In Defense of DOOM 2's City Levels
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- čas přidán 31. 05. 2024
- Doom 2's cities are among the most-criticized part of the game. However, I always felt like they were the best part, for the same reasons why people hate them.
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0:00 Intro
1:21 Chapter 1: What Counts As A City?
6:00 Chapter 2: Why Are They So Hated?
7:52 Chapter 3: Vile Visuals
14:08 Chapter 4: Laughable Level Structure
16:42 Chapter 5: The Other Cities
19:47 Chapter 6: Convincing Conclusion
Thanks for walkin' 'eeeere! - Hry
![[DOOM] Sandy Petersen's Level Design](/img/n.gif)
The idea for this video had actually been floating around since 2018, believe it or not. That's how dedicated I am to these levels!
*Edit:* I find it interesting how many comments I get that are along the lines of "Errmm no ackshually these maps have ALWAYS sucked and are NEVER good!!!" Like jeez dude maybe add some positivity to your life. I quite literally stated several times that these maps have their flaws, the point of the video was just to highlight that they also have positive aspects that get overlooked because people have such an unreasonable amount of hate for them. If you're just looking for flaws, you'll find them.
(trailer guy voice) "five years in the making!"
I feel like with just a bit more detail the city levels could have looked more aesthetically pleasing. Which reminds me! Do you have those maps you made for them with a bit more detail up for download somewhere? I would love to play them!
Wow, I'm perplexed you didn't mention _the_ city level in Classic Doom for comparison: Odyssey of Noises.
never knew you made doom 2 content! wow!
@@SwiftBlitz.
Yep. I recommend his video on keys for doors vs switches.
Fun Fact: Almost all the levels of Doom 2 were made without a pre-set order. The level order was only later set, based mosty on individual level's difficulty. That's why hell levels don't look at all like they did in Doom 1 and some other levels set on earth seem to be kind of garish and hard to imagine as locations on earth.
Imo one of the biggest missed opportunities in Doom was making a cohesive story told through level design rather than just crafting random levels and throwing them together.
Then again they only had 10 months to make Doom 2 and most of Doom 1 maps were made/finished in 3 months by Sandy.
@@Ducky-vl7mp I mean... Doom 1 is the closest to that among the classic games.
There's an actual thematic cohesion between episodes, rather than the mess of D2.
First you start in the Phobos moon in the space ship hangar as it logically would be. The episode itself consist on tech bases with few satanic elements usually hide in the secrets, and the final level is the Phobos anomaly, a giant teleporter platform which shows the first sings of demonic corruption and abstraction.
The second episode continues on the Deimos anomaly, the other side of the portal, and this time you can see the tech bases are corrupted and distorted by hell influence with satanic stuff everywhere. This epidose even shows the Tower of Babel being build slowly in the intermission screen, nice detail.
And the final epidose is hell itself, with cathedrals and pure organic structures, and bits of human tech asimilated in the middle.
@@Ducky-vl7mp that is a big reason why 2016 is my favorite DOOM. It was the only one along with DOOM 3 to nail that.
@@goldheartodyssey4486Doom Eternal definitely successfully tells a story through its level design. It’s all logical and perfectly cohesive with the story, with lots of variation to keep things fresh.
@@PerfectSense77 It's far less interesting than 2016s in my opinion, the story in Doom Eternal has a lot of random places you go to. But doom 2016 keeps the story of you having to rip and tear your way through the facility to prevent olivia from opening a portal to hell, she does anyways. So you go to hell to kill them. Doom Eternal is, oh hey youre the same dude as the last game, oh btw you have a chainsaw and you just get thrown into hell on earth, nothing to link 2016 to Eternal, you just are teleported there. sure Doom Eternal is pretty good if you ignore the story, and so is 2016. In my opinion 2016 just has a better story than eternal. If you compare Eternal's story to 2016, you will probably also say its a lot more coherent than eternal. Sorry for the paragraph lol, it wasn't meant to be a rant. If i were to explain Eternal's story it would make this even longer.
Like them or not, the city levels gave us one of the best tracks in doom 2
Which ones you mean?
@@GermanPeter sandy city was a pretty good song.
@@sheldor6172 i dont think 'the pit' classifies as a city level
@@gibbonplays6111 Into Sandy's City is the name of the song
@@evdestroy5304 yeah, and that song is from a level called 'the pit'
many people say e2m8 is too small to be the tower of babel, but i prefer the idea that you're just at the very top of it and it's like this sandy courtyard area. but for the actual city levels, i enjoyed them for their gameplay rather than visuals (plus, it's not like they could've been all that detailed. even with how primitive it looks now, downtown is only about 30 sectors away from a visplane overflow at the tower with the red key). maybe playing the games dozens of times is a factor in it, but the maps weren't ever as confusing or difficult to navigate as many say they are.
I never even considered E2M8 being the entire tower. It only the top always just made so much sense that's what I'd imagined from day 1.
