There are, by far, a LOT of doom balance mods that simply tweak the way the game is played.
PARKOUR was proof that with no extra assets you could literally rewrite the entire gameplay of doom, while still being doom.
WEAPONS OF SATURN was a nice modernization of doom without going over the top, adding features here and there.
FASPONS kept things arcadey while adding value.
HIDEOUS DESTRUCTOR made every shot count.
BEAUTIFUL DOOM stands out to me as the most faithful recreation/enhancement of doom, adding some minor features here and there and ALSO having a modern take. to me this is the winner.
There are many many more that added some lamps and some revamped sound, and a weapon tweak here or there.
We've had many mods but is there really a consensus? it seems like there's very wild ideas on how doom should be revamped.
What are some of you guy's thoughts on how doom mods have sought to balance the game and some of your inspirations and favorites, and if you had the time and know how, how would YOU make the most perfectly balanced vanilla doom remix mod?
My ideas:
Spoiler:
If I were going to redo doom, I think there are some very basic things we all can agree on.
1.) Vertical inaccuracy matters in a world of mouselook and no autoaim. We've all shotgun sniped zombies all the way across the map on 12 or 15 or 19, or any other large map you can think of.
2.) The pistol is literally useless once you get the chaingun. you can tap snipe with the chaingun just as well if not better than with a pistol.
3.) Melee is also tough even if you go berserk. you just get shredded really quickly because you're so dang slow.
4.) rockets are basically just double shotgun bombs you shoot from a distance.
5.) The double shotgun is love, it's life. and it almost always is preferable than the shotgun even if its so damn inaccurate.
6.) The plasma rifle is hands down the best weapon shot per shot in the game. It's only downfall is that the projectiles are slow.
7.) The BFG code makes absolutely no fucking sense on any planet. WHY DOESNT THE BALL SEND TRACERS FROM ITSELF?!?!?!
8.) I'm so glad TOM HALL left and did Rise of the Triad, because ROTT is awesome and his wild ideas only worked in that drugged fueled setting - doom is great because it's streamlined and condensed (as far as 90's gaming goes).
So, if I were going to do a legitimate rebalancing and reimagining of doom (NOT like lethal doom)...
a.) Doomguy would have a knife. not fists, not a chainsaw (WTH?!?) a knife, and some kicks to push the baddies away. melee with damage and reach. He also would use a good gun butt now and again.
b.) The chaingun sprite is ugly and it's underwhelming as a weapon, and the pistol is useless. I'd replace it with a rifle and just make it do more damage (10d3) and more accurate and smoosh them together. if there was a pistol in my mod, it would be on a bound key and not selectable by scrolling. by and large, the rifle SHOULD be the go to gun for the doomguy for long range engagements, the shotgun for close work, and rockets and plasma for big stuff.
c.) shotguns are so much more ammo efficient than any gun in the game, which is weird because that's not how real life would work at all, but that being said even more weird is double barreled shotguns in space. yeah, it's cool, "oooo a space cowboy" but a modern tactical semi shotgun that had fairly good spread (4x4), 3d3x9 damage, and fired about as fast as the quake shotgun - basically just like the quake shotgun, then yeah, smoosh those puppies together too.
d.) rockets are not something you can hold 10 of, let alone 100. but lets not be pretentious. I really would like a single shot rocket launcher that would do the trick. I'd like to shoot a cybie in 5 shots and kill it, and have splash damage and shrapnel that can do something. like, a special use weapon.
e.) So the bfg and the plasma gun are great guns, but why do i have to choose between them? if i had a big ass rocket launcher to blow single targets up, a rifle to shoot stuff at long range, a shotgun to shoot stuff at short range, then what role would plasma do better than that? I really think making the plasma gun a railgun sniper, maybe if you hold it down its a deathray, with a plasmathrower secondary?
In my vision, doomguy would have a knife, a rifle, a shotgun, a rocketlauncher, and a massively balanced and utilitarian plasma gun. and maybe a pistol. but every gun would have a weapon butt, zoom, a quick pistol option in case you're out of ammo, and berserk would actually be worth using because you can use it with darn near any weapon you had.
