Worst Doom WADs?

"joke"wads for the stupid impression they give to outsiders since they're the easiest to find on Youtube (alongside "worst wad I ever played" videos)... but the ones that actually annoyed me the most that I played are RTC-3057: Hub 1 and pretty much every mapping exercise "limitation" mapset (except for 10 sectors, that yielded interesting results actually).

There's a Doom Radio episode where Linguica talks about InstaDoom. Apparently Youtube can selectively apply a few hundred thousand or millions of views to a video algorithmically. He says there's really no other explanation for it because it went from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands in the span of a few hours. This is probably the case for the other memetic doom wads (in a much smaller measure) such as vuvuzela Doom and fidget spinner doom, etc. I don't think the visible popularity of InstaDoom is actually representative of how interesting to people it really is. It's just a silly topical thing to talk about.

LOL did you hear about the mod for Doom where you can take selfies of yourself? LMAO IM DYING 😂😂😂😂😂😂

wow, just wow... ;P

I mostly only hate slaughter maps when 95% of the encounters are "think quick or die" setpieces with tight gameplay, where the architecture doesn't resemble anything meaningful. If it's a later part of the wad I'm more lenient, though. The kind "slaughter" maps I DO like probably count as semi slaughter or something.

The problem with joke or meme WADs is that they are really only funny or novelty once. After that, it dries down quickly. I don't find the selfie stick thing fun after a while, nor fighting 100000+ revenants or that UBER EXTREME weapon pack of underpowered weapons after the first time checking it out. They aren't the worst wads out there, but the praise for such silly things needs to die after a while has passed.

To actually answer the question I'll go with some megawad I found called Playmasters. It's like JOW.wad but substantially way worse, no thought process on texturing, random cyberdemons and huge ass rooms, all-around fucking bullshit.

Easy answer for me:

Nazi Auferstehung

32 SLIDGE maps with stolen assets, music, textures and sounds mixed with horrendous texturing, buckets of not giving a fuck (specifically the author) and to top it off one of the worst methods of packaging a Doom wad I've ever seen.

0/10 why did DoomWadStation host that garbage, so bad that I still know exactly how to spell that German word I don't even know the meaning of just through infamy earned from this shitfuck.

Yeah, most of them are basically one post material. Open the new thread, chuckle at the description, close it, never think about it ever again. These WADs don't even need to be made really. Just photoshop a screenshot, write a colorful funny description, and that's all you need.

My thoughts exactly. And thank you for putting it into words. I've had problems with doing so myself. Anyway, I think that this applies to map architecture as well. Doom is abstract, but if it doesn't resemble anything at all I don't care for it.

Well said deathevokation

This conversation about "think quick or die" situations is fascinating to me. I recently playtested someones map and even though it wasn't a slaughtermap, it certainly had many traps that relied heavily on reaction time and on nothing else.

I recently have been having trouble with a lot of new maps I've been playing and simply admitting that I suck at Doom is difficult to do. Out of curiosity, I decided last night to play a little bit of 50 Shades of Graytall, a megawad I haven't yet played until then. I made it up to MAP04 before I started to get a little fatigued.

After that, I decided to play MAP06 from Alien Vendetta, a megawad I hadn't played in years. I remember having to save scum my way through this thing, but I breezed right through it! More importantly, I was having a really good time. It wasn't easy, by any means. But the gameplay felt right. Even though it used many heavy monsters like manctanks, arachnatrons, and revenants, I felt resilient the whole way through.

Compared to the maps I played in 50shades, the monster selection was very light -- mostly zombie men, shotgun guys, imps, pinky demons, a few cacodemons, hell knights, and revenants. What the fuck is going on here? Why is this so much harder?

The reason seems pretty complicated, and there isn't really a catch-all solution for each of the maps. It's something I can only seem to describe as "chaos." You can't seem to step anywhere without alarming tens of monsters at once. Then you peck them away one at a time as they creep into your safe zones. Once you've attracted too much attention, the only way to escape from the havoc is to move forward, which has... you guessed it. Nothing but more monsters.

I don't know what it is. People have become more considerate about giving the player too much ammo or all the good guns too early or something. I think what this does, however, is make the player feel very insecure for pretty much the entire playthrough. There's no excess items to save for later, the combat takes too long, the mistakes are devastating, etc. The map I played in Alien Vendetta gave the super shotgun very early, and was very generous with medikits and shell boxes. That was very fun for me, and I felt tough as I was crushing through platoons of tough monsters. It's tough to make the argument that Doom is getting too hard and people should make their maps easier, but I don't think people realize that being overly concious about the complaints of easy megawads is actually making their maps worse.

Doom is a very naturally fun game even when the player is stacked with all the powerful items and weapons, the amount of hoops the mappers make the player jump through to get to a safe place is exhausting.

Kama Sutra is a perfect example. I was just watching some UV-max demos of a few random maps from it. I was watching the player crush through a crowd of archviles with a rocket launcher. He had enough megaarmor and health to take a few hits without too much trouble. I can't remember the last time I played a map like that. I'm almost always counting my stimpacks and rationing out ammo and trying to initiate infighting to save resources.

I mean, both worlds are great in their own ways but goddamn that map looked like a lot of fun.

I think for now on im just gonna turn all the start rooms in my maps into a storage closet with tons of resources. I'm tired of this running around scavenging for resources shit. I just wanna kill stuff.

The last few posts here so feel like reading my own thoughts. The sheer pressure in playing a lot of current hard maps, where you can tell exactly when a trap is happening and that there's no way round it, plus the slog that they tend to put you through just don't appeal. Like, I can't see myself getting back into Doom by playing modern works.

Not a 32-level megawad, but the worst thing I've played so far is Suspended in Dusk.

Good looking but the gameplay lacks way too much. Questionable enemy usage and placement + very controlled encounters.