Doom Mod Review : DoomRPG + DoomRLA + RLME (Rpg mods for Classic Doom)`

Well I found not just one new mod to play doom with recently, not even 2 but 3!

I've been looking For Doom RPG themed mods that can play original and non mod maps well for years. Found HXRTC and that was fine for a while but what really annoyed me about that was the constant use of Gem Pickups in a non-fantasy setting and the lack of skills and stat point leveling... It just had levelups but had no real stats that you could choose from to level up...

Enter DoomRPG, a mod that fixes a lot of those issues.

The Good:

DoomRPG as the title suggests, is a Doom RPG mod. It allows you to level up by killing enemies, and distribute stat points every levelup.  The stats you get are Strength, Vitality, Regen, Capacity,
Defense, Agility and Luck.

Here is what these stats do:

Strength = Determines how much damage you do with weapons
Vitality = Determines your max health
Regen = Determines how much health you regenerate over time
Capacity = Determines how much you can carry
Defense = Determines your damage resistance
Agility = Determines your movement speed and jump height
Luck = Determines how often you get certain "lucky" to find pickups like credits, ammo, health, etc.

You buy items with credits enemies drop regularly, and that is limited to armor and ammo at lower ranks (there is a rank system like in COD games = higher the rank the more you can buy). Rank increases when you kill a certain amount of enemies, and decreases when you die.

There is also a lot of new features not found in normal doom in DoomRPG such as Skills you can purchase with "modules" (that get given to you when you levelup - you need them to upgrade stats too), and a working skill wheel. It's tricky to learn how to play this mod because skills in this are vital.  You will need your skills to survive, it's not just a case of leveling stats and hoping you will win, if you do that you will die a lot. One skill I HIGHLY recommend is heal.  Even at skill level 1 this can save your life provided you have enough energy to use it (Energy is what skills waste when you use them, you replenish it by finding energy powerups). You can upgrade skills levels as well, and it helps. But each level costs more energy to use than the previous level, so you have to manage it well to survive.

There is also a shield you can use, which is similar to the Mass Effect Shields but has some limitations because it replaces armor and strips you of armor. To use it you must find a capaciter, body and a battery.  Once you equip all three your shield is ready and with one press of the shield key.

DoomRPG is pretty good on it's own but does have some drawbacks. Certain levels are programmed randomly to be radiation infested levels or acid rain filled levels and those mess up your health a lot...
It's almost unfair to deal with these traps so I highly recommend anyone playing these mods to SAVE before exiting a level to savescum around these stupid traps.

But to really play doomRPG well you need to play it with two other mods which I am reviewing here at the same time as DoomRPG...

Enter DoomRL..

DoomRL or Doom Roguelike Arsenal, is weapon mod that is quite fun and very RPG like. It introduces literally hundreds of new guns and they spawn randomly in the place of other weapons or on dead enemies. Both mods work well together but getting them to load together is really hard... See below for more info on that.

Guns range from Shotguns to Automatic single barreled shotguns, to auto double barreled ones (!) and some really overpowered energy weapons, explosive weapons and pistols, yes that's right Pistols!  Pistols in this are not crap, there are some ones that rival the Rocket Launcher in Damage! You have to be VERY lucky to get the top tier weapons at an early level, which is good.

There are 5 playerclasses in this mod. Marine is your basic machinegunner soldier who starts with the chaingun. Each playerclass gets perks.. His perk is he wastes less ammo. The scout is your pistol expert and does 3x-8x damage with pistols as his perk, depending on the fire rate, the slower the fire rate the more damage.  He starts with a basic pistol but it is so much better with him than on other playerclasses.  But once he gets a really strong pistol (handcannon, etc) he can slay strong enemies with a few pistol shots, and that is fun!.  The third playerclass is the technician who is a weapon modding expert... I will get into weapon modding and him a bit later. The next playerclass is the renegade and he is a shotgun expert who does more pellet shots per shotgun blast than other classes as his perk.  The final class is the most OP one, the Deadly Demolitionist! He is an explosives expert and his perk is so OP it's stupid, he is completely IMMUNE to splash damage, even enemies splash damage. That means you can kill enemies at point blank range with rockets using him. But is not a huge issue because being overpowered in this mod is one of it's strengths so...

DoomRL revamps the armor system.  Armor has to be equipped now.  And boots are also available and you need to equip them as well. It's important to have both armor and boots or else you won't get good damage resistance.  Basic armor and weapons in this mod are crap though, so It's best to save up credits to get better armor and boots before later levels anyway. Default Combat armor won't help much unless you are VERY lucky.  There are tons of other pieces of armor available and they are much better than combat armor which in this is basic armor not great armor like it was in normal doom.