I've always felt that if the game isn't as oppressive to play as possible, it's not balanced well. Alot of these tweaks I like, and when I rebalance the game for myself I almost always crank up weapon damage as well, so as to make the games a really fast moving glass cannon competition, with very durable bosses with wide varieties of attacks. Possibly one thing I'd like is dash mechanics, mantling, and crouchslide in every doom game, alongside some sort of stun/takedown combo that makes it possible to remove light enemies in close range when executed correctly, but opening you to harm when executed poorly. Lots of ideas how to make this occur, none of which have been developed. One thing Doom needs is a grenade launcher, which could fill the role the Rocket Launcher filled if you lower the ammo of the latter, but with more limitations.
Drake Raider wrote:One thing Doom needs is a grenade launcher, which could fill the role the Rocket Launcher filled if you lower the ammo of the latter, but with more limitations.
It does have a grenade launcher. The one from Knee Deep In ZDoom.
But personally for me, my favorite mods are usually some kind of visual HD mod, like Smooth Doom or this Liquid HD texture pack I found. I also love new weapons and enemies, but I'm very picky.
Crudux Cruo wrote:c.) shotguns are so much more ammo efficient than any gun in the game, which is weird because that's not how real life would work at all,
Open spoiler for minor off-topic pedantry about shotguns.
Spoiler:
Not sure what you're referring to here, but I'd just like to point out that shotguns in real life are absolutely devastating against soft targets, out to about 50m, and can still potentially cause problems out to 200m. The fan pattern is typically more like a 2 degree cone instead of a 20-degree cone, a single 00-buck pellet is basically a slightly slower, slightly less aerodynamic 9mm/.357 bullet, and a 12ga shell could have 7-12 pellets fired at once. It's not like in games where the shots fan out and disappear at 10m.
(Hideous Destructor is one that gets this spot-on accurate, by the way).
The reason shotguns aren't used more often in real life is for two reasons:
Typical extended combat engagements happen at ranges between 100-500m, outside the effective range of most shotguns.
Shotshells are usually bad at penetrating body armor, which is now relatively cheap and accessible even for guerilla forces and civilians.
At the engagement ranges we typically see in Doom (roughly 5-30m), against unarmored biological enemies, shotguns are an extremely solid choice (even with the ridiculously high unrealistic spread values).
All that said, I know this thread is about fun game balance, not necessarily realism. I just wanted to clarify a couple things.
Crudux Cruo wrote:c.) shotguns are so much more ammo efficient than any gun in the game, which is weird because that's not how real life would work at all,
Open spoiler for minor off-topic pedantry about shotguns.
Spoiler:
Not sure what you're referring to here, but I'd just like to point out that shotguns in real life are absolutely devastating against soft targets, out to about 50m, and can still potentially cause problems out to 200m. The fan pattern is typically more like a 2 degree cone instead of a 20-degree cone, a single 00-buck pellet is basically a slightly slower, slightly less aerodynamic 9mm/.357 bullet, and a 12ga shell could have 7-12 pellets fired at once. It's not like in games where the shots fan out and disappear at 10m.
(Hideous Destructor is one that gets this spot-on accurate, by the way).
The reason shotguns aren't used more often in real life is for two reasons:
Typical extended combat engagements happen at ranges between 100-500m, outside the effective range of most shotguns.
Shotshells are usually bad at penetrating body armor, which is now relatively cheap and accessible even for guerilla forces and civilians.
At the engagement ranges we typically see in Doom (roughly 5-30m), against unarmored biological enemies, shotguns are an extremely solid choice (even with the ridiculously high unrealistic spread values).
All that said, I know this thread is about fun game balance, not necessarily realism. I just wanted to clarify a couple things.
haha "pedantery" may be a fair statement. My issue with shotguns in doom is that they're hallway clearers that spray laser like pellets through solid matter, even doing as much damage per pellet as a actual bullet! In real life, not only are shotguns easy to shoot at least 3 shots a minute ( i myself can shoot a 7+1 round tube from my maverick 88 in about 2 seconds), they're accurate and largely single target affairs.
Because of this, doom handles them weird. I LOVE THE WAY HIDEOUS DESTRUCTOR HANDLES THEM.
If doom absorbed all pellets into a single target and had faster firing rates and less damage per shell, i'd like the balance more in a realistic sense.
But as it is, my largest pet peeve is that bullet weapons and even rockets take a back seat to shotguns in this game, at least until you get plasma.
I'd get rid of the pistol, or add/overhaul some major stuff in the core gameplay so that the one advantage of a pistol (it is small) means something.
Player starts with fists, which take no more than 3 ticks between pressing fire and the fist reaching maximum extension. Player momentum, punch placement and distance at moment of impact (sweet spot not too close nor too far) should all increase damage until a good player can fairly consistently one-shot imps.
