Argh, I tried to reply a couple times over the past few days, and every god damned time, the forums glitched out and ate my post!
@Sonicabid - the monster textures I posted are from the Quake Reforged mod. They recommend using them in the Darkplaces engine, but they work with other source ports too, and I don’t think Darkplaces comes with them preloaded. You can check it out here:
http://quakeone.com/reforged/
Even if you installed them at some point in the past, they’ve been redoing some of the monsters, so there may have been an update since then.
@ThePurpleBunny - I like that Icon of Sin redesign. The original “texture on a wall” version was pretty lame and making him an actual monster makes it a lot more dynamic and intimidating. The mod you posted came up with a design which looks exactly as you might imagine him, yet also different enough (with all the wings and arms) from other Doom monsters to seem unique. The Ruiner Mod for Doom 3 reimagined him as shackled inside a wall, which makes his immobility a little more sensible. It also strikes kind of a humorous resemblance with Dr. Who’s Satan Pit scene.
@DarkArchville - You’re right, Unreal’s AI was pretty decent for the time. I didn’t play too much of it, but I remember firefights with the skaarj where they strafed all around the room hurling plasma bolts. It was a lot more dynamic, Half Life was really over-rated, and to this day, there aren’t enough games which try to structure enemy abilities in an equal manner to your own.
If I were making a modern Doom game (i.e. Doom 4) I’d rework the attacks of stronger enemies to be more similar to common Id multiplayer weapons. For example, the barons could have 2 types of attacks: a single powerful fireball with the same velocity/damage/splash/ROF as the player’s rockets, and a dbz-style spam move which tosses smaller fireballs with comparable splash/damage/ROF to say, the Q4 Nailgun. For variety’s sake, the knight’s projectile of choice could be lightning - the spam version being a continuous beam like the Q3 lightning gun, and the single power hit being comparable to a railgun shot.
Granted, this would all have to be animated well to look natural, but if the enemies went dodging all around the round the room hurling those attacks, it’d be a much more challenging experience. You could probably even lower their health to that of a tanked-out player (i.e. full armor and/or megahealth) and they’d still be a bitch to kill.
Weaker monsters like the imps should be even more mobile than the player. Doom 3 tried to portray them like xenomorphs, climbing the walls and flying at you from all angles, but it was only in the cutscenes. In gameplay, they mostly just walked straight at you, or stood in place doing their spawn animation, and couldn’t even crawl through the vents or climb a crate to get at you. If they were actually bouncing off the walls all the time, and if their fireballs were a faster, they’d be pretty tough even if a single headshot killed them.
This is the kind of FPS we don’t really see these days. Modern survival horror FPS tend to be garbage, because it’s always just generic zombies. The great thing about Doom enemies is you had a large variety of monsters to fight which were all very different. In a game like L4D, you basically only have 2 enemies types and 95% of the enemies just run straight at you. It’s tedious and predictable and you never have to approach any situation differently.
I want to see a modern Doom game where 4 players can co-op together through sprawling space station and hell environments, and because the enemies are so fast and intense, you will all just get slaughtered in a matter of seconds if you don’t play your best and work as a team. Enemy encounters should be procedurally generated, so they won’t just spawn in front of you out of nowhere, nor can you just memorize all the positions and shoot them as they come out of their closet. I want the player mechanics to be realistic and believable, with reloads, sprint, and recoil, yet with scifi weapons and dodging at least on par with UT so deathmatch mechanics still come into play.
