I remember trying to use the mouse with Doom way back when, and even with the sensitivity maxed out, it was way too sluggish. I could turn faster with the keyboard, so using the mouse seemed pointless.
Yup. I could trump just about anyone using a mouse from my keyboard. 90s mice sucked. I stopped playing FPS for years because keyboard play was no longer feasible, it took me years to be willing to try.
@@hireahitCA I remember editing a .ini file and setting the mouse value higher than max in there, once you went in options in-game, the bar for the slider was way off the scale. Possibly that was just in the Shareware version though.
@@lmcgregoruk Yeah I had a couple of decent mice, and all sucked with doom. You probably needed fiddling with the config files if you wanted something playable and my 10 year old self didn't want to bother, since keyboard was good enough.
@@lmcgregoruk I doubt mice of the day had the needed sensitivity. Definitely nothing similar to what entry-level gear can manage today. I'm talking a real serial mouse for the 386 or early 486 platform.
It’s true! I first played Doom on Win95 in 1996 or so.. mouse was possible, but I didn’t switch until 2003ish when my counter strike playing brother introduced me to WSDA.. So that means for about 7 years I was a keyboarder! I also agree that elitism over controller choice is stupid. Except those touch screen players. Those heretical n00bs can burn for all I care. But yeah as I was saying elitism is bad!
Like most people born in the 80's, I used the arrow keys to move but I did have a mouse with the first family PC at the time. Windows 3.1 baby! Used it for Wolf3D and Doom. Then along came Duke3D. Vertical mouse look was new to me and didn't use it. Page Up/Down to look. It wasn't until Quake did I change over.
@@Leo.Dalarosa You can try it for yourself with Quad Touch on Android, actually. I got it on my phone just so I'd be able to play some Quake when I get bored waiting for Uber rides, and the touch controls work better than I figured they would.
Started doom on ps1, and why you'd ever want to control someone in a 3d space with only 4 buttons? Beats me, but it kind of makes the game more strategic since you have to time your turns with your shots and your running speed. When I turn ps1 doom on I do appreciate the different challenge
@@hernancoronel That's a common, and perfectly understandable misconception, but Doom is actually 3D. Many of the limitations of the Doom engine were put in place intentionally in order to simplify game related processes and increase performance on machines back in the day, but those limits can be removed. There's a great video by borogk that does an excellent job illustrating Doom's 3D capabilities, so I'll link that here ua-cam.com/video/ZYGJQqhMN1U/v-deo.html
@@WookieFragger sure thank you. Let me rephrase that: movement in Doom is not 3D so the arrows were perfectly fine for playing at that time using the DOS version and the simple machines available at the time. Later games like Descent, Quake and later Dooms implemented real 3D movement so it was a necessity to use a mouse. I myself started playing Descent with the keyboard using the arrows in the numeric keypad which was ubiquitous at the time and it was a total pain to do that but since it was what was available it was either learn or start saving for a mouse which were shitty and expensive at around USD99 for the Microsoft ball mouse as an example.
When i grew up, nobody ever thought of using the mouse for gaming. The first game me or anyone i knew thought to use the mouse, was with Quake 1. Man i still remember using it the first time, that was so weird, when you were used to using keyboard only. Damn im old! :(
Romero still contends to this day that using the mouse for looking up and down sucks. you had to use a console command to enable proper mouse look in quake 1.
@@BeefGeeTV Im pretty sure it was only a very early versions of Quake 1, but I really, honestly don't remember. Haven't played a lot of Quake early, it wasn't until GLQuake that I played somewhat seriously, and by then non console activated mouslook was definetly a thing.
Rise of the Triads was the first FPS I used mouse for. And that would have been around 96 or so. Like you said, using a mouse was too slow and bordered on pointless.
Yeah, up until quake the default was just keyboard. Maybe some very progressive guys used mouse in duke nukem 3d but no one took notice. When we started playing quake on network, and there was one guy using mouse, he was literally running in circes around everybody and nobody could do anything to him, that was the time I understood the mouse is going to be the future and I had to start learn using it.
The one thing that I love about DOOM is that no matter how you play the game, you can have fun. I find the game a lot more fun with more unorthodox controls. This is coming from someone who's first control scheme was on the iPod touch back in 2011, the version of mobile DOOM before the unity port. There was a "steering wheel" scheme that worked so well!
Back in the day, I would of used the mouse. I had no problems with dragging the mouse left and right, but the main problem was the mouse also moved Doomguy "forward" as well, and that's what turned me off it back then. Unless you're a robot, no one can move their hand completely straight in one direction. I couldn't even think of constantly thrusting the mouse forward just to move. Either there wasn't a setting to turn that off back then, or if there was, I wasn't aware or knew what it did; I just assumed that's how the mouse was meant to be used. Fast forward to when someone had put Quake 3 Arena into the school's computers, I immediately changed it back to my horrid ASDF, Space, arrow keys setup. Wasn't the brightest of ideas obviously, but since I still didn't have a gaming computer back then and my last shooter was still DOOM, how would I know the mouse didn't act like that anymore?
it wasn't THE default but it was in there, as 'thresh.cfg' - named after legendary quake player Dennis 'Thresh' Fong, widely credited as the main popularising force behind WASD. check out that vox video I link to in the description.
i would understand if someone thought it was better with arrows just because they're closer; but yeah. WSAD solidified the cause. thinking about it i grew up using WSAD, and i don't even know about Dennis.
I am an only keyboard Doom player, to this day I still play it this way. Mouse back in the day were so terribly bad. You needed to clean it all the time, and even with that, the mouse wasn't precise with fast movements. Other games were even much worse to play with mouse, for example games like Star Wars X-Wing or Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. But for slow point'n'click games, it was totally needed and worked fine (for example Monkey Island or games like The Incredible Machine).
Same here. The first game I started playing with WASD + mouse was Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and I later adopted this control scene for the Quake games as well... but, to this day, I still play all Doom and Build engine games with the keyboard only. No exceptions ;)
i switched to keyboard and mouse in quake, after i lost a rigged local tournament i was going to win for sure as a little 10 year old brat, but the organizers had another idea. they magically put a custom map that was retarded and could only be navigated with a mouse in the finals, just so i lose to their friend, which i had been destroying in earlier rounds. i resent that to this day.
In my experience, ball mice were TERRIBLE. I can to this day (20-some years since I last used a ball mouse) vividly remember the feeling of frustration whenever the mouse inevitably got stuck halfway through trying to do something as simple as selecting some text or drag and dropping a file. Attempting to draw a straight diagonal line (with the regular paintbrush tool) in Paint was futile.
@@adimifus You must have used bad mice(Or didn't clean them properly), I stopped using my ball mouse 2018(When both right click and the scroll-wheel started to have problems, I could easily changed the switch for the click(As I've done several times before) but I don't think I could fix the wheel and I've also started to play Quake 3 Arena quite seriously at the time so I thought why not test this new optical mouse someone had given me...) and if you cleaned it like every 2-3 weeks it worked good(Though I started having problems as you after the mouse had been used around 15 years, but I took the ball from another mouse and then it worked fine again). If you wonder why I used a ball mouse that long, I had cheap quite early optical mouse for a while and it was horrible at most surfaces so I jumped back to my trusty ball mouse and thought "man optical mice is pure shit"(I had that "opinion" for a long time, LOL...)! The newer optical mouse I mentioned earlier that someone gave me was way better than the old optical one and also obviously better than the ball mouse it replaced(Though the ball one still worked on way more surfaces). But a decent ball mice is seriously "quite" good(In my opinion) if you clean it once in a while. I'm quite sure you(And other people reading this) think this comment is quite bizarre, but to be honest I think the ball mouse has too bad reputation kinda like many people saying that CRT-monitors was totally horrible when they actually wasn't(In my opinion). By the way you know any good new keyboards, my keyboard from the 90s(LOL... I'm oldschool!!! Actually I'm autistic and hate change most of the time...) died last year and I currently use some horrible Razer shit at the moment.
i'd actually been looking into this kind of thing recently, particularly how many people were still using Keyboard during the Quake era. Surprisingly, i'd seen people say that they thought free mouselook was cheating, since you needed to type a console command (+mlook, or tape a key down) to use it comfortably. i don't know how many people were still playing keyboard only at the time, particularly as the rise of internet play showed them just how limited it was, but i'd bet the lack of an "Always Freelook" option in the settings did stall the adoption of mice a surprising amount
I definitely played Quake with a keyboard. It wasn't until me and everyone else got wrecked by one guy in a cybercafe that I got a clue. I went over to the guys computer and checked his control setup after he left and saw the mouse and keyboard controls and was like "Whoa!"
@@PlasticCogLiquid With Doom it's no big deal to play keyboard only with the vertical auto-aiming and the levels being designed so that you never have to look up or down, but it just sounds unbelievably awkward trying to play a full 3D game like Quake that way, especially with how fast and frantic it is.
Keyboard Doomer opens video with the line: "Doom was always meant to be played with a mouse." That's integrity. And thank you for explaining why keyboard Doomers are a thing; I never got that until now.