The new guns in DoomRL are quite nice but most of the starting weapons from doom are quite useless due to the difficulty of the mods. These mods are HARD AS HELL, and with default stats, you will die a ton in the first map of the wad you are playing. Until you get to level 2 and pump all your points into vitality and defense, you will struggle mightily at LV 1.  (when I mention "LV" from now on I mean character level, not the level you are playing...) Not till you get tons of levelups and put points into the vital skills will it get easier.  For me the vital skills are Vitality, Defense and luck.  Vitality for the max health, Defense to increase your damage resistance early and Luck to try to get better drops and guns in drops. Enemies can do tons of damage, especially harder ones. Don't play these mods with the monster mod in insane maps like hell revealed UNLESS you are a high level character with good armor, and good stats!  You will be ripped to shreds unless you prepare well..

DoomRL balances this difficulty increase well though with the ability to mod weapons. There are mod packs laying around replacing ammo boxes rarely. There are several kinds. Bulk mod packs increase clip size for weapons (there is reloading for weapons in this mod, all guns need to be reloaded), Power mods increase weapon damage and Technical mods increase weapon switch speed, and Agility mods increase weapon accuracy... It helps to mod your guns a lot. But don't mod TOO much... because one feature is absulutely vital to survive this mod, and this feature, Assmemblies, is  the most OP feature in the whole mod.

Assemblies are Super OP weapons made by using specific sets of weapon mods on a specific gun in a certain order.  For instance, if you take a combat shotgun (the Remington that Shotgun Guys Drop) and add a Power mod and  then a technical mod to the shotgun, you turn it into a tactical shotgun, which is a very OP Auto Shotgun.  Take Plasma Rifle and apply a bulk mod and then a power mod to it and you turn it into a High Power Plasma gun, which is the most OP weapon that can be gotten early in the game, and it is a must to survive tougher maps. Take a rocket launcher and apply a Technical Mod, an Agility mod, a power Mod and then another Tech Mod to it and it becomes an Infusion Launcher, a rocket launcher that shoots weak BFG blasts everywhere when it explodes... These assemblies are ABSOLUTELY VITAL for you to survive the mod. You cannot beat it without them, so keep that in mind. I find the default guns you get are crap so by level 2 I usually have at least one of these...

But one issue in  these mods to me needs another mod to correct, the lack of new enemies. Adding in another mod, RLME adds new enemies into the game (but only for medium difficulty and higher), and that is a must for me. Normal doom enemies get boring very quickly...

The OK:

The mod has issues working with Slaughtermaps. I suggest that you change the monster population to 75% or lower when playing them.  That reduces enemy count but gets rid of the annoying "Runaway script" errors that show up.  This is for wads such as Alien Vendetta, Hell Revealed, etc, anything that uses high enemy counts.  For wads that use Extremely High counts such as Sunder, I suggest you skip them because they often have hard as fuck enemy placement in map 1 and surviving map 1 will be so hard that in this mod it won't be worth it. Basically if the first map involves fighting hordes of tough enemies like Hell Knights or worse then you should avoid it in these mods.


The Bad:

These mods are really fun, but issues prevent them from being the best doom mods I have ever played. Number 1, the damage you take is insane, even with medium to high damage resistance. It is almost unfair.  Pinkies and spectres can one hit kill you if you get unlucky. And one feature almost ruins this mod set... Status effects..

Status effects sound good and all, but the sheer lack of a feature to shut them off, is alarming. Status effects include various debuffs that randomly happen when you take damage. Such as blindness (makes you screen go black for a while), Fatigue (makes you move at a slideshow pace for a while), toxicity (makes you take more damage if it gets higher), Radiation (same thing) and more. These status effects are too common, and resisting them is hard. Some are minor, some are not. I can't count the time these came up and I almost died or died, on medium it was a stupid hindrance that I wish wasn't put in this mod.  The ones that really piss me off are fatigue and blindness. HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DODGE AND AIM with them on? You tell me Kyle873! I'm sorry, it's impossible to dodge with High Fatigue put on you and then you die and your Rank drops due to random bullshit like that, that shouldn't be in it at all! I've never played any RPG with features this stupid in my life.  And blindness is almost as stupid. Why the hell it's in there I don't know. How are you supposed to aim and dodge if you can't see! You tell me Kyle873!

That feature almost made this mod unplayable. I tolerate it because the rest of the mods features make the game much easier to enjoy, due to the fact that no one made a good RPG mod for Doom that is this good.  But this one feature.... It almost ruins it...


