It's less a "young player vs old player" issue than a "ill-fitted UI elements can actually harm the intuitiveness of game mechanics" issue. That crosshair makes no sense in this game and it's not surprising that new players would interpret it that way.
but due to the new norm that the mordern fps games have set, young people will generally try to aim up, and finding themselves unable, will think that was an undefeatable enemy, well i thought the same. it is just that because back in the day people didn't know about aiming up, so, they just shot ahead
@user-oq5kc5cq5r im a young person, i played doom 64, because it was free on epic games. No crosshair in that game, it took me 0.5 seconds to understand that the game autoaims vertically.
@@user-oq5kc5cq5r But here the wrongful assumption on the gameplay isn't inferred by a norm set by modern games, it's explicitly stated by the game itself. A crosshair isn't a convention invented by modern FPS, it's a skeuomorphism from a real life gun's crosshair, and a real life gun's crosshair is meant to indicate where your gun is going to shoot at horizontally and vertically. Even without the context of a 30 year history of FPS games, that crosshair would still be confusing, and a player from 1993 presented with this version of DOOM would probably avoid shooting at enemies on a different elevation by fear of wasting ammo just as much as young players do today. And even a DOOM veteran would still be at least slightly disoriented by the footage at 0:50 and assume this version was modified to have vertical aiming no longer work. If there's one wrongful assumption that was informed by modern games, it's on the editor of the Steam version who thought that adding a crosshair was an improvement or even remotely appropriate, not on the player trusting the cues that the game is throwing at him.
Grandpa just woke up from his nap (me) Yeah apparently the kids need a crosshair I'm surprised that the health economy wasn't worked over from stim packs and medikits, to just cowering behind some kind of cover until the screen was no longer red. 😜
There is and its kinda mid, at least compared with the thousens of source ports, also the crosshair is not import in singleplayer but its great in deathmatch
Interesting that old Rainbow Six games up to Raven Shield also had the similar feature, the crosshair would snap to enemies within the autoaim range. Pretty neat feature - and quite hard to not get addicted to!
What is this crosshair you talk of Sonny... Back in my day.... (Drifts off asleep) I can joke about old days because when I was in the Navy in 1993 I called the phone number that was in the shareware game, and ordered my copy of Doom through the mail. It came in a Ziploc baggie with four floppy disk and a well-printed manual. I'm really proud to see the young players are still picking up this game and enjoying it 😁
Tbf, the crosshair does turn from green to red when it's in line with an enemy so you should be able to figure it out that way. It's also useful when you fight specters in dark areas.
Huh, interesting... but at the same time, I can absolutely see why. Crosshairs have been used to indicate a point of aim for so long that it must be second nature to most gamers (excluding games like CS of course where your crosshair doesn't dictate your _precise_ point of aim at all times), so the presence of a crosshair by default is misdirecting players by contrasting what's expected... But in the absence of such a crosshair, they'd probably experiment and be rewarded. Neat o:
GZdoom cannot be included cause of the GPL license, Bethesda would have to share source-code of any modifications they make. Which would be a no-no for them.
@@ananon5771This is not directed at Bethesda, this is about the players. Steam version of Doom does come with everything necessary to get GZDoom going.
I had a friend in high school (it was circa 3 years ago) and he was playing DOOM for the first time. He had no crosshair at the time and he still didn't shoot the enemies on higher elevation. We were arguing good ten minutes that IT IS possible to kill that enemies, but he insisted it is not possible, because of limited aiming. I only knew this, because 7 years prior my English teacher (as a foreign language) showed me that in primary school and since then it was somewhere deep in my memory as a fun fact. I think this problem with shooting to elevated enemy comes from standardised FPS mechanics.Young people started with them already in use, they think that they point at the enemy and then shoot. And if they cannot point at them they don't. My first FPS was Medal of Honor: Airbourne. A lot of my friends started with CS:GO, a few with 1.6. Visible crosshair does not matter that much in my opinion. edit: I turned 22 this month
Haha way different direction than I anticipated! I was thinking it would be something like "Older players charged into rooms to take out enemies head-on before they took too much damage, while younger players peeked around corners and tried to play more tactically, even though cover doesn't help much in OG DOOM."
When I played doom for the first time (browser emulator a few years ago) I had the same problem. I don't think it's so much the UI, but the fact that we are so used to 3d shooting that it is second nature to us.
