Doom and Doom 2 offered five difficulty levels. They may as well have offered four. The fifth, Nightmare, aptly describes its gameplay. Enemies fire twice as fast and move at lightning speeds, and worse yet, they respawn after dying. Unloading a full clip of chaingun ammo or a crate of rockets into a swarm of monsters is tantamount to throwing ammo away. Not even God Himself stands a chance: cheat codes are blocked.
The best resource is Doom's unlimited supply of lives. In Nightmare, inexhaustible second chances are worth more than a box of inexhaustible shotgun shells.
Doom 2016 offers a Nightmare difficulty, but it's just a warmup. Ultra Nightmare robs players of their infinite lives and gives them one. Die, and players are booted back to the beginning, leaving behind a marker where they fell that serves as both a goal to surpass the next time around and a bleak reminder that they came close, but not close enough. Executive Producer Marty Stratton confirmed that no one at id Software managed to finish Ultra Nightmare before the game shipped. They assumed it would take consumers months.
Zero Master, a veteran speedrunner of the franchise's classic games, beat it in two days.
You've posted speedruns from virtually every Doom game on your YouTube channel. How did you discover the series, and what appealed to you about it?
I have a few older brothers and they managed to get it for the computer that we shared in our family. I remember playing around with it a bit, maps like Dead Simple and Tricks and Traps are the most memorable from Doom and Doom 2, but I was quite young and don't remember much. I played it again in secondary school and high school. Funny thing is that in Norway we each have our own personal laptop during class, and what does the school do to prevent students from playing games during class? Well, the answer is nothing, so obviously with a lot of time on my hands to play games and without the best of computer specs I looked for older DOS games or flash based games.
At some point I played through Doom 1 and Doom 2, not sure if this was when I tried nightmare difficulty for the first time, but I figured it was too difficult so I never played on that difficulty. About five to six years ago I was tired of new FPS games because they were all too easy. I think it was a game called Bulletstorm that made me decide I would play a FPS game purely for the difficulty, as it was released six years ago and I remember I found the game terrible because it was so trivial. I knew how difficult Doom was on nightmare difficulty, and so I loaded up Doom 2 on Nightmare and it didn't take long before I quit, but I had to know if anyone had ever done it.
Turns out there was a someone called Henning, who was also from Norway, had managed to not only get through Doom 2 on Nightmare, he did it without saves and he did it in under 30 minutes. From there I watched some speedrun marathons (AGDQ, SGDQ) and I saw Dime speedrunning Final Doom in early 2014, which I decided to try as well, so it's been about three years now since I started actively playing Doom.
Doom is just a great game, even today, and combined with [a range of] difficulty it was really the perfect game for someone looking for a challenge in single-player FPS.
What appealed to you about tackling Doom's Ultra Nightmare difficulty?
From before release I heard of UNM and how none of the developers had beaten it. It wasn't the first time I've heard something like this, Jay Wilson at Blizzard said similar things about Diablo 3, and even then they decided to double the difficulty to compensate for other players being better. Then the game was cleared in three to four days after release, if I remember correctly, with the Wizard class while I cleared the game after eight days with a Barbarian.
So a combination of game developers never making games difficult enough and probably not being the best at computer games, I figured it was a challenge that wouldn't take long for someone to finish. I didn't expect that I would do it first, but the game was a lot of fun which made it easy putting so many hours into it over those two days.
What are some differences between Nightmare and Ultra Nightmare to keep in mind?
The obvious difference is that you cannot die, everything else being equal except it skips the start. I loved that decision to skip the very start when you play UNM, as it is a bit slow. Getting through the game without saves is however an enormous difference, as a small mistake will send you back to the start instead of a checkpoint two minutes earlier.
On top of that you might get a bit nervous when you know you have to start over if you've gotten far into the game, it might slightly change how you play and that could make you do small mistakes which could add up quickly to dying.
How soon after release did you begin practicing for your Ultra Nightmare run?
I played through the game normally on Nightmare difficulty at first; that took about six to seven hours. Right after that I figured I'd start practicing for UNM by just doing a second playthrough on nightmare. I got about halfway through the game when I thought I would try to just do it straight away, even though I didn't practice the boss fights which I wanted to do first.
I spent about 20 to 22 hours on the game over two days. If you count my initial playthrough as practice I'd say about 11 hours of practice and 10 hours of attempts.
How many times did you die while practicing Ultra Nightmare, and how close did you come before some of those deaths occurred?
Hard to say how many times I died while practicing, I do remember I was dying constantly on my first playthrough. I was thinking that UNM would be very difficult after having died so many times, but once I understood how to dodge most of the monsters it wasn't nearly as bad as I had thought. I felt like I had good control over avoiding monster attacks during my second playthrough on nightmare, which convinced me to skip practice and just go ahead with UNM.
As for how close I got before completing it, I actually died to the second-to-last enemy of the game! The final enemy being the boss, the enemy that killed me was a final remaining Baron just as I was about to kill him with a BFG. In the first UNM video you can actually see my helmet—dying in UNM leaves a helmet behind—at the very last arena. In hindsight I'm glad he did, because I was not recording it and thus nobody would know if I completed it, and I didn't expect to get over a million views on the successful run. I wasn't recording because I didn't think I could really do it, but getting so close convinced me to record the next attempts.
I also did not practice the Spider Mastermind fight; I think I died six to seven times there on my first nightmare playthrough before I killed him when he only did a single attack—which was easy to dodge—several times in a row. Essentially I got lucky with what I assume was a glitch that caused him to just do one attack. Even if the Baron didn't kill me, the Spider Mastermind probably would have. So before my next attempts I managed to get some practice in using the save from my first nightmare playthrough to figure out how to dodge most of his attacks.