Another issue with this mod is the damage you take, which is a minor issue because heal helps a ton and so does High Vitality.  But it still is insane that Revenants can do 300 damage on medium...  That should not be in this. This isn't Ghost recon, It's doom. High damage makes no sense in a non realistic shooter.  I think this person tried to make DoomRPG a REALISTIC RPG, which is cool and all, but realistic features, when overused can ruin classic FPS gameplay. These two mods almost overuse these features, such as Reloading weapons, shitty ass weapons being given in level 1, bullshit status effects and high damage being done by medium enemies...   It makes these mods good but not great.

I'm still waiting on a GOOD RPG mod that does not use features like this but puts in good RPG gameplay (aka levelups and other features too)...





These mods however, do not work easily together so You need to do the following...
-Make sure to download Gzdoom 3.0.1.
-Unzip the DoomRPG version that works with the latest DooMRLA, NOT the latest version
to your doom 2 folder.
-Install the DoomRLA, DoomRLA Hud, DoomRLA monster Pack and RLME to the doom2 folder.
-Make a batch file like this...

Gzdoom -file DoomRL.wad DoomRLHud.wad DoomRLMons.wad DoomRPG/DoomRPG DoomRPG/DoomRPG-RLArsenal DoomRPG/DoomRPG-RLMonsters RLME.wad

(use that batch file to load the two mods together).

Review Stats:
Score 8.2/10
Good - Great RPG features. skills, stats, selling system, etc, new enemies, lots of new guns
Bad  - Realism, BS Status effects, super high damage being done by medium enemies on Medium,
Hard to get them working together.

Stupid trolls put my new channel for Doom playthroughs on a dislike bot...

So I started a new channel to do playthroughs of doom mods. I wanted to focus on randomly generated maps so that's what I did. Generated several 32 map sets last night, and retextured one a bit with custom textures.... Wasn't going to release that wad, but decided to run through it in DoomRLA+DoomRPG to do a playthrough of the mods to show off just how awesome they are..

But some idiot got in the way.

I had recorded part 1 and 2 last night... Completed levels 1 and 2 of the wad in last night's part... Apparently somebody doesn't like the fact I am randomly generating maps and retexturing them just for my playthroughs on youtube now.. I've been doing it for a while. Normal textures are fine but custom ones completely blow them out of the water. If am not releasing the wad, there should be no problem right? Well there is... I woke up this morning to find BOTH videos disliked by (I assume) the same person. I don't know if they are the same person but they probably are because both videos didn't get a single view, yet they were disliked, once per video.

Some stupid idiot must have put my new channel on a dislike bot, you know one of those services that you pay for scripted dislikes. Of course youtube does complete jack shit about this. It pisses me off.. I worked my ASS off in the playthrough.  I may have died a lot in map 2 but I was mostly good. Today I recorded parts 3 and 4 and only died once in that stretch.  I am not THAT bad at doom but some stupid idiots want to ruin everything I do on Doom Channels.

Opened up another gaming channel several months ago. NEVER got a dislike there... Did several games (Not doom) and no dislikes happened. In 3 months! Yet when I do a Doom Channel, I immediately get dislikes by some stupid idiot who put my videos on a dislike bot. I know it's a dislike bot. There is no way on youtube to dislike videos without watching them.  That's what happened to me. 2 Videos, no views, 2 dislikes.   My intro video got viewed though, so I don't know if that viewer is the one who put me on the bot.


I WILL investigate this and call out the fucking idiots who did this. I think I have a few suspects already. Some turds who trashed a doom addon I made in 2012 are suspects because I blocked them on this channel. Some complete idiot who keeps subscribing to my doom channels on youtube  is also a suspect, because once I get him subscribed, I get disliked. He is a doom fan too, weirdly... This fucking community is filled with assholes it seems...

I work my ass off on this shit, these playthroughs,  the commentary, everything...  I don't deserve this....

Edit : I figured out more info on the dislikes today... I looked at analytics and there is no sign that the dislikes came from two different people, both are from People from the USA.... Confirming my theory that it may be a dislike bot... No dislikes since then...

I'm waiting to see if the same thing happens again (My videos get disliked when they aren't even viewed) and if that happens I will complain to youtube, about how dislikes are allowed there, how they don't stop dislike bots and worse... I will take action here...

The Ultimate Hell Revealed Pack goes through a Major Change...

My randomly generated tribute to the Infamous Hell Revealed wads went through yet another major change recently... This time it's for the better...