Heard a story on Giant Bomb about some educators who wanted to do some type of controlled test using a computer program. They didn't know if the young kids would be able to use a keyboard so gave each station a controller to more easily navigate the program. What they didn't expect is that nine times out of ten, the kids would ignore both the controller and keyboard and lean forward to touch the screen.
One of those younger lads getting into DOOM that you mentioned. My first experience playing DOOM was actually on the Switch, and yeah that iteration came with a crosshair. The elevation issue did confuse me at first, but I distinctly remember shooting at a wall below the imps in E1M1 out of frustration and noticing that they got hit anyways. I adapted quickly after that.
Funny thing, the crosshair on the Nintendo Switch version turns red when a demon on any elevation is aimed at, which is more helpful than anything to demons below you, under the screen
in fact, the crosshair become red when your aim at something(regardless of the height of it), but at the end of doom 1 i didn't look for the crosshair to become red, i was looking at the crosshair only to know if there is something in the dark or out of my screen, i just put the enemies in the middles of my screen and shoot at it
It baffled me with or without crosshair prior to me finding out that there is auto-aim. It’s not explicitly communicated in the game itself like it is with modern games.
A similar situation exists in the new Brigador game where the default way to play the game is actually wrong way to play it. As the default movement option doesn't give you tank controls but free movement that is actually makes the game harder. Developers had to implement this because people who thought the game was a Twin Stick shooter review bombed it because tank controls hindered them from moving and shooting. The game is not designed as a twin stick shooter and free movement doesn't help you instead makes it easier to die because you take more damage from behind which free movement often turns you around.
I've been trying to get through Doom recently, having never finished it since the first time I played it was when I was 5 on a computer with OS/2 on it and the WAD I had on my MP3 player during high school was shareware Doom with just the first episode available. I tried using GZDoom since that's currently the recommended way to do it. The game is so different when you play it through GZDoom! They added way too many enhancements, I ended up using DOSBox instead because the game you get in GZDoom with its vertical aim and whatnot is just too different.
Chocolate, prboom, crispy or retro doom are the best for vanilla experience. The chocolate doom is just a dos doom that can be played on modern windows. Prboom and crispy doom got some enhancements like higher screen resolution or bug fixes. Retro doom also got vanilla gameplay but with some graphical improvments like better contrast, blood sprites on floor, smooth liquid animations and some more, and all that can be turned off in config file.
@@mickromash I'll check those out eventually, but for now DOSBox is good enough. I'm one of the people old enough to where my first time with Doom was actually on DOS (more specifically OS/2 booting into some kind of DOS mode), and DOSBox provides a close enough approximation to that experience. Also, a lot of the modern Doom runners break the opening demo, and I need my demo playing behind the menu dammit lol
That's a good point, I never noticed the new one had a crosshair and the old one didn't. It had been probably a decade or more since I had played final doom, then when I played the steam version.
while I do think the crosshair plays a part in it somewhat, as some others have pointed out, the main issue stems from the fact that not only are we so used to the more standardized fps controls, but there isn't really anything to tell you that you can still shoot that enemy above even if you can't physically aim there. the only reason I new about any of that was because of a game theory video that went over the mechanics of the game's engine a long time ago. had I not seen that video, I would have been just as lost as any of these other new players, crosshair or not. as a little bonus tho, the crosshair can still actually help new players learn about this mechanic as it changes color when an enemy is within the line of fire
I own Steam version of Doom for a long while, but I thought that it has only dosbox version in it, which I originally played but then switched to Crispy Doom. So I always played without crosshair
In the past the only option (that was not BFG Edition) was DosBox in all store fronts, more recently they made the Unity Port that comes with a bunch of enhancements such as being limit-removing, having support for some wads that can be downloaded through your Bethesda account, more options of rendering and of course the crosshair.
having done multiple playthroughs of DOOM (most without crosshair, one with it) i think the crosshair lessens the mechanical satisfaction of landing a shotgun blast. because og DOOM made you focus either on the position of your gun (or the position of the enemy) to line up shots, the kickback from the shotgun (or enemy hit frame) is more prominent in your vision, and i think that lends a little extra oomf to shots. the crosshair shifting your focus away from that makes the game feel a bit less juicy
The crosshair makes sense in game versions/source ports that do have vertical mouselook (in my experience, such source ports also tend to enable jumping, which is a much bigger game-breaker IMO).
