Doom?!

[Phoequinox]

So hear me out. I played Doom for the first time this year, which, at 38, is borderline inexcusable, I know. But as I played it, I started to recognize a lot of the design. The way killing a monster would open a door somewhere else in the level that would unleash hordes more monsters. The way you would get teleported into cheeky traps. The way wall switches backfire almost as much as they do useful things. It all felt like going through Dungeon Master, just faster, nastier and more less brainy.

Doom is obviously the progenitor of the FPS genre, but it's clear it has roots in dungeon crawlers, from the way its levels are designed and the layout of traps and secrets. I'm looking forward to playing the Grimrock games in the coming months, and it will be interesting seeing how much, if any, of it reminds me of Doom in a similar capacity. Anyone else get a DM vibe from playing Doom, or vice versa?

[Ameena]

Yeah I'm pretty sure that Dungeon Master was possibly the first of its kind to have that kind of proper first-person immersive thing going on, rather than running through a text-based interface with just static pictures to show what was going on. So that does indeed basically make it the ancestor of those FPS games like Doom, Quake, etc.
Legend of Grimrock was explicitly made as a homage to DM and we even had one or two of the devs in this very forum talking about it back when they were making the first game. So if you see any similarities there, those will have been put there on purpose .

[Phoequinox]

Just now coming back to this, but neat! The first time I heard about Grimrock was right around the time it was about to release, and I didn't really have a means to play it yet. It immediately caught my attention as a game harkening back to that old design. I just started playing it, and it is vicious. But I'm liking it a lot, now that I'm getting in the groove of it. It's awesome that the devs were talking to hardcore fans of those old games, it definitely shows that they wanted to stay true to the old game design, so I imagine talking to fans was paramount for the dev cycle.

[Ameena]

Yeah, I can't remember the guy's username now but the posts are all still around here somewhere, in whichever area of the forum they were made (Creative Endeavours, possibly). A bunch of us did then get the game when it came out - I didn't actually finish it or play the second one, though.

[Phoequinox]

I'm mostly through the game now, and hoping the difficulty doesn't spike to a point that I can't finish it. It seems like the kind of game that has an extremely nasty final boss/challenge. To tie it all together, my impression of Grimrock is that if Doom was built from Dungeon Master, Grimrock is Dungeon Master built from Doom. The traps feel more Doom-like in how they flood the room with enemies and put you into situations where you have to fight really strong enemies within a confined space. I've heard LoG2 is better in most every way, so I'm excited to play that one.

[jcguinez]

Hi there, hi Phoequinox,
I have played a lot DM and DOOM 10 years after mainly on PS1 but didn't made the link ! Now you said it, it's quite obvious ! Besides, the game Wizordum, in early access since about one year (?) is trying to mix dungeon crawling and DOOM, but Wolfenstein 3D too, which is more like an old school dungeon crawler. It includes a level editor and I saw some levels inspired from Grimrock on a modding website. This game worth take a look at it !