Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-26005008-20160407215658/@comment-1496755-20160606054137

The Twitch-y problems are all in the past now :)

It seems the final level was the quickest part of the stream, even though it's supposedly a boss level. E4M6 turned out long due to the Cyberdemon encounter, I suppose. Plus the short item hunt.

D2 has its moments too - one of its levels contains what is considered to be the most famous monster infighting situations in the Doom series (an epic showdown of a Cyber vs. a Spider). A stream would be interesting, especially since your memories of the game are a bit faded and thus you won't always know what to expect. If you are forgetful enough, it could be a semi-blind playthrough :P

Mmmm, Doom's levels don't seem so lengthy compared to some other games from that time - Rise of the Triad and Descent had some levels that were really vast and tended to drag on (and had a good number of detours and dead-ends). And Descent 2 had to add a guidebot feature because people got lost all the time. The philosophy of those days was "more is good" - you had to incline people to buy your game and also show how good you are at circumventing technological limitations. So you just shoved more content, even if that meant more rooms with monsters.

Doom is pretty easy because of the mouselook and easier strafing. Try being a keyboarder and you'll feel the difference - I'm sure you remember your experiences with the press release version ;)

The bestiary was, once again, something that had to do with tech limitations. Still, they managed to provide a good variety of melee and ranged attackers, plus some boss-like creatures. Recycling boss creatures as regular enemies was a common practice back then, again due to limitations. Then what Doom 2 does is to add some extra monsters that are either variations of what we've already seen (Hell Knight), using weapons that were exclusive to the player (chaingunner, Arachnotron), or simply gimmicky (Revenant, Arch Vile). Not impressive by today's standards, but it was quite a thing in 1994. And much better than what the first Keen game had to offer - one melee attacker that charges, one that jumps, a creature that pushes you without killing you, and one ranged shooter that shoots in a somewhat random pattern. Yay.

Better engines provide better gameplay options, of course. If you compare the puzzles of Hexen and Hexen II, the latter's are a lot more sophisticated and meaningful (plus the engine got a cool new feature that allows you to "read" messages found in the levels, which provide clues or story details).

You'll have to come up with some new way of being 100% completionist in Hexen, since it has no official secrets (there are plenty of hidden areas but they are not registered as secrets like in Doom or Heretic), collecting all items could be a problem because the game won't take them away from you between levels (like Heretic did) and I know you won't use the inventory except for the healing stuff (and possibly one other item that I won't reveal yet), so that leaves monsters... though you'll have to constantly watch out for random spawns (most maps have that) to mop up. Another good option for completion is to find all the secret levels - it's fun because they are relatively well hidden (compared to Doom and Heretic).

We'll figure this stuff on the move I guess :)