Doom's Nightmare Difficulty: Everything You Need To Know

Background song now available on Bandcamp: decino.bandcamp.com/album/pumpkin-beats-to-analyse…

Romero cameo nice

This is what makes Romero a legend in gaming. He's a gamer's game designer. Outside of some level design, Romero was just an idea guy that understood his customers. But to this day, Romero has stayed humble and a gamer first guy. The fact that he responds to emails and does a ton of free stuff for the community is what makes him a legend.

You know you are doing something right when one of Doom's creators goes through the trouble of sending an actual voice reply. That was awesome!

12:26 This textual inconsistency was, of course, fixed in the Game Boy Advance and iOS ports of Doom, changing the shotgun shell pickup text from "Picked up 4 shotgun shells" to "Picked up the shotgun shells" and "Picked up shotgun shells", respectively (the latter iOS fix being made by Carmack himself, as indicated by his comment in the source code), hence not specifying the exact number of shells in the message. And that's why all true Doomers today regard the GBA and iOS ports as being the definitive way to play Doom.

"Oh really? Ok then. You're all dead." Great response John Romero :_deciGrin:

Nightmare difficulty always intimidated me as a kid. When cheat codes didn't work, it felt like the difficulty itself was overriding the game rules, like the monsters were just too powerful to be affected by the cheats.

Man, decino. Why are so many of your patrons in such agonizing pain? What did they do to deserve such a fate??

That was a really cool backstory. I had heard rumors that Nightmare was added in as a joke difficulty in future editions of Doom after 1994, but never actually got them confirmed until right now. I think I'm gonna give NERF a run through. It looks fun.

5:50 - Pinkie got lockjaw. How tragic. Also, I thought Nightmare difficulty was already fairly popular. I typically threw it on passively sometimes at one point.

Gzdoom currently has an option for monster nightmare reflexes, meaning you can play "two thirds nightmare", fast monsters and reflexes without the respawning bit. Can be interesting for those who want an "in between" challenge between uv-fast and full nightmare.

The Diablo 2 sounds when explaining the instant death pinkies are a fitting touch. It was absolutely awesome of Romero to give a detailed reply like that. The man is one of the coolest people to ever be in game development.

Great job as always. The John cameo was the best. Now, let the nightmare runs through! :_deciPog:

After playing on NIghtmare it's amazing how fairly-balanced it is. Definitely not a joke at all. The need to juggle moving forward before enemies respawns while also clearing out faster-firing demons works incredibly well.

iD Software really immortalized this game. We might never see any folks like Romero and Carmack in this industry ever again.

Nice, a voice message from Romero! That cool cat is a huge credit to the community, I swear. 3:39 I should note that this proper Nightmare fast reaction speed is achievable in GZDoom by activating the "Monsters Nightmare Reflexes" gameplay option. "Fast Monsters" is just regular -fast. JIC this is useful to someone.

I find it really cool when game devs respond to fan questions and messages like John Romero did here. I once sent Frank Klepaki an email right before the Command and Conquer remakes came out, just wanting to tell him that his music was well over 50 percent of the reason I enjoyed Command and Conquer so much, and was shocked beyond belief to get a multi-paragraph response from him

One way I tried mixing up Nightmare Difficulty was by adding a new difficulty setting via MAPINFO that also enables Total Infighting, creating a much more chaotic nightmare scenario where even the demons are fighting each other - and I think they remember who they were fighting when they died, too.

Your historical research into the topic was immaculate. So proud of you :)

1:38 Gotta appreciate Romero for answering a yes or no question with a several-paragraphed, detailed recollection.