DOOM is the best first person shooter game of all time. What makes Doom 1993 so good, and how has the franchise has evolved with Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal? Find out here. This is the Genius of DOOM. #Doom #DoomEternal #UltimateDoom
I just started a playthrough in Doom 1 today through the easter egg in Doom Eternal. This is in stark contrast to playing the game either with cheats or the easiest difficulty back when I was barely 10 years old. It's now quite rewarding to do little things like saving ammo via berserk mode against a ton of imps while looking for first aid while at 4% health.
Agreed. I've been playing the classic DOOMs since each one came out and I never tire of them. It's odd for such a simple design I'm always finding something new to love about them even though I honestly kinda stink at them lol 😆 You can't even look up or down and its still a blast to play. I love all the classic FPSers but DOOM is the only one I keep coming back to. The only one that always has a place on my hard drive and the only one I've bought on any system that I've had that had a port of it.
I have to argue with you about E1M8. That is one of my favorite doom maps ever. Not only because of the iconic star piece which symbolizes hell all over the first episode (the secret areas), and for the first time takes you out of the comfort zone of being in a man-made base. But because of the atmosphere. The music in E1M8 is literally my favorite music piece in a doom game ever, because it is so incredibly sad. The entire game up to this point has only been hard rock and fast paced music, then all of a sudden the map starts and all you hear is sad music. You see an ocean of "pigs" (as we liked to call the Pinkies as children). You know you have rockets and you know that you can kill them all. But all the sounds they make are making you nervous. Only one survivor and you will be attacked from behind. So you grab the stuff and go up the elevator. The sad music keeps playing and all of a sudden two doors open. You hear a heart piercing shriek of demon cows, and this is the first time you ever meet them. Your blood goes cold, you have no idea what to expect. And not only do you meet one, you get to meet TWO of them at the same time. After a long and ardous batte, you finally win. And then the walls come off. You realize that there is a portal and you enter it. In a few seconds you end up in a dark room and get brutally murdered by enemies you cannot see. The sad music keeps playing. You are dead. And then the demo ends and wants you to buy the full game. (I never got to try E2 and E3 until the SNES release, so what happened in that portal was always a mystery to me until then.) And even in the full version you end up "dead". This level made an emotional impact on me as a kid, and it still does. It ends the first episode, but it is also the start of the real hell. Where it all truly begins.
@@lugbzurg8987 Google takes most of the ad revenue for themselves. If you want to support creators you like, donations are the best way. Ads are just a waste of time and bandwidth, and Google often demonetizes for no good reason, making it a very unstable source of income. Stuff like Patreon, YT memberships and Twitch subscriptions are far better than ads, but direct donations (crypto, Paypal, etc.) will always be better in terms of how much of the money goes to the actual creator.
I'll give a counter point to E1M8 being lackluster for a boss fight and if you want to make a video on this, please feel free. This boss fight, along with all the DooM 1 boss fights was more difficult in 1993 for a first time, but we pan the levels hard based on replay value. Get in the mindset of a new player and then look at the Episode and Level again. The strongest enemy so far is a Pinky at 150hp and rockets take it out in one hit most of the time. Secrets are a thing, but there's no chime to tell you it's a secret. I can't remember if there is even an alert. The episode only gives about 85 rockets, but half of them are locked up in secrets you probably won't find the first time through. Now given the episode is full of easy to gib hitscanners in clusters along with pinkys that you can now one hit kill, you have a tendancy to burn through your limited rockets after you get them. Let's assume save and reloads are a big thing too. You try to conserve your rockets, but being new to this game you find lots of hard fights and are forced to use your rockets anyway. Realistically, how many rockets do we have at the lift to the Barons? Less than 5? Did you burn them earlier in this level to kill the pinkys? So you ride the lift to the Barons with very few rockets and what do you see? Two doors that raise the moment you step towards them. Do you run or start firing? You take a green plasma blast to the face for 