Playing Every Doom Game in a Weird Order

 

After having recently lost everything, a friend of mine has started helping my put back together my digitally distributed games. This, unfortunately, includes the two newest DOOM games, as well as the DOOM 64 expansion. However, with these back, it kinda... y'know, makes me wanna play the things.

    But now that I have EVERYTHING, I wanted to do it in this weird way I did back when DOOM 4 was new. I kinda sorta celebrated that a DOOM 4 existed by not just playing the new one, but all of them at once. Well, 1, 2, 3, and 4 at least. The way I did this is split them into sections, because they don't have an equal number of levels. The first has 3 episodes of 9 levels each, making 27, 2 and 3 have whole campaigns instead of episodes, 2 being 32 levels and 3 also being 27. 4 was the shortest of them at only 13 levels. But the kicker is, DOOM 4's levels are long and involved, and like the original Banjo-Kazooie can be 100%'d in one sitting. So by chopping the other three into 13 groups of levels, I could divide the four main series DOOM games into roughly equal chunks of gameplay, and play them in order.

    So, for example, E1M1 & E1M2, then MAP01-MAP03, then the Mars City sections, then the first level of DOOM '16, then going back and starting with E1M3, etc. This was an interesting way to experience them because it's basically like getting a vertical slice of the whole series, and you don't get bogged down by keyhunts, audio logs, or 2016's often exhausting setpieces because you're biting off chunks at a time. It gave me a real kind of fun size trail mix of everything DOOM games have been over the decades. In short, it was a really interesting experience with my favorite game franchise that gave me a neat perspective on the series as a whole, something that's easy to lose track of when you're a hardcore GZDoomer 99% of the time. It didn't always used to be like that, I was obsessed with DOOM 3 for many years, but over time classic DOOM has become one of the few games I actually play.

   So, I want to do that again. However this time there's two changes:

1. DOOM 5 exists.

2. Because the Neo-id games heavily rely on the ending of DOOM 64 in their backstory, and due to the game's recent re-release, it's been thrust into a kind of pseudo-main series position, making it something like DOOM 2.5. This means aside from the main series, I'm also throwing in 64 and, since there's only one other fps DOOM game left, there's really no reason not to do all 7 fps DOOM games that exist. Rather than just the "canon" series, this time, I wanna do the whole franchise.

3. No I'm not doing the RPGs because I wouldn't even begin to know how to get them running and also it's a different genre so I'm confident in calling those games spin-offs whereas including 64 but excluding Final DOOM just wouldn't make any sense.

    Now all the pre-Neo-id games had around 30 levels give or take so dividing them up into 13 chunks makes them relatively even. But throwing Final DOOM into the mix makes things complicated. There's two ways to handle it: either treat each megawad as a separate game, or take all 64 levels together as the game. It would be far more sensible to split up and play through each megawad, and in practice that's what Final DOOM is, ostensibly two new games. Buuuut it wasn't sold that way. Final DOOM is still a singular product sold as its own thing, and it was packaged along with 1 and 2 as the "Doom Trilogy," not a quadrilogy. To really get a sense of the vertical slice things I talked aboot, you kinda need to treat Final DOOM as a singular entity or else you artificially inflate the series and make it look like there's more games than their already are. Now, regardless of which choice I take with this, I'm going to be doubling up on Final DOOM anwyas, either playing more levels of TNT or a couple levels of both TNT and Plutonia. Either way the amount of playtime given to that game is going to be more than any other and that's just how it's going to be. So the question then becomes merely a matter of taste, and as I want to preserve the feeling of it being a single game, I'm going to go in the intended order and play TNT first, then Plutonia, and I'll typically be playing 5 levels at a time.

    The other big thing is the whole expansion pack situation. Nearly every DOOM game (all except Final and 4) has at least one expansion of single player content. There's The Ultimate DOOM's fourth episode and John Romero's modern fifth episode SI6IL, DOOM II's master levels and No Rest for the Living, the lost levels from the re-release of DOOM 64, Resurrection of Evil and the Bravo team episode from BFG edition of DOOM 3, and of course the Ancient Gods parts I & II from DOOM Eternal. Of these, only DOOM 64 has only a single expansion, a modern one, while 1, 2, and 3 have both an expansion released contemporaneously and well after the original game. Final DOOM sorta has Perdition's Gate, and DOOM 4 has those multiplayer DLC's, but I'm ignoring those for what I hope are obvious reasons.

    Because that's all later additions, I'm treating them all as such. Meaning, I'm cutting up only the original levels into 13 chunks, then cutting up the expansions based on the number of levels in the Ancient Gods. Beyond that, because all but 64 have 2 expansions, I'm going to split them up even more. So the order will be Thy Flesh Consumed, Master Levels, Resurrection of Evil, Ancient Gods part I, and then SI6IL, No Rest for the Living, Lost Levels, Lost Mission, and Ancient Gods part II. Notice how I've grouped the modern revisit episode, made decades after the original classic doom series, all together. Because the Ancient Gods parts are so short - 3 levels in the first, 4 in the second - and there are so many Master Levels and Resurrection of Evil has as many levels as vanilla DOOM 4 & 5, this experience is going to be a little chunky. Oh right, we need to talk aboot the Master Levels. You know, for DOOM II.

    The Master Levels is probably the weirdest addition to the DOOM franchise ever, 20 individual wads, some with story, some with none, some good, some terrible, and despite being an officially produced single player expansion, the Master Levels don't really feel like a cohesive product the way Final DOOM does. What's incredibly frustrating, though, is that the wads with story are never presented in their entirety. Three series - Dr. Sleep's Inferno, Cranium's Cabal, and Jim Flynn's Titan series, all have entries in an officially produced id DOOM product, yet in order to understand the full scope of any of them, you have to play a number of levels not included in the Master Levels at all. There are 2 Dr. Sleep levels missing, 4 Titan maps, and a whopping SEVEN Cabal maps not in Master Levels as shipped. This is weird and pisses me off because, technically, the story of all three DO occur within the DOOM multiverse, specifically in the classic universe, but the whole existence of the Cabal and that Dante was right aboot the structure of hell are just sort of ignored, making you feel like the Master Levels don't count and were a mistake to play.

    My solution to that is, I'm going to make a custom wad by taking the Master Levels, along with the missing maps of the three series from idgames, and some other assets (music from PSX, making sure the skies are all set up) and dividing them into 4 episodes. The 3 series, and the rest of the Master Levels which have no setup and are just "some guy fighting demons on Earth" which could have occurred at any pointe after the invasion. However, I'm not going to be counting the levels not included in the Master Levels. I'll only be dividing the 21 levels into 3 chunks of 7, and playing the omitted levels as they come. Given how vast and elaborate the DLC levels for DOOM Eternal are, I'm hoping this won't be unbalanced.

Anwyas, that's my weird plan to play the whole DOOM series chronologically but staggered. Lastly, I wanna leave a little list here to show the actual order I'll be playing in (I'll update this later with the expansion stuff):