The way HD keeps shotguns from being super-penetrators is pretty much all on the monster end (bunch of extra code to make it stay at full size and shootable at the moment of death), but this can be replicated purely on the weapon end by doing a bunch of linetraces, spawning blood as appropriate and then applying the total damage all at once. (One neat advantage of doing it this way is that you won't need any additional code to let the blast gib enemies.) The lack of multi-kill shots would mean we'd have to make ammo more plentiful and increase the fire rate, so the ultimate result may look a lot like a more powerful version of Quake's shotgun.
I've played around with this in MDT already, but the SSG could get rid of the extra pellets and still be a theoretically better weapon by having wider spread and faster reload (and significantly higher maximum potential DPS), making it a much better crowd control circlestrafing weapon leaving the SG viable for more precision work. This would weaken the SSG considerably compared to its current grossly OP state, so overall damage could be increased or monster HP reduced.
I'd replace the chaingun with an SMG with a similar fire rate, or maybe a bit faster but with reload. No rifles since balancing that against buckshot is going to get us into HD dev hell real quick.
My 2 big problems with the RL:
1. the way it works, I always have to take way too much time to line up a shot that maximizes its efficiency (exploding in the middle of a group rather than on the edge), and by the time I can line up such a shot I probably could've taken out as many additional baddies using another weapon at significantly lower risk to myself. It's a wonderful weapon in deathmatch where you can cover escape routes and gradually wear someone down to nothing, but in single/coop I always feel like anytime I use it there was another weapon that could've done the job better.
2. it's regularly placed as a boss duel weapon even though it's the one weapon the boss monsters have a special resistance against.
So, some ideas for that:
- make the rocket do an initial (fairly large, may sometimes need to do 3 direct hits to kill an archvile the way shotguns work on pinkies now) amount of damage, then slow down, and if it has enough velocity remaining (and the initial victim is dead) it continues moving for ~128 units before exploding (256,256).
- make the cyberdemon and spider mastermind immune only to any explosions they themselves cause.
- allow player to carry 10 rockets, 20 with backpack.
- replace rockets with shells, rocketboxes with individual rockets.
- add a reload animation to the RL that's long enough that no one will ever accidentally fire twice.
- increase rocket speed to 40.
I'd leave plasma as it is and increase the damage of everything else to balance against it if need be.
The cognitive dissonance with the BFG spray direction is most easily addressed by having the spray happen before the ball comes out, though that makes the subsequent detonation much less satisfying. One possible alternative is to have the detonation damage everything that:
1. has LOS with both the ball and the shooter; and
2. is closer to both ball and shooter than ball and shooter are to each other, with damage decreasing the greater the latter distance is.
I imagine a pool of damage being distributed across all shootable actors that are caught in this, with a bit more damage going towards anything that's actually in the line between the ball and the shooter.
If the ball detonates out of LOS with the shooter, it can just explode for a bit less potential damage overall.
Ah yeah, I would like to see the gameplay mod with somewhat more realistic takes too.
Shotguns being ineffective against armored foes would be quite interesting, since they are useful to handle any enemy in vanilla doom and most gameplay mods.
I'd just like to throw in another recommendation for Beautiful Doom's enhanced weapons, seriously love what that mod does. Doesn't mess with vanilla damage values at all, but the kick and shotgun melee makes Berserk packs feel way more useful, the pistol altfire gives the weapon a much needed buff and the chaingun altfire is pretty much balanced by how little ammo the chaingun has anyways. It really almost feels like a "quality of life" mod with how little it messes with the way the game plays.
Matt wrote:Just some arbitrarily organized thoughts...
Spoiler:
I'd get rid of the pistol, or add/overhaul some major stuff in the core gameplay so that the one advantage of a pistol (it is small) means something.
Player starts with fists, which take no more than 3 ticks between pressing fire and the fist reaching maximum extension. Player momentum, punch placement and distance at moment of impact (sweet spot not too close nor too far) should all increase damage until a good player can fairly consistently one-shot imps.
The way HD keeps shotguns from being super-penetrators is pretty much all on the monster end (bunch of extra code to make it stay at full size and shootable at the moment of death), but this can be replicated purely on the weapon end by doing a bunch of linetraces, spawning blood as appropriate and then applying the total damage all at once. (One neat advantage of doing it this way is that you won't need any additional code to let the blast gib enemies.) The lack of multi-kill shots would mean we'd have to make ammo more plentiful and increase the fire rate, so the ultimate result may look a lot like a more powerful version of Quake's shotgun.