I play Doom almost exclusively with a controller but to be fair, keyboard controls are excellent too, as long as it's the traditional WASD and turning with the arrow keys, with shoot mapped to the up arrow key.
When I want/need to play KB only, that’s exactly how I do it! I could never go back to defaults, although all the keys clustered together WAS admittedly perfect when I was a kid..
That's a really interesting point of comparison. In my experience until Halo came about it was common wisdom for PC players to say FPS couldn't really work without a mouse, and that console shooters needed to be designed to accommodate the inherent limitations. I don't think you could find many people to still argue that these days, but I remember believing it myself.
I'm lucky enough that i got a mouse with Windows 3.1 pretty early on. So while i think i played Doom keyboard only early on, mouse control became important quickly. If you already carry your computer and display around to a friend to play Doom over LAN, you really wanted to have all the advantages to kick butt possible. So for me keyboard only really only was a short period in gaming. I think playing lots of different games made that transition really easy too. Games like Master of Orion, Civilization, Syndicate or Xcom/Ufo just worked so much better with mouse that it became normal to use it. Really the only game where i never transitioned to mouse was Descent, those controls really messed up my brain back then.
One of the most legendary Doom players back in the day Chris Ratcliffe was a keyboard only player. And he still has quite a few records in the game played on the original executable files. His channel is Rybacksda for those who want to check him out
My young-self was introduced to Playstation Doom first, and when I got back to Doom in my teens, I played the XBOX Live Arcade. So I played with controlers back then since I played on console. When I discovered the sources ports on PC, I now play with mouse and keyboard. There's many way to play Doom, and no matter how you play it, the important is having fun and kick some demon butts! 🤘
I was not a smart kid back in the day cause while I was using the keyboard only, I didn't know that there was a run button. I DID know that you could use the mouse to move tho. it was just not practical as you needed to move it all the time to get any movement but when at top speed it was faster than walking speed. There was this one tricky gap you had to clear on that Donut stage where normal walking speed wouldn't cut it but if you combined it with your walking speed with the short boost of moving the mouse, you could clear the gap. So I had my brother come in to move the mouse while I pressed the arrow keys to actually do it xD A similar thing happened in Doom 2 on that stage with the Spider Mastermind and Cyberdemon. I couldn't understand how you were supposed to fight them while also avoiding their projections. I wasn't aware that imp fighting was a thing yet but I did discover that there was a key that would allow you to strafe but it was in a tricky spot on the keyboard so I couldn't press it while also turning with the directional keys and Ctrl, so I had a friend over one day where we had to operate Doom Guy like a damn Megazord where one of us would handle movement while the other would press the fire button when we were aligned with the two bosses. xD Took us a few tries but we managed to do it xD Good times!
Mouse had another massive drawback if I'm remembering correctly. Moving the mouse up and down moved your forward and backwards. It's great for turning, but when you're accidentally moving around, it can be a killer. I was a keyboarder until moving to source ports. Now I can barely remember how to play with just a keyboard.
When I was a kid I didn’t even know Doom could use the mouse until way later. I didn’t even know what strafing was until Goldeneye. So for years I played all FPS games with tank controls. And when I tried a mouse I couldn’t get used to it. I’m left handed but only use mice with my right hand. But when I was playing Doom I would use my right hand to move around. I still do it these days. But since I can’t also use my right hand for a mouse too I use a trackpad with my left. So I’ll run around in FPS games with arrow keys and a trackpad. Everyone says I’m nuts. But it works for me. But the problem is the only trackpad I can use comfortably is one on a MacBook. It’s a bit of a conundrum really since many games I can’t even play on a Mac. And I can’t play with a mouse because I can’t do it left handed and I don’t like the motion of constantly lifting the mouse to move it back to center. Even if I get used to moving a mouse I’ll also have to train myself to move with my left hand. Which is even harder. I mean when I am using a controller my thumb is used to movement. But with my three fingers I just can’t. So what I need is a separate USB powered one handed device with a D-pad and control stick for my left hand and a mouse on my right hand. lol
No problem. The N52 (can't remember the brand) and the Logitech G13 did that a decade ago. Really popular at least among "advanced" WoW players. Even if you can't find them new, or devices like them, there's bound to be some floating around on the second hand market. Or you can get a separate numerical keyboard, but they don't have a stick. ;)
I started playing Doom as a kid in the elementary school and as kids, we didn't even know mouse controls were possible. We knew practically no English (Czech kids - we understood things like "new game" and "exit", but that's about it) so that didn't help either. Still had a hell of a time with the game and some of my fondest gaming memories. I still play today, but I'm too spoiled by the mouse controls and source ports so going back to keyboard only would probably be suffering for me.
I still play keyboard only. With 'always run' off, I find combining the direction, strafe and speed keys you can do some pretty tight turns and stops. Great video man. Decino sent me here, and I'm stayin'!
I play not only Doom but Hexen and Quake with keyboard only, is so much fun. The only old game I play with mouse is System Shock with it's original keyboard layout.
I like playing Doom keyboard only because I mostly use laptops. It's actually incredibly comfy if you set movement and use to good ol w-a-s-d-e, use left and right arrows to turn and up arrow to shoot.
One of the happiest moments in my life was when I was little kid and my dad showed me doom 2, I've played that one before doom 1 and it was on a laptop so I had to do it without the mouse and it was amazing to discover that we can cross gaps by running fast instead of jumping, that was a great time
Yes, even though Windows, and mouse drivers for DOS, were available at the time, I stuck with keyboard only on Doom for a long time. In particular, I was like "old man over here" at 2:24, using the arrow keys on the numeric keypad, which I found far nicer for my fat fingers than the 'normal' arrow keys. I stuck with this for so long that I was disappointed that the numeric keypad wasn't a default setting out of the box for many of the source ports that started appearing, so that I had to redefine the keys.
I definitely would not have considered using a mouse back in the day. The comment about them being hard to setup and just crappy to use is not overstated here.
It's possible using only keyboard, I've completed maps in nightmare and pacifist without the mouse, but definitely is more difficult only with the keyboard
I really never understood the fuss about "HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY PLAY KB ONLY???" and I'm someone who first played DOOM on the 360, the controls are exactly the same as KB only since there's only one turning speed. 15-year old me went from Halo 3 -> DOOM 360 -> DOOM PC with just keyboard so no excuses. If you're not playing with Y-Axis aiming then keyboard is more than fine.
I remember there was a time when I played Classic Doom with only a keyboard and I found it unquestionably one of the worst experiences to play that game with, I could tolerate it, but I always felt held back, once I got Doom 95 with working mouse support and later down the line switch to GZDoom, I felt the restraints slip off and I was able to play Doom the way it was meant to, maybe some people want to play this game with keyboard only, but I am definitely not one of those people, I am really not sure why your video specifically was recommended to me as I am as anti-keyboard only as one could get towards this game, but it is funny in a strange way of revisiting my horrible experience with keyboard only from memory lol
I prefer playing with the mouse and keyboard, but keyboard only also works surprisingly well too! The default controls though, moving forwards and spinning with the arroys, and strafing with comma and period... that is weird! However I understand wanting to play the game a certain way. I always prefer Doom with no vertical look, because I feel like that's what makes it feel like Doom
@@BeefGeeTV Hell yeah! I feel like it's a little pointless to go back to the past just to modernize it. It's like if Wolfenstein 3D had vertical look, it really wouldn't add anything. You can mod it into a game that uses vertical look and that's cool, like with Build games I prefer with it on, but for the original Doom experience it's just making it more difficult to play imo
I recently started playing keyboard only after 20 years of playing keyboard + mouse. Took a while to get used to, but I really enjoy it - and I play all of my singleplayer levels that way now.
I was so used to Doom and Wolfenstein's control schemes that I played Quake blissfully unaware of mouse and keyboard control being a thing. It wasn't until Halflife that I learned what I'd been missing.
I didn’t even know this was a controversy until recently. I’ve always used a keyboard + mouse combo. 13 year old me back in 1996 used keyboard for forward/backwards and mouse for left/right. I also used mouse for fire, open, and strafing. I can’t imagine playing these games any other way.
that was an awesome and nostalgic way of ending a video. Long time that I don't see this orange font. Ohhh the memories of putting a plastic cape on my computer.
I played Doom 2 with a mouse and keyboard on a 486, but not with WASD I used the arrow keys to move and strafe and the buttons surrounding them, like num 0 and 1, ctrl etc.
@@BeefGeeTV I didn't know that, makes sense though. It seemed to be the best setup coming from keyboard only. I didn't even consider using the other side of the keyboard to move for years 😂
I played Doom keyboard only because our computer teacher didn’t let us use a mouse, and so whenever we had a sub, the keyboard was the only option. Well, that or actual learning, so yeah, obviously Doom.
Edit: remember, kids. ALWAYS READ THE DESCRIPTION. Where might I be able to find a lot of the old footage of people playing that you used in this video? I love seeing stuff like that, and can't get enough of it.