I starting playing Doom back in 93 and I still play modded to this day. The best way to play is with free mouse look like a normal FPS but keeping the auto aim on. There's a lot of sections, even on fan made WADs, that absolutely require cheesing the auto aim to this day
As a younger DOOM player myself, I only used the Steam version to practice the game. Then, I moved on to source ports. I do have free-look on, and I leave the crosshair on, even going as far as to find a mod that adds one. It's purely for getting a more precise idea in regards to where am I aiming on the X axis of my screen, and to see what else is in the Y axis, since I prefer to keep Infinitely Tall Monsters and auto-aim on. As for auto-aim, I caught on almost immediately, pistoling that Imp guarding the Shotgun secret in E1M1.
When I first played Doom, it was through DOSBox. I felt the controls were wacky at first, but I got around them, later realizing you could change the keybinds by modifying the .cfg file. When I got ZDoom, I was playing with freelook and a crosshair. But later I just went back to being man and disabled freelook and crosshair again, but there are also times I needed to use mouselook to play things like Brutal Doom. And yet I still have had tendencies to play Quake or Half-Life using only the keyboard since then.
I use a crosshair when playing doom, but I also enable freelook with the mouse/gamepad. Crosshair wouldn't really be necessary with the original graphics but I use a weapon model pack in which some of the weapons aren't perfectly aligned with the center of the screen (the models originally displayed off to the side like most modern shooters - I changed this but it's not perfect).
Odd I would assume that people that never played doom originally would just go straight to the source ports where you can look up and down where it actually makes sense to have a crosshair.
I think back when the Steam version was just the original DOS game in an emulator, more people would try source ports, since the original game has some rough edges. The current version feels a lot more modern so there isn't as much of a reason to try something else.
The most impractical addition one could ever conceive. I can see it in Quake and Quake 2 since they have mouse look but even then I leave it off when I play on Switch.
the source port i use lets you have a crosshair that lines up with the autoaim (both fully and only horizontally) and thats what ive used recently as a new player
This is a perfect example of less is more. People might think they want the cross hair on the UI but it only hinders gameplay. It was always neat that bullets just went where the gun was pointing. The cross hair, no matter how implemented lessens that effect
Interesting points being made, however I think the author is jumping to conclusions. "Vast majority of younger doom players play the Steam version" - maybe so, this would make sense, but there are no numbers on how many ended up switching to alternative ports like GZDoom. I know a ton of people who switched, but how many is that - 1% or 20% or 50%? We don't know. And then the conclusion that these players are choosing to ignore and not shoot elevated targets - not clear what's that based on either. Both points sound plausible but not to the degree beyound "feels like it".
Eh, i started with the Unity port and got the aiming down without issue. Maybe because i had some background knowledge already? Worth noting that the crosshair does change colour when an enemy is in sight, including ones in vertical autoaim distance but not actually under the crosshair... it's actually pretty handy for enemies just off ledges or against Spectres 😅
Young Doom player here, my First experience was with Zdoom some years ago and i Took a bit longer to find out about the crosshair, since my instinct allways was to Just point and shoot.
a small detail they did add in the steam version is that, when you are able to hit something, the crosshair will turn red, whereas it's normally yellow but how many people are gonna actually notice that? I only noticed it on accident after I cleared a room and just happed to turn across an explosive barely and when I shot it, my crosshair went from red to yellow because there was nothing on the vertical plane of my crosshair anymore
My zoomer ass has put about 50 hours into the steam version of doom, I love that game so much. Honestly prefer to it to a lot of modern shooters as most of them just feel the same, including the newer doom games, I bought the 2016 version and only played it for an hour or two as I got so bored because it just felt the same as every other shooter, and unlike games like titanfall, it didn't have anything unique enough to keep me interested. OG doom is just plain weird, it's so obvious it was made in a time where no one knew what an fps was supposed to be like, but they made it work and it's amazing. The shotgun makes absolutely zero sense, but it's my favorite video game weapon of all time because it's just so god damn fun. It feels completely unlike any game I've ever played before, and I mean that in the best way possible.
