Doom's color palette - What would you change?

[Craneo]

So I was talking in a Discord server and the topic of Doom's colors came out, and in general, Doom's palette is not the greatest, I still love the palette to some extent, but I do feel it could be better, so I made some changes:



Which makes me think, what would you change about the palette? in my case I feel some colors were redundant, some too strong and some could of used having more shades (this is not a project, I just want to discuss the limited color palette and how would you enhance it).

[Enjay]

The blues have always been a weak area. It has a range of very strong blues (which are cool for cyber/electronic/computer stuff) but no good subtle ones. It's the most commonly altered range in custom palettes.

Honestly though, these days I really don't care about the palette at all. A png in its own palette (or true colour) is my personal favourite for an enhanced palette.

To me, it also really stands out if a graphic from another game/source has been forced into the Doom palette. The artefacts and compromises that this causes are so characteristic that they can actually rip me out of my immersion as I consciously register "oh, that's been forced into the Doom palette" (and it generally looks pretty bad to IMO).

[Craneo]

Well, it is true that nowadays we have the tech for truecolor sprites and textures, which is nice, but a part of me is still fond to the idea of color palettes personally (I used to play a lot with the palette tonenmap actually lol)

[Gez]

The thing that always annoyed me about Doom's palette is that the blue range is split in two. From 192 to 207 and then from 240 to 247.

[Matt]

What Enjay said about the blues, plus the red-white range might look a bit better if it were just a little bit more orange...

[leileilol]

Scale down the gradient of the skintones a bit (which seems directly lifted from Deluxe Paint) to drop some aqua/purples in.

Adjust a couple redundant indexes

[neoworm]

I started swindling palettes for HeXen by adding ranges for certain sprites that feels like they should belong to HeXen, but don't. So it keeps the feel of 16bit palette while having more colors than 256. Using just true color textures and sprites clash with the rest of the game.

[blealolealoleal]

If you look at all the palettes on something like this page
https://lospec.com/palette-list
They usually encourage hue-shifting. Just look at "The Perfect Palette" https://lospec.com/palette-list/the-perfect-palette-20
Doom doesn't do this because its art style is... Well, it's the Doom art style. I'm not going to talk shit about it when I'm sure plenty of people here actually like it, but I will let it be known that I kiiiiiiiiiinda hate it.
Even though it has less colors, I much prefer something like Poom's palette.

[Gez]

That lospec site seems to be all about pixel art, and Doom isn't pixel art (maybe that's why you don't like it): it's low-res digitized photos.

[neoworm]

For Doom being 16bit wasn't stylistic choice, it was technological limitation. If they could go fullcolor back then, they would. And yet it created a atmosphere and style that today games have to achieve by careful colorgrading and other post processes. So most rules how to create good palette for a pixel art game are kinda mute. Yet having premade color ranges that do limit how your art looks is really good for consistent artstyle.