I think what's being pointed out is that the skybox has mountains that clearly reach over the supposed "tower of babel" which is supposed to be so massive it can reach heaven
Yeah I always thought it was the top floor too.
Well, it's still weird, right? Doomguy SHOULD have encountered a lot of shit while making his way up to the top, but i guess the whole goddamn tower is empty
This is forgetting that visplane limits are arbitrarily set by the programmers to enforce respecting technical constraints at the time.
I feel like a lot of kids were much more observant than me on this stuff, I kinda just took everything as is like "yeah that's a doom 2 level aright". Doom levels are like dreams, you can't really make sense of them, just experience them.
One thing about Duke 3D and Blood is that two year difference is actually a lot. It might not sound like much, but in the 90's two years might as well have been 10 or 12 today in terms of how fast graphical fidelity was progressing. Going from 50 polygons to 250 polygons is a hell of a lot more noticeable than going from 300 million to 301 million after all.
Of course they look a lot more like real cities. The cities in Zelda Ocarina of Time and Sonic Adventure sure look a lot more like actual cities than the one in Wet-Dry World in Super Mario 64, and that was also a two year difference.
It was probably more to do with what those games were aiming to achieve. Mario 64 is generally more abstract and the city in that level is only a small element of it, modeled by hand as level geometry without much if any bespoke textures or models from the art team.
The city levels are fiiine, it's just they're really open and their overall ugliness is kind-of a problem when you have to look at them for a decently big chunk of the game.
EDIT: good points but I still think theyre just kinda blech to go through
ive not played or watched doom 2 far enough to see city levels, but i find seeing how ordinary people live in fictional universes extremly interesting
Thinking about it now, there were towns and villages in Heretic and Hexen that were WAAAAY more convincing. Then there was Strife, with it's RPG elements. These games didn't have much more detail to work with than Doom and Doom 2 but they still managed to make way more convincing environments.
Actually the cities in doom 2 are very reminiscent of current day detroit in almost every aspect.
Maybe not as dangerous as detroit
XD
Translation: “I’m a white guy who is scared of black people”
YES! This is what I have been saying! Doom 2 City levels are genuinely becoming more realistic nowadays with how urban areas are becoming brutalist hellholes.
A lot cleaner, though.
Now, just to be fair, Map14 Inmost Dens resembles a shootout scene from a Spaghetti Western movie. It also looks like repurposed storm drains and reservoir channels that can get around the city without being actual streets; hell-spawn simply fortified the area. It may not necessarily be a place where citizens live (unless they're homeless or transients), but it does seem part of a city.
Well after working on making city maps for a doom tc project, I've learned a lot about what makes a good city level. What it mainly comes down to, is does it seem like a place someone could legitimately live in? How do people operate in those buildings? Do people gather there for events? How do people get there? Would you see yourself there in real life? Buildings have windows, they're not piles of bricks. Are there no liminal spaces? Tons of things like that are important design decisions. Obviously, after working on space stations and hell scapes for most of the levels, designing a city is a wild turn in style and precautions, so it's no wonder it looks unrealistic. However making a city level is not impossible in the doom engine either, and I'm sure if the designers had more time and some guidelines they could've pulled off some better scenery.
It all comes down to the fact that DOOM II's design philosophy still revolved around the concept of abstract level design at a time when industry trends and player expectations (due in part to the terrestrial setting of "Hell on Earth") were moving toward more realistic level design. Neither approach is inherently "better", just emphasizes different things. Realistic level design cares about world-building and immersion whereas abstract level design only cares about gameplay. Both approaches have their place. In the modern landscape of FPS, DOOM, DOOM II, and Quake are unique and enduring examples of abstract level design applied to 3D games which you don't see much of these days.
That's a good way of putting it! I guess it was a continuation of Wolfenstein 3D's level design, where SOME levels had bits of realism in them, but the overwhelming majority were abstract concepts that allowed the player to imagine what it could be.
That big fight by the blue key on Suburbs was always one of my favorites. It's essentially the first slaughter fight and inspired SO many WADs to come.
Oh, yes! I still remember the first time i had that encounter. It was nuts.
That fight was pure blissful joy for me. I kept retrying it until I won undamaged
i really love the city levels in concept, i actually really like how they look and they sell the city look pretty well for me, but i hate the gameplay so much. i feel like they made the architecture first and then tried to work out the linear flow of the level afterwards, and it just ends up feeling a bit misguided to me. i think that's why they're probably my favorite deathmatch levels, they feel like they're designed to be roamed around in, and the regular linear flow of doom seems to get in the way of that.
Oh, that's for sure. I mean, Downtown is literally just a set of squares that Sandy shaped into buildings, and Suburbs is straight-up just a recreation of a place he saw in real life.
As a Doom mapper with several years of experience, I loved seeing your additions to the vanilla maps! They're tasteful, and keep to the original style quite well.
Would you consider releasing your edits in a wad? :^)
THIS! I wouldn't mind playing all DOOM 2 all over again with those additions 😂
Which maps have you made???