I mean in the unity port i pretty much just use it to confirm I'm actually aiming at an enemy at a different elevation cos it changes colors. Of course i tend to look at games from more of a "how did the developer intend this to play out" state of mind, and, so, it just made sense to me that if a game has no vertical look but does have enemies on different elevations that are able to shoot down at me, clearly the game does vertical aiming for me. To be clear, the first time i ever touched any doom game was doom 64 on the Google stadia in the middle of my first ever acid trip, so I wasn't exactly fully cognizant.
It's interesting - I always saw Doom's auto-aim as a compromise, not an intended feature, and accepted it as a necessity of the game's engine, but when I think about it, it's a good mechanic in it's own right. Rather than it just being a compromise made by the developers, I realized: You, the player, aim side-to-side, and Doomguy is just changing the angle of his shot. The game does that for you and it makes complete sense. And this allowed for them to have enemies on different levels instead of just your own, increasing the depth of the game. I wonder how a modern approach to this would work, having context-based mechanics to majorly increase gameplay functionality, like the game changing animations, actions, stuff like that based off of camera angle (I know some already do this, but to a more major extent?). I never knew the crosshair was a thing - I am a younger player, but I originally played via DOSBox, but now I use GZDoom, which I reccomend to anybody wanting to play with full modern aiming capabilities and just look around the world a bit more naturally.
It's less a "young player vs old player" issue than a "ill-fitted UI elements can actually harm the intuitiveness of game mechanics" issue. That crosshair makes no sense in this game and it's not surprising that new players would interpret it that way.
but due to the new norm that the mordern fps games have set, young people will generally try to aim up, and finding themselves unable, will think that was an undefeatable enemy, well i thought the same. it is just that because back in the day people didn't know about aiming up, so, they just shot ahead
I use the cross hair tbh. But I can imagine new players being confused. It doesn't help that games all play the same to not confuse players
Precisley what i came to say.
@user-oq5kc5cq5r im a young person, i played doom 64, because it was free on epic games. No crosshair in that game, it took me 0.5 seconds to understand that the game autoaims vertically.
@@user-oq5kc5cq5r But here the wrongful assumption on the gameplay isn't inferred by a norm set by modern games, it's explicitly stated by the game itself.
A crosshair isn't a convention invented by modern FPS, it's a skeuomorphism from a real life gun's crosshair, and a real life gun's crosshair is meant to indicate where your gun is going to shoot at horizontally and vertically. Even without the context of a 30 year history of FPS games, that crosshair would still be confusing, and a player from 1993 presented with this version of DOOM would probably avoid shooting at enemies on a different elevation by fear of wasting ammo just as much as young players do today. And even a DOOM veteran would still be at least slightly disoriented by the footage at 0:50 and assume this version was modified to have vertical aiming no longer work.
If there's one wrongful assumption that was informed by modern games, it's on the editor of the Steam version who thought that adding a crosshair was an improvement or even remotely appropriate, not on the player trusting the cues that the game is throwing at him.
there's a steam version of doom ?!?!?!??!?!?!
AND it has a crosshair !!?!?!?
WHY WOULD IT HAVE A CROSSHAIR !?!?!?!?
Grandpa just woke up from his nap (me)
Yeah apparently the kids need a crosshair I'm surprised that the health economy wasn't worked over from stim packs and medikits, to just cowering behind some kind of cover until the screen was no longer red.
😜
There is and its kinda mid, at least compared with the thousens of source ports, also the crosshair is not import in singleplayer but its great in deathmatch
It also has bad frame pacing, particularly for mouse input.
Isn't the steam version of doom, the unity port?
@@Unlucky-Noo correct!
Crispy Doom has a pretty good solution with an option for the crosshair to snap to the enemy when it's within the autoaim range.
I've never tried that source port but that's seriously a genius feature.
Interesting that old Rainbow Six games up to Raven Shield also had the similar feature, the crosshair would snap to enemies within the autoaim range.
Pretty neat feature - and quite hard to not get addicted to!
a fellow crispy enjoyer
Crispy Doom is a great port.
DSDA-Doom and other similar forks too, I think. it's why Boom-based ports are so called: they're absolutely based
Simple fix: make crosshair stretch to entire vertical length of screen for better player comprehension. Tall bullets.
tall bullets = multiple enemies per shot /= auto aim
Tall boolets go brrr
Yeah but with phonk
Another good instance of "Sometimes, less is more"
it just comes to show how important UI design in video games can be
realism fps player = "what UI for?"
