DOOM's Brilliant Bestiary Balance
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- čas přidán 15. 02. 2023
- DOOM is such an iconic game that still creates waves of inspirations and imitations to this day. But what exactly is it about this game that makes it work so well? The answer - its enemies.
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Thanks for killin' those demons. - Hry
I always thought Cacodemons as the iconic Doom enemy. It’s the first enemy I think of when it comes to Doom plus it seems to be the most meme’d in the Doom community so it definitely left more of an impression then the Imp.
It's also the desktop icon for the official Windows 95 and Unity ports.
Thats not what its called, its a meatball now
yeah
Same
yeah, but does the cacodemon have a wad entirely about Encountering it?
The pain elemental and archvile were designed to encourage aggressive play by giving you something that gets more dangerous the longer it's left alone.
Ain't no way a pain elemental is as bad as a revenant
@@faintfiction5389 revenants don't get more dangerous the longer you leave them alive
In an interview of Sandy Petersen by Dwars and Decino, while playing episode 2 co-op, Petersen explained that he designed the Hell Knight because he was forced to fight a Baron of Hell with a shotgun and he lost patience with killing it.
I always felt like the Hell Knight's strength lay in its place as the in-between of the Imp and Baron. Stronger than the former, so more threatening in numbers, but not a borderline miniboss like the Baron.
It just feels like one of the most versatile enemies to me.
@amcname8789 The Hell Knight really is versatile since even a couple force me to consider them as priority enemies during larger encounters. Doom 1 Episode 4 showed me exactly why placing too many Barons in a level really makes them drag on more than they should. In most situations, having even small groups of them just a few times means you'll be dumping so much ammo fighting very few enemies. E4M2 would be much nicer with Hell Knights.
Yea if anything it's the baron that becomes kind of obsolete after the inclusion of the hell knight. It becomes apparent in how much of an iconic duo hell knights and revenants have established themselves as in the 30 years of custom wads after the game's release. The baron is fine when it's just one or two but in larger numbers they become a chore to deal with. In general low health and high threat monsters are the most interesting in games and the baron is bad in both. It's so easy to just avoid them that it often becomes advantageous to ignore them and move on if you're not going for 100% kills.
Their only good use is being walls, either for example to protect monsters behind them like archviles or to block the exit from a room and force the player to deal with the more immediate threats before they have the time to kill them and be able to exit.
@@eircK Heck this is probably why the baron gets outright replaces or modified in a lot of mods just to keep it relevent
still better than a Cacodemon with pistol only
11:10 They couldn't crash the old computers, because there's a global hard limit on Lost Souls. After it's reached their attacks and death won't spawn them anymore.
Not just this.... Doom 2 limitations made the pit a cakewalk because the devs didn't think of the lost soul limit, so, you may encounter early on a pain elemental that can't shoot you because the game already is on the ready over the lost soul limit.
Most source ports remove the cap though, so nowadays Pain Elementals are much more menacing.
@@Dave01Rhodes You gonna have to wait a few hours if not days to crash a modern computer with that.
@@verbugterherrderdunkelheit6086 oh no, not because they’ll crash the computer. But in DOS Doom they can spawn a total of like 20 Lost Souls. Now they can spawn over 200. Good luck fighting through all of them.
@@Dave01Rhodes That's another thing
Acording to John Romeo, the Archvile was orginaly called "The medic" and was a scapped monster for the original Game, being referenced in some marble textures.
Another "ennemi" that was crapped was "The Blob"
Acording to Romeo, it would an invisible red blob that would spawn on a wall, then show itself it you'd walk passed it, spawn a lost soul pain elemental style and and die. It's sprites was reused for the insides of the pain elemental.
Not quite, the Arch-Vile was describe as an "evil healer", not a medic. It was however a scrapped enemy, much like the Revenant.
@@GermanPeter I didn't new about the revenant being originally from Doom 1, that's a surprise!
"Romeo"
@@GermanPeter the healer stalks
well, not exactly. the blob was origanally gonna be spawned by the pain elemental but was instead scrapped and to the lost souls we have today. (and like you said was used for the pain elemental's sprite instead.
Got to love that the "pain elemental" is incapable of hurting you directly.
but it does cause you a lot of pain
it hurts you emotionally though
I believe in the beta, it was capable of a biting attack similar to the Cacodemon. Theoretically this could be added in a source port, but I don't know if it's ever happened. They can also unleash a Lost Soul at point blank range which does a lot of damage.
@@drygnfyre In Doom 2, if you stand right next to them, they're harmless because they have no room to spawn Lost Souls. But in Doom 64 they do have a biting attack.
Theres one more detail you omitted in Doom and is the graphical design. Every enemy has a shape and prominent color that makes them highly differenciable from each other, even from large distances. This is an art that was lost in time during the early 2000s and returned recently with the second coming of the Boomer Shooters.
It goes even deeper than that: Doom's developers weren't trying to make a cohesive art direction. Like were specifically avoiding it to paradoxically make the game better. Something any modern artist would call idiotic but played to early PC gaming's limitations perfectly...