I've never understood why people were so mad about city levels either and shook that off as some sort of running joke I didn't have enough context to understand. Glad to see other people who had fun on them. Nice video as always
Me too. Everything about Doom's maps is abstract, you literally can't judge their fidelity.
I don't like much of the DOOM 2 maps in general, they just seem badly designed to me
One guy said it's bad and everyone believed it.
I dunno, when first played Doom 2 as a kid, the Hell on Earth thing had me really excited and... It's more Doom. Probably the one and only time that such a statement is a disappointing thing.
Maybe because the combat setpieces are bad, the are annoying to navigate trought, maybe because of the unnecesary backtracking, maybe for the awful monster window dressing? Maybe people here should play good Doom Levels
The city levels were probably the closest thing doom 2 had that resembled a place on Earth. If you ignore the everlasting brick wall surrounding them they're actually pretty cool looking
That’s one thing I feel like people and sometimes myself forget is using your imagination. Some of my favorite things about the Doom 1 and 2 and even some fanmade WADs is the creativity that went into maps to make them resemble certain object and areas of a world. While I do think some places in Doom 2, specifically the Suburbs and The Factory looking the least like what they say they are I can still vaguely make them out and fill in the blanks myself. Fan made remakes of Doom 2 have done wonders to make those thoughts and interpretations become a reality thanks to newer tech and the removal of limitations.
Reading and responding to your tweets about the city levels always did make me wonder how come some people didn’t like them. And from looking at the comments it’s quite clear it’s from the limitations of Doom 2. With most textures being reused from Doom 1 and any other texture vaguely resembling a building or house it’s pretty clear that many people especially those probably, heck, more than likely have played games like Duke Nukem 3D or even games from later generations that have had far more detailed interpretations of cities and houses to go off of due to advancements in technology.
I still personally think that some of the levels that are still city levels in my eyes; The Factory and Industrial Zone, have issues with level layouts being underutilized like the factory having enemies and such occupying the interiors and less so on the exteriors. Aside from a couple of Arachnotrons there’s so much emptiness in that level. Industrial Zone doesn’t have it so bad with at least zombiemen patrolling many out door areas but that’s really all there is aside from chaingunners sniping you from afar on buildings. Some pinkies or specters to throw off the play in those open areas would’ve kept players on their toes so that traversal isn’t just a straight line to the next area.
Mt.Erebus from Doom 1 had this issue of being an open map with not many enemies in areas to go to that wasn’t surrounded with damaging goo. However it feels like a blend of Gotcha! and Suburbs with the mostly open area filled with lava and the huge wave of enemy spawns it almost turns into a slaughter map. For it’s first open map it’s not the worst thing ever, but it’s still got issues. A map like Gotcha! which is far from a city (more like an Earth map I guess) is one that feels slightly more seamless however it does have areas that can pretty much only be accessed with a rad suit and may require trail and error to even get to. The Suburbs having that huge wave of monsters after obtaining the blue keycard is a moment that caught me off guard my first time playing. It’s a a part that did take advantage of the openness of the level that did make things more manageable than say a more confined Doom 1 level. I think what I’m getting at here is that open ended levels with lots of area for the player to roam, should have monsters occupying it. If that means keeping them in structures to snipe the player like in Downtown. Or spawn a battalion after procuring a key item to better utilize that space like suburbs.
I could probably go on about how some things are well made in the city or even just the Earth levels in general. Heck, or even how some parts are frustrating and just haven’t aged all that well in Doom 2. I will say this though, Doom 1 has many issues with its levels especially the later episodes,(episode 3 and 4) that I’d rather play TNT than another minute of those levels.
Huh, i didn't knew they were hated, i always found them to be really cool and ambitious even if limited.
hell yes
personally i'm a huge fan of the hell levels, people really hate them for being ugly or whatever but they play great and never overstay their welcome at all, and the abandoned mines is amazing
the real place sandy petersen said he designed suburbs around was his house, one of the buildings is essentially a recreation of the first floor of his house
I always assumed that when it came to the wacky level designs (even in Doom 1), it was simply the demonic forces corrupting the buildings, we even saw something similar to this in Eternal now that I think about it.
3:42
I like to imagine that this is old castle right in city which kept as either museum or touristic place
This is how I feel about defense sections in games. I love defense sections in games but so many people hate them.
They're bad when they're static, making you just stand in one place and shoot. They're good when they make you keep moving, responding to new threats, or falling back to fresh lines of defenses.
It's fun when they have multiple points of siege to watch, imagining it like a game of tapper where you have to frantically dart between them, spending risky time at each, helps when designing them.
Half life 2 had pretty bad ones.
i feel so weird and alien when i have way more fun exploring city levels than the normal space military stuff, it's just so cool to see bigger areas and huge buildings that you can enter inside and get out and explore more.
fun fact, i'm currently working on a duke3D styled shooter that for most parts contains city levels based on a austrian small town where i live (the game is called bullet trail) this helped alot thanks
@Cycloworks stand alone
I love the city levels except for the visuals. Downtown and Suburbs have some of my favorite combat in all of classic Doom. Thank you for helping me articulate why I liked those levels all along.