I'm a member of that group since Doom Day 1, using just the default out-of-the-box keybinds. That said, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend using a mouse. Definitely an advantage once you're comfortable with it.
I used to play Doom 2 on keyboard only. I tried using mouse when playing but I found it difficult since when you move the mouse, it will not only make your character look left and right, but it will also make your character walk in all directions. When I played Quake, I thought it was the same case as Doom so I still played keyboard only. Only when I played Half-life is where I transitioned to mouse+keyboard and used the wasd configuration (actually it was rfdg at first before using the default bindings)
Exactly. I tried using mouse in Doom and had the same problem. Tried a Joystick and it wouldn't stop running to specific directions, so keyboard was the only thing that worked. Duke 3D also worked fine with keyboard only and since you could look up and down with Page Up / Page Down, I didn't bother using a mouse. I only recall Half-Life really making proper use of mouse look so that's where I went for the new control scheme. So yes, Doom could be played with mouse too but making it work was a hassle.
I used to when I bought the DOOM CE edition for pc from Walmart years ago in 2005 because those versions didn't come with mouse support, had gotten pretty good and used to it but once I started playing with a mouse I can never go back feels too awkward for me now playing with only the keyboard.
i only switched to mouse in quake 1, like half a year in. wasd wasn't a thing, so we had to come up with our own control scheme. i spent weeks trying out many different schemes, and eventually landed on the one i still use today: ds[spacebar]f. it uses all fingers in the hand for movement, including the thumb (move backwards). there's is no delay between movement directions because each gets assigned its own finger, while the pinky is tasked with jumping, crouching, shift-walking and such things. qwerty are my weapon hotkeys, nice and close to the movement keys, which an extra row above (numbers) if i need it. bunch of keys to the left for extra bindings, like scoreboard, text and maybe an eventual extra game mechanic that needs bindings (reload usually goes on Q for me). plenty of keys to the right, too. factually and measurably superior to wasd, which overtasks the middle finger and crams your hand too far to the left of the keyboard, leaving very few keys available on the left side. long story short: wasd is for noobs. ironically i only like wasd for playing doom in keyboard-only mode. wasd for movement and ijkl for looking around. works surprisingly well in doom.
I think this is somewhat confused. It wasn't that people didn't have or use computer mouse. Or because they were bad quality (though they were). You needed a mouse to play a huge number of very popular DOS games. Games like SimCity, Lemmings, X-Com, Civilization, all those point and click adventures, etc. etc. The vast majority of computers capable of running Doom had Windows 3.x installed anyway. It simply did not occur to most people they should use the mouse with Wolf 3D or Doom. The idea sounded stupid; what, I'm supposed to continuously drag and lift the mouse to even move forward? Sounds exhausting. Using the keyboard and mouse like we do today simply wasn't a 'thing' yet for most people.
I didn't know a single person when Doom came out that didn't have a mouse. in the DOS 5/6ish era they were pretty much standard already even if you didn't have Windows. I also didn't know a single person who used their mouse to play Doom! We just used mice for menus and then played the actual gameplay (other than like a Sierra/Lucas Arts game) we just used the keyboard.
Yep, same here. I also remember trying using mouse with Doom and it sucked, not sure if it was the forward movement being tied to it or what. But keyboard only was good enough in my opinion at the time, which you should take with a grain of salt as I was 10 or so at the time.
I recently started playing Doom and Doom 2 again, but with modern controls, and was like man, I didn't remember this game being so easy. I then realized I played keyboard only back then. I thought at first what was wrong with me, then I remembered the issues I had with the mouse when I did try back then. Not only did ball mice suck, mine also had the problem of the mouse controlling forward and back instead of just left and right. I'm sure it could have been fixed back then, but not as easy as it is with modern GLDoom and the like.
When I first bought Doom on Steam in 2020, it was still the original DOSBox version and I didn't know how to set up mouse controls so I ended up playing with the keyboard out of necessity. It ended up really elevating the experience beyond being just another first person shooter and genuinely made the experience more tense and frightening, since I played more slowly and cautiously due to the unfamiliar control scheme. I had a similar experience with Resident Evil 4 later, where the strange control scheme actually added to the experience.
Great video, I used to play doom and wolf3d keyboard only to begin with as a kid but once mouse was more common made it so much easier and wouldn't go back
I sign for every single word. We are not elitists, we just have fun, and for us, fun is feeling like we first discovered this game in the 90s. Beautiful video, proud to be the 500th like or it.
Great editing, BeefGee. This really takes me back and reminds me how annoying the old mice were in the 90s. Thanks for explaining why keyboard only play is still a thing.
I feel like my friend and I played keyboard only for years because the guy I heard of Doom from did it, and for some reason we couldn't quite figure out how to get the mouse working correctly on the port we were using, but I can't quite remember why (this was in 2007; we were maybe 12). Eventually, I switched to Doom Legacy, and then Boom, and then ZDoom, and for those three I was immediately playing mouse and keyboard because it was more comfortable. My friend, on the other hand, was introduced to Doom from me, and it was his first FPS game at the age of 12 (he had only played point-and-click puzzles before then). Because the only way he ever knew how to play an FPS was with keyboard only, he never really felt comfortable using the mouse, and still uses keyboard only to consistently beat people in deathmatch online. I tried training him in keyboard and mouse, and he eventually got quite good with it, and beat Doom 3 several times as well, but he eventually went back to keyboard only for Doom 1 and 2, because he had practiced a specific movement style that actually made him more effective when using keyboard only, and he felt like the mouse was just simply unnecessary to accomplish what he wanted.
A lot of computer mice back then did not have the reliability of current mice that we simply take for granted nowadays. Roller ball mechanisms would sometimes not register in one axis whenever you moved the mouse like 25% of the time, especially if you have gunks of dirt accumulated there. Even high end mice were not spared. Also, it is true that turn speeds were just faster with the keyboard. WASD wasn't even invented until Quake arrived (popularized by pro Quake player Dennis Fong), so you had to move the keyboard really off center to play using the default arrow keys with your left hand and the mouse on your right. I remember playing Playstation Doom and overjoyed to find the strafe buttons were on the shoulder buttons since I can now circle strafe properly unlike the DOS version.
Love videos like this that give historical context for Retro games, Feel like some younger players have no idea what gaming was like before PS2/Windows XP days.
Very interesting video, I enjoy learning more about things I was too small to really, fully remember. I did play Wolf3D and Doom a lot as a kid, but cannot remember how exactly I played it (presumably with a keyboard only as that's how my dad played it, who showed me) He who hasn't touched a PC game in years now, watches me play Doom on GZDoom (with modern controls) and asks if the mouse is to move like how it was in Quake, among other questions about how it plays compared to the keyboard controls he got used to. It's kind of neat to re-learn and think "ah, that makes sense now."
Remember that there was an option to use mouse, but it wasn't only for looking - it was for moving forward and reverse as well. So it was not well implemented at all. It was more like id wanted you to use EITHER mouse or keyboard, not both at the same time. Oh well, not everything was made perfect at first. Quake was the game where some people migrated to keyboard+mouse, but it also was not true mouselook, as you had to hold a key to look around. Quake 2, Unreal and HL were the first true mouselook games which made people migrate en masse.
I remember playing Doom Keyboard only. I don't even think I knew about the mouse control until very recently... though I hate the issue with how moving the mouse forward moves your character forward.
I grew up playing Wolf3D/Doom on keyboard too and I think Duke3D as well. Quake was when I started playing with mouse but the mouse-forward run in Wolf3D/Doom always felt so silly. My father would even play modern FPS games using the mouse-forward run. It was hilarious watching him frantically pull the mouse back trying to backpedal away from enemies he'd walked up on that had him outdone. RIP dad, wish you could've seen VR!
It didn't really ever occur to me to use the mouse until I started playing Quake and realised page up/page down was fiddly.. despite getting through it on Duke Nukem
I was 8 when the first Doom came out, and I literally shredded the Shareware edition, finishing it over and over KEYBOARD ONLY. I didn't even know of the existence of the strafe mechanic(i learned of that by watching the recorded demo in Doom2); I used to simply dodge incoming projectiles by pressing a combination of down and down+left/right. I started using mouse only years after playing and finishing the Snes and Psx versions!
Mouse drivers also took precious space from the 648kB of working memory, which used to be a huge hassle under DOS. You often had to juggle what things to keep in the memory in order to launch some games. Disabling a mouse driver was a way to get some of those precious kilobytes back.
I still remember when the first "lazer mice" came out, a mouse with no ball! The official microsoft lazer mouse was the one to have. It actually took a bit of adjustment and many people complained about things like the mouse picking up movement while lifting and recentering the mouse (mousepads were tiny back in the day, but that's a whole other story). Such phantom movements never happened on ball mice!
I didn't actually end up playing Doom until about 2001. I had an uncle who gifted me a Gateway laptop "for school" but I ended up mostly playing Doom, Neverhood and a lot of Roller Coaster Tycoon. Long story short, I ended up using keyboard only because my, still way too young to be playing Doom, hands weren't going for the shoddy touch pad mouse. That said, I haven't used keyboard only for like a solid decade now but your channel kinda makes me want to give it a try to see if I could get used to it again.