30-40% of your health. Ouch. Do they close and scratch you too? Now you can't get close either. You burn up what rockets you have left and it may not kill 1 of them. Now you're stuck shotgunning from range or chaingunning them. This is the first time you've seen them so you don't know their animation tells or their timing yet. You keep your distance so you can dodge, but you hit walls and take a blast to the face. You return fire away with your trusty shotgun, but 5 or 6 blasts hardly phase it. The chaingun can stun lock one if you get lucky, but the other is still coming and hurling plasma. This isn't an easy fight and as you stated, this is before auto-run. But this is also before circle-strafing was a named concept. This was before people memorized the animations and could dance up close with a shotgun. In 1993, this was an extremely difficult fight. As I said, they are all hard. The mapmakers trick you against the Cyberdemon. The best weapon against him is the plasma gun, but you're given so many rockets that you start a rocket duel. You walk out, meet him and you're dead from his first barrage. Time to try again, but this time a different door and you keep your distance. You're constantly backing up, trying to avoid splash, and returning fire. But this is 1993 and your accuracy isn't what it is today. You're doing so much in a panic that you miss quite a few shots. If you thought the Cyberdemon was hard, wait til you meet the Spider Mastermind. Sure you have a BFG now, but it takes at least 2 blasts to kill it from range. And this thing is a triple power hitscan enemy. It get's you in its sights and half your health is gone in an instant. There's not much cover to be found. Again, this is 1993 before we knew we could pre-fire the BFG so it launched when you left cover. You have to expose yourself for the firing process only to get ripped apart again. At least with the previous bosses you had a chance to dodge their projectiles.
I absolutely 100% remember played E1M8 for the first time almost 30 years ago and it was NOT easy on the first try. Never having seen a Baron of hell before and then suddenly meeting TWO? Flawless... and then By midway through Shores of Hell The Baron is just another baddie thrown in the mix. The progressive doling out of difficulty in Doom was every bit as perfect as its run-and-gun action once you get it down.
I remember when I was a kid how shocked I was the first time I heard the roar of those 2 barons. How much damage they could do with a single attack. How I laid into them with my chain gun for a seeming eternity before they went down. My family wasn't very well off, so it was over a year before I was able to get my hands on the full game (I might have even had doom 2 before I got the full doom 1, but this was nearly 30 years ago and my memory may not be the most reliable), but I must have played the first episode a hundred times. When I found that the barons are fairly common enemies in the later episodes/doom 2, it felt like a betrayal that such magnificent beasts are treated as so much cannon fodder
This bloke DooMs. We first played it on PSX and my brother got trapped on the lift and pummelled to death. "They won't die!" I thought they were Cyberdemons.
I love Unholy Cathedral. It's really not as complicated as you think. When you take the teleporters from the inside, the blinking one takes you to the Pinky room and the other 3 take you to the center. From the outside each teleporter takes you to the center while opening one of the 4 center areas.
It was so simple and yet so fiendishly clever, with proper heart and proper thought put into it. It was a labour of love designed to be shared and modded, and not a multi-million dollar franchise made of scripted cutscenes. So replayability was almost unlimited for Doom. Emergent gameplay meant that it never, ever played the same way twice.
A criticism I have of Knee Deep in the Dead which I didn’t notice until replaying it after spending years designing my own maps: a lot of the stairs are not human scale. It’s puzzling because the giant-sized risers usually have repeating textures, and it is obvious that halving the height would correct the scale. Real stairs aren’t knee-high! Maybe it should have been called Knee deep in the stairs!
The first doom game I ever played was doom 64, then later on I moved on to 2016, then doom 2, and finally eternal. I think it really goes to show how well designed the classic doom games were designed because even after doom 2016, a ridiculously fast and brutal game that's more modernized with platforming, multiplayer, and more, I still enjoyed doom 2 just as much, if not more. Oh yeah, doom 3s in there somewhere too. I loved it, but it was really easy, it took like a week and a half to beat for the first time playing, on the hardest difficulty available immediately.