Not satisfied with the levels in the modded Oblige 6.20 map generator version generated for the hell revealed pack wads, I ended up scrapping the hell revealed wads due to this. So Instead I worked on a hybrid 6.20 epic/7.59 oblige hybrid version that had the architecture lighting of the modded 7.59 version I was using and decided to import texture themes from the modded 6.20 version I found that supported new textures, making it so that the modded 7.59 could use these new textures. The results were quite amazing.

So I rebuilt the hell revealed pack wads for the 4th time in a row tonight to try to get them to look better, and thanks to randoom 6.5a (my hybrid oblige) I can do this. Due to these changes, zdoom is needed to run the hell revealed pack wads because the textures are in the zdoom TX_START/END format and not the normal doom format.

The new wads are quite fun, more so than the older ones. They have tons of arch viles which is great. One map has 315! That's insane! There are also tons of tons of cyberdemons in the final hell revealed pack wad, hr777.wad. Don't play that unless you are perfect at doom. Map 1 has 13+! It's totally nuts.

The new textures work quite well in the modded oblige 7.59. I imported them from the modded 6.20 I found and they look great in 7.59 maps... I will use this map generator from now on to make more maps. Not the other 6.20 one because that one doesn't do original rooms, only prefabbed copy and paste ones. This one does. I needed to redo them. 6.20 simply cannot make good maps. The maps all look the same after a while, no real unique rooms. 7.59 is different and much better.

Here (as always) are screenshots:

-

I plan to release this version of the hell revealed pack around December 26 2017-Jan 1 2018. Sometime around then. I need time to actually test that and I cannot test during early to mid December due to other issues. I will get testing started tomorrow or the next day... Expect that testing to take 1 month or so. I've got 5 32 map wads to playthrough and make sure they are fun and beatable.

Most of my testing will be inside  the doom mods DoomRPG and DoomRLA. I have been having a fun time with them. They make it easy to beat maps like this if you spec correctly in the rpg mod thing that is in DoomRPG.  Normally I would not be playing a mod like this, but I am not good enough at doom to beat maps like this normally, I will need to boost my HP to 500+ to be able to win these maps and I will need OP guns and DoomRLA has got that! I also plan to play one of  these wads (maps 1-20) on youtube starting tomorrow night! Stay tuned for info on which one I will do in a blog post I post tomorrow night around 11 PM-1 AM 2 days from now...

More info later....

Ultimate Hell Revealed Pack finalized for Doom 2.

Ok... Over the last few months I've been working on something for Doom 2 called the Ultimate Hell Revealed Pack. It is a randomly generated set of megawads designed to be a tribute to the original hell revealed.  I had done one version earlier this year in February that was fine but I revamped in in July and was not satisfied... Well now I am satisfied with a new version I just made.

I downloaded a special version of the Oblige Map Generator that was made by a oblige modder that hangs around on the oblige forums. This version is for zdoom only and has the ability to generate maps with new textures being used in them, and has 2 new themes.  However, it is for the older, worse version of oblige, version 6.20. If this guy released a version of this for 7.666 or 7.70 It would have been what I chose to make the randomly generated ultimate hell  revealed pack, but sadly that is not the case. After tweaking it abit to change some textures, remove logos, and add sloped arches to urban and hellish levels, I went off to making the third version of the Hell revealed 3-777 wads found in the ultimate hell revealed pack.

The difference is huge. First of all, the original wads were around 150-200 MB each. That was INSANE and I didn't want them to be THAT big so I needed to use this version to thin them down a lot. Also these new versions are for Gzdoom Only because they use rooms over rooms and have sloped arches everywhere. They lack new enemies but have plenty of old enemies in them. Each level averages from 400-800 enemies per level, and the count of hard enemies is quite high in the later wads...

There are 5 wads...

Hell Revealed 3 : Alien Vendetta Difficulty
Hell Revealed 4 : Hell Revealed 1 difficulty
Hell Revealed 5 : Hell Revealed 2 Difficulty
Hell Revealed 666 : Almost Sunder Difficulty
Hell Revealed 777 : Sunder difficulty

Each wad is quite hard. I did a few playthroughs of them on easy and got hit hard. These maps are far from easy people.  Tons of chaingunners, even in HR3.wad map01. UV is for co-op mostly. It is far too hard to beat normally, so play on HMP if you want something akin to UV.  New music is found in each wad, and consists of metal midis. Each wad just has different metal midis in different levels. The same music is in each wad basically but in a different order.

Here are some screenshots:

The project is near release now. I just have to test the maps. I will be doing a LP on my new channel soon... Starting maybe tomorrow night (11/3/2017)..  Stay tuned for that.... It will take a long time to test for each wad is 32 maps and I have to go through them in order so expect no release before XMAS 2017...