A lot of Doom's iconic moments were, let's not beat around the bush, stolen. Wall textures and statue heads were scanned from photography books, but other details were drawn in MS Paint. The Cacodemon comes from a DnD monster manual, while other monsters were rotoscoped from clay models. The skyboxes were ripped from a CD of stock images (same with the sound effects). The weapons were pictures of toy guns run into whatever we used to call photoshop in the early 90's. No modern artist would be caught dead doing any of this, ethics aside it's a hodge-podge of different lighting techniques, resolutions, color schemes, and art styles. But Adrian Carmack and the other artists on the team made it work on the limited processors of the day. Floors, walls, and enemies needed to be immediately identifiable in a wide range of lighting conditions and screen tints (such as red for berserk pack), not to mention the 320x200 resolution. So the garish mix with no singular art direction turned out to be the perfect fit for this ground-breaking 3D engine gameplay they were making.
I think the graphical design is one of the reasons why Doom can be so easily ported to anything. Even on the SNES, where enemy sprites are sometimes a cluster of like 4 pixels at a distance, you can still make everyone out because of their distinct colors. It's quite insane how well it works, not even Wolfenstein or Quake do it as nicely in my opinion.
@@GermanPeter I mean, if Quake even tried to do so, it'd fail spectacularly at that aspect due to the severely muted and limited color palette it uses. So unless you're not familiar with the enemy designs, it'll be hard to make out a Vore from a Shambler at a distance.
Hey, I'm sorry to hear about you having lost someone, I don't know who Kate was, but I can only hope for the best for you in what must be a very difficult time, please take time away from the channel if you need to, we all grieve in different ways and your wellbeing comes first by miles, sorry for the glum tangent, but I figure she must have been important to you and I just wanna let you know that we are here for you in a weird way...
Thank you very much, but I'm pretty much over it now :) This video is a week old, after all. I do very much appreciate your words, though :)
@@GermanPeter ah ok, I'm glad to hear that things are better for you , and I'm sorry if what I said had the reverse effect and brought things to the surface lol. but anyway I'm happy things are ok for you, and I hope they continue to improve! onto something lighter: this video was a great look at doom's enemies, and I think we can all say the doom remakes wouldn't be complete without the SSG haha, If you don't mind video idea suggestions, considering you do mostly Boomer-shooter focused vids, have you considered doing anything on HROT or duke3D? Id love to hear if you had any ideas for them
@@item459 I don't really care for either HROT or Duke 3D, so probably not.
@@GermanPeter sorry to ask but who is kate
My condolences for Kate
Sorry for no thumbnail yet, it's coming later.
The thumbnail has now arrived.
*that one purple guy panic gif I always send*
The Super Shotgun only harms the weapon balance at a first glance - it seems so effective at what should be the shotgun's optimal range that it seems like it steps on its toes, right? But the reason it doesn't is actually quite ingenious.
The shotgun's role against fodder enemies is primarily to deal close-range bursts of damage, but it does decently even at long range. If you're up against a bunch of zombies pelting you from across the map, the shotgun can potentially still deal with all of them because it has a perfectly flat spread. However, against stronger enemies, it starts to get noticeably weaker even at its optimal range, until it just doesn't feel worth it to take the risk of getting close. The Super Shotgun takes all of that and supercharges its strengths _and_ weaknesses, _tripling_ the pellets it fires for only double the ammo and making it punch like the rocket launcher up close, but rendering it a waste of good ammo at farther than sneezing distance because its spread goes ham in every direction, sometimes even going into the ground past a certain point.
And herein lies the genius: at the exact range the Super Shotty starts to feel like you're missing more pellets than you hit, the regular Shotgun would still be able to hit most or all of its pellets, making it once again the better weapon, and at long range, the shotgun has an exactly flat spread, so it can actually pelt multiple enemies rather usefully. Against fodder enemies, the super shotty can deal with a whole lot of them at once if you line the shot up right, but what if there's only a handful of zombiemen? You could kill them all in a single shotgun blast, let alone a super shotgun blast, and you'd use less ammo to do it and be less vulnerable if you missed one, which often still happens with the SSG thanks to its ridiculous spread. What if you need to deal with shotgun guys and imps at medium range? Regular shotty is at its prime in that situation. SSG has a long enough reload time between shots that it actually leaves you more vulnerable in that situation where the shotgun would instead fire just barely fast enough to prevent most of the enemies from being able to get a shot off. So in a weird reversal, the SSG is impractical against mobs of fodder enemies that aren't all sitting in a convenient hallway-sized line, but it's necessary to fight the stronger demons, and it works really well with their fireball-spewing attack patterns to make a very fun dance of a game. The Super Shotgun is probably the reason why Doom 2 is really the game everyone is still playing and creaming over to this day, not Doom 1.
Go back and try playing Doom 1 without the Super Shotgun. Eventually you're going to have to fight a Baron of Hell with the regular shotgun, which is slow and tedious and suuuuuuucks. You could say the same for cacodemons, too, and lost souls are just small and tough enough that the shotgun doesn't work very well against them at medium range and sometimes takes 3 shots even up close. The Super Shotgun really is necessary to keep shotgun shells relevant as an ammo type late into the game. For Doom 1, the shotgun worked because any enemy that wasn't hitscan was either a boss, or constantly getting closer, or it threw fireballs straight at you with a reasonable amount of health for the challenge level being presented. The imp died in one or two blasts. Cacodemons died in exactly six good shots, about the same as the SSG vs a Hell Knight. The Baron... is where the shotgun is no longer useful and you're really better off going with something like the Rocket Launcher or the Plasma Rifle.