That Raining Blood MIDI at the end is solid gold. Doom 3 was my introduction to the franchise after watching my dad play a few levels before having a short go myself on his savegames including Delta Labs 4, Hell and the start of the final Delta Labs level. However, I did see him play Doom 1 as well, specifically the maps Spawning Vats and Pandemonium but I never knew or forgot it was also a Doom game until years later. I thought it was more in line with Duke Nukem Advance, which I had played before that time and thought looked similar. I distinctly remember asking Dad to jump in the nukage pool in the area of Spawning Vats around 19:10 because I hated hurt floors after seeing them in Tomb Raider 1 & Duke Advance and wanted to see if you could actually swim in it and what was under the surface if you could (you couldn't, as I later found out on my own). I did play the XBLA version of Doom 1 before I completed Doom 3 however as I couldn't find nor knew how to install our original disk copy and instead I played the disk of Doom 3 BFG Edition on Xbox 360 before Doom 2 XLBA, followed by BFG Edition on PC in that order. I didn't play Final Doom until after I discovered Brutal Doom though I played Doom 64 Ex on GZ Doom before the Brutal Doom remake.
Doom WAS a horror game. the first 3 episodes. By doom 2 and episode 4 it was an action horror game. But episodes 1 trough 3 IS a horror game. especially episode 1. Main reason is, the game is trying to spook you out with tight corridors, initial lack of ammo pick ups, and situations where you have to take the game slowly in order of not getting overwhelmed. that is thrown out the window with Doom 2 and episode 4. Episode 4 still has a lot of tight corridors , but since it's not trying to spook you out but instead putting you on your toes constantly with non stop tricks, and ammo stops being an issue past the first stage, the game becomes an onslaught of enemies used as living puzzle pieces (cyberdemon in stage 2) Doom 2 is straight up giant arenas with new enemies made to work in such enviroments. Mancubus fire 3 volleys of 2 projectiles at fast speed, it's literally 3 2 handed imps in one monster. Revenant forces you to deal with homing missiles, Pain elementals make sure you always have something to deal with until you kill them. Chaingunners are the new tight corridor suprise and each hit like fast pistol zombies with double hp. Archvile can literally snipe you out of almost any distance unless you take cover. All the new enemies except the chaingunner and hell knight are made to deal with the player in big arena, while the other 2 are a weak version of an overused tank in doom 1 and a strong version of enemies that get very weak in the endgame. This is because by doom 2, the game is not a horror game anymore. It's an arena shooter.
I think the game's core design is really solid and underappreciated due to how Doom 2 added "more". Doom 2's super shotgun made pinkies far too easy to deal with, when the base shotgun took either 2 or 3 shots it was a tense fight with each pinkie. The regular shotgun was enough to kill imps almost every time so you had that little bit of uncertainty. As Doom 2 didn't have any episodes there was no soft reset 1/4 through the game, you have the Super shotgun the whole way through. The chaingunners weren't only excessive hitscanners they also inevitably introduced the chaingun into levels that you may not want the player to get the chaingun yet. The Hell Knight, Mancubus and Arachnotron are the same type of enemies as Demons and Barons (grounded projectile attacks) but just intermediate between those two in health and Damage, they don't do anything new like how the Cacodemon can fly over obstacles or the pinkie is pure melee damage. These have attacks equivalent to "fast" monsters so that's the challenge option fulfilled there. The raw damage of the Super Shotgun is in Doom 1 with the rocket launcher having pretty much the same damage but you had to think a bit more carefully about its use, it would typically miss on a moving enemy, enemies tended to stop only to attack and you couldn't use them too close. The raw close range damage also existed with the Berserker powerup which reset on each level so map designers had more control of when to grant that power.
Speaking to the music, while overall the game had good music I think that Episode one had the best tracks overall. The tracks had a nice, clear progression from the upbeat energy of E1M1 to the more subdued E1M2 and straight up gloomy E1M3 and so on.
@@Treblaine Yeah, that's because of the horror theme they went with after Doom 2. Both Doom 64 and Doom 3 were more horror themed and obviously Doom 2016 and Eternal are just pure action. Doom 2's sound track honestly didn't stick out to me as much, probably for the most part because I just didn't play it as much as the first game.
