/vr/ - Retro Games

>>4922352
You were a kid.

They didnt need emotional wannabe kino storytelling and actually had inspiration and balls.
T. Boomer

>>4922352
Bad game play couldn't hide behind cinematic experience / celebrity voices / graphics

>>4922352
Here's an actual answer: Interweaving map design with weapons specifically tailored for said stages. Modern games tend to take the big dome approach and never balance their weapons properly. Forgive the shill but High Hell is one of the more refreshing shooters I've played in awhile.

Nostalgia

>>4922352

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krPH0cWIP5U

FPS games suck, including the old ones.

Duke was awesome because leveldesign, weapon selection and enemy characteristics were great.

The same goes to Doom, although it has inferior leveldesign (Petersen), but it was much easier to mod, so it became the more successful of the two.

Blood was also good, but had flaws. Same goes to Heretic, Hexen and Shadow Warrior.

>>4922912
blood's biggest flaw was that one of its most common enemies was a hitscanner, but compare that to duke which has a shitload of hitscanners by comparison.

>>4922932
>blood's biggest flaw was that one of its most common enemies was a hitscanner
Not a flaw.

>>4922907
>Stops at McDonalds every morning to announce that he won't be eating there

Why?

>>4923029
contrarianism is fun, or at least that's the gist of what the shitposters here give me

>>4923029
That’s a pretty amusing thought

>>4922352
Fast pace, minimal interruptions (cutscenes etc), comedic amounts of violence, good level design and mechanics (in some cases).

>>4922932
Compared to Duke, Bloods hitscanners weren't so much of a problem because they had little health and you had a lot of tools to take them out before they saw you.

Comparatively, all of Duke's hitscanners were bullet sponges and you had a relatively small pool of weak explosives to take them out quickly. Plus theres the issue of the Battlelord - why the fuck would you make such a common (especially in Ep 3) and tough enemy fire powerful hitscan?

>>4923145
I always thought that hitscanners in Duke could be avoided by strafing. But that never seemed to work against those guys. Also, the subway level where they teleport in 3 of them? No.

>>4922352
It was when the genre had the most depth and challange
>enemy variety
>weapon variety
>resource management
>level design/exploration
>use of items, power ups or even score systems
>health bars
It was when the genre was "video game" and didn't use "realism" as a setting to disguise its simplistic gameplay with no challange besides reloading and zooming in for headshots
Not only that, the use of realism meant no more interesting levels, weapons, enemies or even protagonists, while with older titles, you get shit like Doomguy vs Master Chiev arguements or crossovers (Samsara)
Imagine if 3D platformers were still relevant but they become too casualized and simple, the jumps become QTE's and Mario is residned as a normal guy like Nathan Drake
For fuck's sake, some of these elements mentioned above were in other genre's too

>>4923308
Exactly. I believe before someone makes an FPS, that they should play Doom, Quake, and Half-Life to see how it's done right.

>>4923145
Just use the shrinker vs battlelords. Makes them almost trivial.

I think that the original Doom, and especially Doom 2 are overrated. Sure, it might gave been groundbreaking in 1993, but the gameplay hasn't aged well. Don't get me wrong, I played the game a ton and liked it when I was a kid, but unlike what circlejerking nostalgia hipsters say, it's not the best FPS ever made.

>>4923318
>Half Life is good now
In a few years, Halos, Bioshocks, and Calls of Duty will be good here, lol

>>4923356
What the fuck are you talking about. Half Life came out in 98

>>4923145
You've obviously only played blood on the lowest difficulty. Cultists will kill you almost immediately on higher settings.

>>4923336
They don't shrink them with auto aim on, and that's the way the game should be played.

>>4923730
Not to mention the cultists have a terrible voice that poisoned all the levels.

>>4923952
You poison this whole board.

>>4923952
MODERN ARTS AND FEAR OF BOOKS

genre wasn't tired

>>4923995

This is the only correct answer.