😂
@@4IZUKI generally in realism FPS the UI is all extremely well designed so you can know whats going on without an overlay
The crosshair turns red when it lines up with an enemy at a different height, which may be indication enough that auto aim is a thing here.
Not very intuitive tho,
What is this crosshair you talk of Sonny...
Back in my day.... (Drifts off asleep)
I can joke about old days because when I was in the Navy in 1993 I called the phone number that was in the shareware game, and ordered my copy of Doom through the mail.
It came in a Ziploc baggie with four floppy disk and a well-printed manual.
I'm really proud to see the young players are still picking up this game and enjoying it 😁
i can imagine myself sitted with crossed legs while seeing you play the game on an old i386 computer, that was pleasant to read :)
yay Garbaj didn't quit!
no shit
She refused to quit! Check out her last video.
it is a he@@super8bitable
@@theevolutionfather Her Twitter account says that she's not
@@super8bitable UPPERCASE *HE*
It just feels so cursed every time I see OG DOOM with a crosshair or free look.
I like it that way. Not because I don't enjoy original doom. Its because for me that feels enhanced.
never show this guy freelook in strife and heretic/hexen, or the crosshair in strife
as a kid a remember first time pressing spacebar to open the door in quake. it was like WHAAAA I CAN JUMP?!
or the fact that the corpses don't always face you anymore
Tbf, the crosshair does turn from green to red when it's in line with an enemy so you should be able to figure it out that way. It's also useful when you fight specters in dark areas.
Huh, interesting... but at the same time, I can absolutely see why.
Crosshairs have been used to indicate a point of aim for so long that it must be second nature to most gamers (excluding games like CS of course where your crosshair doesn't dictate your _precise_ point of aim at all times), so the presence of a crosshair by default is misdirecting players by contrasting what's expected... But in the absence of such a crosshair, they'd probably experiment and be rewarded. Neat o:
CS2 follow recoil be like
I have unhealthy amounts of fortnite, cs and ultrakill, yet the no crosshair really isnt hard...
My computer lab teacher taught me about the vertical auto aim when he caught me playing in class
They shouldve just gotten gzdoom
GZdoom cannot be included cause of the GPL license, Bethesda would have to share source-code of any modifications they make. Which would be a no-no for them.
*CrispyDoom.
Wait... doesn't GZDoom has free aim enabled by default? It makes Doom a bit counterintuitive to play ngl
@@ananon5771This is not directed at Bethesda, this is about the players. Steam version of Doom does come with everything necessary to get GZDoom going.
@@user-ol4dl9ks2oWhy would it be counterintuitive? It plays just fine.
Younger Doom player here. I actually use the crosshair as an indicator to tell me if I'm in line with the enemy. Crosshair turns red, I shoot.
i love gamers psychology
I like this kind of quick viedo style
Life really felt a bit empty without some "garbaj" in it.
how mutch impact a little detail like this can have....
glad your back man, you cannot understand the joy i feel seeing one of your videos in my feed. Keep up the great work!!
I had a friend in high school (it was circa 3 years ago) and he was playing DOOM for the first time. He had no crosshair at the time and he still didn't shoot the enemies on higher elevation. We were arguing good ten minutes that IT IS possible to kill that enemies, but he insisted it is not possible, because of limited aiming. I only knew this, because 7 years prior my English teacher (as a foreign language) showed me that in primary school and since then it was somewhere deep in my memory as a fun fact.
I think this problem with shooting to elevated enemy comes from standardised FPS mechanics.Young people started with them already in use, they think that they point at the enemy and then shoot. And if they cannot point at them they don't. My first FPS was Medal of Honor: Airbourne. A lot of my friends started with CS:GO, a few with 1.6. Visible crosshair does not matter that much in my opinion.
edit: I turned 22 this month
"Ehh, just put the crosshair in the middle of the screen, it'll be fine"
"Will do, boss."
you should make this a short
I think it would perform great considering the length and content
Even without the crosshair I never shot at enemies at a higher elevation, because you can’t look up I just assumed you can’t shoot up to.
Haha way different direction than I anticipated! I was thinking it would be something like "Older players charged into rooms to take out enemies head-on before they took too much damage, while younger players peeked around corners and tried to play more tactically, even though cover doesn't help much in OG DOOM."