Doom is the best FPS ever made and is still very playable 28 years later. I do not think any game of its type will ever truly surpass its staying power. Sure, games today are infinitely more complicated, superior graphics, far better level design, ect...they will never surpass it. My all time favorite maps from vanilla Doom (1993) are... Episode 1- E1M2 Episode 2- E2M4 Episode 3- E3M6
What's "shocking" about the first Doom is how MAGNIFICENT the overall design is, the progression, the atmosphere. This wasn't just the start of 3D fps heyday, but a lightyear jump ahead - they got most of it right if not perfect for the first game. The level design is amazing - along with the setting - perfect progression. You are stranded, alone against overwhelming odds. It had and still has a soul - just watching these videos is enough for me to want to go back right away and play it trhough for the n'th time... Doom 2016 and Eternal are great shooters, but they dont feel like the original game at all... they just missed the atmosphere - making the "Doomguy" the biggest/most badass thing out there just rendered everything else dull - including the enemies... IMO they should have just stuck with the original concept of trying to make an action/horror type of setting. Doom 3 may have had slower gameplay, but the atmosphere was there. No one will play Doom Eternal or 2016 in 10+ years, while original Doom will still be at the top.
Agreed. I think Doom is very similar in this regard to Super Mario Bros 1 -- a _very_ early genre entry that goes _so_ far beyond the bare minimum and basically redefines what a game can be in one go.
Oh my god finally!!! You're one of the only fucking people I know of who actually understands that Doom isn't only run and gun, as it pays often to not move in areas!
I agree. I don't see why SoD is hated so much. I actually LIKE the level. But yeah, the cathedral can "SoD" off. Also, "Erebus" is pronounced more as "air-uh-bus." Just letting ya know since I always hear you say it the other way. :P
I loved Doom 94 (yes I know it was launched in Dec 93 but I started playing it in 94) and played it in my mid 20s, the biggest challenge at the time was having a machine fast enough to play it full screen with reasonable frame rate. Eventually I got a 486DX2-66 which was very capable for full screen play. Fast forward many years later and I hated Doom 3 because it was another kind of game, dark and spooky. Didn’t like it at all. Thanks for the great video!
Well, there was Catacombs 3D, also by iD software. But Doom is, by all means, the game that put FPS gaming on the map (as well as indies and PC gaming!).
I LOVED. DOOM 3 …..I respect peoples opinion in not liking it but for me it was everything I imagined an updated DOOM game to be in 2004 …loved the creepy slow pace going through corridors and offices jump scares…ya I loved it
And Hell Followed is my favorite doom level; I love how demons just appear about thee, and overall the levels feels very supernatural, and spooky. It also uses my favorite doom song. I also like Halls of the Damned.
The real genius of original doom ? Binary space partioning : the game runs stupidly well even on bad hardware and newer machines with addons. It's a overhead 2D shooter rendered in first person. Abstract level design : most maps are a labyrinth painted with artwork. The artwork is partly taken from id software DnD sessions, adrian carmack artstyle and alien movies, especially the contrast between human and demonic. They actually knew about how many things in average can be held in working memory (of the player). That number happens to be 7, and there are effectively 7 weapons and 7 types of demons. I could in theory give any combination of demons in front of someone who played enough doom, and that player will know instinctively which weapon to use. The genius of doom is that it may look like a horror shooter, but it's action chess.
I have been enjoying your videos alot since I came across your channel. Not many people take such deep dives into classic Doom, and I like the topics you bring to the table. I was always wondering about all those weird Doom ripoff compilations from the 90's as well as where the Master Levels (which I now own) fit into it. Thank you again for these and I hope your channel grows!
Damn, your channel deserves a lot more subs. EXCELLENT DOOM content. Excellent 👌 DOOM ETERNAL is one of my favorite games, that being said- recently discovering your channel has been a pure joy 🙏 Much love from NY!
Too me Doom was basically a dungeon crawler with guns -- until I beat it a couple times and it stopped seeming that challenging, after which I began playing casually as a hunting game.
I have a specific way of running through tricks and traps in doom II for example I won't go into the cacodemon room without a chaingun or a rocket launcher....