I've played around with this in MDT already, but the SSG could get rid of the extra pellets and still be a theoretically better weapon by having wider spread and faster reload (and significantly higher maximum potential DPS), making it a much better crowd control circlestrafing weapon leaving the SG viable for more precision work. This would weaken the SSG considerably compared to its current grossly OP state, so overall damage could be increased or monster HP reduced.
I'd replace the chaingun with an SMG with a similar fire rate, or maybe a bit faster but with reload. No rifles since balancing that against buckshot is going to get us into HD dev hell real quick.
My 2 big problems with the RL:
1. the way it works, I always have to take way too much time to line up a shot that maximizes its efficiency (exploding in the middle of a group rather than on the edge), and by the time I can line up such a shot I probably could've taken out as many additional baddies using another weapon at significantly lower risk to myself. It's a wonderful weapon in deathmatch where you can cover escape routes and gradually wear someone down to nothing, but in single/coop I always feel like anytime I use it there was another weapon that could've done the job better.
2. it's regularly placed as a boss duel weapon even though it's the one weapon the boss monsters have a special resistance against.
So, some ideas for that:
- make the rocket do an initial (fairly large, may sometimes need to do 3 direct hits to kill an archvile the way shotguns work on pinkies now) amount of damage, then slow down, and if it has enough velocity remaining (and the initial victim is dead) it continues moving for ~128 units before exploding (256,256).
- make the cyberdemon and spider mastermind immune only to any explosions they themselves cause.
- allow player to carry 10 rockets, 20 with backpack.
- replace rockets with shells, rocketboxes with individual rockets.
- add a reload animation to the RL that's long enough that no one will ever accidentally fire twice.
- increase rocket speed to 40.
I'd leave plasma as it is and increase the damage of everything else to balance against it if need be.
The cognitive dissonance with the BFG spray direction is most easily addressed by having the spray happen before the ball comes out, though that makes the subsequent detonation much less satisfying. One possible alternative is to have the detonation damage everything that:
1. has LOS with both the ball and the shooter; and
2. is closer to both ball and shooter than ball and shooter are to each other, with damage decreasing the greater the latter distance is.
I imagine a pool of damage being distributed across all shootable actors that are caught in this, with a bit more damage going towards anything that's actually in the line between the ball and the shooter.
If the ball detonates out of LOS with the shooter, it can just explode for a bit less potential damage overall.
This is really interesting actually coming from you, because you've had the perspective of turning Doom into a milsim - which is no small task!
I really loved the way you handled shotguns. I also would like a beefier but more limited RL and a more logical BFG.
If you ever decided to do a vanilla remix/redux style mod i'd really love to see it. Xaser did Parkour all in code (correct me if im wrong, but the 64k contest back with code-only or simple tweaks, didn't that influence HD?)
namsan wrote:Ah yeah, I would like to see the gameplay mod with somewhat more realistic takes too.
Shotguns being ineffective against armored foes would be quite interesting, since they are useful to handle any enemy in vanilla doom and most gameplay mods.
I'm trying to build the courage to start a mod based on my experiences in released and unreleased mods, but i'm trying to wrap my head around zscript/ C language principles, which is by no means easy for me. In order to really turn doom "modern", a health script, stamina, armor/unarmored damage, player armor, and weapon penetration/damage types would need to be present. HD is good for what it does, but i invision something less than that, but more than brutal doom's "modern replay".
However, the problem with vanilla is that it simply is an end-sum game: the person with the highest DPS wins usually. It's also why so many people love it, but if we're all being honest all of us here in the community wished doom had more oompf sometimes like duke nukem did. There's a reason we lurk here instead of the Duke4.net forums (i browse from time to time to play).
Mummelpuffin wrote:I'd just like to throw in another recommendation for Beautiful Doom's enhanced weapons, seriously love what that mod does. Doesn't mess with vanilla damage values at all, but the kick and shotgun melee makes Berserk packs feel way more useful, the pistol altfire gives the weapon a much needed buff and the chaingun altfire is pretty much balanced by how little ammo the chaingun has anyways. It really almost feels like a "quality of life" mod with how little it messes with the way the game plays.
agreed, that's an important aspect. In many ways, Beautiful Doom is one of my all time favorite mods.