[PikaCommando]

No matter how many times I try, the game makes me sick. It's just too much blue and too maze-y. I know I'm a scrub, but I can say for sure that Wolf3D aged a lot more worse than Doom. I'm not hating on the game (which is why I want to play it to finish) but seriously man.

Anyone here who can still find fun in this game?

[Hendricks266]

You using ECWolf?

[Fox]

I still like the game. But indeed it's tiresome after some point.

[DNSKILL5]

I've been playing Wolfenstein 3d for a very long time. Before I owned the game, I would play the shareware episode over and over, as well as the Spear of Destiny demo. It is one of my favorite games. I own many versions of it.

Wolfenstein 3d may be very aged now, but it is still worth playing. Also the modding community, though small, is still very active, and you'd be surprised what they can do (check out WSJ's Castle Totenkopf SDL). I make mods for Wolf 3d myself and it is really fun to do when you've gotten the hang of it. Currently I'm working with someone on a project that pushes the Wolf engine to its limits, there's things never before seen on the Wolf engine, like alt fire (that functions how it does in Blood), enemies with attacks determined on distance, etc.

Wolf4SDL is my choice for playing the game. I don't like going back to the DOS stuff, but there's a lot of DOS mods too. I've heard about ECWolf, and it sounds amazing, but it is still early in its development and I think I'll wait a while before getting into it.

I'd say try playing it using Wolf4SDL instead of DOSBOX. Wolf4SDL makes it less pixelated, more than one sound can be played at once, no more invisible corpse glitch, etc. As soon as I played Wolf under SDL, I never wanted to go back to DOS, and I found the game more enjoyable.

The initial game can become boring after a while, that's why it's best to find some addons and mods after playing.

[Frederik Schreiber]

The biggest appeal of Wolfenstein 3D was the fact, that it was a true First Person Shooter.
That aspect alone was enough back in the early nineties to keep the player in awe for multiple playthroughs.
Unfortunately, the FPS genre is so big and popular, that practically everyone takes, what made Wolfenstein revolutionary, for granted.

Behind the Shooting and Genre Defining Perspective, there wasn't much more to the game than mazes, and secrets.

It's a revolutionary game, but It's perfectly fine if it's hard for you to play through, given the fact that we're not in 1992 anymore.

Games like Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D aged way better, being the first 2 First Person Shooters that truly defined what the genre would aim for, for decades.
Many still struggle to match the horror, style and gameplay of Doom. Or the Action, Interactivity and genius level design of Duke Nukem 3D.

That's why those games stand the test of time, and Wolfenstein struggles a bit.

[mrthejoshmon]

To try and keep games like Wolf3D fun and interesting I always attempt to play the game differently.

By doing things like attempting to finish game as fast as I can on the hardest mode or by trying to 100% everything on every level I can keep myself entertained with the game, it is surprisingly effective at keeping your attention when you set yourself a goal to do other than play through the game.

[Person of Color]

What Fred said. Couldn't have put it better myself.

Mario 64 is another game that falls into that category.

[ZedSlayer]

Pretty much with Frederik here, Wolf3d is a defining game, but there's no shame in not liking the maze structure. Doom and later FPS's added much more complexity in level design as well as graphic design so overall Wolfenstein feel so much less in comparison. You don't have to love it, you just have to respect it.

[Lunick]

I think it is a game that you shouldn't finish in one go, maybe an episode at each play session or you will really wear yourself out.

[High Treason]

I never enjoyed it from the first time I ever played it, so no shame in not liking it in my opinion.

I think in my case it's that I was always more of an adventure game and action game player and, as with MIDI Maze and other FPS games prior to 1994, I found the game rather lacking in what I liked to see in games. Walking around a maze aimlessly pressing the fire button seemed boring to me yet somehow it worked better in 2D... Who knows. Personal preferences and all that I guess.

[Trebor_UK]

I never understood why Doom had such a huge thriving modding community with a ton of source ports, and Wolfenstein had hardly any.

I guess what Fred said explains why.

[MusicallyInspired]

I'm going through the whole thing right now. The look is rather same-y but honestly the level design, I feel, for the time, was fairly dynamic and varied. Especially the last 3 episodes. That's pretty good for a fairly limited engine like that that can't have any details besides blocks. I don't know, I was worried the most about levels looking the same but it really wasn't. For me. The gameplay doesn't change, though.

[Blzut3]

The first three episodes of Wolfenstein 3D are definitely worth playing I think. The second set are basically the expert levels and will feel quite repetitive if you're not interesting in "more of the same only harder." Spear of Destiny lies somewhere inbetween, so I can't really say it's a must play.

Trebor_UK, on 04 November 2014 - 01:27 AM, said:

I never understood why Doom had such a huge thriving modding community with a ton of source ports, and Wolfenstein had hardly any.

I think this had more to do with the quality of the code base rather than the quality of the game. Up until Wolf4SDL came out in 2006, it seems like most of the source ports took an engine recreation approach in order to avoid having to deal with porting the old DOS code directly. As a result, none of the source ports were really taken as a base for mod authoring. On top of this the Wolf3D engine never had mod support. What that means is that whatever source port you choose, you can only play vanilla and not the thousands of mods that have been released. (On top of that, few of the old source ports managed to get to a point where they were stable enough for even playing the vanilla game.) Even when Wolf4SDL came out and got adopted, the fact that modding is done through source code edits by people that know very little if any C/C++, means that only one source port can really exist.