But the reason they can get away with Doom 2's enemy balance is because of the Super Shotgun. It's as strong as the Rocket Launcher but it fires much slower, costs 2x the ammo you can only carry 100 of, and needs you to be up close and personal. It defines the risk-reward dance of Doom 2. The Hell Knight was necessary as it ended up because of the Super Shotgun, though, because they needed an enemy that posed the same threat level the Cacodemon did when you only had the Shotgun, and it also gave them something with the same offensive punch as a Baron without you needing to fight a bullet sponge of an enemy every time they needed that kind of power, so it could be killed with the regular shotgun in a reasonable amount of time, and they could put two of them in an area to raise the stakes against you without raising the ammo consumption, while also making the rocket launcher a more attractive option, because it's really good against Barons of Hell, and Hellknights by extension, but kinda sucks against Cacodemons because they fly away before you can land the second shot.
Man, I wanted to talk about the shotgun and instead I started pinning lines to everything like a weird conspiracy nut. That's how brilliant Doom 2's overall balance is.
It's interesting to think about how much thought must have gone into the creation of the classic Doom games. There's lots of little things, like how projectiles behave, the ways enemies and weapons counter each other, the levels, and more. I like the level progression in the first episode of Doom 1 in particular. The game slowly introduces elements in a way which feels natural, and doesn't escalate too quickly.
archviles are my favorite but
14:01 "impossible in groups"
so innocent, you have not seen a tenth of the horrors i have.
Sunlust map 32.
Plutonia 2 map11, "Arch-Violence".
BTSX E2 map24, "Perhaps Now The Vultures".
Who else knows more maps like that?
@@DinnerForkTonguemost of the new Sunder maps (map 15+) make use of large groups of arch viles and other enemies as well. If you enjoy slaughter maps, absolutely worth checking out
In modern doom combat baron is considered to be more hated than his pallete swap. When large numbers they make them more grindy.
Modern doom combat however is epitomised by presence of revenant. To specialised infantry to hell knights standard infantry.
Also modern doom combat is not afraid to use archvile. Infact Archvile and Revenant are considered dream team for making combat encounter interesting as revenant forces you to move his projectiles while archvile forces you to seek cover with his attack
Also Revenants have that no-attack zone when you're so close, they don't fire tracers and are stuck with closing in for melee. That can be manipulated like playdough, as Coincident's world-first UV-Fast run of Sunlust map30 demonstrates.
Honestly doom 1 had barely any balance, it was Doom 2 wich gave the game balance.
Doom 1 had only 3 kind of enemies. Hitscan, projectile based enemies that would replace proj with melee if close, and melee pure, pinkies. The true magic of doom started with Doom 2. None of the doom 2 enemies repeat a single behavior from Doom 1. except hell knight, but that was to have something in between imps and barons that wasn't flying. Revenants not only respond to damage with mini missles, they can shoot homing. pain elementals try to up the pressure , and if you are not quick drain your ammo, Arachnotron is the only quick shooting projectile enemy in the game, and mancubus can deceive your reflexes with the second projectile Not mentioning Archviles are made to break your dance having an attack that hits hard on sight and the ability to resurrect enemies (wich isn't very used in Doom 2 , but a nightmare in Plutonia)
@@yusukeelric "Revenants not only respond to damage with mini missles"
Wait, mini missiles? I don't think I've ever seen that. Is that a rare thing that sometimes happen?
A thing that wasn't mentioned about the Spider Mastermind is that her weapon isn't just the Chaingun, it's actually a Shotgun Guy's shotgun with the rate of fire of the Chaingunner's Chaingun, which is why it has that sound. It's very nasty up close, but at a distance, it becomes really easy to get her to infight, even with other Spider Masterminds because of how hitscan infighting works.
Her weapon and low HP is her biggest weakness as a boss enemy. It only takes one shot to kill her with the BFG, she pauses for a second to look at you before she starts firing, and she's an immensely wide target, so there's almost no way to not get a perfect shot on her, and that also means there's no reason not to use the BFG unless you don't have it. The Cyberdemon is a way better boss enemy for a multitude of reasons, basically boiling down to "he's everything the Mastermind isn't." He takes 2-3 hits with the BFG even if you get all of them perfect, and it isn't necessarily easy to even use the BFG on him, because he may be a big target, but he's a much _skinnier_ target, so you have to be right in his face to get a perfect shot, and his rockets may be easy to dodge, but from that close there is no dodging. Because of that, you might even correctly feel the BFG would be wasted on him unless there's nothing else in the area and you can focus all your attention on doing the dance between his rockets while getting closer. His splash damage also makes him extremely nasty in tight spaces, so how easy or hard his fight is can change based on the map, and that makes him a very dynamic and adaptable enemy.
The mastermind's biggest problem is that if she's effective, she's too bullshit. Cybie might be nasty in tight spaces, but you can still deal with him and it'll be a fun fight. If Spidey traps you in point blank with no cover, no BFG, and no infighting to save you, you're just fucking dead with no fighting chance unless you get lucky with the SSG or something. You can't even add more of them to add a challenge because they just infight each other. She's such a rare enemy because it's so hard to use her in a way that doesn't make the other enemies less effective. In fact, that seems to be her purpose as an enemy! Of all the enemies in Doom, I would say she's the odd one out as being the one that's not very good.
