Old megawads

[JohnnyRancid]

I've been playing a lot more old wads such as S.T.RA.I.N., Momento Mori, Hell to Pay, Batman TC, Perdition's Gate, Aliens TC, etc. And the more I play them, the more I begin to hate the New age stuff like Dynamic Lighting, Slopes, Colored lighting, Floors over Floors, Ambient soundfx, Text messages, Deep water, etc.

I feel like all the creativity in doom is lacking nowadays. I miss custom made textures from scratch, sound replacements, midi music, elevators with lower unpegged textures, Invisible Stairs, Voodoo Dolls, Deepwater effects, Vanilla 3d Bridges, The excess use of middle textures, and all that.

I really feel that There was far more creativity in Vanilla compatible wads than all the JDoom, Legacy, ZDoom, and Skulltag wads nowadays.

I see a lot more of "Let's see how many sectors I can jam into one hallway!" than new and effective mapping techniques that were present in older wads. There's a lot of stuff that is limited to what you can script in a text file, rather than finding what can be done with the current engine. Does anyone else feel the same?

[Danimetal]

I feel that it really depends. New possibilities are meant to expand creativity limitations related to the engine. What mappers do with them... Oh, well, that's another point. I can tell you, there are absolute masterpieces out there with the Engines you mentioned, as creative as they can get.

[MR_ROCKET]

I see where you both are coming from.
And agree with both of you. heh

Though I currently happen to be working on a strict standard/vanilla DM wad. ;)
But that's not to say that I might make a wad later on that is entirely script driven.

There seems to be more script and editing feature experimenting going on than the usual, I suppose that's due to the fact that the features have been added to loved sourports by the community dev's, and the end-user-map-author wants to make that developer happy and see that all his hard work pay'd off. ~ (which are good intentions), but I see where Johnny's coming from in this topic. ~ "you don't really need special effects to make a good map". ~ but it is nice to have the option, it just depends, as Dani said.
So I agree with you both on the matter. ~ Though I'd like see more hard-core vanilla standards also heh.

[Illdo]

I'm playing Hellcore now, and now that you bring this up, I must say: sometimes I feel that today's wads (i.e. KDiZD) are a bit overloaded with all the new features. They are starting to lose the spirit of Doom.

[Kristian]

Some new features add nothing more than novelty value, while others radically steer the gameplay away from that which characterizes the game Doom. Then there are some which, if used moderately and correctly, may enhance the playing experience.

In other words, I much prefer the old-school maps and gameplay, but now and then, there comes along a newer creation which also appeals to me.

[JohnnyRancid]

I'm playing Hellcore now, and now that you bring this up, I must say: sometimes I feel that today's wads (i.e. KDiZD) are a bit overloaded with all the new features. They are starting to lose the spirit of Doom.

I kinda like how Illdo put it. When I played KDiZD, i felt like I was playing a low res doom 3. Needless to say that the way it was executed was well,, and made a good game. It just didn't feel enough like doom. Nowadays people are going above and beyond what doom could already do, but I kinda liked the limits of the doom engine, because it took a lot of brainstorming to give unique special effects. I think it's more creative to create a special effect that wasn't already defined by doom to look like it much like the vanilla doom map editing tricks page, rather than using special scripting effects that were coded to give that special effect. It just doesn't impress me as much as older wads do.

[ace]

I think that it all boils down to the natural problem of progress. As limitations (and I am applying this to not only Doom, but everything in general) gradually vanish, things become much easier to do, and those things become taken for granted--people tend to not appreciate the serious challenge once provided in order to be able to perform such feats that now practically don't exist.

That being said, I don't agree with WADs "losing the spirit of Doom" being the equivalent of making them less likeable. The fact is that not all Doom mods try to be like the original Doom. In fact, I find it's quite the opposite; it seems to me that mods are trying to be less and less like Doom. And to be honest, I don't blame the developers of said projects for taking such a route. After nearly 14 years of the same old song and dance (kill monsters, get key, kill monsters, flip switch, kill monsters, exit), I find it refreshing when a mod does something different to change the gameplay up a bit.

Granted, very few mods have ever truly changed the gameplay's dynamic to the core; even objective-driven mods serve basically the same purpose (albeit in a slightly more elaborate cover-up). But I really admire mods like Phocas Island 2, Foreverhood and the like for doing something completely new, rather than the same old stuff.

I imagine that that was more talking about mods that are closer to being like Doom, but I feel the same applies there.

Now where mods ARE certainly failing is focusing on looks instead of gameplay. Admittedly I am a normally a detail-whore when it comes to mapping, but I always at least try to make sure that the gameplay is twice as good. Unfortunately, all too many mappers put all their time into the design and then skimp out on the gameplay when it comes time to put it together. I would say that this applies to KDiZD. I did for the most part find it enjoyable, but the gameplay brought relatively nothing new to the table (though it is very safe to say that a great deal of the disappointment was due to its being overhyped).

So I guess I both agree and disagree, based on the different points you've made. But I do see what you're talking about, for sure.

[JohnnyRancid]

Oh yeah I can't disagree that all the new game play effects are somewhat cool. But they got pretty old pretty quick. At least for me. It really does bother me how all the many many sectors and scripts and stuff are setting the new standard for doom maps.

I played a wad about a month ago called Alpha Invasion (a wad specifically for skulltag) and it was off the walls with particles, deep water, recolored textures, and loads of scripts, but the maps alone were junk. There was no unique creativity in almost any of them. Just good scripts. I was not impressed.