Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-26005008-20160407215658/@comment-3547390-20160807161913

You did mention some things like that, but you also said that vanilla Doom had some clunkier controls that made it more of a challenge and would have made this map much harder back in the day than what I went through.

I just felt terrible that I was nerfing a game, especially when I am a person that talks a lot about challenge. I appeared to be a hypocrite because I made the game so easy for myself.

But, I can understand that the mouse versus keyboard-only thing is a choice of playing style. Of course a keyboard will be slightly harder due to the lack of turning and strafing, but it is more of a handicap for those that wish to take it. Clunkier controls similarly might be harder, but it sounds more like a handicap. There is a difference between challenge and tedium. While the difficulty increases, the only reason is because I am forced to fumble more with controls. The same could be said if I did extreme things in other games, like always ran everywhere in Thief. It doesn't kill the experience that I don't run everywhere, but it would make the game even harder if I wanted it.

NewDark's biggest problem is the mantling system. It is so horrible, it allows you climb things with ease you couldn't climb before, meaning you can skip entire portions of the map without even realizing it. I guess that would be closer to GzDoom's jump functionality, if I used that key I would probably be fully abusing a source port's functionality. I could even say such if I used mouselook to aim directly down, which I almost never do (there are exceptions when I forget, but I mostly keep it in control) in order to try to keep it fair. The only difference is that I don't play with the clunky controls of 1994, which would indeed make it harder due to being less responsive and therefore more frustrating. It wouldn't be the fault of the gamer, it would be the game just being annoying with moving the mouse.

I have been a bit worried about all these responses and especially what you were saying in chat, it almost felt like you were just trying to backtrack what you said because I was too sensitive to talk about it. You noticed that it didn't result in a positive reaction and instead of discussing it, wanted to just forget the whole thing, which made me afraid you were making excuses for me to have played the game in an unpure way. Still, I think after seeing what you said above, and reasoning it out as I have above, I think clunky controls are not exactly the type of purity I should focus on. Especially for a sprite game like Doom, which I rather not play with full purity anyway in comparison to something like Quake or later games. I guess I cared because even though I wanted not the purest, I wanted the challenge we would normally get, and was distressed to hear that I had cheated myself of that. It is harder to play Doom just using lookspring, but I don't think I need to do that in order to challenge myself, since that is just focusing on tedious controls and is more of a fake difficulty as you wrestle with them. If a level is challenging in 1994, regardless of responsiveness of the controls, it would be challenging for me.

You are right about all that you have said. If anyone would be guarding the purity of Doom, it would be you, since you are a massive fan of the series and have played it since it first came out. If it fully nerfed the game, you wouldn't bother with ZDoom. You were rambling about how tedious it can be to play with just a keyboard and I misinterpreted that to think I had cheated the experience. But yeah, after calming down, I think I realize that clunky controls isn't the way to go and that if it was that horrible you wouldn't be defending it. For example, if I decided to use the jump key to do stuff, like solve that beginning area. We figured it all out legitimately.

Yeah, you are right. We aren't in the 90s anymore, so we have the choice not to play with clunky controls. For those that used to play Doom like crazy back in the day, it makes sense to have nostalgia about the terrible controls like I do with terrible levels, but that doesn't mean suffering them is necessary to play these. Next I need to buy an old mouse from 1994 that probably had worse latency and response times than any mouse today, as well as replace my computer and hard drive with 1994 stuff so I can deal with some of the other fun challenges like frame rates crawling and barely being able to play some of these levels due to their lack of optimization. You know, I can imagine the insane lag of levels that were too demanding with old school software would make things more challenging as well, but I don't think we need to go out and buy an old computer to suffer through that again. There is a difference between purity and going to the extreme to play the game exactly as someone would have back in the 90s.

Yeah, I apologize for overreacting, and I think everything that has been said has given me some encouragement to continue. So don't worry, the series is not dead. In fact, I didn't get rid of the videos of the stream, mainly because I wasn't sure if I would archive them just because we played them, kinda like I did with the old Doom series with the messed up colors. So that means I can just upload everything like I would have anyway and we can continue forward.