>>4923354
What is a good fps then? Doom has still the best weapon balance there is and the original maps are still fun to play excluding those horrible Doom 2 city map. Mapping scene is still very active and Doom is the most played retro fps to this day, so consider that maybe your opinion is just a wrong one.

>>4922912
>easier to mod, so it became the more successful of the two
so you are basically ignoring the fact that doom was released like 3 years earlier? c'mon man duke came out the same year id released Quake

>Blood was also good, but had flaws
the biggest being a shitty sequel. Blood is objectively the best Build engine game. Duke is not that well designed. fight me

>>4922352
yeah piece of cake
yeah piece of cake
yeah piece of cake
yeah piece of cake
yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

>>4923943
um yes they do lol

>>4924169
Duke is my favourite but I agree, out of the big 3 Duke is the most simple gameplay wise. SW is a lot of fun and feels like a more evolved Duke but Blood takes it one step above those two (probably because it's actually difficult)

>>4922352
My favorite thing about 90s 2.5D FPS games, especially anything in Build, was the immense environmental detail. The levels felt like actual places. Unreal, despite showing off, was sparsely populated with things. I'll take billboards over jank models, or what happened in most cases: nothing at all. It wasn't until 2017 with Prey that I was satisfied with the amount of stuff I could play with in a 3D FPS.

>>4922352
>no hand holding
>games were complete
>dlc were full expansions
>mod community
>diverse games

what a glorious time

>>4924162
lmao dude your a fucking faggot for getting so asshurt over 1 persons comment. He didnt say it was bad, just not the best thing ever made you trog

>>4922352

Because it was new, fresh, exciting. FPS is the only genre i avoid like the pest now. Because they are stale, bland, boring.

>>4924162
t. Doomfans

>>4924169
>Duke is not that well designed

Then show me the Blood levels which are at least half as good as the likes of Lunar Reactor, Dark Side, Freeway, Derelict or Golden Carnage levels from Duke.

>>4923354
Yeah, the gameplay has aged so poorly that there are thousands of people still creating levels for it to this day

>>4922352
Because 90's games were not made by people with lots of focus testing, heavy market studying, or people who wanted to make what was basically just a tech demo. They were made by people who wanted to make something fucking awesome. They were friends who got together and made some really fucking cool shit because they wanted to. That's why we got Doom, why we got the Build games, what we were going to have with Quake, and so on.

>>4925263
>what we were going to have with Quake
fuck off you hopeless pleb of a doom babby gimp

>>4925326
Fuck you, Quake was awesome, but since the Keen days they planned to have a lot crazier shit going on with it. The D&D stories Romero and Carmack had would have been great settings for games.

>>4925329
I have news for you, anon, they ended up making that game based off their old D&D campaigns using the Quake engine, pic related.

>>4925340
I liked Daikatana unironically. Despite the AI issues it's actually a really fun game.

>>4923952
MARANAX PALLEX

>>4925195
Because it's 1000x easier to make a level for Doom than for a modern FPS.

they actually cared about making a fun game and wanted to make a fun game for themselves to play

>>4923354
I've played a lot of fps and would argue its one of the best if not the best

>>4925585

although I like the Doom gameplay, I agree with this, you can compare the amount of content that's produced for doom with quake, and then quake with, I don't know, unreal, and then unreal with ut2004, and then, well, you see where I'm going, the amount of content decreases exponentially, heck, I don't remember last time when a professionally made ut2004 map came out

These old games were pisseasy to get in. No fancy shiny bloomy blurry graphics, just the pure game in it. Start, maybe plain intro, directly to the menu, directly to the game. No movie, just a game. Also no ranks, no matchmaking, no boundaries by the publisher. And no politics or something like that.