ECWolf seeks to solve those problems, but in many ways it's far too late. The Wolf3D community is already confortable with copy and pasting source code in order to do rather arbitrary effects. Convincing them to scale back is nearly impossible even if it means the mod will run anywhere and will run for the foreseeable future with minimal modification. Judging from the ECWolf download count, the number of ECWolf users far exceeds the size of the Wolf3D community. if we count Android installs, we're talking orders of magnitude larger.

[Hendricks266]

Fuck, I downvoted you by accident.

[themaniacboy]

Then let me correct the mistake.

[Inspector Lagomorf]

MusicallyInspired, on 04 November 2014 - 06:26 AM, said:

The look is rather same-y but honestly the level design, I feel, for the time, was fairly dynamic and varied. Especially the last 3 episodes.

Methinks the General in Episode 6 lost his marbles a bit when designing his fortress.

[PikaCommando]

Comrade Major, on 05 November 2014 - 09:55 AM, said:

Methinks the General in Episode 6 lost his marbles a bit when designing his fortress.

Not to be a whiner, but while it looks cool, it also looks like it will drive me away.


Actually my main reason to want to play the game is because I get to fight Hitler in it, which none of the sequels do.

[MYHOUSE.MAP]

Trebor_UK, on 04 November 2014 - 01:27 AM, said:

I never understood why Doom had such a huge thriving modding community with a ton of source ports, and Wolfenstein had hardly any.

I guess what Fred said explains why.

It's not just the gameplay; the game is easy as shit to mod and make maps for. If any idiot, from a teenager to a dude in his 40s, can make a map or a quickie mod, then it's going to attract a lot of people. It's become the new Quake 1 or UT99 in terms of ease of modding.

Really, the Doom community is more-or-less a giant quarentine for every sort of misfit, from obnoxious teens to metalheads and depressed dudes in their early 30s that haven't played the game in 15 years trying to remember happier times, that would appear in other classic FPS communities.

Then again, I find the blind Doom worship hilarious because it was Quake 1 that really made FPS games what they are now. It put e-sports on the map, launched a thousand gaming careers, brought capture the flag and class-based FPS game into existence, showed the future of graphics, and introduced players to the power of tricks like rocket jumping. However, you don't hear a goddamn thing about it. You'd think that "classic FPS" went straight from Doom 1 to Quake 3 without anything in between if you listend to nostalgia-obsessed idiots from places like /r/gaming. Doom might've gotten people to enjoy FPS games, but Quake 1 manged to pull it from "really cool game to play at work when your boss isn't looking" to something in it's own right.

[Duke of Hazzard]

MYHOUSE.MAP, on 05 November 2014 - 02:10 PM, said:

It's not just the gameplay; the game is easy as shit to mod and make maps for. If any idiot, from a teenager to a dude in his 40s, can make a map or a quickie mod, then it's going to attract a lot of people. It's become the new Quake 1 or UT99 in terms of ease of modding.

Really, the Doom community is more-or-less a giant quarentine for every sort of misfit, from obnoxious teens to metalheads and depressed dudes in their early 30s that haven't played the game in 15 years trying to remember happier times, that would appear in other classic FPS communities.

Then again, I find the blind Doom worship hilarious because it was Quake 1 that really made FPS games what they are now. It put e-sports on the map, launched a thousand gaming careers, brought capture the flag and class-based FPS game into existence, showed the future of graphics, and introduced players to the power of tricks like rocket jumping. However, you don't hear a goddamn thing about it. You'd think that "classic FPS" went straight from Doom 1 to Quake 3 without anything in between if you listend to nostalgia-obsessed idiots from places like /r/gaming. Doom might've gotten people to enjoy FPS games, but Quake 1 manged to pull it from "really cool game to play at work when your boss isn't looking" to something in it's own right.

Rocket jumping was perfected in Quake, but was around since Doom.

And wasn't Quake responsible for the transition to WASD + mouse? That alone makes it more relevant to modern FPS than Doom. Also, the Build games added more interactivity to the genre beyond just flipping switches.

[Lunick]

Duke of Hazzard, on 05 November 2014 - 02:59 PM, said:

but was around since Doom.

But you can't use mouselook in the original Doom... I could understand rocket pushing or using the Archvile to jump though.

[MrBlackCat]

In fairness to Wolfensteins pixelation, look at average monitor sizes then vs now... My "Giant" monitor was a 17, but most others were 13 or 14... look at this for example... This was in 1999, but these are the "back wall" computers, still running 14's. I had two larger monitors on another row of computers on the LAN.


Before I had an editor, I "block count" mapped a number of the levels by hand. This is one of them... the time this took was crazy... and worth it.




I enjoyed Wolfenstein for sure back then... today I play it for nostalgic reasons on GameBoy Advance and other platforms. : )

MrBlackCat

[Duke of Hazzard]

Lunick, on 05 November 2014 - 03:11 PM, said:

But you can't use mouselook in the original Doom... I could understand rocket pushing or using the Archvile to jump though.

It's horizontal jumping but still is jumping. It's the intended method of getting into the box in E3M6 with the switch that leads you to E3M9. (although you can press the switch while outside the box)