City levels give me a headache
edit: they still give me a headache, tbf most DOOM 2 levels do (especially Sandy's), city ones just last longer, so they give me a worse headache
Motion sickness is a special kind of hell.
And by god can I feel it while playing DOOM 2.
The only maps that ever gave me a headache from the iD sanctioned map sets that aren’t the master levels were Map 8? The one that ends with two archviles and a bunch of revenants that teleport in, in Plutonia and Barrels o fun in DOOM 2 (both from pistol start)
IG shooters aren't for you
@@panthekirb7561 I play a ton of shooters, especially the "boomer shooter" kind, DOOM 2 just turns my brain into scrambled eggs
@@Maceror You're probably just one of those zoomers who think they're retro because they play Doom Eternal and Ultrakill (garbage game btw)
I mean i thought the weird castles and visuals were a part of Doom 2's story text where it mentions the starbase being "warped by the demons presence" and i imagine this applies to the City levels as well. (and The Shores of Hell in Doom 1).
CyberMage actually had an interesting take on a city area. The game tried to use it like a hub area in between plot levels in the game. It actually did a good job of looking and feeling like an urban area.
People who say "the city levels in Doom 2 don't look like cities" have clearly never been to certain parts of the Midwestern states of the USA. I literally have been to places that look like "The Factory" level in Up-North Minnesota.
Something people forget too is that Doom takes place in the Future. Judging by how buildings nowadays are lifeless gray cubes and how companies won't stop with minimalism, I think it was actually a very realistic depiction of the future of cities having brutalist architecture.
Although I have never been to an ex-Soviet country, I have seen many pictures of places from that part of the world that look like Doom 2 city levels!!
I remember when I first found out Doom 2 had you go back home to Earth to stop the invasion of Hell there. I thought that was SO cool and scary. I've always been personally susceptible to apocalyptic themes and imagery, so when I first played it when I was much younger that skybox did a lot of heavy lifting for me and I found them mostly enjoyable. I've kinda hardened on them over the years for the same reasons as everybody else however. They're not bad levels, but do not give me a sense of place.
Post video edit: I think the point that the city setting gives you room to set expectations is potentially at the heart of the issue. Perhaps when people get stuck on these levels, the facade falls apart and the frustration of being stuck is amplified by not being able to tell what the area you're in is supposed to be. I don't know what a spaceport would be like so it feels like exploring, but I have an idea of what a city is and how I might navigate it.
city levels suck and theyre bad and i hate them
actually theyre cool i like them now
You didnt watch the video, there isnt enough time since the video went live you fiend
I love your videos and how exited you sound, your fast pronunciation and overall humor
I've always found DOOM's architecture really interesting. I mean, it is very limited since it's a 3D engine from the 90's, but it still makes the player use their imagination to figure out what certain things are, and I personally think that makes the architecture unique and cool. Even when making your own maps, you are limited with what you can do, but you are still using your imagination to create certain sections of the map. It's really cool tbh
5:47 nah i say citadel is a city level. Back in the day you would have a citadel in the center of your city to hold troop garrisons and Factory is on the outside of the city
i mean, they're not the worst, but they're hard to navigate
just like real cities without signs
@@StanislawNiemyjski exactly
my theory has always been that map 14 is a fort, like a historical site or something
I love how I watch videos I would normally not watch just because they're by you. Great quality as always!
Always excited whenever you upload C:
I always took the cities as like at the time sci fi brutalist types. like what was in comic books in the late 80s and early 90s like Judge Dredd etc.
Thanks for defending the city levels! Although I will admit there's one thing I hate about Downtown: The overabundance of teleporters. I still have a hard time remembering which takes to which place. And, if you get it wrong, off you go back to the warehouse, wait for the slow elevator ride and then try the next teleporter.
I just recently found your channel to watch some half life videos, I did not expect to see a video about Doom soon after! And such a topic too.
I always loved city levels in Doom, has to be my favorite theme. It's the most relatable one, since hell is just an abstract otherworldly dimension, and a space base or a scientific research facility... might as well be an alternate dimension too. Cities also inspire a more non-linear exploratory design... and even if a city level is linear, then it just feels like a journey, since you're inevitably gonna end up going in and out of buildings, through the streets and whatnot.
The original doom cities are a lot more abstract than the ones in people's custom levels today... but as a wolf3d enjoyer, I'm used to flexing my imagination.
Anyway, I don't have the time to watch the video right now so I'll get back to it later. Maybe it'll give me some new insights.
Im literally playing the original 1993 doom, alt tabbed to change music, and saw this. Great timing, peter 😎
The thing is the doom engine was not designed to represent outdoor areas, its made to be creative with lighting, which is where the detail lies in closed spaces. Also the enemies are designed to work better in tight spaces, which is why the city levels don't have many memorable encounters
Very Fair Points. With that said they need some work visually and I will stand by this.
I'm currently working on a mod for doom 2 that fixes some bugs, and I specifically made downtown more citylike.