I was lucky to know about this before I tried the Steam version, but not knowing woulda driven me crazy.
This was simply something I did when I first played Doom 20+ years ago lol. Eventually you figure it out or put the game down.
When I played doom for the first time (browser emulator a few years ago) I had the same problem. I don't think it's so much the UI, but the fact that we are so used to 3d shooting that it is second nature to us.
Great to see you making video's again !! I love these, do what you love !
Heard a story on Giant Bomb about some educators who wanted to do some type of controlled test using a computer program. They didn't know if the young kids would be able to use a keyboard so gave each station a controller to more easily navigate the program.
What they didn't expect is that nine times out of ten, the kids would ignore both the controller and keyboard and lean forward to touch the screen.
concerning
garbaj is back. yay
One of those younger lads getting into DOOM that you mentioned. My first experience playing DOOM was actually on the Switch, and yeah that iteration came with a crosshair. The elevation issue did confuse me at first, but I distinctly remember shooting at a wall below the imps in E1M1 out of frustration and noticing that they got hit anyways. I adapted quickly after that.
So I started playing it on my DS and boy...it is mad FUN!
Funny thing, the crosshair on the Nintendo Switch version turns red when a demon on any elevation is aimed at, which is more helpful than anything to demons below you, under the screen
It's a certified banger! Thank you for continuing to make videos!
I love how you noticed this and decided to share it. And I find it intriguing.
doom with a crosshair is ever so slightly cursed
man its so cursed watching someone play Doom with autorun turned off. its like a whole different game lol
in fact, the crosshair become red when your aim at something(regardless of the height of it), but at the end of doom 1 i didn't look for the crosshair to become red, i was looking at the crosshair only to know if there is something in the dark or out of my screen, i just put the enemies in the middles of my screen and shoot at it
The crosshair does actually tell you that you can fire at enemies at different elevations. It turns red if you are able to shoot the enemy.
It baffled me with or without crosshair prior to me finding out that there is auto-aim. It’s not explicitly communicated in the game itself like it is with modern games.
I play on Steam Deck and the crosshair is so tiny that I didn’t even notice it at first.
A similar situation exists in the new Brigador game where the default way to play the game is actually wrong way to play it.
As the default movement option doesn't give you tank controls but free movement that is actually makes the game harder.
Developers had to implement this because people who thought the game was a Twin Stick shooter review bombed it because tank controls hindered them from moving and shooting.
The game is not designed as a twin stick shooter and free movement doesn't help you instead makes it easier to die because you take more damage from behind which free movement often turns you around.
I've been trying to get through Doom recently, having never finished it since the first time I played it was when I was 5 on a computer with OS/2 on it and the WAD I had on my MP3 player during high school was shareware Doom with just the first episode available. I tried using GZDoom since that's currently the recommended way to do it. The game is so different when you play it through GZDoom! They added way too many enhancements, I ended up using DOSBox instead because the game you get in GZDoom with its vertical aim and whatnot is just too different.
Try crispydoom.
You know you can just turn those off
Chocolate, prboom, crispy or retro doom are the best for vanilla experience. The chocolate doom is just a dos doom that can be played on modern windows. Prboom and crispy doom got some enhancements like higher screen resolution or bug fixes. Retro doom also got vanilla gameplay but with some graphical improvments like better contrast, blood sprites on floor, smooth liquid animations and some more, and all that can be turned off in config file.
@@mickromash I'll check those out eventually, but for now DOSBox is good enough. I'm one of the people old enough to where my first time with Doom was actually on DOS (more specifically OS/2 booting into some kind of DOS mode), and DOSBox provides a close enough approximation to that experience.
Also, a lot of the modern Doom runners break the opening demo, and I need my demo playing behind the menu dammit lol
@@bokunogentoo4420 all ports that mentioned except retro doom got demo in the menu
21 years old here, began playing 'the ultimate doom' and actually quit for this exact reason. You're observation is exactly right.
keep up your content, you always find new interesting topics to show to us!
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 KEEP MOVING FORWARD! WE LOVE YOU!!
Doom player☝️
That's a good point, I never noticed the new one had a crosshair and the old one didn't. It had been probably a decade or more since I had played final doom, then when I played the steam version.