I always played Doom with keyboard only, and when I recently installed GZDoom to run it on Windows 10 I found out it was possible to play with a mouse.
Why did anyone play Doom Keyboard Only!? Simple because some people didn't have a mouse. The question we should be asking is why did I complete the shareware episode of Doom MOUSE ONLY. 2-button mouse at that, move mouse forward/back to go forward back, left/right to turn, hold right mouse button to strafe, left mouse button to fire, double click rmb to open doors.
I grew up playing keyboard only, so nowadays going back to Doom *with* a mouse almost feels too easy. I'm too used to playing the other way, and having the game proceed at that constant, steady pace.
It was 1995, my parents gave me my first pc. It came with Doom 2. I started playing and messing with the setup, where I saw the possibility of using mouse. I tried and it was like reading upside down, I thought you were supposed to move forward using it. I made the obvious choice to stick to keyboard only. I have been playing Doom this way since.
1993 ball mouse was so stiff and sticky that it was impossible to move the mouse more than in just one direction and often the ball would slip over the input roller which made them very unreliable for aiming. Not to mention they get dirty and you had to clean them like every 30 minutes.
@@ghost.8836 Doomsday deserves to be hung on the upside down cross in E2M1... And personally texture filtering makes everything look blurry as fuck, and things with small pixels like shotgun shells look absolute shit.
@@chaosblitz7921 And after that they should feed Doomsday to the Cacos on the same level. Texture filtering looks quite ugly, but I can live with it, it's not as drastic as Doomsday, after all.
Watching this made me realise that I dont know when I switched. I remember playing Doom keyboard only, and using the mouse by the time Half-Life came around, but i cant remember what happened in between.
It was quite normal back in the time to play Doom Keyboard only. Most of us didn't know the concept of keyboard+mouse controls for FPS games. Much later when Quake came, I continued playing with keyboard only, not knowing any better. It was harder there though because you also have to aim up/down, it wasn't just rotate one axis till you line up with enemy. Later a friend showed me deathmatch in Quake 2 or Unreal Tournament and I had to get used to the mouselook controls. But back in the day, keyboard only Doom was very common, the idea that FPS without mouse wasn't even there. And I know there was mouse support in classic Doom at the time (but in a bit different and awkward way, moving mouse forward would also move the player which you don't want it), but it wasn't standarized and most players didn't know or care about it. WASD was a cultural change yes, people think it's the default option that makes sense and everything else is weird. Everything is WASD now. But it was a Quake e-sports player that was famous for winning a Ferrari from Carmack, his prefer keys where WASD and everyone else used them. Before, people where using weird combination, even things like QAWE or other non cross stuff. Many times people see my preferences and are like, what are you crazy? Like the most popular way is the on true way and not a matter of cultural accidents. I just use WAXD instead of WASD and inverted Y mouse. It might seem uncofortable but there is a reason that makes sense to me. My fingers on WAXD are not the same placement as people with WASD. I can equally controll all 4 movements of player.
It had more to do with the fact that Vanilla Doom bound mouse up/down to forward and back, because there was no look up/down in Vanilla Doom. At the time, 1993-1995, mice were popular enough that most PCs came with them. So was Windows 3.1, which any Doom-capable PC could handle easily. Mouse controls under Doom were just naff, such that using kb+mouse was awkward except for trained players who had practiced enough to work around the idiosyncrasies. I myself never got into using the mouse for Doom until source ports came out. The true transition happened not because of Windows 95, but because Quake implemented "mouselook", allowing you to aim in any direction with the mouse. This too was disabled by default, but was easy to turn on and much more ergonomic than Doom's mouse controls.
I agree that it was more of a problem of execution rather than not having the right tools. If WASD was a known thing in 93 Doom probably would've come with it as default. Also, I know a lot of PCs did have mice but in my personal experience a lot still didn't. funnily enough win 3.1 was kind of polarising, often seen as either a luxury or an annoyance. win95 was the first windows to simply take over and become an unequivocal standard.
I first played Doom with the Doom95 engine. For some reason I could not get the mouse to work, or I did not bother to set it up. Because of this I played keyboard-only for a while, up until 2016 when I switched to ZDoom because of certain custom maps that did not work properly on '95. On the topic of controls, I used to play Half-Life 2 on a laptop with the touchpad, and the arrow keys to move and strafe. There was a glitch where you could not aim and move forward at the same time unless you pressed the left then the right arrow key first. I managed to beat the game like this, but in easy difficulty mode.
I think Doom95 defaulted to keyboard only and is partially to blame for spreading the myth that Doom was meant to be played keyboard only. Which isn't quite true of course, Doom was ideally meant to be played mouse and keyboard but in 93 mice were relatively less common so Doom's DOS setup defaulted to keyboard only. Doom95 then lazily assumed this was the 'proper' way to play so to speak.
I know better, but this almost feels like the true response to my enquiries about your videos. More DooM history, and context for history is always great video fodder as well!
1. Back then, practically all action games used keyboard only. The only real exception was point and click adventures like Monkey Island and DOTT. 2. Most games used the arrow keys for movement, and there often wasn’t a way to change this. Spacebar was jump, and firing was usually the left CTRL/ALT buttons or other keys in the area like Z/X. The concept of using WASD and a mouse for an FPS was very foreign. Doom must’ve been the first to provide a mouse option? 3. Other early FPS games (Wolf3D, Blake Stone, ROTT) just didn’t really need mouse-look since you were usually only aiming at enemies right in front of you. And I don’t remember most of those games having a mouse option (Maybe ROTT?). 4. Even if you had Windows 3.1, you certainly didn’t run DOS games in it. You rebooted the PC and chose to boot straight to DOS. After that, you usually didn’t touch the mouse. Trying to run a DOS game in Windows would either result in a “not enough memory” error, or the game would be choppy as hell. Even earlier AAA games made for Windows 95 (Need for Speed 2, for example) ran pretty shitty because most PCs still didn’t have the CPU grunt to run a proper game on top of a Windows GUI. 5. While the old mice needed to be cleaned often, they were very usable and not that bad at all. This is the least reason why gamers didn’t use mice. The main reason is that the concept of mouse-look was new, and it took some time for both gamers and games to really adopt it.
Me being a late teenager, I was introduced to DOOM as a kid in DOSBox. And thus, I always played with the keyboard. I never saw a reason to use my mouse. I don't think it's a "dying breed", seeing as I got into DOOM over a decade after it was released, and STILL used keyboard only. Hell, I even play Quake keyboard only.
I'm gonna need to see a Doom playthrough on a steering wheel now
drifting the doomguy
It happened with doom eternal
Doom with a steering wheel is possible, it was called Quarantine.
saw a video other day someone playing SM64 with drums, don't think steering wheel would be that weird haha
Technoblade beat Minecraft with a wheel so anything is possible
I remember trying to use the mouse with Doom way back when, and even with the sensitivity maxed out, it was way too sluggish. I could turn faster with the keyboard, so using the mouse seemed pointless.
Yup. I could trump just about anyone using a mouse from my keyboard. 90s mice sucked. I stopped playing FPS for years because keyboard play was no longer feasible, it took me years to be willing to try.
@@hireahitCA I remember editing a .ini file and setting the mouse value higher than max in there, once you went in options in-game, the bar for the slider was way off the scale. Possibly that was just in the Shareware version though.
@@lmcgregoruk Yeah I had a couple of decent mice, and all sucked with doom. You probably needed fiddling with the config files if you wanted something playable and my 10 year old self didn't want to bother, since keyboard was good enough.
@@lmcgregoruk I doubt mice of the day had the needed sensitivity. Definitely nothing similar to what entry-level gear can manage today. I'm talking a real serial mouse for the 386 or early 486 platform.
It’s true! I first played Doom on Win95 in 1996 or so.. mouse was possible, but I didn’t switch until 2003ish when my counter strike playing brother introduced me to WSDA.. So that means for about 7 years I was a keyboarder!
I also agree that elitism over controller choice is stupid. Except those touch screen players. Those heretical n00bs can burn for all I care. But yeah as I was saying elitism is bad!
git gud boomer, touch screen is the future, and already is meta.
@@Jitterskull Lol, imagine playing Quake deathmatch on a touch screen vs someone on mouse & keyboard
Like most people born in the 80's, I used the arrow keys to move but I did have a mouse with the first family PC at the time. Windows 3.1 baby! Used it for Wolf3D and Doom.
Then along came Duke3D. Vertical mouse look was new to me and didn't use it. Page Up/Down to look. It wasn't until Quake did I change over.
@@Leo.Dalarosa Or if you wanna go even further beyond....
Keyboard and trackpad, this one is OFFICIALLY the worst...
@@Leo.Dalarosa You can try it for yourself with Quad Touch on Android, actually. I got it on my phone just so I'd be able to play some Quake when I get bored waiting for Uber rides, and the touch controls work better than I figured they would.
