brootal dum

I'm going to jump in and add my two cents in regards to Brutal Doom, from the perspective of somebody who follows the Doom modding community, and I want to let some things be known, and offer my opinions.

There's been a ton of drama in the modding community surrounding it, especially in the past 6 or so months. The drama stems from a number of things, one of the first and foremost reasons being the attitude of the mods creator, SgtMarkIV, who I will simply refer to as "Mark". Mark is... One of the most unpleasant people I have ever seen online.

Originally, Brutal Doom started off as a mod for another doom mod known as "Beautiful Doom", a mod which adds extra graphical flare, like blood and guts, spent cartridges, smoother animations, and so on and so forth to Doom, whilst retaining the core gameplay. So Mark comes along, and does his own take on it, which you know as Brutal Doom, when it first started, mark didn't give any credit at all to the original creator, but as time went on, Brutal Doom became less of a reimagining of somebody else's mod, and more it's own thing, so that's fine, right? Well, there's the other thing... There's this common misconception that Brutal Doom was made by one guy, Mark, and Mark alone, but this is far from the truth. Brutal Doom contains the work of many, many contributors, offering sprites, coding, audio, everything you can think of.

The thing is, Mark advertised it as a one man job, he never gave proper credit to the others who made it, the most he did was credit SOME of the contributors, and hid those credits on the second page of the Doom help screen, where nobody would actually think to look, so for the longest time people thought it was only him who worked on it, even professionals like Total Biscuit weren't aware of this. It wasn't until just recently that people started getting fed up with this, even though now Mark actually is the only person still working on it (As far as I'm aware), it's still unfair that no credit is given to those who had previously contributed assets to it, and bugged him to include a credits file, and he finally did... Only it's still incomplete. The best part? One of the people he didn't credit in this new credits list is the creator of Beautiful Doom. Yup, Mark is still using assets from somebody else's mod years later in Brutal Doom.

On top of the lying, Mark just has a totally sour attitude towards... Everybody. He can't take criticism at all, anytime somebody offers creative criticism for the mod, he insults them. He says they're just jealous of his mod, and he's not going change anything about it, because it's his mod... Which is somewhat fair, he shouldn't have to if he doesn't want to, but he doesn't have to say "No" with such a harsh attitude, and even then, most people agree that Brutal Doom has its flaws that need fixing, which is something I'll touch a bit more on later. One shocking thing that used to be part of Brutal Doom was different sprites for the gore... Thing is, these sprites weren't drawn using an art program or whatever, he took images of real life dead bodies, addled and destroyed corpses, and made turned the guts from those into sprites for the game, the community collectively flipped shit, and convinced him to change it, albeit with mark acting passive aggressive about it.

Mark has said a good number of really awful things too... He tossed racist comments into the code of his mod, for one, and more recently, a member of the ZDoom forums (one of the larger doom modding communities out there) made a thread about how he's depressed, and was contemplating suicide, most responses were kind, understanding, others said "Hey I'm sorry you feel that way, but this forum isn't the best place to vent that...", what does Mark say? He encourages him to kill himself, going as far as providing instructions on how to make a suicide bag. Obviously, this upset a lot of people, Mark tries to defend himself by saying he was just joking, and that nobody understands his humor, but at this point the moderators/admins of the ZDoom forums are starting to lose patience with him, he just likes to stir up trouble. Eventually, Mark was banned, I can't remember what he said specifically, but the mods just had enough of his attitude and banned him. So Mark does what any rational person would, he goes and complains on another large doom modding forum about how terrible the one he was just banned from was. Betcha can't guess what happens next. Yup, he's banned from not one, but now TWO of the largest doom modding forums out there, leaving him stuck with using Facebook and ModDb to get any news across for the mod itself.

Now my thoughts on the mod itself. I like it. I know that's probably not what you were expecting after I tore into the creator of it, but hate the artist, not the art, as they say. It's good fun, there's a great level of satisfaction with popping enemies heads, or doing one of the cool execution moves on them. That said, I don't think it's perfect, the ammo capacity for some weapons is lower than it should be, there's some coding issues, which cause problems with certain actions (one liners, executions, and dodge rolls specifically), some of the enemies are kind of unbalanced, as are some of the weapons. There's a good many people out there who like Brutal Doom, but aren't totally satisfied with some of Marks design choices, so there's people who have taken it upon themselves to improve Brutal Doom, one of the most popular edits of Brutal Doom is Brutal Doom: Sperglord Edition. Brutal Doom: SE improves a great many things over the default Brutal Doom, it improves balance, weapon behavior, ammo capacity, too many changes to list, the creator even went the extra mile and added a totally badass new swinging attack to the chainsaw. Brutal Doom Sperglord Edition is, in my opinion, the best way to play Brutal Doom.

That said, there are other, better mods for Doom out there, and this is where some of the other drama comes in. Brutal Doom is popular as fuck, and there's so many just totally fantastic mods shadowed by its popularity. Whenever you hear of a Doom mod on a gaming media site, chances are its Brutal Doom. There's a whole world of mods out there for Doom that totally transform the experience, one of the biggest ones in recent years is Project MSX, a blend of old school fast paced action, and newer gameplay mechanics found in modern games, like Halo, or Crysis, the result is an incredibly fun, fast paced, action packed experience, with amazingly well done spriting. Another fun one is is GMOTA, or Go Medieval On Their Ass, an arcadey mod based off of old school fantasy action games, like Super Ghosts and Ghouls, and another fun one to look forward to is The Space Pirate, a mod that has a larger focus on Hand to Hand combat, you can pull of combos with your fists, punching and kicking, and of course there's still a fun array of weapons at your disposal. Want Ratchet and Clank levels of crazy weapons, wanna have the option to play as 4 different badass russian guys? Then Russian Overkill is the mod for you! There's too many great mods out there for me to list, but take a look around the ZDoom forums and you'll surely find some.

Anyways, that's about all I have to say, I just wanted to toss out there the drama that came with Brutal Doom, and that there are other mods out there that are just as fun.

tl;dr, Brutal Doom creator is a dick, got banned everywhere, mods other than brutal doom exist, go play them, and have fun dooming.