I tried playing Doom and Doom 2 but I couldn't, I really tried, but I couldn't. The weird mapping of the time just didn't jive with me and I had a mostly negative experience hunting switches before I gave up both games after around 13 levels.
After that I picked up Sunlust after being told it was masterclass in mapping and really hard. Putting it on Hey not too rough and going in blind is what kept my interest on Doom and its the only reason I still check out new wadpacks and mods for it (shout out to MtPain27).
So how would these more hated City Levels not suck?
The edit part: yeah real. Too bad I dont know these maps like the back of my hand, that would help a lot prolly
after all this time, i never realized that Doom 1 end sceen was actually city with their skyscrapers. I always thought it was a huge tower where you fought the bosses. (hence the name Tower of Babel)
Honestly, I just don't get all the hate. I honestly just loved the city levels for the "sentimental value", seeing as even a man like the slayer has a home, a race, and had a family as well, before.. y'know. Poor little bunny...
It always felt like it showed you that there's actually something left of humanity, and something to fight for. I didn't care for the looks or the level design, I just cared for the feeling.
Nur so nebenbei, ich habe erst neulich durch "the quirks of German half-life" diesen Kanal entdeckt, und ich liebe den content. Ich bin halt Deutsch, wodurch es natürlich toll ist, Videos zu haben, die man so richtig versteht (z.B. die deutsche Barney Stimme ist einfach nur toll). Und natürlich ist auch der ganze Beta content wundervoll. Ich kenn's nicht lange, aber ich liebe diesen content.
I think you might have got the three biggest issues slightly wrong
From my perspective it's more like --
1. A lack of atmosphere -- I don't really care if it looks like a real place, but it should at least make me *feel* something. There isn't enough variety in the geometry or textures to evoke anything. With the hard boundaries around a little box of buildings I don't feel like I'm a vast explorable city, let alone the ruins of a city infested with monsters. I just feel like I'm hemmed in by giant boxes. In a sense it's more claustrophobic than the usual little rooms and tunnels.
2. Playing a little too fast and loose with the logical concept of a city in the gameplay -- designing these maps as if they were any other Doom maze hurts the player's ability to traverse them because the comparative uniformity of the structures makes it harder to tell areas apart. They could have easily been designed so that there was less need to always know exactly where you were. In fact, I think Tenements, The Courtyard, and Gotcha all manage to do exactly this, but they're not on the list. :D If they wanted to make you feel like you were in a city, they could have done that much more easily by making the level *act* like a city and not caring quite so much whether they could make it look like one.
3. Trying to stick too close to the idea of a city visually -- their technology just wasn't up to the task they were trying to make it do, which led to those dull monotextured boxes around the levels and that aforementioned uniformity in the maze design.
And there were other problems with these levels but they tended to be specific to each one.
All three pretty much boil down to how the concept of what a "doom level" is, as established in the first game, wasn't really designed to do this, but the iD folks didn't seem to bother rethinking it. They would, with their later games -- I mean, look at what Quake 2 does with the concept of an alien city -- and the benefits would really show.
I feel like the only person justified in hating those levels was John Carmack (since they probably gave him more work in optimizing the engine to run them properly)
H'ok you definitely get a sub. I like the research and different perspective.
I always assumed, like you said In the video, that the cities were just heavily damaged by the hellspawn and this became more maze-like then they were before so that anyone that was trying to get to hell’s gate would have a harder time surviving and hopefully die. I liked the city levels when I first played it, just because the maze-like nature of it was fun for me, and I liked a fun little maze every now and again
Peter, you seem like the kind of guy who would really enjoy the Happy Fun Time Circus 2 WAD.
Please enjoy it at your leisure.
Outstanding video many thanks
Great video! Really enjoyed it
Okay I'll bite.
My thoughts on city levels now: Eh... They're okay.
My thoughts after the video:
Eh... They're still just okay. Also I disagree with what you consider a City Level.
If you play the beta version of Duke 3D you can see that its city levels were originally a lot more open and Doom II-like. It was only later in development they were cut apart into the more closed-off sections we got in the final game.
As for the Doom II city levels, aside from their lacking visuals (which I think stem largely from having to create city maps without any actually suitable textures), the biggest problem _I_ have with them is how vertical they are. While I can appreciate the ambition in pushing the game and engine further, I never found vertically-based gameplay in Doom to work that well. Being attacked by off-screen enemies and doing platforming onto platforms you can't see - I'd rather not.
As for "The Factory", I absolutely count it as a city level based solely on how close its gameplay, style, and _feel_ is to the other city levels. It is also my favourite out of the bunch (possibly due to being the 'flattest').
Gotta say, a year or so ago I played a Doom 2 remake megawad called Honte (Hell on THE Earth).
Unlike other remake megawads that have a tendency to overbloat the vanilla maps, Honte actually stick very true to the source level and size while adding a TON of visual improvements while only using vanilla textures.
When they managed to take The Factory and make it GREAT thats a good mind for detail.
