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.

WOLFENSTEIN REVEALED! Slaughtermap episodes for Wolf3d in the works!

Time to bring the Slaughtermap to Wolfenstein 3D People!
(Don't wanna let doom have all the fun!)
 In that aim I have started work on the ultimate difficulty test for Wolf3d Players... Behold.....
WOLFENSTEIN REVEALED!

Wolfenstein Revealed is what it would be like to Have Hell Revealed gameplay in Wolf3d... Basically it throws HORDES of enemies at you and in later levels Hordes of bosses! (That includes Hans Grosse's and other bosses) It's my new pet project to attempt to make the hardest Wolf3d mapset EVER!

Slaughtermaps for other games have been lacking, I notice. It seems Doom 2 has a ton. But other games like Wolf3d, Serious Sam, Quake, etc have little to none. Time to correct that! As you can see with this screenshot it's quite difficult:

That's only e1m3 people out of 60 new levels to be done... to speed up the process of making 60 maps I had help... I had no choice. I had to randomly generate the layouts of all 60 maps with a modded oblige 0.97 to help me a little. I still did the enemy placement though... That is the good news... And it's difficult. Episode 1 is the only one I have done and it's quite hard. But later episodes will be WAY harder... This is just the beginning people. It's not nearly as hard as episodes 2-6 will be. They will be NUTS!

Here is a screenshot of one map in the editor:

that's from E1m7.

It's gonna get way harder in episodes 2-6. This is just the start people. Episode 1 is designed to be easy compared to the others. By the time we reach episode 3 it will get hard as fuck with gigantic hordes of nazi's per level and lots of bosses. Bosses will start  to be used like crazy in later levels, just like in Hell Revealed. A new miniboss, a flamethrower guard is mostly going to be the one that will be used in insane hordes, but expect 5-10 hans grosse's per room later on!

It's going to be NUTS! I can't wait...

HARDEST WOLF3D MAPSET EVER HERE WE COME!

Automatic Doom Project unleashed

Well since I finished my major challenge run I did some other things on my channel, including a 1 map permadeth challenge run in an insanely hard map, a 4 map playthrough (of an insanely hard wad, this one was done in complex doom and I did not do well) and more. But since then I decided that my channel needs to focus on new content... I don't want to do playthroughs anymore.  So the release of a certain sourceport helped me immensely this time.

The sourceport in question is Autodoom. It's made by the same person who made the amazing "automatic wolfenstein project" port. Both ports are very similar. They automatically play levels without the user's input, using a built in bot. Autowolf was fantastic. It dodged like a bot not a person and could shoot and even knife huge hordes of 30-40 nazi's from around the corner and survive without dying a lot of the time.

Now the author has made a doom port that has the same premise and almost as good reflexes.

Autodoom is pretty cool. It automatically plays the level, dodges like a pro player or speedrunner but isn't quite as impressive as Autowolf.  In autowolf the bot was close to perfect at beating hard maps. In autodoom, the bot is good but not quite as good. Against weak enemies, the bot is fantastic, even in big numbers, but stronger enemies give it trouble. It often gets major damage done to it by revenants and mancubi and even chaingunners. Against archviles, it's dodging can be way off and it can get seriously hurt. And don't even try it against Cyberdemons. They kill it every time. It can't dodge their missiles for shit. This is all with a dehacked patch that makes the weapons fire faster. It's very good at easy to medium maps with this patch loaded, not so good without it... DONT try it against hell revealed and the like. It cannot handle maps that hard... yet... (hopefully it will someday)

But it does a good enough job to beat most doom levels at least.

It wouldn't be fair however to not mention that it's one of the buggiest source ports out there. On 2 occassions I have lost all sound playing totally. One time I got the sound back. I don't know how. But it seems like the sound sometimes completely fails and there is no remedy. It sometimes plays with music when music is turned down and does the opposite. And it crashes every other time it runs... In several levels it also completely falls apart and gets stuck in one area refusing to continue...

Masochistic Death 2 and 3 tribute Doom 2 wads have been created

Recently I made a huge group of new Modified Randomly generated Doom Wads. Among them were a bonus episode for the recently completed Ultimate Hell Revealed pack. Also made a 32 map tribute to Eternal Doom that may or may not be released. But the real star of the show here is the completion of the Masochistic Death Trilogy wads....


Masochistic Death 1 was made 6-7 months ago as a tribute to a doom wad I made and released that ended up getting trashed horribly by the community and as a result idiots from the community trolled me for it. It wasn't THAT bad but they all called it horrible like it was the worse wad ever made. It pissed me off so I decided to recreate it with randomly generated maps this time. It came out great.

