..also i am not a fan of brutal doom. it was a fun diversion for an hour or so, but the synergy between the weapon balance, enemy behavior and pacing of the original maps just works so much better in vanilla.
doom was about maneuverability as a defensive mechanism, while in brutal doom your only real defense is unmitigated offense. instead of carefully rationing your shots to take advantage of weapon stun/recovery properties and reduce the number of projectiles coming at you in tight spaces, its about unrelenting bullet spam to kill things as quickly as you can see them. brutal doom would work better with serious sam 'killbox' style maps that play to the mod's strengths.
i can understand that people don't see it as any sort of replacement for vanilla doom and (i hope) newcomers aren't playing it as their inaugural experience. as for me, i've been playing doom for all 20 years and i've never felt it needed any kind of 'freshening up.' when i am in the mood to play doom, i want to play
doom, not some other game wearing it's skin.
I agree entirely with this.
Sorry, I just cannot wholeheartedly recommend
Brutal Doom -
especially not for a first-time runthrough. It changes too much, and the game isn't really better for it, just
different. Imps now lunge at you. Your pistol is now an AR, rendering the chaingun redundant (also not sure if it's good for sniping like the pistol was). The BFG's complex mechanics were completely tossed out the window in favor of another, bigger rocket launcher. Plus, all of its changes mean that many other mods are entirely incompatible - pretty sure anything with a modified monster, via a DeHackEd file or what have you, is going to have issues.
It's not like I'm some purist filth, either. I regularly play the game using GZDoom - OpenGL renderer, mouselook, jumping/crouching (well, I
try to refrain from using those, generally) - not very close to the original at all. I just prefer that gameplay as set up originally to anyone trying to think they can do the same thing, only arbitrarily better.
If all you want is the gore, the guy also made a "Ketchup" mod, which only adds gore, but leaves everything else about the game alone.
As an oldschool doomer and a bit of a doom purist, and I think Brutal Doom is the greatest mod of any game EVER. I can't understand why people don't like it.
Because it's not
Doom. It's some other game wearing
Doom's clothing and everyone praising it as doing the job better, when frankly, it does it worse. (More specific complaints noted above.)
Doom is one of those games that don't look better if you up the resolution or add higher detail textures. In fact, the OpenGL ports aren't able to faithfully render Doom's lighting. Makes the game more sterile looking.
Also, the scary specter demon apparently can't be done right with OpenGL. Perhaps like how it's not until recently, with DirectX 11, that we got ports of Quake that get all the lightning oddities of the software renderer right.
Not wholly true. GZDoom does a damn good job on both of these points; the "Software" lighting method uses shaders to emulate the original lighting mechanics of, well, the software renderer, and it has several options for how to render Spectres, some of which come darn close to the real deal (although here, we'll probably never get it QUITE right...).
There are some things I don't understand. I have Doom 1&2 (Doom95 CDs) and want to expand my library to celebrate.
Which version do I need to play Brutal Doom (and other mods)? Where can I get it? Should I get Final Doom on Steam?
GZDoom for single-player,
Zandronum for online multiplayer. Zandronum's based on a much older version of ZDoom that is missing a lot of the cool things added since (like mouse control in the menus, mmm). GZDoom's done by one of the people working on ZDoom proper, and as such is generally in lockstep with all of ZDoom's latest additions - but the netcode isn't something I recommend using online (tried it once; you have to specify the number of players who will join, because the game won't start up until that quota is met, and players can't join after the fact, either - plus, it was a rather laggy affair for all parties involved).