>>4922912
I love Duke, but I think that Doom also has better combat, although part of this is just because in Doom, for whatever reason, it's more common to see large hordes of enemies. Doom's AI is simple but somehow it's just right and, in combination with the infighting, tends to lead to some very interesting emergent behavior. Doom also benefits from a larger variety of enemies, and I think that in Doom the fact that each instance of any given enemy type is identical to every other instance is better hidden. In Duke, for example, I start to wonder after a while why I keep fighting the same exact pigcops who are all wearing shorts that are ripped exactly the same way.
Duke is great though. The aesthetics are superb, and so is much of the level design. It's amazing that a game as comedic as Duke is also legitimately spooky (for example, in The Abyss and the entire space episode). Duke 3D's vision of a ruined, overrun Los Angeles seeped deep into my mind when I was in my teenage years. There's just something about that nighttime skyscraper skybox, the random small fires here and there, the palm trees, that distant scream sound effect, etc... This was before I had ever visited LA. Now when I think of LA my conception of it is of course informed by having actually been there, but alongside that are various artistic takes on it... Duke 3D, the Terminator movies, Predator 2, Raymond Chandler novels, Mulholland Drive, the music of The Doors, etc.

>>4922912
I love Duke, but I think that Doom also has better combat, although part of this is just because in Doom, for whatever reason, it's more common to see large hordes of enemies. Doom's AI is simple but somehow it's just right and, in combination with the infighting, tends to lead to some very interesting emergent behavior. Doom also benefits from a larger variety of enemies, and I think that in Doom the fact that each instance of any given enemy type is identical to every other instance is better hidden. In Duke, for example, I start to wonder after a while why I keep fighting the same exact pigcops who are all wearing shorts that are ripped exactly the same way.
Duke is great though. The aesthetics are superb, and so is much of the level design. It's amazing that a game as comedic as Duke is also legitimately spooky (for example, in The Abyss and the entire space episode). Duke 3D's vision of a ruined, overrun Los Angeles seeped deep into my mind when I was in my teenage years. There's just something about that nighttime skyscraper skybox, the random small fires here and there, the palm trees, that distant scream sound effect, etc... This was before I had ever really visited LA (I might have been there once for a day, but hadn't seen much). Now when I think of LA my conception of it is of course informed by having actually been there, but alongside that are various artistic takes on it... Duke 3D, the Terminator movies, Predator 2, Raymond Chandler novels, Mulholland Drive, the music of The Doors, etc.

>>4926712
Original Doom had like zombies, shotgun zombies, imps, pinkys/spectres, barons, cacos, lost souls. Duke had much bigger enemy variety. It's a bit worse than Doom 2 tho.

>>4926836
I agree. I'm considering Doom and Doom 2 as part of one game.

Oh man, I'm remembering how awesome this level is.

>>4922932
>baw hitscan
Don't get hit, bitch.
Take cover around corners, jump, duck and strafe like a madman, never stand still or remain out in the open if you can help it.

Blood is a fucking exhilirating game.

>>4923156
They can be avoided by getting out of his line of sight.

>>4923336
I always had a real hard time making the rays actually hit him, I just assumed he was programmed to be immune to them.

>>4923354
Come back when your balls drop, kid.

>>4927394
Shoot their feet

>>4922912
Both Duke and Blood are 10/10 masterpieces, fight me

Shadow Warrior on the other hand, it blows my mind how they got it so wrong. It proves that there was more to Duke and Blood than just a good engine.

>>4923974
YOU ARE NOT PRO!

Seriously, masturbating furiously onto Blood MUST be some purely American thing. I can't explain it any other way.

>>4927403
Well I know that now, but the last time I played was on the PS4 port, where you can't turn the auto aim off.

I'll probably give it a try sometime when I set up EDuke32.

>>4927547
I'm a Europoor, and I love Blood. It's an intense shooter with a lot of gothic charm.

>>4923730
The borked damage scaling make them hit much harder on easy though, so it evens out.

>>4923952
GERO SHE CRUUU

>>4926836
Doom 2 had a great new bestiary, but a lot of the levels aren't so strong.
The new monsters would really get to shine in Final Doom, and the decades of usermade content.

>>4926836
Wrong.

Doom 2 had 17 different enemy types (which include fake difference, like Pinky and Spectre or Baron and Hell Knight), Duke had 18 enemy types (with only the Battlelord and Mini-Battlelord being actually fake).