Bro my channel is Doom related and it's really cool seeing you upload this video
new garbaj content. All my homies love garbaj content.
while I do think the crosshair plays a part in it somewhat, as some others have pointed out, the main issue stems from the fact that not only are we so used to the more standardized fps controls, but there isn't really anything to tell you that you can still shoot that enemy above even if you can't physically aim there.
the only reason I new about any of that was because of a game theory video that went over the mechanics of the game's engine a long time ago. had I not seen that video, I would have been just as lost as any of these other new players, crosshair or not.
as a little bonus tho, the crosshair can still actually help new players learn about this mechanic as it changes color when an enemy is within the line of fire
make the crosshair a vertical line 😎
Keep doing this
i like your videos, i like your content, i think you are ding a great job and i have learend alot for myself from your videos
Banger vid keep em comin
I own Steam version of Doom for a long while, but I thought that it has only dosbox version in it, which I originally played but then switched to Crispy Doom. So I always played without crosshair
In the past the only option (that was not BFG Edition) was DosBox in all store fronts, more recently they made the Unity Port that comes with a bunch of enhancements such as being limit-removing, having support for some wads that can be downloaded through your Bethesda account, more options of rendering and of course the crosshair.
If I had never played Doom before and played it today for the first time, I can see how I would make that mistake.
I don't need a cross hair, I just need someone to fix my neck so I can look up and down.
having done multiple playthroughs of DOOM (most without crosshair, one with it) i think the crosshair lessens the mechanical satisfaction of landing a shotgun blast.
because og DOOM made you focus either on the position of your gun (or the position of the enemy) to line up shots, the kickback from the shotgun (or enemy hit frame) is more prominent in your vision, and i think that lends a little extra oomf to shots. the crosshair shifting your focus away from that makes the game feel a bit less juicy
solution: vertical line
Legend is here! and holy shit doom with crosshair.....
hello :)
love your content
The crosshair makes sense in game versions/source ports that do have vertical mouselook (in my experience, such source ports also tend to enable jumping, which is a much bigger game-breaker IMO).
I starting playing Doom back in 93 and I still play modded to this day. The best way to play is with free mouse look like a normal FPS but keeping the auto aim on. There's a lot of sections, even on fan made WADs, that absolutely require cheesing the auto aim to this day
you should check out the very vibrant Doom 2 map maker community!
As a younger DOOM player myself, I only used the Steam version to practice the game. Then, I moved on to source ports. I do have free-look on, and I leave the crosshair on, even going as far as to find a mod that adds one. It's purely for getting a more precise idea in regards to where am I aiming on the X axis of my screen, and to see what else is in the Y axis, since I prefer to keep Infinitely Tall Monsters and auto-aim on. As for auto-aim, I caught on almost immediately, pistoling that Imp guarding the Shotgun secret in E1M1.
Doom gameplay at walking speed! *points and laughs*
It does light up red when the autoaim will be applied
When I first played Doom, it was through DOSBox. I felt the controls were wacky at first, but I got around them, later realizing you could change the keybinds by modifying the .cfg file. When I got ZDoom, I was playing with freelook and a crosshair. But later I just went back to being man and disabled freelook and crosshair again, but there are also times I needed to use mouselook to play things like Brutal Doom. And yet I still have had tendencies to play Quake or Half-Life using only the keyboard since then.
I thought the level they existed on was gonna be a level above. Well played.
The crosshair turns red when you're aiming at and within vertical autoaim range of an enemy. Not sure how recently this was added
i like this format 👀
I use a crosshair when playing doom, but I also enable freelook with the mouse/gamepad. Crosshair wouldn't really be necessary with the original graphics but I use a weapon model pack in which some of the weapons aren't perfectly aligned with the center of the screen (the models originally displayed off to the side like most modern shooters - I changed this but it's not perfect).
Odd I would assume that people that never played doom originally would just go straight to the source ports where you can look up and down where it actually makes sense to have a crosshair.
I think back when the Steam version was just the original DOS game in an emulator, more people would try source ports, since the original game has some rough edges. The current version feels a lot more modern so there isn't as much of a reason to try something else.
video summary: steam version's crosshair addition tricks new player on the wrong way shooting works on doom
The most impractical addition one could ever conceive. I can see it in Quake and Quake 2 since they have mouse look but even then I leave it off when I play on Switch.
the source port i use lets you have a crosshair that lines up with the autoaim (both fully and only horizontally) and thats what ive used recently as a new player
"why bad UI is bad"
They didn't live it like we did, our excitement, the new technology, a blessing in a pixel infested realm of glory.