I noticed during your speedrun that you often chose to finish off enemies with bullets rather than glory kills. Any particular reason?
It's a very nice thing that the glory kills are so quick to perform, it also provides you with an invulnerability during the animation. Unfortunately, if a monster sends a projectile my way from a certain distance then it will hit me just after that invulnerability period wares off, but before I am able to move anywhere. So I tried to avoid it unless I knew where the enemies were.
What are some of the most difficult levels, or encounters in levels, when running Ultra Nightmare?
The Imps were really well made; they were quite agile, somewhat unpredictable, and they hit really hard. There are also a lot of them at the start where you don't have a rocket launcher to deal with them, so the early levels were quite difficult. Several of the late monsters aren't as dangerous when you know how they attack. For example Revenants and Mancubi are slow and inaccurate while Barons are easily dealt with by using a BFG because you know when they are coming.
However some of the levels in the middle were quite difficult because of the most feared enemy, the Pinky demon. They are quite brutal, difficult to kill, fast, and hit even harder than the Imps. I don't think anyone who has played through UNM isn't scared of them. So besides the early levels I'd say Lazarus Labs is definitely the hardest because of the high Imp and Pinky demon count, while the later levels are not too difficult because of the BFG.
The bosses felt quite balanced, all three of them having some dangerous attacks that certainly made them challenging. The Cyberdemon sometimes covers the ground with rockets while throwing another attack, which means you have to pay attention to two things, and if you fail to dodge them both then you take a lot of damage. Hell guard has some dangerous attacks, but I managed to bring him down fairly quickly so I didn't have too much trouble. I would say the Spider Mastermind is the most dangerous, mostly because his attacks were a bit difficult to see coming and not too easy to dodge at first. Of course it doesn't help that he's the last thing standing in the way of actually completing it.
The longer you hang around in a level on Ultra Nightmare difficulty, the higher your odds of getting killed. Given that, do you go for most weapons and upgrades? Or do you prioritize some and leave others?
After having gone through UNM without upgrades I can safely say the upgrades I missed the most were the self-damage reduction from the rocket launcher for armor upgrades, plasma stun, and Siege Gauss for the weapon upgrades. While I didn't use them in my first UNM playthrough I would want Equipment Rune to allow Siphon Grenades to give armor.
The rocket launcher does so much damage to yourself if you hit something close with it which makes the damage reduction important. Plasma stun was always really good in case you got yourself in a really bad situation and needed to get out, and Siege Gauss is just very strong at killing everything. Of course one way to avoid getting hit by your own rockets would be to not use the rocket launcher, but it's a very strong weapon in dealing with the dangerous Imps as it will kill them in one hit most of the time.
Another important thing would be knowing when to use the BFG and where the BFG cells are. Some of the fights which I had huge trouble with in my first playthrough were made trivial by knowing when to fire [the BFG], like the very end of Lazarus Labs, or right before the Cyberdemon fight.
I imagine that knowing tricks to avoid fights helps. What are some of your techniques?
Knowing where the monsters spawn helps a great deal. As I've mentioned earlier the BFG is really good if you know when to use it, which saves a lot of time since you don't have to deal with some of the higher tier enemies with weaker weapons.
What was it like to complete Ultra Nightmare for the first time?
It was amazing considering I had just died right before the final boss earlier. It was quite demotivating to try again after that death, and if someone had completed it already I probably would have left it at least for a few days. But since there was a decent chance I can do it before anyone else, I figured I'd keep going, and then going all the way made me forget all about that previous death.
There was a lot of worry among the Doom community prior to the reboot's release that it wouldn't live up to the legacy of the original games. Where do you rank Doom 2016 in the series?
It's certainly one of the best games I've played in a long time. Classic Doom will always be my favorite game, so it was never going to be better, but I'd say it got as close as it could possibly get. I have to admit I am not a big fan of Doom 3. I played through the game when it was new and I'll mostly remember it as a horror game considering the frequent ambushes. I've tried a few times in the last years to play through it, but it's just not a fun game today.
I wasn't expecting much from the difficulty, but I was pleasantly surprised. I can completely understand that game developers don't want to make a difficulty where nobody could beat the game even after months. Doom 2 was completed on Nightmare some five years after it was released. Final Doom's two episodes were beaten on nightmare by me 19 and 20 years after they were released, respectively. I spent about 300 hours on just practicing for The Plutonia Experiment even after having played it for many hours already on Ultra-Violence difficulty.
I think the biggest disappointment during [Doom 2016] for me was when I played the Dead Simple area and realized there wouldn't be any Arachnotrons, which is my favorite monster from the original. Also the Summoner didn't quite replace the Arch-Vile, but I can understand resurrecting the Arch-Vile in the new Doom might not be the best choice.
I will admit I haven't looked too much into SnapMap, while I am sure there has been some quality levels made there I feel that one important aspect for me, challenge, just isn't there, or at least it's hard to find. Other than that it was really the perfect game for me, the biggest positive surprise was definitely the music.
You've beaten Doom games virtually every way they can be beaten. What keeps the series exciting and fun?
It's always possible to bring the time lower, and in order to do so I need to take bigger risks or make fewer mistakes. There's also plenty of undone challenges in classic Doom; for example I would never be able to do something like Final Doom on Nightmare while grabbing all the secrets, though there are things that are difficult but not impossible. A fast-paced game with constant challenge is all I need.