I kinda wish she got to really feel like the final boss of Doom. Part of me wishes they'd given her a special BFG 8000 that irradiates the areas it strikes instead of a super-chaingun, but I wouldn't know how to implement it with Classic Doom mechanics or delicately balance it without removing the iconic rivalry she seems to have with the Cyberdemon.
It might have been interesting if instead of a chaingun, she was using plasma like the Arachnotrons, just shooting either faster or shooting twice as many projectiles. Or, if they wanted to get REALLY creative, a BFG9000 as well. That would have made peeking around corners EXTREMELY dangerous and turned her into an actual final boss.
You could use the Beta BFG as it's basically multiple plasma guns all firing wildly in a cone. It would make her more like her children whilst also giving her a weapon that could remain devastating in open spaces and not too cheap in tight spaces. I'd love to play a mod where she uses that.
One BFG shot? Yeah no, unless you are playing gzdoom
THANK GOD there isnt a enemy equivalent to the super shotgun, the chainsaw and beserk
Super shotgun = Daedabus from Valiant
Chainsaw = Greater Pinky from Avactor
Berserk = Kamikaze from Valiant
@@DinnerForkTongue :(
hell knights, barons, revenants, and probably more monsters have melee similar in damage to the berserk and the chaingunner straight up has the same type of attack as your chaingun
There are chainsaw zombies in Doom 3.
Come to think of it, the enemy equivilent to Berserk would be the revenants.
@@-AAA-147i said chainSAW
Worms can not describe how much I ADORE the Doom enemies. They really do all fit their niches perfectly. I was wondering how you'd do an OPE episode on the game.
worms
worms
No, worms indeed can't describe. Words may be able, though. lol
Ha! My pet worm has written a whole essay about how he loves the doom enemies.
You should’ve gotten slugs to do the job. Those guys could go on for DAYS about why you love these enemies.
I just googled her, great artist. Sorry for your loss, Kumpel. 😔
It's honestly shocking how incredibly did this game age to this very day, in fact I'd say it puts many modern AAA titles to shame. The fact that they came up an invented so many new things that haven't really been seen in fps games before and did it so well and balanced is beyond amazing, which is the main reason why modding community is still incredibly productive even after 30 years.
I think classifying the Hell Knights as filler enemies is a bit unfair, because they do have a role to play in the roster. The fact that Knights have a smaller health pool than Barons means that you can use more of them in a group without making fights just super tedious or overwhelming the player to the point of bs. Specters can be hit or miss partly depending on if the mapper knows how to use them correctly, but also on what the player's settings are for lighting. Specters work best in dark areas and with lighting mode set to either Vanilla, Doom or Dark. There's also a setting that you can play with that changes what specter transparency looks like, so maybe changing that around can help as well.
An interesting thing to see is how using -fast changes up the monsters in Doom. Normally something like the pinkies/spectres are kind of a nuisance in normal but on fast monsters, they become a huge threat because of how fast they can close the distance and corner you, and that they are always placed in groups and/or in tight areas.
Worth giving it a try at least a few times to experience a Nightmare-lite without the respawning enemy nonsense.
On the flipside, fast monsters makes Arch-Viles super predictable. Useful in a few hard wads, but _deadly_ when they're perched and moving from cover to cover is non-negotiable.
Pinkies have a couple extra features as well. Their erratic movements make them likely to flank you while you're busy with other threats, and in they also work as meat shields for other enemies.
The fact that a game as old as DOOM had a mechanic like In-Fighting is mind blowing. Some modern games still haven't figured this out.
Even better that it's not just a quirky side effect, but an actually integral part of the gameplay. Luring enemies into other enemies' projectiles is a legit strategy, and how you get through some of the tougher encounters. They could have just made it so enemies can only damage each other, but they even made it so they go after one another. They fully committed to the idea, and it's great. And impressive, because in Wolfenstein 3D, all enemies just shot through each other!
I consider cacodemons best and most iconic Doom enemy.
3:03 heh the way you mentioned that reminds me of the imperial guardsman from 40k.
what they lack in firepower they make up for in numbers.
I think the point made about the specter's a bit moot, if you ask me. Mainly due in part to the default settings GZDoom imposes on you, which more or less screw with their presence in the game as a whole. As someone who's played both the original games *and* a handful of megawads through PrBoom+, I can say confidently that they *can* stand on their own threateningly.
Well, I think it's a big problem with technology outgrowing games. The fact you can display so many more pixels alone messes with them, because their initial design was clearly intended for them to blend in with backgrounds. Adding a different shader messes things up further, but I wouldn't really hold that against GZDoom. I think the problem is mainly that they were designed with limitations in mind, and those limitations just don't have a reason to exist anymore.
@@GermanPeter Well like I said, source ports like Crispy Doom and the one I mentioned don't seem to share that same issue. They upscale the game wonderfully without compromising its original, well, look.
@@GermanPeter As the other guy said, it's a Gzdoom issue. Plenty of other source ports don't have this problem(Crispy Doom, Prboom+, DSDA-Doom, Woof etc.)