Thats pretty funny. thanks for the short post
This is a perfect example of less is more. People might think they want the cross hair on the UI but it only hinders gameplay. It was always neat that bullets just went where the gun was pointing. The cross hair, no matter how implemented lessens that effect
Interesting points being made, however I think the author is jumping to conclusions. "Vast majority of younger doom players play the Steam version" - maybe so, this would make sense, but there are no numbers on how many ended up switching to alternative ports like GZDoom. I know a ton of people who switched, but how many is that - 1% or 20% or 50%? We don't know. And then the conclusion that these players are choosing to ignore and not shoot elevated targets - not clear what's that based on either. Both points sound plausible but not to the degree beyound "feels like it".
Eh, i started with the Unity port and got the aiming down without issue. Maybe because i had some background knowledge already?
Worth noting that the crosshair does change colour when an enemy is in sight, including ones in vertical autoaim distance but not actually under the crosshair... it's actually pretty handy for enemies just off ledges or against Spectres 😅
Garba is back babyyyyyy
Young Doom player here, my First experience was with Zdoom some years ago and i Took a bit longer to find out about the crosshair, since my instinct allways was to Just point and shoot.
on the steam version, if there is a higher enemy the crosshair changes colors.
a small detail they did add in the steam version is that, when you are able to hit something, the crosshair will turn red, whereas it's normally yellow but how many people are gonna actually notice that? I only noticed it on accident after I cleared a room and just happed to turn across an explosive barely and when I shot it, my crosshair went from red to yellow because there was nothing on the vertical plane of my crosshair anymore
It's fun because I'm a somewhere in the middle Doom player. Started in like 2012 with a mobile Freedoom port. Played Zdoom since 2015.
I'm in my 30s and didn't know you could shoot the higher up enemies.
As a young person, I never had this problem because the crosshair changes color whenever you can shoot at an enemy even if it's above the aim
My zoomer ass has put about 50 hours into the steam version of doom, I love that game so much. Honestly prefer to it to a lot of modern shooters as most of them just feel the same, including the newer doom games, I bought the 2016 version and only played it for an hour or two as I got so bored because it just felt the same as every other shooter, and unlike games like titanfall, it didn't have anything unique enough to keep me interested.
OG doom is just plain weird, it's so obvious it was made in a time where no one knew what an fps was supposed to be like, but they made it work and it's amazing.
The shotgun makes absolutely zero sense, but it's my favorite video game weapon of all time because it's just so god damn fun.
It feels completely unlike any game I've ever played before, and I mean that in the best way possible.
I mean in the unity port i pretty much just use it to confirm I'm actually aiming at an enemy at a different elevation cos it changes colors. Of course i tend to look at games from more of a "how did the developer intend this to play out" state of mind, and, so, it just made sense to me that if a game has no vertical look but does have enemies on different elevations that are able to shoot down at me, clearly the game does vertical aiming for me.
To be clear, the first time i ever touched any doom game was doom 64 on the Google stadia in the middle of my first ever acid trip, so I wasn't exactly fully cognizant.
I’ve been using an engine that disables the auto aim and unlocks the y axis as well. I didn’t even realise original doom had auto-aim lol
That must be for motion sickness. Still it seem like there should be a better way to deal with that.
great content
It's interesting - I always saw Doom's auto-aim as a compromise, not an intended feature, and accepted it as a necessity of the game's engine, but when I think about it, it's a good mechanic in it's own right. Rather than it just being a compromise made by the developers, I realized: You, the player, aim side-to-side, and Doomguy is just changing the angle of his shot. The game does that for you and it makes complete sense. And this allowed for them to have enemies on different levels instead of just your own, increasing the depth of the game.
I wonder how a modern approach to this would work, having context-based mechanics to majorly increase gameplay functionality, like the game changing animations, actions, stuff like that based off of camera angle (I know some already do this, but to a more major extent?).
I never knew the crosshair was a thing - I am a younger player, but I originally played via DOSBox, but now I use GZDoom, which I reccomend to anybody wanting to play with full modern aiming capabilities and just look around the world a bit more naturally.
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