#Gzdoom gameplay mods mod
#Gzdoom gameplay mods mods
#Gzdoom gameplay mods free

It was in this environment that GZDoom began incorporating one of the most widely requested missing features: widescreen graphical support.

#Gzdoom gameplay mods free

We used the internet to preserve our interpersonal contacts-taking advantage of video streaming, forums, and messaging applications to fill the void caused by social distancing-while others used their newfound free time to indulged their creative hobbies. March of 2020 was a uniquely chaotic moment in time across the globe we were frantically trying to grasp the ramifications of a global pandemic and making the best of a tumultuous moment in history. Not that that's necessarily a hard bar to meet - those expansions, man! - but it's a target that it more than exceeds with panache to spare.

#Gzdoom gameplay mods mods

I can't wait to see new mods and modmakers accept and meet that challenge, but in the meantime, this is the best thing to come of the Painkiller franchise in years. There's a lot of love for the original Painkiller in this faithful tribute, with enough tweaks, adjustments, adaptions and sheer technical prowess to raise it from a mere Xerox to something that raises the bar for Game-X-But-In-Doom mods. This adds a bit of extra depth to proceedings, forcing you to weigh up one buff against another in building a deck to fit your play style, while also letting you put together your own personal screw-you button with which to better survive massive encounters. At the start of every map, your Black Tarot board will open, letting you equip and swap out Silver Cards for passive boosts (higher base health, more ammo from pickups.) and Gold Cards for active effects you can trigger once per map (speed boosts, quad damage, slowing monsters down.), with new cards earned by either finishing maps or spending the gold you find during play.

The icing on the cake is the Tarot Card system. Upon collecting 66 souls in a single map, you temporarily transform into a hulking, invulnerable demon, with an instant-kill hitscan attack and a screen filter showing off GZDoom's shader functionality, with monsters glowing bright red against a greyscale world and the screen dramatically rippling with every blast of your powers. Monster corpses dissipate into Souls, which can be picked up. While Agent_Ash could be forgiven for stopping with just recreating Painkiller's movement and weapons, he went further. If Painkiller came out on the BUILD engine, this is what the weapons would look like. What isn't copied over is their sprites, which have been lovingly recreated from scratch in a well-rendered and animated pixel-art style. The Painkiller arsenal - which traditionally consists of common FPS weapons bolted together into primary/altfire combos - is lovingly recreated with all its perks and quirks, from juggling enemies with the titular lasso-blade-thing, to hanging their impaled (and comedically flat) corpses against walls with the Stake Gun, to the numerous obscure Combo Attacks that many weapons include.

and this is even before factoring in the weapons and the cards.

This feels pretty close to the original (right down to the crazy bunny hopping!) and really changes the feel of gameplay as you stomp through your favorite mapsets. A host of useful options, like swapping primary and alternate fires on specific weapons, are present, and among them is the ability to enable Painkiller style player movement. Painslayer, as the name suggests, transplants the gameplay from 2004's Painkiller into GZDoom, and it's quickly clear just how much effort has been put into recreating and imitating the original game's experience, right down to the rotating compass on the HUD. Yet here we are, basically worlds away from such origins, with improvements in both skill and available tools allowing for painstaking, gorgeous adaptions that blend one classic into another with a surprising amount of grace, preserving the strong points of both games.

#Gzdoom gameplay mods mod

It doesn't seem like so long ago that we were still looking at grainy screenshot-based sprite-ifications of 3D models paired with janky DEHACKED, or even EDGE's DDF taking the community into its wobbly first steps into plain-text mod scripting. It's been interesting watching attempts to recreate other games in Doom grow and evolve over the years.