Gzdoom is made by a guy that thinks texture filtering looks good on a game that clearly wasn't made for it.
@levesteM You can make GZDoom look vanilla with a few settings. You just need to run True Color and have the fuzz effect on. It definitely makes Specters an enemy with a unique advantage, and I'm often caught off guard by them if they manage to somehow sneak to my side.
I think Hell Knight is a lot better than Baron as an avid Doom mapper. These day you just need a lot more monster than the OG to make the map more challenging. A group of Baron is a no challenge but they have just too much health, without BFG, Barons take a lot more time to kill and make combat really boring especially when you playing a Slaughter maps. On the other hand, the hell knight offer the same threat but less of a bullet sponge, ideal for early map when the player doesn't have powerful weapon in their hands and for Slaughter maps, it offer great infighting to other mid demons and slaughter fun.
Barons are best used as tanks, like in Sunlust where sometimes Barons are used as a constantly advancing wall of meat and death, and others as battlefield congestion.
Hell Knights are Barons that don't waste your time. All the stats, but half health, so they're appropriately fragile without being too easy to shred through. Even the plasma still takes a few seconds to down one.
Circle strafing has always been a thing in DOOM.
Many people might not have known about it because they played with the keyboard only (as that was the default configuration), but anyone who decided to play the game with keyboard and mouse back then would naturally figure out circle strafing in a very short time.
May Kate rest in peace. I didn't even notice her passing, I hope you're okay :(
Binging your videos right now since I missed your content and I really miss Kate too. I'm happy knowing we still have her drawings and the memory of her in our hearts.
8:44 to be fair, you never shoot rockets with pinkies nearby, that's a rule of thumb :P
Let there be a prayer for Kate. May she be in a better place than this world. 👼
You forgot to mention that cacodemons can be completely stunlocked with the chaingun.
They have like a 50% chance of a pain state when getting damaged with anything, so the rate of fire just puts them constantly in it.
It keeps the chaingun from becoming obsolete even after the super shotgun.
Great video! I'm liking the channel so far
Awesome vid. One of tge many things I love about Classic Doom is that even tho I played it for like 20 years now having gotten my first PC in 2003 (25 years if I include PS1 Doom and Final Doom back on my PS1), I still keep learning new things about this game. It's really like an old marriage at this point xD
Hey. Great video with a cool analysis. It’s not common to see a video from Germany with that amount interesting information in this high quality. This applies to all your videos. ❤
What Id like to hear more of is the use of dooms enemies in fanmade wadpacks... Hearing the term "not used often" gave me such fucking whiplash of a couple highend wads that just spam Cacos and Pain Elementals and Archviles in either smart or not so smart ways.
Well, the problem with that is that people seem to misunderstand how these enemies are MEANT to be used. Like you said, they just spam the high-damage enemies to make them harder, without actually realizing that they're more fun when limited. Just look at Plutonia and stuff like that. Yeah, they're harder, but not in a fair way.
This analysis was more about the actual enemy designs and how they interact with each other properly. And for that, I could only talk about the original Doom. Not even episode 4 fell into this category because the level design is often intentionally frustrating.
Just fyi, the lost souls ARE sentient fireballs. which is why they don't count as enemies (at least not in the vanilla ports.) But the way they are programmed to essentially become their own projectile while charging. So their attack is a projectile based one and not melee. Funny enough, the lost soul sprite reuses part of the mancubus fireball sprite.
Archvile easely the coolest enemy in classic doom
Very much so. Archies are my favourite by faaaar, and it's very hard to misuse them in any of their roles (short-range sniper, resurrector, cover denier, invulnerability staller, etc.). Only Arch-Violence from Plutonia 2 did them dirty.
hell yea, i love every single sound they make
🤷🙇 ↗️🔥🧑✈️🔥
Never doubt the regular shotgun, that weapon can hit hard pretty far due to the balance of the tighter spread and stronger single-shot damage making it a better way to deal with cacodemons or other enemies from afar especially when you don't have the time to chip away with the pistol.
I'm glad you did this one, my man.
The monsters on Nightmare are a completely different story, however.
1:46 DOG
I knew I was watching quality shit the moment you mentioned tapping the chaingun for sniping
"Dog." - GermanPeter, 2023.
Ah, the Spider Mastermind. Honestly, she was really shafted in the original Doom Games. Wads like In Spain Only and Going Down Show how much potential she has. Using her as an ever-looming sniper that is tough to avoid is the best way to utilize her.
Oh and you hate Pain Elementals, huh? Wait 'til you see them in Doom 64... dear god...
Chaingunners are the ultimate glass cannon
You're like the one person I watch to see what Doom is all about!
Decino also makes excellent analyses.
I think one thing that separates Doom's use of hitscan from many others is also that (unless you're playing on nightmare) their attacks are telegraphed giving you time to dodge them. Of course in higher numbers that becomes considerably harder to do, but the fact that they have their bark when they notice you, and a slight "aiming" delay before they fire (as well as their first shot being less accurate) gives players with low health a chance to avoid damage, unlike something like Call of Duty where there's this constant chip damage going on, which they solved by giving players unlimited health if they head for cover.
Even many of Doom's contemporaries lack these tells, making avoiding damage much harder and fighting hitscanners becoming much more frustrating.