When I started with doom, I didn't even used strafe buttons, just used alt.
the defaults, I still use that to this day ;)
Same here
we all did. ghosting was a terrible problem back then. press ctrl+alt and half the keyboard stops responding, usually starting with the right arrow.
Started doom on ps1, and why you'd ever want to control someone in a 3d space with only 4 buttons? Beats me, but it kind of makes the game more strategic since you have to time your turns with your shots and your running speed. When I turn ps1 doom on I do appreciate the different challenge
I get you, but the shoulder buttons for strafing makes it all pretty easy to control
@@WookieFragger how could I forget the L1-R1 strafe 😵
Doom is not 3D, you can only move in a 2D fashion. That changed when Descent and eventually Quake was published among other games.
@@hernancoronel That's a common, and perfectly understandable misconception, but Doom is actually 3D. Many of the limitations of the Doom engine were put in place intentionally in order to simplify game related processes and increase performance on machines back in the day, but those limits can be removed. There's a great video by borogk that does an excellent job illustrating Doom's 3D capabilities, so I'll link that here ua-cam.com/video/ZYGJQqhMN1U/v-deo.html
@@WookieFragger sure thank you. Let me rephrase that: movement in Doom is not 3D so the arrows were perfectly fine for playing at that time using the DOS version and the simple machines available at the time. Later games like Descent, Quake and later Dooms implemented real 3D movement so it was a necessity to use a mouse. I myself started playing Descent with the keyboard using the arrows in the numeric keypad which was ubiquitous at the time and it was a total pain to do that but since it was what was available it was either learn or start saving for a mouse which were shitty and expensive at around USD99 for the Microsoft ball mouse as an example.
When i grew up, nobody ever thought of using the mouse for gaming. The first game me or anyone i knew thought to use the mouse, was with Quake 1. Man i still remember using it the first time, that was so weird, when you were used to using keyboard only.
Damn im old! :(
Romero still contends to this day that using the mouse for looking up and down sucks. you had to use a console command to enable proper mouse look in quake 1.
@@BeefGeeTV Im pretty sure it was only a very early versions of Quake 1, but I really, honestly don't remember. Haven't played a lot of Quake early, it wasn't until GLQuake that I played somewhat seriously, and by then non console activated mouslook was definetly a thing.
Rise of the Triads was the first FPS I used mouse for. And that would have been around 96 or so. Like you said, using a mouse was too slow and bordered on pointless.
And then mouse look was also reversed on the Y axis by default, because that was the way flight sims were configured.
Yeah, up until quake the default was just keyboard. Maybe some very progressive guys used mouse in duke nukem 3d but no one took notice. When we started playing quake on network, and there was one guy using mouse, he was literally running in circes around everybody and nobody could do anything to him, that was the time I understood the mouse is going to be the future and I had to start learn using it.
The one thing that I love about DOOM is that no matter how you play the game, you can have fun. I find the game a lot more fun with more unorthodox controls. This is coming from someone who's first control scheme was on the iPod touch back in 2011, the version of mobile DOOM before the unity port. There was a "steering wheel" scheme that worked so well!
The steering wheel control scheme was genius, they should’ve added that back to the modern mobile port.
except pacifist
Back in the day, I would of used the mouse. I had no problems with dragging the mouse left and right, but the main problem was the mouse also moved Doomguy "forward" as well, and that's what turned me off it back then. Unless you're a robot, no one can move their hand completely straight in one direction. I couldn't even think of constantly thrusting the mouse forward just to move.
Either there wasn't a setting to turn that off back then, or if there was, I wasn't aware or knew what it did; I just assumed that's how the mouse was meant to be used. Fast forward to when someone had put Quake 3 Arena into the school's computers, I immediately changed it back to my horrid ASDF, Space, arrow keys setup. Wasn't the brightest of ideas obviously, but since I still didn't have a gaming computer back then and my last shooter was still DOOM, how would I know the mouse didn't act like that anymore?
I remember setting the vertical sensitivity to 5 and the horizontal to 95 when I loaded the mouse driver.
I wonder why id didn't set WSAD as the default setting in the initial release of Q2(3.05) even though the auto-aim was removed.
it wasn't THE default but it was in there, as 'thresh.cfg' - named after legendary quake player Dennis 'Thresh' Fong, widely credited as the main popularising force behind WASD. check out that vox video I link to in the description.
i would understand if someone thought it was better with arrows just because they're closer; but yeah. WSAD solidified the cause. thinking about it i grew up using WSAD, and i don't even know about Dennis.
Why not ESDF...
@@sijonda *NO*
@@BeefGeeTV Yeah Thresh won the Ferrari, I heard about that when I'm playing Q3A in 1999~early 2000s.
I am an only keyboard Doom player, to this day I still play it this way. Mouse back in the day were so terribly bad. You needed to clean it all the time, and even with that, the mouse wasn't precise with fast movements. Other games were even much worse to play with mouse, for example games like Star Wars X-Wing or Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. But for slow point'n'click games, it was totally needed and worked fine (for example Monkey Island or games like The Incredible Machine).
Same here. The first game I started playing with WASD + mouse was Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and I later adopted this control scene for the Quake games as well... but, to this day, I still play all Doom and Build engine games with the keyboard only. No exceptions ;)
i switched to keyboard and mouse in quake, after i lost a rigged local tournament i was going to win for sure as a little 10 year old brat, but the organizers had another idea. they magically put a custom map that was retarded and could only be navigated with a mouse in the finals, just so i lose to their friend, which i had been destroying in earlier rounds. i resent that to this day.
In my experience, ball mice were TERRIBLE. I can to this day (20-some years since I last used a ball mouse) vividly remember the feeling of frustration whenever the mouse inevitably got stuck halfway through trying to do something as simple as selecting some text or drag and dropping a file. Attempting to draw a straight diagonal line (with the regular paintbrush tool) in Paint was futile.
@@adimifus You must have used bad mice(Or didn't clean them properly), I stopped using my ball mouse 2018(When both right click and the scroll-wheel started to have problems, I could easily changed the switch for the click(As I've done several times before) but I don't think I could fix the wheel and I've also started to play Quake 3 Arena quite seriously at the time so I thought why not test this new optical mouse someone had given me...) and if you cleaned it like every 2-3 weeks it worked good(Though I started having problems as you after the mouse had been used around 15 years, but I took the ball from another mouse and then it worked fine again).
If you wonder why I used a ball mouse that long, I had cheap quite early optical mouse for a while and it was horrible at most surfaces so I jumped back to my trusty ball mouse and thought "man optical mice is pure shit"(I had that "opinion" for a long time, LOL...)!
The newer optical mouse I mentioned earlier that someone gave me was way better than the old optical one and also obviously better than the ball mouse it replaced(Though the ball one still worked on way more surfaces).
But a decent ball mice is seriously "quite" good(In my opinion) if you clean it once in a while.
I'm quite sure you(And other people reading this) think this comment is quite bizarre, but to be honest I think the ball mouse has too bad reputation kinda like many people saying that CRT-monitors was totally horrible when they actually wasn't(In my opinion).
By the way you know any good new keyboards, my keyboard from the 90s(LOL... I'm oldschool!!! Actually I'm autistic and hate change most of the time...) died last year and I currently use some horrible Razer shit at the moment.
i'd actually been looking into this kind of thing recently, particularly how many people were still using Keyboard during the Quake era. Surprisingly, i'd seen people say that they thought free mouselook was cheating, since you needed to type a console command (+mlook, or tape a key down) to use it comfortably.
i don't know how many people were still playing keyboard only at the time, particularly as the rise of internet play showed them just how limited it was, but i'd bet the lack of an "Always Freelook" option in the settings did stall the adoption of mice a surprising amount
I definitely played Quake with a keyboard. It wasn't until me and everyone else got wrecked by one guy in a cybercafe that I got a clue. I went over to the guys computer and checked his control setup after he left and saw the mouse and keyboard controls and was like "Whoa!"
@@PlasticCogLiquid With Doom it's no big deal to play keyboard only with the vertical auto-aiming and the levels being designed so that you never have to look up or down, but it just sounds unbelievably awkward trying to play a full 3D game like Quake that way, especially with how fast and frantic it is.
0:05 It's like looking at a great ape using tools for the first time.
Keyboard Doomer opens video with the line: "Doom was always meant to be played with a mouse." That's integrity. And thank you for explaining why keyboard Doomers are a thing; I never got that until now.
I play Doom almost exclusively with a controller but to be fair, keyboard controls are excellent too, as long as it's the traditional WASD and turning with the arrow keys, with shoot mapped to the up arrow key.
When I want/need to play KB only, that’s exactly how I do it! I could never go back to defaults, although all the keys clustered together WAS admittedly perfect when I was a kid..
I am amused by the ASWD being described as "traditional", in the context of Doom.
