Isn't this the same shit democrats in the US said when Trump announced he was running for the right to be run for president? And then also when he did?

I am not talking about the recent remake/reboot. I am talking about the original Doom and Doom 2. Perhaps some of you are too young to remember them but I have played them fairly often for almost 15 years now.

Anyway, when people talk about modern level design vs old level design they like to show something like this:

https://i.imgur.com/BITmX.jpg

But the thing is, (and this is coming from somebody who has spent 99999x more time playing the old Dooms than most people have) I think Doom's level design is massively overrated.

For one thing, unless you have played the games before you will probably get lost at least once almost every level because you can't find out which switch to press or where the keys are. In fact while playing custom levels this can still happen to me even to this day and it just completely ruins the fun when it happens.

Second, non-linear levels are just overrated in general. Honestly, just how important is a level's layout to the gameplay compared to other things like the gunplay and the graphics? Almost nobody gives a shit in what order you progress through the rooms as long as killing the stuff in them feels fun to do. Perfect example: Half-life. Half-life is almost completely linear and yet it's considered one of the best games ever made.

Third, Doom's level design looks ugly and crude a lot of the time (Doom 2 is even worse in this regard than Doom). Knee-deep in the dead is the best episode because it has the most levels that actually sort of look like something, but most of the time through the Doom games the levels just look crude and random and make almost no sense at all. They don't even look that good in an abstract/artistic sense, they just look BAD. Compared to the level design in Duke 3D which actually looks like real places, the level design in Doom becomes a joke. I know this can be blamed largely on the technical limitations of the time it was made but that doesn't matter to us gamers playing it today.

Thankfully just about every single one of those complaints become meaningless once you start modding the game, but at least if we are only talking about the originals I think Doom's level design doesn't deserve it's praise.

Anyone else feel the same way.