What's worse than a Pain Elemental? The Doom64 version of it.
Two-mouth monster goes AHUEHEUHAUEH
The Pain in the Ass Elementals can make a wall of Lost Souls. That is so annoying.
You make some good vids.
"Literally to hell with it" - Iconic phrase!
I prefer the Knight over Baron, because the Knight has health aproapiatly to his difficulty.
Barons can feel like just damage sponges at times.
"Yeah just let me unload 25% of my shells into this bastard"
"Oh look there two more, fuck"
Hell Knight's thing is that in dark environments you can not easily differentiate between a Knight and a Baron.
Believe it or not, there's still a place for the regular shotgun even with the SSG. I use it for whenever I need to dish out damage where the SSG is just too inaccurate.
Yep, the regular shotgun is better for high ledges and longer distances. Not to mention there are certain situations where the ssg is just overkill and a waste of ammo.
It's good for clusters of former humans and imps early on, for mid-range shooting, and especially when you're dealing with chest-high rainings and windowsills. Bless that duckbill spread.
I'd love it if you played some modern Doom wads and come back to this topic. The pressures of 30 years of design have teased out the potential of every monster, and highlighted even more how exquisite the design of the bestiary is
Everyone calls the human enemies a low threat until they play plutonia.
One detail about Pain elemental and lost soul, in the original engine there was a limit of 21 lost soul in the map for performances and balance, this is not limited to spawned losrt soul. Modern port often disibale this limit but allow you to put it back in.
11:13 Pain elementals have a lost soul limit of 21 in the vanilla game, and I think that applies to P.E.s in a map. Once they are able to spew lost souls up to the limit, they'll become a useless enemy until one/more of the lost souls(spewed by the P.E.s, not placed ones/spawned by the Icon) die. That's what I know atleast.
It actually only applies to pain elementals, so you're correct. The map maker can place more than 21 lost souls on their own but a pain elemental can't spawn more if there exists 21 or more; a famous example of that is the pain elementals in The Pit.
@@dististik Oh ok, thanks for correcting me.
No Wolfenstein SS and Commander Keen? JK, great video as always!
I was tempted to include the SS at least, but they exist literally just in two levels :D
@@GermanPeter it was just some "DOOM nerd" nitpicking as a joke, since both of them count towards the kill count, therefore, can be considered as enemies, even though they're pretty much Easter Eggs in the original game.
But hey, I've seen some brutal usage of the Wolfenstein SS in some custom .wads, it's rare, but it happens. Think about a middle ground between the Chaingunner and the standard zombies, and there's your analysis.
Once again, great video(s), I'm already a huge fan of the channel, cheers from Brazil!
Fun fact: John romero actually created the pinkies to slow down the Player
some nerd-ass corrections and trivia that werent mentioned:
- the cacodemon actually does more damage than the imp, it also blocks space like the pinky because the doom engine considers it infinitely tall
-there's a setting in gzdoom that emulates how the spectres look in original doom, you can also enable the limited colors and it makes them a threat again
-you can make pain elementals unable to shoot out lost souls by getting all up in their face and getting on top of the explosion, it's very funny and they totally deserve it (also, in original doom they can't spawn more lost souls if there's 20 in the map already thank god)
-hell knights are considered a very good monster by mappers due to being a imp 2 but then again doom modders are insane
-i hate revenant missiles
3:34 Voodoo-Cursed Heavy Soul
I always feel bad for Doom PS1's Nightmare Specter always getting over looked but i also get it because its only exclusive to that port lol
For those unfamiliar with him, Specters have a different invisibility gimmick in PS1 where they arent fuzzy textures, theyre pink like demons but are incredibly transparent so easy to miss. Because they have this different design, midway was able to make a new transparent demon that looks pretty cool.
Unlike the Specter, the Nightmare Specter is very easy to see in lit rooms as hiding is not the point of them, they're black and their shading is a bit anomalous as the shaded parts are actually a lit up dark teal.
Their gimmick is actually the fact they have twice as much health as Pinkys and theyre twice as fast.
Its a bummer these havent made a return in any game since. The closest we got was the Nightmare Imp from Doom 64 (also Midway) which was clearly the inspiration of Eternal's Prowler.
first off i hope you're doing well and deeply sorry for your loss.
nice vid but i mildly disagree with super shotgun throwing off the balance, yes all enemies can be taken out with the supe but it consumes 2 times as much ammo and is far less accurate also being the only weapon in doom to have vertical spread, unlike it's single pump action older brother, the pump shotgun is better for picking off individual targets that would die to single pump shotgun blast anyway, also is better for sniping them in the mid range, i find i frequently swap between super and pump usually for picking off stragglers.
The ammo consumption hardly matters, honestly. Like, I used it for a large majority of the game and I never ran out of shotgun ammo. It's only wasteful if you use it on literally every enemy, but that's when you should use other weapons regardless. My point was more that since it deletes certain enemies that were previously very dangerous so quickly, it makes these enemies less important. They absolutely accommodate this in the game, but it did change things up a lot.