That's a really interesting point of comparison. In my experience until Halo came about it was common wisdom for PC players to say FPS couldn't really work without a mouse, and that console shooters needed to be designed to accommodate the inherent limitations. I don't think you could find many people to still argue that these days, but I remember believing it myself.
I'm lucky enough that i got a mouse with Windows 3.1 pretty early on. So while i think i played Doom keyboard only early on, mouse control became important quickly.
If you already carry your computer and display around to a friend to play Doom over LAN, you really wanted to have all the advantages to kick butt possible.
So for me keyboard only really only was a short period in gaming.
I think playing lots of different games made that transition really easy too. Games like Master of Orion, Civilization, Syndicate or Xcom/Ufo just worked so much better with mouse that it became normal to use it.
Really the only game where i never transitioned to mouse was Descent, those controls really messed up my brain back then.
Man, you should have 1K times as many subs as you have now! You are so underrated! Your content is like papa decino's :D
amazing video! good explanations and good quality, keep it up.
I love your videos covering the deeper doom topics like this. You've got a good reading voice and the analysis is great. Gg BeefGee
One of the most legendary Doom players back in the day Chris Ratcliffe was a keyboard only player. And he still has quite a few records in the game played on the original executable files. His channel is Rybacksda for those who want to check him out
My young-self was introduced to Playstation Doom first, and when I got back to Doom in my teens, I played the XBOX Live Arcade. So I played with controlers back then since I played on console. When I discovered the sources ports on PC, I now play with mouse and keyboard. There's many way to play Doom, and no matter how you play it, the important is having fun and kick some demon butts! 🤘
Why did we play Doom keyboard only? Because we didn't have a mouse on our MS-DOS PC.
I was not a smart kid back in the day cause while I was using the keyboard only, I didn't know that there was a run button.
I DID know that you could use the mouse to move tho. it was just not practical as you needed to move it all the time to get any movement but when at top speed it was faster than walking speed.
There was this one tricky gap you had to clear on that Donut stage where normal walking speed wouldn't cut it but if you combined it with your walking speed with the short boost of moving the mouse, you could clear the gap. So I had my brother come in to move the mouse while I pressed the arrow keys to actually do it xD
A similar thing happened in Doom 2 on that stage with the Spider Mastermind and Cyberdemon. I couldn't understand how you were supposed to fight them while also avoiding their projections. I wasn't aware that imp fighting was a thing yet but I did discover that there was a key that would allow you to strafe but it was in a tricky spot on the keyboard so I couldn't press it while also turning with the directional keys and Ctrl, so I had a friend over one day where we had to operate Doom Guy like a damn Megazord where one of us would handle movement while the other would press the fire button when we were aligned with the two bosses. xD
Took us a few tries but we managed to do it xD
Good times!
Mouse had another massive drawback if I'm remembering correctly. Moving the mouse up and down moved your forward and backwards. It's great for turning, but when you're accidentally moving around, it can be a killer.
I was a keyboarder until moving to source ports. Now I can barely remember how to play with just a keyboard.
When I was a kid I didn’t even know Doom could use the mouse until way later. I didn’t even know what strafing was until Goldeneye. So for years I played all FPS games with tank controls. And when I tried a mouse I couldn’t get used to it. I’m left handed but only use mice with my right hand. But when I was playing Doom I would use my right hand to move around. I still do it these days. But since I can’t also use my right hand for a mouse too I use a trackpad with my left. So I’ll run around in FPS games with arrow keys and a trackpad. Everyone says I’m nuts. But it works for me. But the problem is the only trackpad I can use comfortably is one on a MacBook. It’s a bit of a conundrum really since many games I can’t even play on a Mac. And I can’t play with a mouse because I can’t do it left handed and I don’t like the motion of constantly lifting the mouse to move it back to center. Even if I get used to moving a mouse I’ll also have to train myself to move with my left hand. Which is even harder. I mean when I am using a controller my thumb is used to movement. But with my three fingers I just can’t. So what I need is a separate USB powered one handed device with a D-pad and control stick for my left hand and a mouse on my right hand. lol
No problem. The N52 (can't remember the brand) and the Logitech G13 did that a decade ago. Really popular at least among "advanced" WoW players. Even if you can't find them new, or devices like them, there's bound to be some floating around on the second hand market.
Or you can get a separate numerical keyboard, but they don't have a stick. ;)
I started playing Doom as a kid in the elementary school and as kids, we didn't even know mouse controls were possible. We knew practically no English (Czech kids - we understood things like "new game" and "exit", but that's about it) so that didn't help either. Still had a hell of a time with the game and some of my fondest gaming memories. I still play today, but I'm too spoiled by the mouse controls and source ports so going back to keyboard only would probably be suffering for me.
I still play keyboard only. With 'always run' off, I find combining the direction, strafe and speed keys you can do some pretty tight turns and stops. Great video man. Decino sent me here, and I'm stayin'!
I play not only Doom but Hexen and Quake with keyboard only, is so much fun. The only old game I play with mouse is System Shock with it's original keyboard layout.
:0
I like playing Doom keyboard only because I mostly use laptops. It's actually incredibly comfy if you set movement and use to good ol w-a-s-d-e, use left and right arrows to turn and up arrow to shoot.
Yeah, that's the stuff!
One of the happiest moments in my life was when I was little kid and my dad showed me doom 2, I've played that one before doom 1 and it was on a laptop so I had to do it without the mouse and it was amazing to discover that we can cross gaps by running fast instead of jumping, that was a great time
Yes, even though Windows, and mouse drivers for DOS, were available at the time, I stuck with keyboard only on Doom for a long time. In particular, I was like "old man over here" at 2:24, using the arrow keys on the numeric keypad, which I found far nicer for my fat fingers than the 'normal' arrow keys. I stuck with this for so long that I was disappointed that the numeric keypad wasn't a default setting out of the box for many of the source ports that started appearing, so that I had to redefine the keys.
I definitely would not have considered using a mouse back in the day. The comment about them being hard to setup and just crappy to use is not overstated here.
I tried and I couldn't figure a way of disable mouse movement, so I gave up and used keyboard only.
Setup was easy. Hardware was absolute shit.
It's possible using only keyboard, I've completed maps in nightmare and pacifist without the mouse, but definitely is more difficult only with the keyboard
oh the default way is possible :O genius
"Why did anyone play Doom Keyboard Only!?"
Raises hand.
I didn't even know I had watched a couple of your 'Coincident'-like videos. Would love more Doom-essay content please.
I call your bluff and raise call to Wolfenstein 3D, joystick only.
I really never understood the fuss about "HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY PLAY KB ONLY???" and I'm someone who first played DOOM on the 360, the controls are exactly the same as KB only since there's only one turning speed.
15-year old me went from Halo 3 -> DOOM 360 -> DOOM PC with just keyboard so no excuses.
If you're not playing with Y-Axis aiming then keyboard is more than fine.
Me who plays hideous destructor on mobile: *south park silence*
I remember there was a time when I played Classic Doom with only a keyboard and I found it unquestionably one of the worst experiences to play that game with, I could tolerate it, but I always felt held back, once I got Doom 95 with working mouse support and later down the line switch to GZDoom, I felt the restraints slip off and I was able to play Doom the way it was meant to, maybe some people want to play this game with keyboard only, but I am definitely not one of those people, I am really not sure why your video specifically was recommended to me as I am as anti-keyboard only as one could get towards this game, but it is funny in a strange way of revisiting my horrible experience with keyboard only from memory lol
I prefer playing with the mouse and keyboard, but keyboard only also works surprisingly well too! The default controls though, moving forwards and spinning with the arroys, and strafing with comma and period... that is weird! However I understand wanting to play the game a certain way. I always prefer Doom with no vertical look, because I feel like that's what makes it feel like Doom
hard agree on vertical look
@@BeefGeeTV Hell yeah! I feel like it's a little pointless to go back to the past just to modernize it. It's like if Wolfenstein 3D had vertical look, it really wouldn't add anything. You can mod it into a game that uses vertical look and that's cool, like with Build games I prefer with it on, but for the original Doom experience it's just making it more difficult to play imo
It's kind of a nightmare
I recently started playing keyboard only after 20 years of playing keyboard + mouse. Took a while to get used to, but I really enjoy it - and I play all of my singleplayer levels that way now.
I was so used to Doom and Wolfenstein's control schemes that I played Quake blissfully unaware of mouse and keyboard control being a thing. It wasn't until Halflife that I learned what I'd been missing.
I didn’t even know this was a controversy until recently. I’ve always used a keyboard + mouse combo. 13 year old me back in 1996 used keyboard for forward/backwards and mouse for left/right. I also used mouse for fire, open, and strafing. I can’t imagine playing these games any other way.
that was an awesome and nostalgic way of ending a video. Long time that I don't see this orange font. Ohhh the memories of putting a plastic cape on my computer.
