Final Doomer gives newer collection of weapons, ok. But, what about the monsters? In some wads I played over the years, I’ve seen maps with Heretic enemies (oh hell, even Duke3d enemies), or with recolored enemies like ‘shadow imps’, or with some slight variations, so I was thinking, it would be cool if there was a way to put new enemies in any map, automatically. And if possible, in a way that preserve the original aesthetics and design balance.
I started searching for mods that do that. There are thousands of Doom mods, so I was sure this was a solved problem! This was what I found:
Shades of Doom. This is a nice mod with tons of variations, but it’s only a cosmetic mod, it doesn’t change anything of the gameplay.
Colorful Hell is a mod that adds color-coded version of enemies, each color more and more powerful than the last. Ugly, imo.
The famous DoomRL Arsenal mod has its own monster pack that can be used individually, although I found that the new monsters are rare and only appear more on higher difficulties.
LegenDoom adds random legendary monsters, tougher than usual and that drops a legendary weapon.
Champions adds colored elite versions with new abilities.
Complex Doom is a bit like the previous two, but with real new monsters instead of colored skins. Each monster type has 3-4 tougher variations, and they drop new usable items/powerups. Weapons are also redone.
There are also bigger mods like Aeons of Death, which puts lots of new enemies of tons of games, but it also has more stuff like spells and new weapons and they can’t be turned off, and in general it seems it screws over the balance a lot.
Finally, I discovered Super Shuffle, which is much closer to what I wanted in the first place. It’s a collection of new enemies, mostly lifted of other mods or taken from the beastiary, but it mostly keeps the theme (no cartoon characters or strange shit), and the original balance (although not totally). It also has new items and a series of ‘classes’ (7 new weapon sets), like Final Doomer, although they don’t seem as good as some of the ones in FD. In any case one of the classes is the original Doom, so you can play with that if you don’t want new weapons.