Is the community out of ideas and motivation?

[Ravick]

You see... don't "bash" me for saying that, but I agree with cortlong50 in this thing of new/newbie projects being chastised. I guess it takes many new minds from the hobby of making Doom mods, and, with then, the good ideas they'd have after learning more and being able to make good projects. (Of course, however, many people can deal with the criticism and use it to evolve their skills.)

_

About ideas, don't be angry with me by saying this too (I'm aware I'm just a relatively newbie in the community), but, you see, we have an engine/source port with an almost infinite potential for making new stuff. We can improve monsters AI and have complex events with heavy scripted gameplays, but we almost don't use it. I mean, it is very common to still have the "oldschool" Doom style of opening-a-door-and-have-several-dumb-monsters-'A_chasing'-in-zigzag. It is not bad (actually, it is barrels o' fun to play), but I guess some new things could be done with this potential. See, I'm not saying that people should make use of this potential just for using it, but we could try to explore more this stuff.

For example, most new monsters follow the A_Chase-and-eventually-Missile behavior. Most new maps lower a sector and releases some dozens of this dumb monsters between the player and a key or a switch. Of course it is fun to play, and we all love that (I'm not saying that it is bad, please don't take me wrong), but, if the complain are about new ideas, I guess it is a relevant point.

My feeling is that the community in general has always cared a lot about maps detailing, but not so much in unforeseen events in the maps; And also cared a lot about visual effects for the actors, but not so much in actor's behavior/AI.

Again, maybe I'm wrong, and I'm not criticizing other modders, I'm just wondering about this complain of "out of ideas" stuff.

[Blue Shadow]

My "code" is: mod what you want and let others mod what they want. If someone likes a certain idea and wants to stick with it, we as a community, have no right to tell him to do X and Y because we, for some reason, don't like or bored of it. This is a hobby for them and us. We do it as a recreational thing for our own enjoyment.

[kodi]

Doom and HL1 have had some of the most imaginative modders in history imho.

By virtue of being a retro game, it's kind of natural Doom modders are drawn to retro/nostalgic type gameplay, since otherwise they'd more likely be interested in Unreal or cryengine or whatnot. Ravick made some good points though, it's possible to be innovative without re-inventing the wheel.

My own pet project I'd have to say is pretty unique, but it's extremely unlikey I'll ever finish the whole planned thing. A complete and polished demo/prelude to a future "real game" is certainly in the realm of possibilities though.

[DoomRater]

I've played Brutal Doom once or twice. It was fun when I played it, but I never really loaded it more than that. I'd rather play a squad based overhead shooter where you kick some serious ass with a melee guy running into the fray to cut down all the weak ones, heavy support guy setting up turrets and pushing with a slow but powerful dual cannon setup, a sniper targeting high profile targets, a summoner in the rear making things into an RTS, maybe a walking radar and a walking stat booster to top things off?

[cortlong50]

blue shadow and ravick nailed it.

i make what i make, im not the biggest COD fan...at all. i dont even like the game, but i made the mod because i made the mod, and it feels different enough for me to feel the doom underneath it, while still utilizing the brutal doomf eatures i like, nixing the ones i dont and giving you enough firepower to play how you want (like how ww was saying..i play tacticool style so its my cup of tea) and there are new thigns coming out, its just a matter of being open to whats new and not feeling like "this is what i like i want more or something brand spanking new". my mod isnt new by any means, but there are things that are...map packs i think are really the way into new thigns, the interface is there and i dont want it to change, it hink its up to the mappers to vary the gameplay...and lately i really feel like theyre doing it.
...the thing i dont understand is WHY HAVENT I PLAYED A FULL URBAN AND SUBURBAN FIREFIGHT WAD!?! im over going around bases that are mazes (sandy-esque if you will)....i want some god damn real world setting stuff!
im working on it now, but im not the best mapper in the world...anyone interested in getting together for a project? its not different but its unique (trust me...ive looked everywhere for a smooth running one) and its just something that doesnt exist haha. like a really killer big map, every house explorable...urban wonderland....with all the doom intact.
anyway...its jsut a matter of keeping your ear to the ground, letting people make the cheesy things they want, and the awesomet things they want, letting people learn by leaving your mod open to base modification...and being nice to the new guys, people were nice ot me and now this is what i do. some new dudes come in and people are just straight rude. and people bash brutal...but it got me seriously into modding, it made me really want to start doing it, and get involved. so be nice, let people play how they play and help people when they ask for it...and download their stuff and play it. if it sucks help em make it better, if its good let em know. it makes my day when someone digs opinhuman.
im done. sorry for the rant hahaha.
typos....i know.

[twinkieman93]

I've played Brutal Doom once or twice. It was fun when I played it, but I never really loaded it more than that. I'd rather play a squad based overhead shooter where you kick some serious ass with a melee guy running into the fray to cut down all the weak ones, heavy support guy setting up turrets and pushing with a slow but powerful dual cannon setup, a sniper targeting high profile targets, a summoner in the rear making things into an RTS, maybe a walking radar and a walking stat booster to top things off?

Adept, Rigger with the burst fire shotgun, Street Samurai with proficiency in rifles, and a Shaman for those last two roles. Yeah, I've been playing a lot of Shadowrun Returns lately. >.>

[DOOMERO-21]

Tormentor i dont think is a problem of motivation, the problem is the time. I saw great wads like Alien Colonial Marines and others very impressive. I know by experience a wad with the quality of those wads need a lot of time and resources. I am very sure the community have a lot of ideas, but make that idea "possible" is very hard.

[cortlong50]

Man has a point.
I think there's a lot of new jacks making stuff that they haven't posted yet.
I'm one of em.

[Phobus]

I'm with Torm on this one - aside from Pirate Doom (still need to get round to playing that), Reelism, some of what Pyroscourge is doing and ZDCMP#2, there really is nothing that interests me coming out of this community. Having gotten bored of endless vanilla-compatible or -esque megawads coming out of doomworld, I've basically been off doom for this year. From my POV the doom community needs to integrate more. The large supply of gameplay and weapon mods from this community and others within the "ZDoom Family" really need matching to mapsets to make properly fresh experiences that play and balance well. The 32-map traditional megawad feels stale to me now, so I'd want mapsets that are as long as they need to be and embrace more varied ideas. As things stand Doom just isn't giving me what I want, so I've been exploring other games and largely getting that freshness and satisfaction.

[Graf Zahl]

I'm with Torm on this one - aside from Pirate Doom (still need to get round to playing that), Reelism, some of what Pyroscourge is doing and ZDCMP#2, there really is nothing that interests me coming out of this community. Having gotten bored of endless vanilla-compatible or -esque megawads coming out of doomworld, I've basically been off doom for this year.

I couldn't agree more. It's an endless supply of more of the same, which is truly getting tedious. I liked Back to Saturn X because at least it didn't slavishly follow the typical conventions but it still wasn't enough. What was the last great mod that got released, using more advanced features? There have been a few single mod WADs but aside from them and Winter's Fury I seriously cannot remember anything that really caught my interest over the last 3 years. But Doomworld seems to revel in this sea of boredom and make it look to mappers that this is the only right way.

So how did this happen? 10 years ago this community was full of fresh ideas and experimenting a lot. But it seems at some point in time a switch was thrown and all of a sudden all those retro-kids came out of their holes going back to the roots, and the more experimental people gradually vanished.

Needless to say, this is a very large part of the reason why I scaled back my involvement in engine development so much. 4-5 years ago I had the feeling that what I did still mattered. I don't have that anymore.

From my POV the doom community needs to integrate more. The large supply of gameplay and weapon mods from this community and others within the "ZDoom Family" really need matching to mapsets to make properly fresh experiences that play and balance well.

Oh yes! There's this large supply of stuff but what can it be played with? Mostly the same old worn out stuff I don't care about anymore. Ugh...

The 32-map traditional megawad feels stale to me now, so I'd want mapsets that are as long as they need to be and embrace more varied ideas.

The 32-map megawad has been feeling stale to me since it was invented. I don't get it why some people are hell bent on filling all the map slots instead of focussing on a smaller number of maps and doing more with them.

As things stand Doom just isn't giving me what I want, so I've been exploring other games and largely getting that freshness and satisfaction.

Please name those other games. Personally, I can't warm up to all that modern stuff. It's all looks (the more realistic, the better) but that doesn't appeal to me. I prefer the simpler looks from games of the 90's.

[Phobus]

Well Graf, these choices might not appeal to you in quite the same way as they do to me, but I've had a lot of enjoyment from the following over the time I've not really been on Doom:
Serious Sam 3: BFE
Serious Sam HD (both First Encounter and Second)
Rise of the Triad 2013
Forza Motorsport 4 (XBox 360)
Dirt 3 (XBox 360)
LA Noire (XBox 360)
Duke Nukem 3D Megaton Edition
Postal 2

The racers are mostly for the fast-paced, bite-sized arcade feel, whilst the shooters all fill the various niches that Doom used to hold very nicely. Getting into Serious Sam in particular was a real eye opener as to why I've never been too fond of slaughter in Doom. LA Noire was more because I never finished it the first time around, plus it's sufficiently different from my usual gaming to be a very fresh experience. I've got plenty of other games (recent and classic) over the last two years that I'm yet to play, although I anticipate a couple of duds in there somewhere (Serious Sam 2, for example. Plays pretty well, but damn is the styling and "humour" a detractor...)

[LilWhiteMouse]

I couldn't agree more. It's an endless supply of more of the same, which is truly getting tedious.

I'm curious, have I done anything you liked? Or is my work too far out of the box for your taste?

[DoomRater]

Pretty much anything Mouse has done lately has interested me even if I haven't played it myself. If anything, I feel like I should experiment with multipart actors and named ACS scripts and see what sort of things I can accomplish. Multipart actors can easily make a giant boss. Named ACS scripts should allow a lot of the ACS stuff I didn't want to attempt beforehand for weapon mods. Since whatever maps I've made have little to zero criticism and are so few and far between that I haven't bothered to really invest in whether they're okay or not... I don't think I'll be making any sort of maps anytime soon.

A lot of experiments are underlooked and never get released, too. It might have been more common when modding was just starting because nobody knew how to make reloading weapons in ZDoom yet, so once that was figured out there was a HUGE craze for reloading weapons (and suddenly, people understood why you would want to choose between weapon magazines and not)... So some experiments actually led to all sorts of short crazes. Then again experimentation sometimes is just "bullshit your way through until you understand what you wanna do".

[twinkieman93]

Hehe, Mouse, I wouldn't say your ideas are out of the box. I'd say they're in a different box entirely. You're just that much farther ahead of everyone else when it comes to the things you've accomplished. Multi-part actors that move smoothly and seamlessly, and truly on-the-fly randomized levels? People have been wanting to do things like that for ages, I'm sure, and you've actually gone and done them!

That said, you guys, this is a Doom forum, and the vast majority of the people who come here do so because they like playing Doom. You say the Doom community is in a rut because it keeps cranking out megawads and more Doom-like content on the regular, but did you ever stop to consider that it's because this is the Doom community and as such they would very much like to play Doom? The modders are just doing what the community wants, is all. I'm not saying that catering to the consumers is necessarily the right thing to do, that's just what's going on.

[Dynamo]

[quote="twinkieman93"]That said, you guys, this is a Doom forum, and the vast majority of the people who come here do so because they like playing Doom. You say the Doom community is in a rut because it keeps cranking out megawads and more Doom-like content on the regular, but did you ever stop to consider that it's because this is the Doom community and as such they would very much like to play Doom? The modders are just doing what the community wants, is all. I'm not saying that catering to the consumers is necessarily the right thing to do, that's just what's going on.[/quote]

No it isn't, because otherwise this thread wouldnt exist. Clearly a part of the community is concerned by the current state of events and just because the majority doesnt seem to express concern in the same way, it doesnt mean the problem isnt there.

Overall I just think there has to be a balance. Back in the day, wads like STRAIN or cyberdreams (or more recently scientist 2) successfully expanded on the doom gameplay while remaining faithful to the original experience. They didnt have dumb goals such as creating perfect architecture or putting 50000 monsters in a map, but merely offered an experience that was similar to doom, but different and expanded in various ways. Now you have wads that try to emulate the classics of days gone but they feel like cheap copies that fail to recapture what made those wads great, because they apply a very much conservative approach to wads that didnt follow it and were trying to be innovative instead.

On the other hand. wads that break the tradition end up being completely different than what they are based off, and while that isnt necessarily a bad thing, it isnt surprising that people on a doom forum want something closer to the original experience, but with zdoom features.

Ultimately its all about creativity and not attempting to make the best possibly looking mapset that runs on vanilla limits or the weapons mod with the most original and complex acs code ever. stuff like what lilwhitemouse makes for example is in a league of its own and doesnt feel like a rehash, but, hell, typing this from android was painful and I think you can see the point I'm trying to make