I played Doom 2 with a mouse and keyboard on a 486, but not with WASD I used the arrow keys to move and strafe and the buttons surrounding them, like num 0 and 1, ctrl etc.
very similar to what the ID guys themselves did
@@BeefGeeTV I didn't know that, makes sense though. It seemed to be the best setup coming from keyboard only. I didn't even consider using the other side of the keyboard to move for years 😂
I played Doom keyboard only because our computer teacher didn’t let us use a mouse, and so whenever we had a sub, the keyboard was the only option. Well, that or actual learning, so yeah, obviously Doom.
Edit: remember, kids. ALWAYS READ THE DESCRIPTION.
Where might I be able to find a lot of the old footage of people playing that you used in this video? I love seeing stuff like that, and can't get enough of it.
The problem with keyboard only is that nightmare was impossible to play, really. No matter how much I tried, I couldn't finish the 2nd level.
Well researched and well produced. You do the keyboard-onlyers proud. Cheers. :)
I'm a member of that group since Doom Day 1, using just the default out-of-the-box keybinds. That said, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend using a mouse. Definitely an advantage once you're comfortable with it.
I used to play Doom 2 on keyboard only. I tried using mouse when playing but I found it difficult since when you move the mouse, it will not only make your character look left and right, but it will also make your character walk in all directions. When I played Quake, I thought it was the same case as Doom so I still played keyboard only. Only when I played Half-life is where I transitioned to mouse+keyboard and used the wasd configuration (actually it was rfdg at first before using the default bindings)
Exactly. I tried using mouse in Doom and had the same problem. Tried a Joystick and it wouldn't stop running to specific directions, so keyboard was the only thing that worked. Duke 3D also worked fine with keyboard only and since you could look up and down with Page Up / Page Down, I didn't bother using a mouse. I only recall Half-Life really making proper use of mouse look so that's where I went for the new control scheme.
So yes, Doom could be played with mouse too but making it work was a hassle.
new subscriber, found this video on YT's recommended and I am not disappointed.
My dad used to use the mouse movement. It was hilarious to see him sliding the mouse up over and over like one of those rev up toy cars lol
yeah, they weren't always the most sensitive things lol
I used to when I bought the DOOM CE edition for pc from Walmart years ago in 2005 because those versions didn't come with mouse support, had gotten pretty good and used to it but once I started playing with a mouse I can never go back feels too awkward for me now playing with only the keyboard.
i usually play on keyboard only just because i dont have a mouse
i only switched to mouse in quake 1, like half a year in. wasd wasn't a thing, so we had to come up with our own control scheme. i spent weeks trying out many different schemes, and eventually landed on the one i still use today: ds[spacebar]f.
it uses all fingers in the hand for movement, including the thumb (move backwards). there's is no delay between movement directions because each gets assigned its own finger, while the pinky is tasked with jumping, crouching, shift-walking and such things. qwerty are my weapon hotkeys, nice and close to the movement keys, which an extra row above (numbers) if i need it. bunch of keys to the left for extra bindings, like scoreboard, text and maybe an eventual extra game mechanic that needs bindings (reload usually goes on Q for me). plenty of keys to the right, too. factually and measurably superior to wasd, which overtasks the middle finger and crams your hand too far to the left of the keyboard, leaving very few keys available on the left side.
long story short: wasd is for noobs. ironically i only like wasd for playing doom in keyboard-only mode. wasd for movement and ijkl for looking around. works surprisingly well in doom.
I think this is somewhat confused. It wasn't that people didn't have or use computer mouse. Or because they were bad quality (though they were). You needed a mouse to play a huge number of very popular DOS games. Games like SimCity, Lemmings, X-Com, Civilization, all those point and click adventures, etc. etc. The vast majority of computers capable of running Doom had Windows 3.x installed anyway.
It simply did not occur to most people they should use the mouse with Wolf 3D or Doom. The idea sounded stupid; what, I'm supposed to continuously drag and lift the mouse to even move forward? Sounds exhausting. Using the keyboard and mouse like we do today simply wasn't a 'thing' yet for most people.
I didn't know a single person when Doom came out that didn't have a mouse. in the DOS 5/6ish era they were pretty much standard already even if you didn't have Windows. I also didn't know a single person who used their mouse to play Doom! We just used mice for menus and then played the actual gameplay (other than like a Sierra/Lucas Arts game) we just used the keyboard.
Yep, same here. I also remember trying using mouse with Doom and it sucked, not sure if it was the forward movement being tied to it or what. But keyboard only was good enough in my opinion at the time, which you should take with a grain of salt as I was 10 or so at the time.
I recently started playing Doom and Doom 2 again, but with modern controls, and was like man, I didn't remember this game being so easy. I then realized I played keyboard only back then. I thought at first what was wrong with me, then I remembered the issues I had with the mouse when I did try back then. Not only did ball mice suck, mine also had the problem of the mouse controlling forward and back instead of just left and right. I'm sure it could have been fixed back then, but not as easy as it is with modern GLDoom and the like.
When I first bought Doom on Steam in 2020, it was still the original DOSBox version and I didn't know how to set up mouse controls so I ended up playing with the keyboard out of necessity. It ended up really elevating the experience beyond being just another first person shooter and genuinely made the experience more tense and frightening, since I played more slowly and cautiously due to the unfamiliar control scheme. I had a similar experience with Resident Evil 4 later, where the strange control scheme actually added to the experience.
When I started playing Doom in those days I didn't even knew about the "strafe" thing..
Great video, I used to play doom and wolf3d keyboard only to begin with as a kid but once mouse was more common made it so much easier and wouldn't go back
I sign for every single word. We are not elitists, we just have fun, and for us, fun is feeling like we first discovered this game in the 90s. Beautiful video, proud to be the 500th like or it.
Pretty well made video. Very underrated and informative.
Damn, that Windows 95 start-up sound did some unexpected nostalgia-kicks to my brain. Edit: It had completely left my conscious mind.
Great editing, BeefGee. This really takes me back and reminds me how annoying the old mice were in the 90s. Thanks for explaining why keyboard only play is still a thing.
I finished Doom this year for the first time with keyboard only.
Everyone played with a keyboard when Doom was released. Hell, it was rare to meet anyone who strafed even.
I feel like my friend and I played keyboard only for years because the guy I heard of Doom from did it, and for some reason we couldn't quite figure out how to get the mouse working correctly on the port we were using, but I can't quite remember why (this was in 2007; we were maybe 12). Eventually, I switched to Doom Legacy, and then Boom, and then ZDoom, and for those three I was immediately playing mouse and keyboard because it was more comfortable.
My friend, on the other hand, was introduced to Doom from me, and it was his first FPS game at the age of 12 (he had only played point-and-click puzzles before then). Because the only way he ever knew how to play an FPS was with keyboard only, he never really felt comfortable using the mouse, and still uses keyboard only to consistently beat people in deathmatch online.
I tried training him in keyboard and mouse, and he eventually got quite good with it, and beat Doom 3 several times as well, but he eventually went back to keyboard only for Doom 1 and 2, because he had practiced a specific movement style that actually made him more effective when using keyboard only, and he felt like the mouse was just simply unnecessary to accomplish what he wanted.
Excellent point! I grew up in the DOS era but kinda forgot that yeah indeed, most people didn't even have a mouse when Doom came out.
A lot of computer mice back then did not have the reliability of current mice that we simply take for granted nowadays. Roller ball mechanisms would sometimes not register in one axis whenever you moved the mouse like 25% of the time, especially if you have gunks of dirt accumulated there. Even high end mice were not spared. Also, it is true that turn speeds were just faster with the keyboard. WASD wasn't even invented until Quake arrived (popularized by pro Quake player Dennis Fong), so you had to move the keyboard really off center to play using the default arrow keys with your left hand and the mouse on your right. I remember playing Playstation Doom and overjoyed to find the strafe buttons were on the shoulder buttons since I can now circle strafe properly unlike the DOS version.
Love videos like this that give historical context for Retro games, Feel like some younger players have no idea what gaming was like before PS2/Windows XP days.
Very interesting video, I enjoy learning more about things I was too small to really, fully remember. I did play Wolf3D and Doom a lot as a kid, but cannot remember how exactly I played it (presumably with a keyboard only as that's how my dad played it, who showed me)
He who hasn't touched a PC game in years now, watches me play Doom on GZDoom (with modern controls) and asks if the mouse is to move like how it was in Quake, among other questions about how it plays compared to the keyboard controls he got used to.
It's kind of neat to re-learn and think "ah, that makes sense now."
Remember that there was an option to use mouse, but it wasn't only for looking - it was for moving forward and reverse as well.
So it was not well implemented at all. It was more like id wanted you to use EITHER mouse or keyboard, not both at the same time.
Oh well, not everything was made perfect at first.
Quake was the game where some people migrated to keyboard+mouse, but it also was not true mouselook, as you had to hold a key to look around.
Quake 2, Unreal and HL were the first true mouselook games which made people migrate en masse.
I remember playing Doom Keyboard only. I don't even think I knew about the mouse control until very recently... though I hate the issue with how moving the mouse forward moves your character forward.