Great game, for sure, but I don't count e1m1 as the greatest map ever... it's great, to be sure, but it's over too fast to be greatest :( My two favourites in the original game are, ironically, Halls of the Damned and Spawning Vats. Both of those push the envelope in terms of what a Doom level can be, compared to what had been seen up to that point. Both get the unsettling, hellish atmosphere down, even within the man-made areas of the level; and they both nail the frantic pace of action along with it. And it certainly doesn't hurt that they have two of the best ambient music tracks in the game. And I think that since I came to Doom 1 after Doom 3 came out (though I still played 1 and 2 first) the rough edges of e2m7 didn't stick out to me as much as they would have to somebody who first played that map when the whole game was cutting-edge. The boxy art style is part of the whole game's charm to me, and 'cause of that, ironically, in some ways Spawning Vats does it better. I'm also a big fan of e3m7 just for the texturing and atmosphere. It, again, just does a really good job of making you feel like you're stuck in some location that goes against nature.
Doom reminds me of a 3d version of enter the GUNGEON. You just go in a room and have to prioritize enemies and clear the room. I know they’re very different but I find enemy prioritization makes for a very engaging game
I always wondered why nobody remade doom as in just take doom 1 and throughout episodes 2 and 3 add in the new content from doom 2 like throughout episode 2 introduce the hell knight, revenant and either the arachnotron or mancubus along with the super shotgun. Episode 3 would introduce doom 2s most irritating monsters fitting in with finally diving into Hell, the pain elemental and Archvile. Personally that would be my perfect classic doom experience as i like doom 1 the most of the classics but wish it had doom 2s content added through a new wad or mod.
As much as I hate to be "that guy" There were other FPS made before Wolf 3d, by Id. Hovertank 3d and catacomb 3d which they made for Softdisk before Wolf 3d.
DOOM isn't just the best FPS of all-time, it's the best game of all-time. It isn't just a shooter, since it's map design owes alot to Dungeons and Dragons (which is itself the single biggest influence on gaming in general) and it boils everything good about video games down to it's most elemental core.
I like E2M2 a great deal, too. It's creepy and atmospheric. with a weird mixture of the mundane and the hellish. I don't understand why so many Doom fans shit on it.
Doom isn't one of the best first person shooters of all time. It IS THE BEST First Person Shooter of All Time! Doom 1&2 with 28 years of wads and mods, absolutely unparalleled and pure perfection.
I never got why they made the spider mastermind so weak. I like it but it should really be killable in at least 10 BFG shots to make it more of a battle.
10 bfg shots??? Good way to softlock players. You'll have to get to the final level with almost full cells ammo capacity. And you'll have to not miss one shot. And remember that in 1993, most players didn't used the mouse to turn and strafe at the same time (even if it was always possible from the beginning). As it stands, if you play Doom as intended (via Chocolate Doom or Crispy Doom), Killing the Spider Mastermind is not that easy. You can't kill it in one shot like with gzdoom. So if you try to kill it as it was intended (by using the pillar to take cover between shots), it can take you between 3 or 6 direct shots to kill spidy, because you're not that close to it anymore and you often have to hide behind the pillar (because of the hitscan nature of the boss), cancelling the ray tracers of the bfg.
I just recently got a laptop, not had a pc in a long while, and first thing I did... downloaded doom. And smashed through Go 2 it on final doom - plutonia.. ultra violence of course
@@Adrian-vy5vn the laptop although it's a quad core, and runs on windows 10, struggled with okuplok couldn't even play it... I'm tried level 1 of sunder seemed ok. Is there a site I can get a few wads to check out?
@@buzzkillington7725 @Buzz Killington maybe you should try playing doom with gzdoom and vulkan render mode ON... it's supposedly the most "optimized" way to play doom with low tier hardware so to say... The only way to get project malice mod is joining this discord channel: discord.com/channels/290174261497430036/487042579746258954 You can download embers of armageddon mod here: www.moddb.com/mods/embers-of-armageddon/downloads/embers-of-armageddon
@@buzzkillington7725 I wanted to add... If you are only looking for new maps you can download "maps of chaos" or eviternity I guess. They are the only wads worth mentioning that come to my mind right now... Eviternity: www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/megawads/eviternity Maps of chaos: www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom/addons/brutalized-doom-and-doom-ii
