Secret Areas in Doom and Doom Clones Ruin the Game

[Chuck Norris]

Every time I try to play Doom and Doom clones, the secrets ruin my enjoyment. And I can't ignore them, because there's a big number at the end of each level telling me that I basically missed more than half of its content.

Don't get me wrong. I love secret areas in games and discovering little nooks and crannies, but as long as they complement the general game design. For example, secrets complement metroidvanias. They complement RPGs with big maps. They complement survival horrors in which you need every single bullet you can get. They DO NOT complement a high adrenaline rampage simulator.

Every time I'm killing enemies running around, I'm having fun. Every time I'm dry humping every wall on the level to find the God damned secrets, I'm NOT having fun. What sucks is that most of the time, you don't even need what's inside these secret areas. The level itself gives you enough resources and the resources in secret areas are overkill. The irony is that they COULD be useful for newbs, who are never going to find the secrets. They reward experts who know the game like the back of their hand with resources they probably can't even pick up because they're armed to the teeth. And some of these secret areas are so obscure, there's no way to find them unless you look them up, which kills the flow even more.

So this is pretty much my experience playing Doom and Doom clones:

5 minutes of absolute joy, being in a state of orgasmic flow, blasting every moving creature to oblivion while skateboarding around

10 minutes of depressing, discouraging wall-humping until one of them opens up by chance and lead me to a mostly underwhelming resource depot.

Doom is a fast game. Whatever crap they wanted to come up with to add to its playtime had to complement this fast high-adrenaline gameplay. Secrets, as they are designed, don't do that.

And the sad thing is all these Doom clones and boomer shooters keep repeating the same mistake, as if they don't have the mental capacity to just pick what works and discard what doesn't.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Doom is not a fast game. Modern-day source ports and various mods have made it faster than it is.

Also, some user-made levels require that you find (some of) the secrets to stand a chance.

 

[Butter]

They should not tell you how many secrets there are/how many you've missed. Always keep the player wondering if there's more out there.

 

[Average Manatee]

Good Doom maps don't make it just a bunch of retarded wall humping. Secrets are things that you find by observing the level carefully.

 

[Machocruz]

IIRC, Doom 64 had just one secret I would call completely unfair, the rest I found to have reasonable indication.

 

[Zlaja]

I can't seem to find more than half of those in games, at most. This in turn makes me feel bad and makes me think "God, I'm such a casual".

I hate those that require you to push an object around, so you can jump on it to reach a vent, or similar.

 

[udm]

Arthurian Legends has one of the best implementations of secret areas. The secrets are still hidden in very obscure places, but more than half the time you're able to find them if you just open your eyes to spot weird-looking nooks and crannies, or open areas that seem to have potential for exploration. I've found about 95% of its secrets by just checking out anything that stands out without having to go into full autismo mode.

 

[Darth Roxor]

imagine thinking that finding the rocket launcher three levels before it's given in a regular manner is useless

 

[Just Locus]

This feels like completionist talk. Trying to 100% complete any DOOM level will only guarantee you hate them. It's better if you finish the levels and try to find the secret areas, but don't go out of your way (IE pressing E on every surface) to see them. That's basically how I played all the DOOM games including 64, and I found myself enjoying the secrets way more.

 

[Nutmeg]

Doom and Quake are, at high level play, time trial racing games. The secrets are checkpoints.

 

[octavius]

Doom needs a remake with quest compass for "a modern audience".

 

[Modron]

First you start to speedrun then you start to chop your penis. Look at games done quick streams for all the "funny looking women".

 

[DannyRope]

The only way that you could say that Doom, the Doom clones and the Build Engine Shooters (Duke Nukem 3D, Blood...) were fast games is if you played the Doom game from 2016, which has indeed a very fast-paced gameplay, and then came back to the old Doom from the 90s and expected it to be just like that. Or, as Unkillable Cat said, you used modern source ports and mods for the game. Playing, say, Brutal Doom is very different to playing vanilla Doom. The Doom from 2016 is closer to Brutal Doom than to the original vanilla game; as a matter of fact, the executions were taken outright from the Brutal Doom mod.

Doom and its clones and the Build Shooters were not fast-paced games, the opposite was probably true not that that made them any less awesome. The intended normal gameplay is to advance carefully and know which enemies to prioritize (normally, hitscanners with low health, other enemies have attacks you are able to dodge) Build Engines Shooters were a bit more hardcore but with a no less surgical approach. Part of the gameplay cycle in, say, Shadow Warrior and Blood was to assume that behind every corner there was a group of enemies and pre-emptively lob an explosive in that direction before even seeing the pixelated sprites of said enemies.

Modern gaming has muddied a lot the ancient knowledge of the classics. It disgusts me. Although to be fair, part of the blame is on publishers who claim any shooter with pixel-art or with graphics imitating Quake is a boomer shooter when is not, and younger gamers don't know any better.

 

[Necrensha]

It feels good to lack the will to 100% anything in life or in videogames, you should try it.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

didn't wolf 3d have already secret rooms? and one mythical supersecret secret room with a phone number to call to receive a prize?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Commander Keen had secret areas as well, that's probably where id Software got the idea from.

But back to talking about Doom for a bit. Currently I'm playing through a user-created WAD, and just finished a level that can best be described as "frustrating", but had what I considered a cool secret area.

Here's the scenario: DoomGuy needs to get through the blue door to get the yellow key, but right before the blue door, via a window, he sees another room to the side he can't get to that holds a rocket launcher. Obvious secret is obvious. Doomguy has a rocket launcher already, but the extra ammo would be nice... so how to get in there?