I'd love to see you compare D2 with Honte's unterpretation of D2.
now I want fan rebuilds of the doom 2 cities, like, before hell corruption
I once attempted that! It's just a bit too difficult to figure out which parts were due to the hell corruption and which ones weren't. Another problem is that levels lose like half the detail if you remove the hellish assets or repair the destroyed parts.
Nice to know people like gba doom 2. Makes me feel less like an odd one out.
I recently made a video on an opensource game called cube, and one of the few levels I couldn't beat was Stalingrad, which really reminded me of these
I've been playing Doom and Doom II forever. I'm one who never hated the city levels. I think it kind of odd that some folks dislike them so much. I couldn't agree with your take on this more .
Honestly I never thought much off of these city levels, to me they are just another level. On the other hand, Downtown and Suburbs are really fun to play due to its high enemy count
I honestly love all of Doom 2's levels. The surreal level design gives the game a unique feeling. It's memorable, and leaves a lot to the imagination.
The maps are conceptually smart as well as creative and innovative for the time. Early doom's toolkit was nothing like what we have today, and it definitely influenced the OG level designs. Sandy Petersen was pushing the limits of those source tools when he drew up downtown, and I think that makes them interesting, even if they aren't "great" by typical ideas of a map.
22 minutes of video explaining abstract art concept to fan of realism
I really like the "CyberBuilding?" drawing in the thumbnail lol
I remember my first time playing Downtown not finding where I needed to go first. I eventually found stairs but completely missed the arrow on the floor and it's worth noting that I felt like I always had to be on the move because of the enemies.
For what it's worth, I didn't remember to start a comment but I can say that your points on making these levels more relatable and immersive are absolutely correct.
Whenever I play any other game, like Uncharted or Battlefield, their cities are never wide open spaces when it comes to physical interactions. Even my favorite level in Doom Eternal the ARC is a linear your through several buildings that just so happens go loop back around to a plaza of sorts. It doesn't FEEL like a city that I could explore or get lost in unlike open world games like Red Dead Redemption. And for me, Downtown was one of my favorites in Doom 2 specifically because it broke the mold set by Doom 1.
Probably because it also scratched my Banjo-Kazooie bone where I could just roam freely before making progress. And I'll say this, Suburbs is just a straight up good level. Every section of it has a point to me, even if the exit area makes no sense.
As a fan of old FPS games, I understand that there has been a notorious evolution throughout the games since Wolf3D, which I like a lot for being simple as it is. Doom came with new resources such weapons and high and dark areas, and for me the city maps in Doom 2 are visually awesome, especially Downtown and Industrial Zone, maybe due to the nice view you get from the high up ledges and buildings. Of course the engine used in Duke Nukem and Blood brought more realism to the levels and then it just went better until nowadays when we have games with levels more realistic than real places LOL.
About gameplay and complexity of the city maps, I find Doom reached its target with the resourcing limitations it had then. I found other maps more confusing than these ones, for my opinion still remains that Downtown and Industrial Zone are my favourite levels in Doom 2 followed by The Courtyard, which in my opinion has the best enemy infighting moment, more than Suburbs.
A well-known bug in one of the early versions of Doom II caused the skybox to not change when you went to the city levels. You would have had to save your game, exit, restart Doom II, and reload the game to get the new sky.
All the hate aside, I like the city levels. They’re not great to look at, but the wide open areas provide for some huge and intense fights.
My problem with the city levels weren’t with the design, I was actually pretty alright with it. It’s just traversing it, I roamed downtown (like the city prior) for longer than I should have, and I couldn’t tell for the life of me where to go.
3:35 they rearranged the levels multiple times during development check it's development page on the Cutting Room Floor and say which order would make more sense
I played through Doom 1, it was a pretty smooth experience with bits of confusion and needing to look some stuff up for some levels near the very end. It was enjoyable. Once I got to these levels in Doom 2, I could barely function. It was just me wandering aimlessly in levels with poor gameplay design, for long periods of time just looking at piles of corpses and blank cardboard exterior walls. Until I eventually got frustrated enough that I quit and never came back.
Gonna have to respectfully disagree with basically everything you said here - the abstract level designs worked much better in Doom 1, the cities in Duke and Blood look much more memorable and interesting, and even my imagination can't fix the total lack of detail present. What you call "exploration" I call "frustrated aimless wandering" trying to figure out where the devs want me to be at any given time.
Honestly I never thought too much about the city levels in DOOM 2 being worse than the rest of the game (before of this video I wasn't even sure there was more than 1 city level aside of the obvious city one) *because I already don't think the great majority of levels in DOOM 2 are anywhere as good as the ones in DOOM 1*
EDIT: My opinion didn't change by the end of the video lol
But I will say that something that could had at the very least had alleviated the City level's aesthetic would be if the ground was made out of actual asphalt with visible roads and sidewalks instead of a big carpet of gravel
All I can say is that I first played through the Doom games in 2020, and completely forgot that Doom 2 was subtitled 'Hell on Earth' until after after I finished it. I didn't dislike anything about its levels, I just never made any connection between them and our planet.
