Doom Roguelike: Intro

Doom Roguelike is a game that when I first heard about it, I was pretty weirded out by the idea: the father of almost all FPSes, but its gameplay translated into something more like Angband? What kind of circumstance would even lead to someone having this idea, let alone taking it seriously enough to actually do it?

Playing it made me quickly realize it was actually quite natural: classic Doom has design wonkiness from points like the fact that the game designs its levels on the premise that any level can be beaten if you just load into it with nothing but your Pistol, but then lets the player carry forward gear from one level to the next and pretty freely save and load, meaning plenty of players will respond to a death by just loading an earlier save, rather than having to now beat the level from a Pistol-only start. Doom Roguelike embracing procedural generation and permadeath sidesteps this wonkiness in multiple straightforward ways.

In general, there's a surprising amount of roguelike sensibilities to classic Doom's design, even though it's not turn-based, just with a lot of these sensibilities obscured by it lacking some of the most iconic elements like procedural generation: compared to later FPSes, classic Doom puts a surprising amount of emphasis on husbanding precious resources and using them carefully specifically when situations call for them, which is a very roguelike dynamic, just one undercut by the fixed levels you can (and will) memorize with repeated play. And even there, the ease of creating and sharing .wad files means players can dodge around the issue to an extent by grabbing any of the zillions of .wads out there and jumping into a fresh experience they don't have the correct answers memorized for. Commit to ironman play, and classic Doom suddenly is quite a bit like a classic roguelike!

So at this point to me Doom Roguelike is less 'an interesting mashup of unrelated ideas' and more 'a natural drawing out of something that was always there in classic Doom'. With its own twists and additions, mind: Doom Roguelike having you level up by killing enemies is very different from classic Doom's design, for example, as is the entire concept of Mod Packs and Assemblies. But it's a lot closer to faithfulness to classic Doom's design than I had been expecting, since I'd not previously realized how roguelike-ish classic Doom actually is.

Though maybe I should've opened this post with talking about Jupiter Hell, given that for a lot of people they'll be familiar with Jupiter Hell and not Doom Roguelike? Possibly unfamiliar even with classic Doom? And Jupiter Hell is the successor to Doom Roguelike, so there certainly are parallels...

Well, let's talk about Jupiter Hell. More specifically, let's talk about why I'm not doing a series on it.

The first, biggest reason is development: when I committed to constructing these posts, Doom Roguelike had gotten no development in over a decade, whereas Jupiter Hell was still regularly getting major updates. These deep-dive series don't work well when my topic is in flux, especially if it's really major flux where core pillars of design can be gutted all of a sudden and radically recontextualize the rest of the design. So Doom Roguelike seemed a pretty safe choice -it clearly was never going to update ever again, right?- and Jupiter Hell a completely unworkable choice. Of course, then on August 6th of 2024 version 0.9.9.8 of Doom Roguelike came along and the devs announced ongoing support for the game would resume, but by then I'd already substantially written the posts you'll be reading, so... whoops, I called that wrong.

The second reason is that, due to the stupid ongoing circumstances of my life, I haven't actually played Jupiter Hell much: I only got it relatively recently, only made maybe a couple dozen run attempts, then had my computer die at a bad time and had to switch to a computer that couldn't run it at all (Not that the first computer ran it well, mind), and only recently switched to a computer it does run on...

... which touches on a third big reason I'm not covering Jupiter Hell: it hits a lot of notes I'm very critical of in regards to gaming industry norms. It's the comparatively big-budget, ambitious commercial release spiritual successor to Doom Roguelike, and as is depressingly common with this sort of story, the result is a game that's less accessible (You can play Doom Roguelike on basically anything that has internet access to download it in the first place. Jupiter Hell is... not so friendly to lower-end computers), a game that gets basically all the disadvantages of using full 3D graphics and very few of the advantages (It's still a top-down view on a flat grid world; 3D graphics, not 3D gameplay), a game that loses several noteworthy strengths of the free release (Doom Roguelike has sound as an important part of gameplay, which as far as I'm aware is completely unique among turn-based roguelikes... and Jupiter Hell carefully avoids recreating this very interesting quality), and otherwise is largely a step back when it's meant to be a big leap forward.

It's not all bad, as Jupiter Hell does clearly learn lessons from Doom Roguelike 0.9.9.7's flaws, where Jupiter Hell successfully avoids replicating some specific issues, but at least as of this writing I (unfortunately) consider Jupiter Hell a far inferior experience that I don't expect to sink as many hours into and also expect to never have any interest in analyzing/documenting for others. If I ever do any kind of series about it, it's likely to be a short series focused on why I consider some of its flaws bad, and why I consider some of its attempts to dodge Doom Roguelike's problems cases where the solution is, indeed, a solution to the problem, but where the old problem still makes for better and more interesting gameplay than the new solution. And probably only if people express a lot more interest in such than I'm expecting.

So that's the major reasons why I'm covering Doom Roguelike instead of Jupiter Hell.

Well, except for the other big reason: Doom Roguelike is great! And it deserves more attention! And more complete coverage than the Chaosforge wiki, which though it's great for grabbing technical info and checking basic stuff like stats, it really doesn't contextualize or organize info well! (And it's focused purely on the console mode, which is inconvenient if you're playing graphics mode) And clarification on a lot of stuff, because it does have communication flaws like using 'instantly' to describe actions that actually are instant but also for actions that occur in 0.1 game seconds, which is crucially different from actually being instant!

I should also explicitly point out that these posts are not covering Jupiter Hell Classic. The store page for Jupiter Hell Classic presents things in a manner that can be read as 'Jupiter Hell Classic is Doom Roguelike, but with graphics and audio that don't infringe on copyright', but playing the demo makes it clear this is not so: Jupiter Hell Classic is using the ammo organization of Jupiter Hell (eg your pistols and basic rapid-fire weapons use different ammo types, unlike in Doom Roguelike), introduces enemy types with no Doom Roguelike counterpart, and even has radically different floor generation routines! So these posts should not be treated as a resource for Jupiter Hell Classic, even once Jupiter Hell Classic actually releases.

As for my own coverage, I should note that I'm largely writing from the perspective of playing Ulttraviolence difficulty with no Angel challenge active. I've always found that to be the best-tuned, most consistently challenging-but-mostly-fair experience, with the least odd design jank. I'm particularly unfamiliar with Nightmare! difficulty: prior to version 0.9.9.8, you couldn't save and quit from a Nightmare! run, and my most intense period of playing Doom Roguelike was under circumstances where I simply could not commit the necessary amount of time in a row to complete such a run. I do pretty regularly make commentary about Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs: Angel of 100 is a bit too long (I really wish there was an Angel of, like, 70), but an interestingly different experience from a standard run that, among other points, is actually more consistent on difficulty working as intended. Other Angel runs I mostly will comment on them in the posts dedicated to covering Angel runs.

Anyway, one final note: Doom Roguelike itself has a fair amount of kind of gratuitous profanity. I'm not going to censor this profanity when it comes up in Trait names and so on (With one exception I'll point out when we get to it), and if you're someone who really does not like cuss words in your games then I guess Doom Roguelike is not the game for you, so there'll be a bit more swears in these posts than in most of my series. So if that matters to you, you've been warned.

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Next time, we start things off with Traits, specifically the ones available to every class.

See you then.