Little did they know that this old wad had two sequels, Torture and Insane Doom. Well I recently made tribute wads for them too! These are called Masochistic Death 2 : Torture and Masochistic Death 3 : Insane Doom...   Both wads were recently made and both came out amazingly well for modified randomly generated doom wads... And both are so hard that they utterly destroy masochistic Death 1 in difficulty, just like Insane Doom and Torture destroyed the other wad I made in difficulty, which is cool because I may have made a ground breaking difficult doom 2 wad....


Masochistic Death 2 is a really tough wad. In the first room of map01 you have to fight a darkvile, an insanely hard partially invisible arch vile that is normally fought way later in wads. It's insanely hard. The whole wad has almost 400 cyberdemons in 32 maps and has 1008 fricking archviles in 32 maps!

Masochistic Death 3 is slightly easier but still is a very hard wad. But what makes it cool is that you get SUPER overpowered guns in map01 and get to rip your way through gigantic hordes of bosses early on and it gets really intense with big groups of 30-50 bosses even as early as map05. You also don't get the autoshotgun (kickass new gun found in the wad) till map07 so it gets tough early on. It has less enemies than masochistic death 2 but for some reason turned out to be the harder wad. Don't know why.

Here are screenshots from Masochistic Death 2 and 3:

Masochistic death 2:

Masochistic Death 3:

My Complex Doom permadeth challenge run of Hell Revealed IV is Done...NO Deaths!

I just completed my very first Video Game Challenge run people. The game is doom 2 (modded). The mods are:

A) Complex Doom
B) LCA for complex Doom
C) Random Monsters pack for Complex Doom
D) My monster pack for complex doom
E) Various scary sound mods
F) A fog mod
G) A megawad with new enemies and weapons that is part of the Ultimate Hell Revealed Package,
the wad I chose was HR4.wad

I chose Hr4.wad because it was one of the easier ones to do a Permadeth challenge run in. Harder ones would have drastically increased the chance I would die by a big chunk, so stuff like hr5,666,777 would not work. I played through maps 1-30 in complex doom and other mods and survived with NO DEATHS!... Repeat NO DEATHS!

It was amazing!

Lots of hard fights. I made them look easy. I can't count the times I annihilated hordes of cyberdemons and archviles (!) without being seriously hurt because I had the 500 health sphere from LCA and the Rune. Ice Gun and Demon Tech Rifle made it easy to do. Only had a few tough fights.

One was with 2 Darkviles, partially invisible, yet far more deadly  version of archviles. They seriously hurt me. I ended up killing them with the Rocket Launcher and Demon Tech bfg. It worked.

Another fight was with  the insanely overpowered Legendary cyberdemon. He almost killed me! But I survived to kick his ass with the lowly Quad Shotgun! That was the best part of the entire run by far, right there. It is in part 11 of the playthrough I will post below... (it is linked here, it's the first video)

It was a blast to play and record. Youtube gave me some issues though... Once it gave me the dreaded "User does not own and cannot manage the video" error message. Once on my other channel I kept getting that. But  this time it was Not permanent thank god. The playthrough is complete and the challenge run is successfull.

This is the FIRST TIME IN HISTORY, someone has played and beaten a Slaughtermap Megawad (randomly generated or not - that doesn't matter) in a super hard mod and failed to die at least once. Everyone else who plays slaughter map megawads in Complex Doom has completely been slaughtered... One guy tried to play hell revealed with complex doom. He got his ass kicked by mere weak enemies in map3. Nevermind the stronger hordes in later maps which he did not fare well against. Same thing with another guy who tried alien vendetta in complex doom with commentary. He had to reload over and over again because legendaries kicked his ass. Not me! Legendaries I pwned in this run. Only one legendary was a threat to me and that was the Leg Cyber in map25. Everything else I pwned with my ice gun or demon tech rifle + Rune. It was fun.. AND... It's a first for me being my first successful challenge run but also it's a first for Doom. And that I love...

I won't be doing any more challenge runs for the game or any other game. Challenge runs are way to hard and way to stressful. You have to be insanely lucky to pull off what I just did. I got VERY lucky today. Other people aren't so lucky. They run into insanely hard enemies that have insta-death and rapid fire insta-death and even AOE Insta-death attacks. I know. It happened to me a few times in complex doom. But this time that did not happen.  I got VERY lucky due to that alone. And I got very lucky that I got so many 500 health sphere dropped for me. That was insane. And no rune ripping! (my term for when a seriously hard enemy kills you and when you resurrect (like I do to save time) you loose your rune). I kept my rune from map03-30 and that was great! I also was pwning enemies right and left with the ice gun, demon tech rifle and legendary autoshotgun, nevermind the Demon Tech and normal BFG's. That was a blast... I will do a partial map1-11 playthrough of a newer wad I made but in terms of full wad playthroughs, (never mind challenge runs) this is the end people........