Totally disagree about "if you think Doom 2 was lackluster, you must feel the same about classic Doom."
Context and expectation is everything here. In Doom you were sold generic sci-fi bases and hell and got it. In Doom 2 you were promised Hell in Earth... And didn't get it.
I don't know I got it just fine.
Seeing as im in the video most folk can see how I feel about the city levels in doom, it mainly comes from demons spamming at you from long range on top of buildings where you cant see them because you don't have mouse look.i dont have a problem with them as far as they play personally apart from the demons spamming projectiles thing of course. I do actually appreciate the feeling of exploration you get due to the levels being less linear as a whole. they are an interesting step in the test of what works and doesnt in doom insofar as the original 2 and while i dont really care either way about the maps i can appreciate their ambition in trying to represent a realistic place evem if it kinda falls flat instead of the same hell, catacombs, and military bases over and over again.
edit: (is this how you do these edit things? I dont comment all that often so it'll have to do) After watching the video all the way through I agree with german peter on all of his points. I think the reason doom's city levels are seen the way they are is due to people like me who didnt grow up and play doom when it originally came out, for people like me my eyes have been spoiled when it comes to the way people design maps in games and most specifically when it comes to cities. I never asked myself when playing siege of shanghai in battlefield 4 if it was a city, when i play doom 2 I can't really suspend my belief that dooms cities are cities and i believe thats where the biggest stigma against them comes from.
TL:DR Doom's city maps aren't bad per se just kinda antithetical to how doom plays mainly due to visibility. They also dont really look like a city but thats a symptom of it being one of the first games to make them (at least in first person). People dislike them because they've been spoiled on how a city should look.
I tend to agree with you, however, when I remember those awesome city levels from Doom Zero, I see what the cities from Doom2 could have been. But, yeah, Sandy Petersen was probably overworked at the time, we can't blame him.
BTW... share you more-detailed maps to us to play them! :D
Just played doom II for the first time recently. Reading intermission describing how doomguy has to return to his home town and seeing factory level left me very much satisfied. I liked how big the map is even if simplistic, cause its matched what i expexted a city to be. Next city levels were even better. Didnt dig castle looking levels like courtyard and citadel cause they felt very generic and didnt make sense why would there be a castle inside the city.
I never understood the complaints “they don’t look like real cities” “they’re too big and I get lost”
Ever been to a city for the first time? Because my god it is easy to get lost. Even with GPS I couldn’t find some stuff when I went to Tokyo. I followed the directions but my little indicator of where I was never seemed to correspond with reality. In fact by the time I found the destination I wanted to go to, the place was closed for the evening.
Also, considering when the game came out and even compared with mostly vanilla compatible newer mapsets, computers back then would have absolutely crawled trying to render something more realistic. DOOM was well optimized but it still ran poorly on a lot of hardware at the time. I think people take that for granted now with hindsight and almost 30 years of innovation and technological advancements.
Even between Doom 2 and the plutonia experiment the later levels look more defined than the levels in DOOM 2, but it was also released a long time afterwards as well. I’d argue TNT’s other set for final doom had some more blatant design sins of being too big.
Besides there’s map 21 in DOOM 2 and people want to complain about downtown and industrial zone? Even before I saw others talking about how bad Nirvana is, I always felt something was really off about that map. Indeed, there is a lot off about it.
Just my take. I’m not saying I’m right. I’m just confused why people would complain about any map that isn’t Map 21.
Did you ever release the enhanced cities wad you made? It looks really fun.
I enjoyed the city levels mostly, it was when I got to the Hell portion that this game just took a massive dump in quality for me and barely recovered. I really enjoyed Nirvana, Condo, Chasm and Spirit World in particular was my favorite map. The city stages were the best in my opinion
The song “Into Sandy’s City” is amazing
Great video. I also felt that the other CZcamsrs’ criticism of city levels was a little bit exaggerated. The developers basically INVENTED FPS cityscapes, and I think they did an excellent job considering the limitations of the era. I agree those levels haven’t aged as well as others, but are still very much enjoyable even after almost 30 years!
I remember as a kid I thought being in the city was the coolest thing ever. Odyssey of Noise in Plutonia is a great city level though. Wish there were more like it in Doom 2. When I replay Doom 2 for the thousandth time, I have to admit the city levels can be a slog. Especially factory. But there was something really special about every city level when you're playing Doom 2 in the early 2000s as a kid, like whoa, Doom also can be set in cities? Not just space ports and hell? I even used to think Downtown was a super cool level until my standards for cities went up when seeing custom mods or Odyssey of Noise.
I didn't experience this personally since I played this game pretty late in its life cycle when literally any system can run it, but I heard computers at the time struggled to perform in the city levels. They had to make them a bit more bare bones and remove some detail.
I personally consider Gotcha a city level. If I remember right, it's one of the last city levels if not the last one. It's an incredibly corrupt and horrifying city level where there are a few abstract buildings in a pool of blood. How metal is that? The place has been corrupted beyond recognition.
