Arise!
I was thinking on doing a thread for Doom modding / sourceports, but this thread is more or less already about that, so I will re-purpose it.
Also, we wad another thread were we talked about Doom itself, here
This week I just played The Slaughter Spectrum. As the name indicates, it’s a 4-map slaughterfest wad.
They were very, very, pretty. But it’s also a bitch to move properly, you need a recent highend cpu (ie 8700k!) to do it without problem at all situations, because even modern sourceports like GZDoom aren’t multithreaded. The worst part is some areas of the first map. At least the second and third maps, which are the longest, had better performance than the first one. The fourth is a much shorter map, with an interesting gimmick.
Speaking of, GZDoom has now a Vulkan renderer in experimental phase, in my case it just crashes :(.
In any case, this mod is an intense experience, and it has some interesting parts, but it’s a slaugther map which I find a bit boring at times. You know, 90% of combat is holding the fire button with the RL, plasma or BFG. It also plays mostly with an arena design, where you reach an area, monsters spawn and area is closed, you kill them and area is opened again. No keys or interesting exploration, either.
On some occasions I had killed 350 monsters already and started being a bit tired of the map, when I noticed the monster count, being 350/750. Ouch. Difficulty is also pretty high (for me), although at least it supports all difficulty settings, I played it on the HNTR.
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After playing that, I got in the mood of more Doom, and I found Eviternity. It’s a 32-map megawad which uses a very good, cohesive texture pack, and it’s being great. Maps are small but well designed, interconnected and twisted in interesting ways. It doesn’t rushes out in putting out the biggest weapons and enemies, instead it follows a more natural, paced progression, and the difficulty is gasp normal and balanced, unlike so many wads that are too hardcore.
Still, I wanted to play it a bit more differently. I usually play this levels normally, but this time I wanted something that would spice up the gameplay itself a bit, without reaching the extremes of Russian Overkill, and would maintain normal themes and balance (so no Guncaster where you are a Wizard Dragon or Neutronian Chaos with MSPaint style either).
In the end it was recommended to me Final Doomer, which is a very well done collection of weapons. Five collections of weapons, to be more exact. They maintain some basic standards (pistol / shotgun / mg / RL…) but each set has it’s own interesting spin, like one where you have a bow that paralyzes enemies, or the super shotgun has a very reduced range and the normal shotgun fire energy projectiles that can bounce projectiles. The design, sounds, animations, it’s all pretty pro.