Ultimate Hell Revealed gets a bonus Episode and I reveal Eternal Slaughter, my next wad...

Recently I've been working on a series of modified randomly generated doom 2 megawads designed as a massive tribute to the awesome Doom 2 Wad Hell Revealed. Each one is a 32 map megawad with hell revealed gasmeplay, plus new textures, new enemies and weapons (thanks to zdoom and decorate) and music as well. These wads are part of a pack of wads I will be releasing possibly around June 1 entitled Ultimate Hell Revealed.

In Ultimate Hell Revealed news I added a bonus 5th megawad to the project... Called Hell Revealed 777 it is the 5th and final megawad found in ultimate hell revealed and it is the hardest by far. This thing is so hard that map01 has almost 40 cyberdemons in it alone! That one was insane to playtest. I avoided 90% of the cyberdemons because their were too many for even me to handle!

Here are screenshots of hell revealed 777:

Take note of the awesome mideival episode that is episode 1:

Also I am working on the first megawad I will make as of late that is not part of the ultimate hell revealed project.  This is called Eternal Slaughter and it is a tribute to Eternal Doom done in a modified Randomly Generated way like Hell Revealed 3,4,5,666 and 777 were.  I designed the maps to be slightly easier than hell revealed 777. Felt that making them too hard would be a bad idea. But later on they actually get much harder than hell revealed 777 was, according to dmtha, reducing the health in later episodes is the reason why this happens I think, and I think it was a good idea.

The maps are all slaughtermaps in eternal slaughter, hence the name. They range from hordes of easier enemies in map1-11 (the tech episode) to insane hordes of bosses in episode 2 and 3 (the mideival episodes, with the same textures found in episode 1 of hell revealed 777). This makes it the ultimate tribute to eternal doom!

Screenshots:

 I made 2 other wads tonight besides that. Both are modified Randomly Generated wads like this one and are actually MUCH harder than this... I made sure I limited the health. That helped alot. In a few days I will post screenshots from each.... Stay tuned for that....

Doom Revealed Blog opening now...

I am a 38 year old Doom Fan from Massachusetts. I run this blog "Doom Revealed" to discuss and release Doom Slaughtermaps I have made, Discuss and Release Doom Slaughtermap Styled Total Conversions and slaughtermap sets for Existing Doom Total Conversions, and more.

I have been playing doom since 1993. In 1997 I played the first slaughtermap made for Doom that I had found, Hell Revealed. Slaughtermaps were something I virulently HATED back then. I didn't see how anyone could beat a map that threw big hordes of revenants, arachnotrons, and archviles into a map and expected you to beat all 3 with just a chaingun and shotgun. But over time I gradually got better at Doom (I was pretty bad at it in 1997 or so, I got way better in 2007+), and began to actually get Good at such maps. So Good that I enjoyed playing them... I even made my own...

I have made several Doom Slaughtermap megawads. Each of them varies in difficulty. Some are actually easier than hell revealed, others are more difficult than HR by a mile. It depends... The following wads have been made but NOT released yet. I have a reason not to release them. I will get into that reason in another post. I may release them in the future.

Here are the names of the wads I have made... (don't look for these on IDgames - you will never see my stuff there, I have a reason not to release there, just trust me - the post I will do later that I mentioned before in the last paragraph will explain why):

MD.wad (masochistic death)
DT3.wad (dark terror III)
sf.wad (silence forever)

MD.wad is the only one of these three that is really ready to be released the other 2 are bonus and have some issues... (stuck monsters and such). All 3 are modified Randomly Genned Maps made in my random map generator Randoom, then retextured, and in some cases, new enemies were added later. I really don't give a shit that these maps are modified Randomly Genned maps. To me they are just as good as a man made map. The textures, lighting, architecture is almost as good as a map made by a person so to me It's just as good. Other people my disagree, but only an idiot would whine about a modified Randomly Generated mapset that is designed to challenge people, like these are...

Screenshots of dt3.wad

Screenshots of Md.wad (Episode 1)

Screenshots of MD.wad (episode 2)

Stay tuned for updates people....