choice but with the Icon of Sin spawning things you can get screwed by a single archvile behind 40 enemies shooting you, or ride away easy with nothing tough at all. There's a drop/jump you have to do to get a key right in front of a cyberdemon where you're often either blocked by the cyberdemon or cacodemons (infinite Z-height means you can't shoot down at them below you, and being stopped means you're probably getting killed by that cyberdemon). Then there's a bunch of running through lava which is at the high-damage level, with no protection suit and only a few health packs that barely compensate for the loss if you know exactly where to go. Then at the end there's a section where you have to survive for like 5 mins in an arena of spawning monsters and cyberdemons, which eventually opens a hole that you have to shoot through to hit Romero's Head (but it isn't really indicated that you have to do this so you could be spending time waiting for more to happen).

Aside from that I think almost all of the maps in the 2nd half were decent to good with the first half being hit or miss. Map14 is the tipping point into the good levels.

Currently playing Back to Saturn X ep1, up to map 11.

So far pretty good. It's about a midpoint between adventure and encounter based. Moderate to high level of difficulty. It likes to surprise you with traps but they are mostly fairly mild and beatable on a first try. The only map that I've seen with a bullshit trap was Map6, where 4 archviles teleport into a room without much cover and a lot of corpses to raise.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Bad news - someone helped voxel guy (gave him some code) to mess with the arsenal

I'm not usually a weakling - head bobbing (default STALKER one) or spinning around like a record round in the submarine.
But this is cursed to me...

 

[JBro]

Bad news - someone helped voxel guy (gave him some code) to mess with the arsenal

I'm not usually a weakling - head bobbing (default STALKER one) or spinning around like a record round in the submarine.
But this is cursed to me...

That'd work really well with the VR mod.

 

[ferratilis]

Some people have no self-control, do they? That's why I gave up on using Beautiful Doom. It started as a sprite smoothing mod, then the creator learned more stuff and kept weaving his autism into the game. Not as bad as Brutal Doom, but still destroys the feel and look of vanilla.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Oh god why?

Even a crosshair ain't going to help much there. Maybe VR is why he went this route.

 

[Lemming42]

Say what you will about whatever the fuck is going on in that video, but voxels are great. The surreal novelty of seeing the original sprite suddenly rotate as a 3D model never gets old. I spent all my time in Voxel Doom just trying to line up the camera with enemy and object models to try and make them look as much like the original sprites as possible, then giddily zooming around to see them from every angle.

 

[axx]

He's come so far, might as well add hood mode

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Exactly. I never shot a beretta or any pistol like that gangster shit crap. Fucking retarded unless you're reaching over a barrier and not looking for some bullshit cover fire.

 

[jebsmoker]

chocolate doom and gzdoom have cemented themselves as the best source ports imo

discovering how gzdoom gets around conflicting key bindings by just making dedicated sections for major mods that have their own bindings in the .ini file, such as cold as hell or hideous destructor, was a nice little surprise

 

[ferratilis]

crispy doom > everything else

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

 

[toroid]

When the video starts to reveal what's so special about this wad you may want to stop watching to save yourself from spoilers and then go play it yourself. Good stuff.

 

[Alex]

When the video starts to reveal what's so special about this wad you may want to stop watching to save yourself from spoilers and then go play it yourself. Good stuff.

Damn doom fags.

 

[Tweed]

LE BACKROOMS!

Dropped.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Ooohhhh!

THE BACK ROOMS?!!

ALL 1000+ levels?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I'm gonna give it a go today.

People's reactions may be overrated, but from a technical perspective it's at least worth a look.

I mean, it's not as silly as making a fusion Blood/Doom-mod and calling it 'Bloom' - right?

 

[HansDampf]

MyHouse is yet another instance of Big Hype that makes me feel like an outsider. Everybody is talking about it. Everybody loves it. It's even seeping into the mainstream a bit. It's going to tower over every other wad in the next Cacowards. I can appreciate the creativity and effort. But actually playing it is so boring to me!
Progression is so cryptic, it's probably meant to be solved by "the community" instead of a single player. Every tiny bit of progress ends up putting me back right where I started, just as clueless. Having to repeat the same steps, read the journal for clues, and hope to spot another detail I've missed before. I've given the map multiple chances, but the rewards haven't been worth it. Add to that the piss-poor performance, a hallmark of GZDoom mapping. Thanks, but I'll just watch the video.