I grew up playing Wolf3D/Doom on keyboard too and I think Duke3D as well. Quake was when I started playing with mouse but the mouse-forward run in Wolf3D/Doom always felt so silly. My father would even play modern FPS games using the mouse-forward run. It was hilarious watching him frantically pull the mouse back trying to backpedal away from enemies he'd walked up on that had him outdone. RIP dad, wish you could've seen VR!
It didn't really ever occur to me to use the mouse until I started playing Quake and realised page up/page down was fiddly.. despite getting through it on Duke Nukem
I was 8 when the first Doom came out, and I literally shredded the Shareware edition, finishing it over and over KEYBOARD ONLY. I didn't even know of the existence of the strafe mechanic(i learned of that by watching the recorded demo in Doom2); I used to simply dodge incoming projectiles by pressing a combination of down and down+left/right. I started using mouse only years after playing and finishing the Snes and Psx versions!
Mouse drivers also took precious space from the 648kB of working memory, which used to be a huge hassle under DOS. You often had to juggle what things to keep in the memory in order to launch some games. Disabling a mouse driver was a way to get some of those precious kilobytes back.
I still remember when the first "lazer mice" came out, a mouse with no ball! The official microsoft lazer mouse was the one to have. It actually took a bit of adjustment and many people complained about things like the mouse picking up movement while lifting and recentering the mouse (mousepads were tiny back in the day, but that's a whole other story). Such phantom movements never happened on ball mice!
i joined doom in 2020, i played on my awful loan laptop and i didn't want to ask my sister for her mouse so yeah.
I didn't actually end up playing Doom until about 2001. I had an uncle who gifted me a Gateway laptop "for school" but I ended up mostly playing Doom, Neverhood and a lot of Roller Coaster Tycoon. Long story short, I ended up using keyboard only because my, still way too young to be playing Doom, hands weren't going for the shoddy touch pad mouse.
That said, I haven't used keyboard only for like a solid decade now but your channel kinda makes me want to give it a try to see if I could get used to it again.
I always played Doom with keyboard only, and when I recently installed GZDoom to run it on Windows 10 I found out it was possible to play with a mouse.
Why did anyone play Doom Keyboard Only!? Simple because some people didn't have a mouse. The question we should be asking is why did I complete the shareware episode of Doom MOUSE ONLY. 2-button mouse at that, move mouse forward/back to go forward back, left/right to turn, hold right mouse button to strafe, left mouse button to fire, double click rmb to open doors.
I grew up playing keyboard only, so nowadays going back to Doom *with* a mouse almost feels too easy. I'm too used to playing the other way, and having the game proceed at that constant, steady pace.
It was 1995, my parents gave me my first pc. It came with Doom 2. I started playing and messing with the setup, where I saw the possibility of using mouse. I tried and it was like reading upside down, I thought you were supposed to move forward using it. I made the obvious choice to stick to keyboard only. I have been playing Doom this way since.
1993 ball mouse was so stiff and sticky that it was impossible to move the mouse more than in just one direction and often the ball would slip over the input roller which made them very unreliable for aiming. Not to mention they get dirty and you had to clean them like every 30 minutes.
"Play DOOM however you like"
Agreed, except for the people who just jumping and texture filtering in GZDoom...
Texture filtering is not that bad. Try Doomsday Engine and feel the horror.
@@ghost.8836 Doomsday deserves to be hung on the upside down cross in E2M1...
And personally texture filtering makes everything look blurry as fuck, and things with small pixels like shotgun shells look absolute shit.
@@chaosblitz7921 And after that they should feed Doomsday to the Cacos on the same level.
Texture filtering looks quite ugly, but I can live with it, it's not as drastic as Doomsday, after all.
Doom's textures were not designed with filtering in mind, so it is no surprise they look bad that way.
Watching this made me realise that I dont know when I switched. I remember playing Doom keyboard only, and using the mouse by the time Half-Life came around, but i cant remember what happened in between.
My dad and I would play Doom 2 co-op back in the late 90s/early 2000s. I never knew at the time that there was mouse support.
It was quite normal back in the time to play Doom Keyboard only. Most of us didn't know the concept of keyboard+mouse controls for FPS games. Much later when Quake came, I continued playing with keyboard only, not knowing any better. It was harder there though because you also have to aim up/down, it wasn't just rotate one axis till you line up with enemy. Later a friend showed me deathmatch in Quake 2 or Unreal Tournament and I had to get used to the mouselook controls. But back in the day, keyboard only Doom was very common, the idea that FPS without mouse wasn't even there. And I know there was mouse support in classic Doom at the time (but in a bit different and awkward way, moving mouse forward would also move the player which you don't want it), but it wasn't standarized and most players didn't know or care about it.
WASD was a cultural change yes, people think it's the default option that makes sense and everything else is weird. Everything is WASD now. But it was a Quake e-sports player that was famous for winning a Ferrari from Carmack, his prefer keys where WASD and everyone else used them. Before, people where using weird combination, even things like QAWE or other non cross stuff. Many times people see my preferences and are like, what are you crazy? Like the most popular way is the on true way and not a matter of cultural accidents. I just use WAXD instead of WASD and inverted Y mouse. It might seem uncofortable but there is a reason that makes sense to me. My fingers on WAXD are not the same placement as people with WASD. I can equally controll all 4 movements of player.
It had more to do with the fact that Vanilla Doom bound mouse up/down to forward and back, because there was no look up/down in Vanilla Doom. At the time, 1993-1995, mice were popular enough that most PCs came with them. So was Windows 3.1, which any Doom-capable PC could handle easily. Mouse controls under Doom were just naff, such that using kb+mouse was awkward except for trained players who had practiced enough to work around the idiosyncrasies. I myself never got into using the mouse for Doom until source ports came out.
The true transition happened not because of Windows 95, but because Quake implemented "mouselook", allowing you to aim in any direction with the mouse. This too was disabled by default, but was easy to turn on and much more ergonomic than Doom's mouse controls.
I agree that it was more of a problem of execution rather than not having the right tools. If WASD was a known thing in 93 Doom probably would've come with it as default. Also, I know a lot of PCs did have mice but in my personal experience a lot still didn't. funnily enough win 3.1 was kind of polarising, often seen as either a luxury or an annoyance. win95 was the first windows to simply take over and become an unequivocal standard.
Turned 30 this year and man, relating to all this really puts into perspective how much time has passed. Fuckin 30.
I first played Doom with the Doom95 engine. For some reason I could not get the mouse to work, or I did not bother to set it up. Because of this I played keyboard-only for a while, up until 2016 when I switched to ZDoom because of certain custom maps that did not work properly on '95.
On the topic of controls, I used to play Half-Life 2 on a laptop with the touchpad, and the arrow keys to move and strafe. There was a glitch where you could not aim and move forward at the same time unless you pressed the left then the right arrow key first. I managed to beat the game like this, but in easy difficulty mode.
I think Doom95 defaulted to keyboard only and is partially to blame for spreading the myth that Doom was meant to be played keyboard only. Which isn't quite true of course, Doom was ideally meant to be played mouse and keyboard but in 93 mice were relatively less common so Doom's DOS setup defaulted to keyboard only. Doom95 then lazily assumed this was the 'proper' way to play so to speak.
The benefits of mouse are less when there’s no vertical look
I know better, but this almost feels like the true response to my enquiries about your videos.
More DooM history, and context for history is always great video fodder as well!
4:37 Playing Doom Witch A Fourt Wheel Controller 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣
Quake doesn't have six degrees of freedom. It only has four.
1. Back then, practically all action games used keyboard only. The only real exception was point and click adventures like Monkey Island and DOTT.
2. Most games used the arrow keys for movement, and there often wasn’t a way to change this. Spacebar was jump, and firing was usually the left CTRL/ALT buttons or other keys in the area like Z/X. The concept of using WASD and a mouse for an FPS was very foreign. Doom must’ve been the first to provide a mouse option?
3. Other early FPS games (Wolf3D, Blake Stone, ROTT) just didn’t really need mouse-look since you were usually only aiming at enemies right in front of you. And I don’t remember most of those games having a mouse option (Maybe ROTT?).
4. Even if you had Windows 3.1, you certainly didn’t run DOS games in it. You rebooted the PC and chose to boot straight to DOS. After that, you usually didn’t touch the mouse. Trying to run a DOS game in Windows would either result in a “not enough memory” error, or the game would be choppy as hell. Even earlier AAA games made for Windows 95 (Need for Speed 2, for example) ran pretty shitty because most PCs still didn’t have the CPU grunt to run a proper game on top of a Windows GUI.
5. While the old mice needed to be cleaned often, they were very usable and not that bad at all. This is the least reason why gamers didn’t use mice. The main reason is that the concept of mouse-look was new, and it took some time for both gamers and games to really adopt it.
Awesome watch !! Never heard of you but you gained a sub
Me being a late teenager, I was introduced to DOOM as a kid in DOSBox. And thus, I always played with the keyboard. I never saw a reason to use my mouse.
I don't think it's a "dying breed", seeing as I got into DOOM over a decade after it was released, and STILL used keyboard only. Hell, I even play Quake keyboard only.