OK Doomer

Why would I want to play Doom in 2020? The stylized abstraction of the game makes it feel like a strange, nightmarish vision you are hallucinating, which gets progressively more terrifying as the early infested techbase levels transition into hell itself.But that is just the base game, its immediate sequels (Doom II, Final Doom, Master Levels), and the add-on episodes officially/semi-officially released (Thy Flesh Consumed, No Rest For the Living, Sigil). Because the source code of the game engine is freely available (you need the proprietary game files to play it), Doom can be modded and customized to fit almost every imaginable taste and niche. There is even a graphically intensive total conversion mod that hardly looks recognizable anymore (looks a lot like Resident Evil and Silent Hill) and transforms Doom into a survival horror game. Besides being fun to play, I find the contrasts between them interesting as a case study in the balancing of tradition and innovation in legacy socio-technical systems.The incredibly controversial but popular mod Brutal Doom and its forks Ali’s Brutal Doom and Project Brutality (NB: I play the development version of PB from Github).The Zorasoft line of class-based shooter mods such as Doomzone, Zagemod, QuakeStyle ZX, and QuakeStyle Unbound. At its best (especially on higher difficulty levels), the BD style of Doom mods can be played as a hybrid of Doom and modern FPS games, perhaps an alternative timeline in which id Games anticipated the CoD/Battlefield wave of shooters and pre-empted it in the 1990s.Former human enemies that once were the weakest combatants in the monster bestiary become far deadlier opponents. Additionally, you have to reload and manage a far more complicated tactical system than the original game, forcing you to have to merge tactical styles you learned playing modern FPS titles with the older and divergent 1990s FPS style Doom pioneered. Complex Doom – in particular with the Legendary Complex Addon or Clusterfuck – is a modernization that also increases the intensity of the game and randomizes monsters and their abilities but is far more conservative in preserving the balanced experience of the “vanilla” Doom.The Zorasoft line of games presents a different philosophy for modernizing Doom play. MetaDoom, because it features monsters and weapons from across the Doom series, averages the various elements out to provide an all-in-one experience within the base Doom game engine. Zagemod lets you play as all of the protagonists from the Doom games. It’s really up to you, again, to customize your experience of playing Doom. You can play classic Doom pretty well out of the box using these game launchers, but I don’t exactly recommend it. As I have mentioned throughout this post, though the base Doom experience is similar across all variations even minor implementation differences can noticeably change the game experience. This is a critical file that contains information about where GZDoom searches for game data, what files to automatically load when Doom launches, and all of your customized options. So, Doom game data is stored in WAD (where’s all the data?) files. This is a good opportunity to show one of the niftier features of the gzdoom.ini file, which is setting PWADs to autoload with particular games.Here, you can see that I’ve set GZDoom to automatically load the heavy metal music WADs for both Doom I and Doom II whenever the respective games are launched. It doesn’t mean that Doom is the last word in FPS gaming, or that there’s no way to enjoy mods and improvements.