@@GermanPeter ah i see i was sorta assumed you meant weapon balancing, and yeah 1 shell doesn't particularly matter when you get plenty from boxes and fallen shotgun Sargents (i think i been soo coded by certain mods where ammo is harder to get it bleeds into base game where I'm conscious of ammo usage for some reason and in some wads ammo is hard to find), and yeah makes pinkies easier to deal with making them far less a threat, although i think it's kinda cool how a weapon can change how an enemy is used, pre supe stronger tanky enemies would be used more sparingly the post supe would have to put them in harder places or in larger numbers
I don't really have a problem with hitscanners themselves, what I do have a problem with is maps that just flood you with them because when they're the main threat you're facing, the fighting just isn't as interesting.
What I like about Pain Elementals is when they're placed just right they give you a very very satisfying reason to pull out the BFG :D
And I do think the Cyberdemon is a little bit too beefy to be used as a special enemy as often as some designers seem to like to. When you're playing a megawad that has you spending a whole two or three minutes on a single enemy every other map it can start to feel more boring than challenging. I definitely think he should show up once in a while, but I think it defeats the purpose if he shows up so often you get *used* to him, because he only has one trick and that can get monotonous.
I kinda wish that the bullet weapons had a "tier 2" weapon like the SSG, but I figured out why they didn't. Firstly, what would this bullet weapon look like? A minigun. But Doom already has one of those. Right. They'd have to retcon that into an assault rifle, since that's essentially what the chaingun is, and then triple its rate of fire and make that the chaingun.
Anyone who's played Brutal Doom or Project Brutality knows how this minigun would feel. It'd fire like 24 bullets a second and drain your ammo so fast you'll always be out of bullets because it's so much fun to shoot. Well now you have no bullets for anything else either but it's all you want to use them for. Now you can kill enemies with power that rivals the Plasma Rifle, and your hitscan attacks hit so fast it invalidates most enemies completely, even better than the plasma rifle. It's so addicting and effective to hold down the trigger you're always out of bullets. There's a reason those mods turn up your max bullets to 600, you need every last one. You're always out of ammo anyway.
That leaves you with one more problem - now you can't snipe because you're either out of bullets or saving up your bullets for a big Minigun spree, so ironically by getting a better bullet weapon that's effective enough to stand side by side with the SSG, you make your long range option unreliable. BD and PB solved this issue by making the basic shotgun viable as your long range option, so you always have at least one long range gun, but now we see that the entire game's weapon and enemy balance had to get retooled just for this one weapon, whereas the SSG and the enemies in Doom 2 went hand in hand with each other, and the SSG really felt like it was solving the problem of "how do we deal with all these new demons?" While the Minigun feels like "how do we make new demons that can stand up to the raw power of the Minigun?" Because if you've played either of those games, the Minigun is so powerful it can rip a Cyberdemon in half while making it do the Chaingun Cha-Cha, so it really would be in a tier of its own as a weapon, a gun that feels like a BFG of its own.
So it's obvious that the tier 2 chaingun is the plasma rifle, and that gun's usage is held back by the fact that its ammo is shared with an even bigger gun, I just really wished bullets had a use against Cyberdemons. I kinda still want a minigun that feels like one though lol. I should play PB.
Yay more doom content!
Hey GermanPeter, which music did you use in this video? I liked it!
Imp is definetly most iconic for me, never got why in later Doom games, they feel the need to redesigned it so much :(
Another perfect enemy could be the HECU Grunts from Half-Life, I still have more fun fighting them than the Combine (who are also still fun)
The Combine have the inverted Baron of Hell problem: they are too flimsy to bring their full kit into play. Buff their health by like 20-30% and you get a formidable force.
Mouse look is the most iconic enemy
7:37 It bothers me so much in gzdoom that I usually modify the spectres to make their visibility about on par with dos version
14:45 *Okuplok has entered the chat*
Could you please make a video about Unreal (1998)? I think it was a beautiful game for its time, probably even comparable with Half-Life.
Imagine Archvile and Pain Elemental being "paired" as "Duet Boss"
tip for archviles: you can avoid an archviles attack by hiding behind something, which most of the time levels in doom 2 will intentionally have
I'm happy i'm not alone with annoyance with Lost Souls and hatred for Pain Elemental.
10:44 original versions of the game had a feature where they only could spawn up to 20 lost souls at the same time, so despite their agressiveness, they were a bit of generous with the limit count.
I don't think sourceports still have that feature on, so perhaps the experience is more difficult there.
I would love to see you dealing with the Lost Souls and Pain Elementals of Doom 64, in case you think the pc originals are cruel enough.
Ohohohoho, I was just about to mention those. Nuisances? Try again, they're deadass threats now.
*Sees Doom 64 Pain Elemental*
"Hehe, I'll just get right in its face, it won't be able to do anything!"
*Lost Souls explode, as does all my health*
"....What the fuck?"
There's actually a limit to the amount of Lost Souls that can be on a map (I think it's 31). If you reach this limit, Pain Elementals literally can do nothing, even upon death. However, source ports can likely alter this limit, so I think this applies strictly to the vanilla games.
The limit is 21 Lost Souls. Total Lost Souls, too, so if a map has more than that spawn in by default, the Pain Elemental can't do anything until the number starts to drop. But modern source ports often disable it, likely to make slaughtermaps like Cosmogenesis even harder (and harder on your PC, since the reason the limit exists was to limit the memory usage on old 90's beige boxes).
