Download Duke Nukem
Vinnie Breidenthal
Duke Nukem 3D is indeed technically more advanced game than Doom engine-based games. The two most important things Duke3D is better at are more map geometry possibilities (room-over-room, sloped floors and ceilings etc.) and lots of interactivity with environment (destroying things, using toilets, talking etc etc.).
However, despite that, I feel that Doom is still better in some aspects, and playing through Doom gives me somewhat better experience and feelings. I'd like to discuss what Doom is better at than technically more advanced Build-engine games.
- More stable engine. Duke 3d's engine feels quite fragile and buggy, for example it can happen I can sometimes die by simply walking into some corner or weirdly-sloped room, or even crushed by a rotating door. Doom's engine feels much more consistent and reliable.
- Better and reliable splash damage spread in Doom. In Duke 3D, the explosion and splash damage spread is extremely weird and buggy, sometimes a bomb explodes right next to a monster but it barely hurts it.
- Much wider and more versatile bestiary in Doom2. Duke Nukem has less monster types, and most of basic monster types can be killed with about two shotgun shots or single RPG shot. Duke Nukem is much more about individual or small-group monster encounters and fights, while Doom is often about fights against big hordes of monsters and many monsters being active at a time.
- Doom has map format which is much easier to understand and create maps in, and most importantly much better and comfortable mapping tools. Duke 3D has just "Build" editor which is clunky and uncomfortable to use, many things are done with various key shortcuts and combinations you need to figure out and remember. But most importantly, map actions and "scripting" is done via special things you add to map, and sector and thing tags (lo-tags and hi-tags) you need to know and remember what each value does, for example even making a simple door needs an advanced tutorial. A person needs to be engineer to create anything.
- Doom has nicer "marble", "wooden" and "hellish" textures and nicer-to-look-at color palette. Duke 3D is indeed superior in realistic-looging city and interior textures and environments, but Doom has nicer artwork for more abstract environments and nicer green color.
It could be a variety of factors really. For me, Doom (I mostly mean Doom 2 actually) has more replay value than Duke3D, despite Duke having better level design and better protagonist. For me, one of the major factors is that I like the core gunplay and the enemy roster of Doom more than that of Duke3D.
Doom 2's enemies seem better balanced (like hitscan enemies have high pain chance and less hp) and have more diverse roles like:
- Enemies that replenish the battlefield (Archviles, Pain Elementals)
- Enemies with complex attack patterns (Revenants, Mancubi)
- Area denial enemies (Archviles)
- Turret style enemies (Arachnotrons)
- Strong enemies in levels (like Cyberdemon and SMM) unlike mini-Battlelords that can be shrunk in 1 shot or killed by 6 rockets.
I really like Duke 3D but I felt like the game was wayyy too happy to throw tons of hitscans at you when you don't have the means to fight them properly. At least in Blood you can crouch and have stuff like dynamite to counterbalance it but here? Nothing, just hit and duck in cover.
I really like Duke 3D but I felt like the game was wayyy too happy to throw tons of hitscans at you when you don't have the means to fight them properly. At least in Blood you can crounch and have stuff like dynamite to counterbalance it but here? Nothing, just hit and duck in cover.
I think Doom 2's enemy roster elevates it over most other old school shooters. How every enemy has it's role in combat and what interesting encounters one can create by combining them in different ways. Of course, this mostly just applies to modding, vanilla usually Doom 2 doesn't make the best use of em, imo, with exceptions being some of Romero's and McGee's work. I won't say that Duke 3d's combat is boring or anything but it's strengths lie elsewhere.
I think Duke 3D also has some Level Design that is to "advanced" for the Engine.
Placing Enemies way above you in an Engine that isn't so much better than Doom ones and having sometimes to use the Jetpack in such Engine just doesn't feel as good.
Duke 3D used many Novelties into Ego Shooters, Doom lives with its Limits and uses its Strengths pretty good (Combat, Discovery, Puzzling).