If you're up to it (controversial opinion incoming), you could play that Brutal Doom mod, extermination day is its name now. It recreated the city levels in a way that was recognizably the original levels, but set in a city. I vaguely remember it made Gotcha look like a mall LOL.
And as for a response to watching the full video, the problem is somehow visually the non-city levels tend to look more visually appealing even though they're completely abstract and make no sense. Just when you compare Factory in Doom 2 with E1M7 in doom 1, neither level makes any sense at all, but one looks much nicer than the other. Custom doom maps set in cities also probably have the benefit of running on more modern hardware so they can push details up more. It's not really a fair comparison to say a GZDoom mod in 2023 is nicer than a Doom2.exe wad file from the 90s is looking better, but there are levels that show that with the tech limitations at times, some levels looked much nicer than the doom 2 city levels. Especially Knee Deep in the Dead had probably the best levels. That was the freeware episode that made other people want to buy the rest of the game, even though the rest of the game was somewhat of a disappointment compared to the free first episode. I even noticed this with other shareware games at the time. I loved Duke Nukem 1's shareware episode but couldn't complete the slog that was episode 2. This level was horrible. dukenukem.fandom.com/wiki/Mission:_Moonbase?file=Vlcsnap-2011-03-02-15h03m39s222.png
I’ve always loved city levels in Doom 2, they looked so cute. Yeah, and walking around some realistic-ish-ish environments was a nice change of pace for a predominantly hell/space environment based game
I'm a zoomer in my early 20's, and I played Doom 2 back in 2017 or so for the first time. Before watching this video, I had no strong opinion on the city levels. I heard people criticize them in the past for looking nothing like real locations despite being supposedly based on real locations. I could look past that, figuring "Based on and looks like a real place" was different in 1993 than it is today. Plus, it's far more "realistic" than the hell levels or the rest of the game. I enjoyed walking around the city levels and seeing all the towers and buildings. It was a little confusing and complicated, but that's any old school Doom level. I never heard anyone complain heavily about these levels apart from the usual "It's based on a real place but doesn't look very realistic!" angle, which I find to be an unsurprising observation for a debatably 3D game engine made 30 years ago.
For me, the city levels were no different than the rest. Doom is always so abstract, you'd have to be a pedantic dongwad to say "BuT iT lOoKs NoThInG lIkE [insert theme here]!!!" with a straight face.
I have no previous opinion because I never got to the city levels in Doom 2 but in the gameplay I've seen from friends and youtube I feel like Doom 2's city levels are a predecessor to Halo 3 ODST's Mombasa Streets, which is fantastic.
Suburbs is one of my favorite levels. The engine is really what holds the realism back for detail. You wouldn’t be able to make overhanging awnings, or streetlights when you’re dealing with that level of verticality. With more thought, you could certainly achieve it, but it wouldn’t play the same. I put a dam and power plant into a map and while the dam was quite believable with working floodgates, I’m not sure that anyone would immediately think power plant unless it was pointed out to them. I think some better textures would have gone a long way. Raised sidewalks and broken windows rather than random bars everywhere. But, like you said, it’s almost more believable than most levels throughout the games. But a lot more detail to make it look like buildings had crumbed walls rather than perfectly cut openings would have gone a long way and it probably came down to time or possibly issues with optimization. All those vertices add up quickly in wide open areas like that.
Sandy once mentioned how Downtown map tested PC HW and Doom engine to the limits back then, he could not added more details even if he wanted. I always loved Dooms abstract design. You can make pretty realistic maps with todays editors and HW. But most popular WADs are still the abstract ones, no doubt.
Yeah, doesn't surprise me. The PS1 port cuts it and Industrial Zone out entirely.
Interestingly, the GBA port of all things manages to have both of them, even if IZ is cut into two maps.
20 minutes of pedantry. Beautiful.
Thank you! :) Glad you enjoyed it.
I also like the city levels. And recently I played Plutonia for the first time and the city level there was amazing.
when i was very very young, like around 4, I didnt know the names of the levels, but I always liked the city levels the most, the burning skyline, the atmosphere, and i always thought it was really on earth, in a city and it felt cooler to me than being on mars, but anyways i would always ask to play the city levels
I love Doom 2 because of its gameplay and secret levels. In terms of map design, Doom 1 if my favorite, especially the PSX version. However, Plutonia surely has some of my favorite levels, such as Cyberden and Go 2 It. There's one city level, however, that shows ID Software evolved the formula: Odissey of Noises.
Gotta say, I really appreciate how you highlighted the merits of the story and setting. Too many people STILL believe to this day that no one cared about any kind of storytelling just because John Carmack was quoted as not caring about ANY videogame stories in general at the time, but quickly changed his mind. Heck, I've seen people who assume the spaceport is in actual space or can't figure out when you actually go to Hell.
I had to look up a guide for downtown my first play through, other than that I didn’t mind the city levels
Good job pal!