The thing Iove the most in classic Doom is the in-fighting amon enemies lol... Pretty much all enemies can turn on each other and I find it histericaly hilarious
It's one of the only FPS games I can think of where that's even the case! And they really showed that off before the game release too, they were really proud of it.
And it's such a useful mechanic as well, because you can save your ammo if you can herd enemies together to take each other out for you :D
3:42 its actually 466.7 rounds per minute 🤓
7:17 Hey, spectres aren't totally useless. In maps with dark areas, spectres are pretty damn hard to see even when using the lighting setting with the highest "light level". Vanilla DOOM's maps were of course made with the 320x200 screen resolution in mind and spectres being hard to see so they aren't as effective in ports like GZDoom, but newer WADs like Freedoom are made knowing that source ports exist and they put spectres in REALLY dark places where you wouldn't expect.
But once you spot a Spectre, they go down just as easily as other Pinkies lol
'The enemies are more prolific in the Mario series'
cap of the century material right there.
PAPAYAPA
The problem I have with hitscanners is that they're incredibly annoying. There's nothing like being close to finishing a level with 200 health and armor, but should you go to clean up the stragglers, those bastards will easily ruin that sweet megasphere/ soulsphere-mega armor combo.
"The suit dents when you shoot it, so STOP SHOOTING IT!!!" -Gordon Freeman, in Freeman's Mind
There's one extremely annoying feature of the Pain Elemental that is somehow rarely mentioned by reviewers if at all, yet I find it terribly dangerous when exploited properly. This is: they can be induced to infight, which means they spit Lost Souls at their "attacker", but those Lost Souls will attack you, and even if you are out of sight for the attacked Pain Elemental (which means it would normally not produce more enemies), it will still pour its offspring endlessly. So if you don't dispose of it quickly, it will fill a room with Lost Souls in seconds.
when he says tauhuu he means touhou by the way.
tips: for pain elementals, just bodyblock the shit out of them in order to stop them from spawning any lost souls
for revenants, you can bait it's melee attack similarly to the pinky/demon, use that to your advantage
the super shotgun can more easily force a pain chance from archvilles, as long as most pellets connect.
Archviles are by far my favorit demon of all doom games, they have that caster type element but still are like Gandalf on steroids in that regard, being able to completely destroy you alone and might just have an army in their backpocket.
Something to keep in mind is this all applies to Doom 2, not Doom 1.
Doom 1 gets all the credit because, well, it came out first and everyone played it because it was shareware. But its roster is so bare-bones that you just have "zombieman, shotgunner, imp, flying imp, stronger imp, and bosses." Doom 2 gets none of the historic recognition despite being the far better game (indeed, the one this video is based on)
Hey fellow German, so you played/owned (and certainly shared) Doom, surely back then as a minor. YOU BROKE GERMAN LAW!!! SENTENCE: LIFE IN PRISON OR LIFELONG PLAYING CHILDFRIENDLY DOOM-ENGINE GAMES ONLY! Make your choice :)
My favorites have always been the Mancubus, Arch Vile, and Cyberdemon. Mancubus and Cyberdemon for their design, and Arch Vile for the challenge and for being the demon that always gives me a little rush of panic, knowing that i have to go for them first or i'll get overwhelmed. I like the designs of Revenants too but they can be pretty annoying. Fuck Pain Elementals, but i can appreciate that the creators knew that everyone hated the Lost Souls, so they made a Cacodemon-like enemy whose sole attack is producing Lost Souls. Thats a troll creation i can appreciate.
They once got a piece of mail from a fan who tried to mod a Cacodemon to shoot Lost Souls, but couldn't. So they made a monster who could.
you could say that the Lost Souls "SOUL purpose" is hunting you down.
Get it????? GET IT???? SOUL PURPOSE HAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA
Heh. 😎
Sorry for ur loss peter qwq, i hope ur oke
I'm fine now :) this happened over a week ago.
What always got me in the original DOOM was how the different enemies worked together well in some levels. Particularly in the final levels of episodes 1 and 2, where you have bosses you could quite easily take down with rockets, BUT THEN you have either Spectres or Lost Souls blocking your shot and risking a rocket blowing up in your face. Tactical perfection by the game designers. (Of course in episode 2 you have the plasma gun but the game tries to convince you to use rockets by supplying you with heaps of them)
Perhaps this is why the last level of Episode 3 is a bit of a let down as the supporting monsters for the boss don't really support her as much as simply try and do their own thing.
The Casali Bros used this to their advantage in Plutonia by teaming up chaingunners and arch-viles to insane levels, allowing the chaingunners to be easily resurrected if picked off. And then they saw the value of the Revenant as a glass cannon soldier and simply piled them in.
1:46 Dog.
Im not gonna lie,
You can easily deal with the gargoyles from blood if you use the entire aresenal, I think I have this view point cause I had watched civvie's blood series, which he used and gave good tips on how to deal with them,
Unless we're talking about extra crispy.
Would like to see what you think of the Heretic and Hexen monsters.
Actually, arch-viles are programad to not attack when their distance from the target is bigger then 1048 map units, unless provocked by a "pain state". :)
But I just loved the vid!
Biggest heat break in gamin - A pain elemental in fighting a a high hp enemy out of your sight. You just come back and there's like 50 lost souls