You're right on about the monster types and in-fighting etc. Doom's bestiary is much more iconic, involved to fight, bigger in number and variety, and you're not pigeonholed into playing some blonde dude who talks alot
as mentioned previously, modding the game is a bit easier and doom 2's bestiary is much more balanced and diverse, leading to a larger variety of original mods and such that can be created. that's in addition to the game just having better gameplay in general, and being an incredible base to create mods for
1.) doom's source code was released 5 years earlier than duke's. this meant that source ports that could bring the game to modern systems and add all sorts of new features could be created much earlier than for duke 3d, making it far more accessible. i honestly think that, other than what everyone else has said, this is one of the biggest reasons as to why the doom community is so much larger. by the time duke's source code was released, there were already a multitude of source ports for doom that could do what the build engine could do and more
Doom has map format which is much easier to understand and create maps in, and most importantly much better and comfortable mapping tools. Duke 3D has just "Build" editor which is clunky and uncomfortable to use, many things are done with various key shortcuts and combinations you need to figure out and remember. But most importantly, map actions and "scripting" is done via special things you add to map, and sector and thing tags (lo-tags and hi-tags) you need to know and remember what each value does, for example even making a simple door needs an advanced tutorial. A person needs to be engineer to create anything.
Duke Nukem 3D's levels look better and it has a more satisfying arsenal (except the Trip Mines) and it is nice to be able to carry powerups around and use them when necessary, but Duke Nukem himself seems more fragile than he ought to be, fighting 2D sprite enemies in full-3D environments can be very frustrating, the level design allows for too many cheap deaths (e.g. pitfalls, getting squished by a freaking door), most enemies are not very fun to fight and all the boss fights are just annoying, the Steroids are a poor substitute for Doom's Berserk and it also has some weird pacing issues; I mean, E1L3 not only taking away all your weapons but starting you off on an electric chair that will chip away at your health right off the bat, really?
All in all, Doom feels like a fairer, tighter, more balanced experience - with the exception of Thy Flesh Consumed, but since that one was meant as a bonus episode for veteran players released later, it does not really count.
Kinda reminds me of the age old "Super Mario World" VS "Sonic 1" argument. Sonic has more attitude and dared to take some really interesting risks that Mario didn't, but the experience was still jankier on the whole just not as balanced, grounded and fun. Still definitely a worthwhile competitor though.
This is a side note, and I know the mapping formats and general functionality of the games are far too different for this to be conceivable, but if there was some weird version of GZDoom that had full Build game support (or even just Duke 3D) that would be mind-blowingly cool.
Duke3D's artwork is in many cases inferior, especially the "enemies"(few exceptions like the flying fatso-disc? and the octabrain) but also has some immense strengths regarding some of the texture work and level design(especially E1M3, E1M5). The mappers pulled of "realistic" entries while keeping them enjoyable and interesting. Player movement and feel is jumpy but nonetheless great. One of the weak points is that when killing the enemies they often feel like cutouts with no volume or weight behind them(mostly the little lizards?).
The build tools are Ken-o-matic which means they're not meant for standard users - there should have been one abstraction layer and then an expert mode revealing all tidbits. The biggest no-go was the 1024 sector limit though. Despite the criticism Ken did all the framework by himself so kudos to him.
True. But like you said, he is fragile anyway (6 rockets kill him) so it doesn't change much. The thing about Doom is that the monsters are more diverse in terms of hitpoints. The hitscanners in Doom are more fragile than Duke's hitscanners, but Doom also has a whole variety of stronger enemies.
There was a program called WAD2MAP that allowed you to convert DOOM, DOOM II & possibly Heretic maps and convert them to Duke 3D. It's still available in the Duke 3D modding community, but dare I say to you, that's not supposed to be the intended way to create maps for Duke 3D, and it's not good. Taking an existing DOOM map and converting it to a Duke 3D map isn't the way to go.
Doom is better than Duke3D in almost every regard if you ask me. That's not to say the latter is a bad game - having played through it once, I found it decently enjoyable and can see its appeal - but I just find Doom overall the more enjoyable and technically impressive game. Though two cool things Duke3D does have that (vanilla) Doom doesn't is 3D floors and swimmable water.
Raze is awesome, but I was thinking more along the lines of something that somehow interprets Duke/Build maps and spits them out in a ready-to-play format GZDoom understands natively (UDMF I suppose it would be in this fantasy world). So basically you could play Duke stuff practically lossless but in GZDoom's more stable and flexible engine! Again, I know this is a pipe dream, lol.
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