Turns out DoomGuy has to shoot the three faces in that secret room to unlock the hidden entrance behind him. Beyond that entrance is a long-ass corridor that runs on the outside of a large chunk of the map (with rockets on the ground at regular intervals) that eventually ends up in the room with the rocket launcher. OK, now to head all the way back *groan*. Except, for once a secret is clever. The way back is now blocked, and a new path has formed which serves as an alternate entrance into the blue room. This turns out to be advantageous to DoomGuy, because the blue room is full of crushers that are activated the minute someone opens the blue door... which hasn't been done yet... which means they're harmless for now. Sweet.

But here's the best part: Once Doomguy has cleansed the blue room and acquired the yellow key, the entrance to the long passage is still there. A thought: If one end of the passage got re-routed to a new area, what about the other end? So DoomGuy enters the long-ass secret passage AGAIN to find out - and ends up in a large room with a BFG9000 sitting on raised pedestal like some object of worship. Again DoomGuy already had a BFG, but the ammo is appreciated.

Two secrets for the price of one!

This shows that secrets in Doom can be made to be useful and contribute more to the gameplay than just extra gear - but I'll also admit that these are the exception rather than the norm. Another similar example is a secret near a confined Cyberdemon, where you can teleport yourself to the Cyberdemon's location for a quick, efficient way to kill it. Gee, that sounds familiar somehow...

 

[deuxhero]

The worst secrets have to go to Dark Forces 2 and Mystery of the Sith. You have to find them not because you want what is in them, but because finding them all in a level gives you an extra level up point. In a game that already suffers from overly obtuse level design these are rotten.

Also I'm going to mention how virtually all the secret levels in Doom, Doom 2, Heretic, Hexen AND Duke Nukem 3D are just complete garbage. Almost all of them are some combo of the following
1: multiplayer levels given just enough to make them nominally playable as a single player map
2: some kind of shitty gimmick level a dev thought was clever when making it and everyone realized it's actually shit before release but was complete enough they couldn't just cut it entirely
3: Pure unbalanced untested enemy spam either because only hardcore players will get to this so don't care about making it actually good

 

[Berengar]

Every time I try to play Doom and Doom clones, the secrets ruin my enjoyment. And I can't ignore them, because there's a big number at the end of each level telling me that I basically missed more than half of its content.

5 minutes of absolute joy, being in a state of orgasmic flow, blasting every moving creature to oblivion while skateboarding around

10 minutes of depressing, discouraging wall-humping until one of them opens up by chance and lead me to a mostly underwhelming resource depot.

I say this with absolutely good will: have you considered talking to a doctor about ADD? You don't need to feel like this.

 

[grimace]

Were the secrets in the game to sell a guidebook or get you to call a hint line?

 

[Average Manatee]

Doom 1 absolutely *could* be a fast game. It was back in the time period where half the population was still using various control methods like joysticks, keyboard only, or even not strafing at all. For anyone doing so the game was definitely fairly slow. But if you ever played deathmatch you absolutely had to figure out how to go fast.

Source ports can't make a faster Doom because they are literally input-identical with the original (or, well, most recently patched) version of Doom and Doom 2. You can take demos recorded with modern source ports, which are just a list of player actions performed at specific frames, and replay them on the same executable that id released, or vice versa.

The worst secrets have to go to Dark Forces 2 and Mystery of the Sith. You have to find them not because you want what is in them, but because finding them all in a level gives you an extra level up point. In a game that already suffers from overly obtuse level design these are rotten.

OK but it feels really fucking good to find all of those secrets in DF2.

 

[grimace]

Post the DOOM players guide with the maps.

 

[JarlFrank]

Secrets are optional bro
That's why they're secret
You're allowed to finish the game without finding all of them

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

imagine thinking that finding the rocket launcher three levels before it's given in a regular manner is useless

Or napalm launcher on the first level while also finding out, that there are Super Secrets as well.

 

[JarlFrank]

When they released the new engine port, they added Steam achievements to Doom.
What they did NOT add was an achievement to find all secrets in all levels. There is one for finding all secrets in *one* level, but no achievement for finding all secrets in all levels.
They probably thought about it and concluded it would be too tedious to achieve.

Because you're not supposed to 100% every level, unless you're a turboautistic completionist. You're supposed to go with the flow of gameplay. Look at the map, examine the architecture, think "hmm that place over there looks fishy", investigate, find secret, be happy you found it, go back to shooting demons.

Even the original devs didn't intend for all secrets to be found in one playthrough. IIRC there is a bugged secret in one level, that simply cannot be triggered. Yet it was left in, and never patched out. Because it doesn't really matter, just play the game!

 

[HansDampf]

But back to talking about Doom for a bit. Currently I'm playing through a user-created WAD, and just finished a level that can best be described as "frustrating", but had what I considered a cool secret area.
...

Name of the WAD?

The thing with modern Doom WADs is that some of them do a lot more with secrets than just "hump walls for a box of rockets". But not always, and not consistently. There are still many humpable walls. If you play lots of Doom, you get conditioned to hump every wall that looks suspicious. But sometimes, you also get secrets that open up entire new areas. Maybe you get a funny bonus fight. Some maps have secrets that exist only to make the map more difficult as an extra challenge for completionists. But when you're playing a new map and are missing one secret, you don't know if it's a box of rockets behind a wall or a cool gimmick fight or something else.