True, some Duke enemies didn't feel true enemies, like turrets, sharks or slimers. But it's not true it had a weaker beastiary.

>>4925585
modern FPS have absolutely gargage level design

>>4928615
Doom 2 is still the most garbagest

>>4925585
that's because we have modern editors such as doom builder or trenchbroom

if devs would just release any editor that isn't an absolute clusterfuck and doesn't require tons of external tools for the full toolchain I sure bet people would keep making levels

>>4925329
I think the resulting Quake is probably better than the crazy vision Romero failed to follow through with, and which shone through in Dai-Katana.

>>4925341
It isn't despicable like people say but it was horrendously dated on release and has nothing really remarkable going on. This combined with the hype train was probably the second biggest disappointment in gaming history.

>>4925585
True, the bar for entry is low (and thus you do have more quantity than quality, though that's tempered a lot in 20 years), but you also have a fundamentally solid game as a base.
So you can just take the stock gameplay and make just an all new set of levels for it, and that can come out really well.

Though it isn't as easy, you can also just do something all new from scratch, and have that turn out well too, a guy just released his all original game made to run with Vanilla Doom and a DeHacked patch: Rekkr

You can kind of look at it as the FPS equivalent of RPGMaker, I guess, except it's also a set of complete games.

>>4930039
I think that instead of switching engines, they should have finished the game on the Quake 1 engine, released it that way, and then made a sequel or new game in the new engine, instead of desperately stalling to try to keep up.
Similar with Duke Nukem Forever, they should have wrapped it up and released it in like 1999 or 2000, instead of skullfucking the pooch and stalling it into the abortion it eventually became.

Basically don't fucking cook the food for so long that it gets the time to start rotting.

>>4928719
Doom 2's level design is like a mix of 7/10, 3/10, and everything in between, some levels are pretty good, some are pretty poor.

Final Doom I feel is better, and uses the new monsters in much more creative ways.

>>4924169
Duke is VERY well designed, it takes quasi realistic environments and packs them with abstract design and largely non-linear progression, rewarding exploration, and details the (rather interactive) environments well, without cluttering.

Pretty much all the weapons and items have distinct uses and are wildly varied, and this gives you the tools to deal with a varied cast of enemies, and a varied set of obstacles and hazards.

>>4924162
As someone who thinks Doom is one of the best games in its genre, I don't agree that the weapon balance is fully solid. It's not bad, but I see a few deficiencies.

The pistol is shit, you have zero reason to ever use it if you have the chaingun, it exists solely to be the weakest weapon to you.
Compare to Duke's pistol, which actually is pretty useful, owing to its separate ammo pool, and reasonably fast rate of fire (though interrupted briefly every 12 shots, as to not let it take the role of a machinegun).
Even doing as little as give it a separate ammo pool I think would make it more valuable, even if you gave it a hard limit of fifty.

The super shotgun is a good performer, but it actually gives you more damage per shell than the regular shotgun.
In the first game, the shotgun is fine, but in the second game, it still has the horizontal spread, while the super shotgun has the crazy wide spread to make it only useful at close ranges or large groups.
The shotgun could potentially be retooled to have a tighter, circular spread, with 10 pellets to compare to the super's 20, that way the shotgun is a very reliable long/medium range tool, but not so suited for crowds, while the super remains the close range pounder it always was.
Basically because a lot of players just arbitrarily abandon the regular one and default to the super, because of the higher damage output, despite the shotgun still being a decent medium range weapon.

For the plasmarifle, it's an excellent weapon, a high DPS gun that can saturate an area in firepower. The problem is that it shares ammo with the BFG, and thus a lot of players absolutely refuse to use it because they want to save precious ammo for the BFG (understandably, as it's your ultimate weapon)
Splitting their ammo pool, at 300 for each (maybe half for the BFG, until you get a backpack), would give an incentive to actually use the plasma and see how good it is.

>>4930219
I'm not saying any of this makes it bad, or that Doom would significantly improve with these changes, but if I were to change the arsenal up a little, to make the weapons more distinct from each other, things like these come to mind.