- No Rest For The Living is the best official release, followed by Plutonia. I have yet to play SIGIL 2 or LOR yet so I can't speak of the quality of those 2.
Update on previous post: SIGIL 2 is, well, I don't even really know if I get to have a say on what I think about it. Now, it wasn't until this go around that I tried most of the wads on UV except on Plutonia and LOR, which I played on HMP, I found TNT and SIGIL to be the hardest on UV, which I think they should be. I knew going into SIGIL 2 that it was far harder than 1 so I decided to play on HMP this time around. I got through the first map and saw my health at like 15 going into the second map and got promptly fragged by a lost soul that Romero "lovingly" placed there. I played through the first map about 5 times it seems like before I just raised my hands and said "screw this"
I'm already on the fence about difficulty. I really, REALLY, did not want to play on HNTR. Lo and behold I start the map on it and that 51 monster count on HMP goes down to measly 20. Maybe it's a pride thing, but going from 51 to 20 feels really patronizing. It's like as if Romero himself came to me and said "Hi player, hope your doing well. You suck at Doom so I'm making the level a cakewalk for you"
Is this all my fault for not sticking with HMP all the way through? Totally. But c'mon, there really shouldn't be that much of a difficulty difference. now some might say that beating a wad on any difficulty is "legitimate" but to me HNTR feels like cheating. One day I'll get around to finishing it on a "legit" difficulty.
As for Legacy of Rust, it was pretty good. The first episode beats out the second in terms of quality by a pretty wide margin though. New enemies were cool but having minicybers instead of one giant new boss kinda blows. I also felt that (on HMP) some of the enemies didn't get to shine as much. If I'm not mistaken there's even a map in the second episode that doesn't even use any of the new enemies. Some enemies from Doom 2 were also a little underutilized, for example Arachnotrons and Pain Elementals barely appeared. Not that I'm crying over not seeing the latter. The 2 new weapons were pretty cool, but I felt that (on HMP at least) there wasn't that many places where the Calamity Blade was really necessary and because ammo was rare for the two I felt I had to save it for large encounters which obviously rarely happened.
One of the thing I really liked was the secret maps, Ash Mill is somehow horror done well in Classic Doom and Panopticon is a fun gimmick, even if the map itself is broken though, or at least finnicky, because there's a couple triggers that you can't sprint over which is not viable since there's a Cyber sniping you the entire level.
I think its a safe way to get a Quake like stuff after Champions flopped. Iirc the 2 Machine Games made expansions for Quake 1 and 2 were well recieved, so if Dark Ages sell well, I can see them putting Doom on a hiatus to do Quake next. Same with Wolfenstein, they wont be releasing 3 (which they announced a long time ago) if Indiana Jones doesnt sell enough for Bethesda to aprove.
I remember hearing in an interview a couple weeks ago that Hugo said "This won't be the last Doom game" so chances are TDA doing well financially will mean another Doom game, not Quake. Me personally, I wanted a sequel from Eternal, not a prequel, so if the next game is that then you won't hear me complaining.
Though by the time Doom 4(2) rolls around people are going to get sick of it. Even normies have a limit.