 

[Modron]

MyHouse is yet another instance of Big Hype that makes me feel like an outsider. Everybody is talking about it. Everybody loves it. It's even seeping into the mainstream a bit. It's going to tower over every other wad in the next Cacowards. I can appreciate the creativity and effort. But actually playing it is so boring to me!

Sums up how I feel about Dark Souls and its clones.

 

[V17]

MyHouse is yet another instance of Big Hype that makes me feel like an outsider. Everybody is talking about it. Everybody loves it. It's even seeping into the mainstream a bit. It's going to tower over every other wad in the next Cacowards. I can appreciate the creativity and effort. But actually playing it is so boring to me!
Progression is so cryptic, it's probably meant to be solved by "the community" instead of a single player. Every tiny bit of progress ends up putting me back right where I started, just as clueless. Having to repeat the same steps, read the journal for clues, and hope to spot another detail I've missed before. I've given the map multiple chances, but the rewards haven't been worth it. Add to that the piss-poor performance, a hallmark of GZDoom mapping. Thanks, but I'll just watch the video.

I think it's a cultural thing. Backrooms and creepypasta were also always a community effort, both the creation and the consumption (people speculating about the mysteries), and I think they were always a thing of younger millenials/older zoomers, so if you're outside that range that may also play a role. And the specialty of this map is that it kind of subverts Doom - it doesn't create an obviously different game based on GZDoom, instead it uses it to set expectations which it at some points fulfills, at others goes against them. So to really appreciate it you probably have to like doom, the weird thing that it morphs into and the meme-y "internet horror" trends that it references at the same time.

Personally I don't care about the gameplay either, but learning about the mystery from the video was cool.

 

[430am]

MyHouse is yet another instance of Big Hype that makes me feel like an outsider. Everybody is talking about it. Everybody loves it. It's even seeping into the mainstream a bit. It's going to tower over every other wad in the next Cacowards. I can appreciate the creativity and effort. But actually playing it is so boring to me!
Progression is so cryptic, it's probably meant to be solved by "the community" instead of a single player. Every tiny bit of progress ends up putting me back right where I started, just as clueless. Having to repeat the same steps, read the journal for clues, and hope to spot another detail I've missed before. I've given the map multiple chances, but the rewards haven't been worth it. Add to that the piss-poor performance, a hallmark of GZDoom mapping. Thanks, but I'll just watch the video.

Yeah, it ticks all the normalfag hype checkboxes today like LIMINAL SPACES and BACKROOMS, so obviously it's going to be covered by every single e-celeb and streamer on the internet. It has excellent technical execution, but if you're not into entry-level reddit creepypasta, you're not going to like it. However, if it gets more people interested in Doom, I'm OK with that. I personally doubt it's going to dominate Cacowards, but it'll be there. Also, I'm just glad it's another wad that's not focused on combat. I wish there were more wads that were puzzle-focused, especially for multiplayer. The engine has all the tools to easily make intricate puzzles with interesting environments, yet nobody's taking advantage of it other than a handful of wads.
Meanwhile I'm here looking for more wads that work good with Hideous Destructor and don't desync in multiplayer.

 

[toughasnails]

There is a fashion for this stuff amongst the indie devs. if you check the Alpha Beta Gamer channel on YT, you'll see quite a few titles in this vein. Gimmicky experimental horror games that appear short or simple at first but hide many secrets and offer some replayability, and sometimes, like in this case, include meta or ARG aspect. Often creepypasta-y flavor to writing, the games sometimes even presenting as a cursed game from some creepypasta.
But to My House's credit it appears to be meatier and more ambitious than most, plus of course there is that extra appeal of being a GZDoom mod and so being technically impressive in that context.

 

[Sceptic]

I think it's a cultural thing. Backrooms and creepypasta were also always a community effort, both the creation and the consumption (people speculating about the mysteries), and I think they were always a thing of younger millenials/older zoomers, so if you're outside that range that may also play a role. And the specialty of this map is that it kind of subverts Doom - it doesn't create an obviously different game based on GZDoom, instead it uses it to set expectations which it at some points fulfills, at others goes against them.

The problem with the "subversion of Doom" aspect is that this has already been done as far back as 1998, it's been done many times since, and it's often been done much better than here.

