Woolie Wool wrote:Keep in mind that I played Wolfenstein before I played Doom, where all the enemies are hitscan, so I guess I'm just more used to dealing with hitscans.
The thing is, the hitscans in Wolfenstein weren't nearly as bad as the ones in here. I'll quote terminus' tumblr:
TerminusEst13 wrote:Well, in that case, Wolfenstein 3D also had a very unique feature that not a lot of other games have, a wonderful property known as “damage dropoff”.
TerminusEst13 wrote:See, the way Wolfenstein did damage wasn’t just “get shot, get hit, take damage”, the bullets were made out of bullshittium and were affected by distance. The farther the distance the target was, the lower their damage and hitchance. If you stand right next to a Nazi, you’re going to get shredded because his bullets will all hit and they will all do oh-my-car levels of damage. If you stand on the other end of the hallway, the bullets not only will rarely hit you but even if they do you’re looking at maybe a fraction of damage.
TerminusEst13 wrote:
Wolfenstein’s maps, for the most part, were long and wide open corridors, so there was often plenty of room to distance yourself so that you could “avoid” Nazi fire while returning it. Even if you opened up a door and saw a Nazi right there, there was always time to open fire right away and drill them rather than getting shredded for half your life.
That's the big thing. In Wolfenstein, you could always "avoid" everything if you knew what to do. You can't here. Any kind of open battlefield-Hell, even
basic TNT Evilution, an
IWAD has balance issues with this thing.
Woolie Wool wrote:
Also, when in doubt, retreat, just like in Wolfenstein.
Ok, now do it in a map which doesn't have anywhere to retreat to. For instance, refer to Map 20 of TNT. I'm getting murdered in the
first room. Or better yet, the author has a well choreographed Skullkey trap, which seals off the room upon getting the key. Where exactly do I run to?
Really, this is almost as bad as Blood. Blood, for the uneducated, was a Build Engine game alongside Duke Nukem 3D. Well, it suffered from hitscan cultists, and really, those cultists ruined it for both me and Terminus. I can't play having to deal with that many hitscanners, and to make it worse, they had dynamite, meaning they could flush you out no matter what. Plus, they had super-fast reflexes meaning taking damage was unavoidable.
This isn't fun.
TL;DR: Doom really cannot handle hitscan spam, unless you severely nerf the hitscanners to Wolfenstein levels of weakness, which means being able to hide from them even when they see you.
Let's see. Traps. Traps of any sort are near impossible now. You know, stuff like "Grab-Key-Room-Shuts-Monsters-Teleport" traps, since you simply can't position yourself to escape them-traps are set up in that fashion to force you into a position where dodging is required. This is why the demon replacements doing damage can really be a bad thing; in traps that surround you with them, the pinkies/dogs go from "threatening" to "absurdly lethal death trap".
The nerf to the SSG was too much. It's nigh-unusable now. Fires too slowly, and does too little damage. Why is this such a big issue? Because modern map authors know how powerful the SSG is and thus balances maps to it's tier of firepower. That's the things most good mods do; even if you don't get the SSG, you
must have a weapon capable of filling the power gap.
Why do the mancubi replacements have 1000 health? Given that the most common weapon you're supposed to use against them is -surpise- the SSG, which now goes from taking 6-8 shells to kill one to taking 14 shells to kill one. This really starts eating your ammo, which is one of the big problems I have: why are zombie ammo drops inconsistent now? The zombieman, shotgunguy, and chaingunguy should have 100% chance of ammo drop, everything else optional, because again, maps are balanced around this.
EDIT: Also, the hitler ghosts shot fireballs
TL;DR: you can't try to totally transform Doom simply because map authors started balancing around Doom, and trying to change too much ruins that balance