(Also please tell me how the BFG works, I am a weak-spined liberal who vomits at every FPS and I always just thought it was a shmup screen-clear equivalent)
An in-depth video explaining the specifics can be found here:
...But in a nutshell, the visible projectile the BFG fires only deals 100-800 contact damage to any target it hits. Unlike the Rocket Launcher, there's no splash damage what-so-ever. The
actual reason it can hit multiple targets is that it fires in two stages, and the green energy ball is just the first stage. In the BFG's second firing stage, which activates after it has hit an enemy or some other obstacle, it fires 40 hitscan tracers in a 90-degree arc, from the player's current location, in the direction the player fired in, with each tracer dealing a unusually complicated math formula that adds up a random value from 1-8 fifteen times, which is where the overwhelming majority of the damage comes from.
Effectively, the BFG is a shotgun in disguise, and the most-effective way to deal with a big boy like Cyberdemons and Spider Masterminds is to get right up to their grill, allowing you to pull off over 3,000 damage on a single target, killing Spider Masterminds in a singular blow.
Now with all that in mind, let's take a look at some footage from Phil's playthrough of DOOM II:
Notice that Phil is ducking into cover between shots. What this means is that Phil is gimping his damage output because the second firing stage is being aimed at the wall he's hiding behind.
Now Phil is incredibly stupid, but I'll hand him a mulligan on this one because nothing in the game tells you how the BFG actually works. For how powerful it is, it's incredibly unintuitive to use, which is most-likely why its functionality has been changed in future titles.