The other problem, which 430am touched on, is just how manufactured the whole thing is if you dig a little bit under the surface, and this goes completely against the subversive aspects. I'm not terminally online so didn't immediately get the Liminal Spaces references, but others who know these things have pointed out that almost every single sequence in the map is lifted wholesale from an existing Liminal or Creepypasta or whatever that's already out there. Not just "inspired by", but recreated in almost exact detail, and then strung together with others. I really got suspicious of the hype when everyone started raving about the Discord notification - like, seriously? this is all it takes now to amaze people, put a random sound from a random app and script it to appear 10 minutes into your map? It's yet another hype checkbox to tick. And I can see why it became so successful, if you're into all the memes you'll enjoy seeing them collected so thoroughly, if you have no idea they exist you'll marvel at the map's "original" content. But if you know of them but don't care for them then there's very little originality in the map, outside of the technical aspects. Which are interesting for sure, but if that's all there is to then it's little more than a GZDoom tech demo.

And then there's the whole fake mystery set up around the map's authorship, which got hilarious when a prominent community member got so excited about playing it and gushed over it and wrote a full walkthrough for Doomwiki... and then it turned out he was involved in its creation, after which he of course got very quiet. Another prominent member got really involved in finding the true identity of the author and really pushed for this, until the author privately messaged him, at which point he did a 180 and said that since he now knows who the author is all further attempts at figuring it out should be dropped because this is stalking and stalking is bad.

It's a shame because it really could've been something remarkable if the author had dropped the meta and fake mystery aspects and just focused on creative mapmaking.

 

[toughasnails]

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/135602-doom-ii-rpg-port-reverse-engineering-version-01/
I just saw that this is now a thing. It's really something i was hoping for a while, there were prior attempts but they just fizzled away. Now if someone did the same for Wolfenstein RPG.

 

[HansDampf]

I think it's a cultural thing. Backrooms and creepypasta were also always a community effort, both the creation and the consumption (people speculating about the mysteries), and I think they were always a thing of younger millenials/older zoomers, so if you're outside that range that may also play a role. And the specialty of this map is that it kind of subverts Doom - it doesn't create an obviously different game based on GZDoom, instead it uses it to set expectations which it at some points fulfills, at others goes against them.

The problem with the "subversion of Doom" aspect is that this has already been done as far back as 1998, it's been done many times since, and it's often been done much better than here.

The other problem, which 430am touched on, is just how manufactured the whole thing is if you dig a little bit under the surface, and this goes completely against the subversive aspects. I'm not terminally online so didn't immediately get the Liminal Spaces references, but others who know these things have pointed out that almost every single sequence in the map is lifted wholesale from an existing Liminal or Creepypasta or whatever that's already out there. Not just "inspired by", but recreated in almost exact detail, and then strung together with others. I really got suspicious of the hype when everyone started raving about the Discord notification - like, seriously? this is all it takes now to amaze people, put a random sound from a random app and script it to appear 10 minutes into your map? It's yet another hype checkbox to tick. And I can see why it became so successful, if you're into all the memes you'll enjoy seeing them collected so thoroughly, if you have no idea they exist you'll marvel at the map's "original" content. But if you know of them but don't care for them then there's very little originality in the map, outside of the technical aspects. Which are interesting for sure, but if that's all there is to then it's little more than a GZDoom tech demo.

And then there's the whole fake mystery set up around the map's authorship, which got hilarious when a prominent community member got so excited about playing it and gushed over it and wrote a full walkthrough for Doomwiki... and then it turned out he was involved in its creation, after which he of course got very quiet. Another prominent member got really involved in finding the true identity of the author and really pushed for this, until the author privately messaged him, at which point he did a 180 and said that since he now knows who the author is all further attempts at figuring it out should be dropped because this is stalking and stalking is bad.

It's a shame because it really could've been something remarkable if the author had dropped the meta and fake mystery aspects and just focused on creative mapmaking.

That explains a lot, especially why everything seems so random and disjointed.
I play lots of Doom and am not easily impressed by all this technical stuff like the guy in the video apparently. This is GZDoom, after all. Not Doom. Room over room, Smooth Doom animations, silent teleporters, swim mechanics, etc. None of that is new or special anymore.

Also, I'm just glad it's another wad that's not focused on combat. I wish there were more wads that were puzzle-focused, especially for multiplayer. The engine has all the tools to easily make intricate puzzles with interesting environments, yet nobody's taking advantage of it other than a handful of wads.

The closest thing to puzzle maps I've played are some maps in Finely Crafted Fetish Film which consist of pure logic puzzles, and Jumpwad, a monsterless collectathon with jumping mechanics. I also want to check out The Given and Moonlight. Is there anything else?