Doom The Way id Did (2011)

March 24, 2022

Doom The Way id Did is a community WAD pack that intends to pay homage to the original “classic” Doom mapping trio of Romero, Tom Hall and Sandy Peterson, by emulating their design philosophies and – literally – make a new Doom campaign, but the way id did.

The problem I have with this is that outside of pigeonholing Romero into his now-famous, tech-base-based (lol) design criteria (you just need to look at Sigil to realise that this has gone the way of the dodo), Hall and especially Peterson are harder to pin down. Specifically when it came to his contributions for Doom II, Sandy’s maps are all over the shop. Granted, the man was under an intense amount of pressure to deliver on a tight deadline, but the worst thing about Doom II is the inconsistency and half-arsed feeling of some of the levels.

Anyways, at the end of the day – does this have anything to do with the quality of the WAD? Absolutely not. This is gonna be high on the list of WADs that I’ve played. I love the episodic nature of classic Doom, and these folks have nailed the progression nicely, and even though these levels were culled from a smorgasbord of entries from tons of contributors, there feels like there is a genuine flow and purpose.

Another refreshing element of this WAD, is that even on Ultraviolence setting, this wasn’t astronomically difficult. Yes, of course it was hard, but it felt fair. Some of the WADs I’ve played recently are beyond stupid in difficulty. I was able to put Doom The Way id Did down with only four deaths, on UV in Brutal Doom, and all of them occurred in the third episode, with two of those being on the spiderdemon boss map. As a fairly useless / casual Doom player, I was quite impressed with myself lol.

Anyways, if you’re new to Doom community WADding (lol), I can’t recommend this enough as a starting point.