Wirehead Studios

So I've been on a classic games mod binge (charitably speaking - I never really have time to binge) lately, and I've encountered two Doom mods that take Gen's crossover concept to one extent or another. It's scratching my Gen itch as I wait for updates, and it's also friendly to my hardware.

The first is QC:Doom Edition (https://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-champions-doom-edition), an interpretation of Quake Champions in the Zandronum/GZDoom engines. When I tried running QC during the open beta, my poor laptop couldn't handle it, so I resigned myself to never being able to play QC for a long time. But then YouTube's algorithm gave me a recommendation for QCDE, and I found it quite impressive, especially how it adapts QC concepts and mechanics. It certainly bears that Q3 feel, champion classes notwithstanding... but wait there's more! Just like QC, it introduces a number of familiar faces like Ranger and Doomguy, but since they're not bound by trademark protection (ehehehehhh...), there are also a bunch of champions from other IPs, including The Duke, Lo Wang, the heroes from Hexen... All in all, it's a fun experience I'd recommend for those of us who want to QC experience but can't afford the hardware. Version 2.0 is coming out very soon (in 10 days!), and I can't wait.

But when QCDE stops at giving our heroes the same weaponset, Samsara (https://www.moddb.com/mods/samsara) takes the Gen concept and turns it up to 11... three or four times. The base version has a loadout of 8 heroes, among them Ranger (of course), the Security Officer from Marathon, the nameless elf Corvus, and the MFing Chex Warrior... each with their original weapons and abilities. Unlike GenArena, however, this mod doesn't even try to pretend it's legal, although TBF most people already have bought those games in one form or another, and nobody's complaining. But BOY is it sure fun, be it single-player, co-op, or DM.

The base mod was abandoned by its creator several years ago, but several ambitious modders have picked up where he left off, and added their own classes up to a whopping 25. No minor FPS was too obscure for inclusion in Samsara Extra Heroes (https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?t=61431), including Cybermage (who?) and In Pursuit of Greed (uh... wha?). With so many different projectiles and weapons flying around, DM is absolute mayhem. It's got balance issues for sure, but it's enough to scratch the Gen itch that has been going on for over a decade.

And like with Gen, my favorite class is "Random". :doom_thumb:

I fixed the link for Samsara Extra Heroes in your post, hence the edit.

Awesome stuff, and thanks for dropping in and posting!  I'm going to have to Chex... er, check this out.  Mecha has been on me about playing Brutal Doom as well.  I'm almost done with the texture work on the Phalanx, so once that's up and finished I know what I'll be doing when I take a little break.

As for the real QC, I've been playing that on and off a bit, and it's kind of a mixed bag.  Visually it's great, the character models and their voice lines are for the most part very well done (some voices could be better), but there's some gameplay issues.  Hit detection and framerate drop tend to be the two biggest, though they're getting better on the hit detection part.  I'm no longer shooting a railgun a foot next to someone that's running dead at me and watching them gib when it's an obvious miss.  There's also some definite cheaters.  I've seen two obvious aimbots so far.  Id definitely needs to implement some anticheats at some point, but with their history of that with Doom 16, I'm not counting on it in the short term.

One rather interesting problem they're running into is one that Gen Arena encountered prior to .99c, and that's being stuck in game balance hell.  QC has a small but VERY vocal group of complainers, and thus is constantly getting this nerfed and that nerfed to the point that the Champions and weapons might end up losing their distinction.  It's pretty amazing as it's following about the same pattern Gen did - Object X is overpowered, so nerf it. Now Object Y is overpowered, so nerf that, etc, etc.  It got to be so bad with Gen that I had to put my taloned foot down and scrap the weapons code and rewrite all the weapon behavior from the ground up to match Q1, Q2, and Doom as close as possible.  It also helped that I figured out how to program in C by that point and actually knew what I was doing, and had the original game sources to examine.  I decided we needed to stick to the vision, code it original, then once everything is in place we can worry about balancing it after 1.0 if there's a serious problem somewhere, and for purists' sake, throw in Old School mode that says "spork balance, here's 100% as close to vanilla as we can get in the Q3 engine".  It's something I wish the devs for QC could learn from because what 1.0 is shaping up to be is so much better than what Gen would have been had we continued muddying everything into basically reskins of the same weapons.  QC runs the risk of being reskins of the same Champion if they balance the uniqueness of each character into oblivion.  I'd hate to see the game ruined by that when they're starting to get a lot of other things right.

Anyway, I definitely need to check these out when I get the chance!  :doom_thumb: