Doom: The Golden Souls 3
A downloadable mod
-This mod was originally announced in 2019 and is still being developed-
-A TRUE COLLECT-A-THON ADVENTURE-
Explore giant colorful worlds while completing quests to obtain Golden Souls! You can fully explore the maps at your own pace, and even experience completed missions again!
--NEW SUIT, NEW ABILITIES!--
Doomguy's got a plethora of new abilities to overcome any kind of dangerous situation and travel through unusual lands:
He canclimb ledges,wall jump and evenlong jump now!
With all these abilities combined, you can easily dash through levels like a pro!
--AN ADVENTURE TAILOR-MADE FOR YOU--
Experience Golden Souls 3 with tons of different settings and difficulties!
Easy mode - 20% less enemy damage, Regenerating health, Falling into a pit makes you lose 10 coins.
Normal mode - Standard difficulty, Falling into a pit makes you lose 20 HP and 10 coins.
Hard mode - 20% more enemy damage, Legacy deathpits: Falling into a pit equals to instant death.
Yes, that's right, unless you play on Hard, there'll be no instant death pits!
--THE NEW CHECKPOINT SYSTEM--
Many checkpoints are scattered across the map, walking into a checkpoint flag will automatically save the game, and also act as a respawn point if you fall into a pit (Unless you are playing on Hard, where pits are instantly lethal)
You can also disable the autosave in the options of the mod.
This mod is NOT standalone, DOOM2.wad and Gzdoom are required to play!
| Status | In development |
| Category | Game mod |
| Rating | Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars (28 total ratings) |
| Author | Batandy |
| Tags | Doom,golden-souls,mario,mod,Singleplayer |
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Batandy, you are an incredible artist.
I specifically want to call out your brilliant use of sound effects and music. Everything fits so well and it's always fun when they're sounds and songs I recognize, like finding audio Easter eggs. I cannot overstate how good your ear for audio is. It's easy for people to underestimate the amount of work that goes into selecting all those sounds and music. You breathe new life into them with the way you implement them.
I didn't know you were also the genius behind Simon's Destiny until I saw your Itch profile, but when I saw it, it made perfect sense. If Konami had any sense, they'd pay you for making it and turn it into a full blown game. There is no justice until Simon's Destiny is available on all platforms! It should be a Switch 2 launch title!
I want to ask you if you have any plans to make a standalone game in the future. You should be making boat loads of money for your creative talents. It would be exciting to see what you could do with your own studio. I could see you publishing a game with Dunkey through BigMode. That would be amazing!
Golden Souls is a masterpiece. I would rather play Golden Souls than Doom Eternal. I'd support any game you put out.
Wishing you nothing but success.
P.S. I'm also a huge John Carpenter fan. How good was the Halloween 2018 soundtrack?
Cheers!
Thank you, I really appreciate it.
Sound design makes or breaks a game so I'm always very picky when it comes to both custom sounds and sounds taken from other sources.
I wanna make standalone gzdoom/games that are not on Gzdoom, eventually, but for now, I gotta think about wrapping this up, this is gonna be my swan song regarding Doom mods and I need to do it justice.
I'd argue that John Carpenter score for 2018, kills and ends was the only consistently great thing about those movies, their plot is all over the place!
Cheers!
Will there be an MBF21 version?. You really shouldn't need a GTX 760 'at minimum' to play Doom, regardless of how much more ambitious this mod is. I blame GZDoom for this, and an MBF21 version would allow for all the custom assets you'd want while making it playable on other, better source ports that are much less bloated. I hope you will consider this, if not for Golden Souls 3 then at least for a future mod or a re-release of the prior Golden Soul games.
Golden Souls 3 and to an extent 2 and 1 use a lot of features Gzdoom offers that other sourceports don't, and that's because Gzdoom is its own thing at this point, and it's so advanced that it can be used as a proper engine for indie games, it's miles ahead compared to every other sourceport in terms of what the developer can do, and I assure you that this project would not by any chance be possible on anything else.
A GTX 760 as a minimum requirement isn't so absurd, considering it's a 10 year old GPU at this point...
For a time GZDoom was uncontested, but for years now the developers have made it worse and worse and they show no signs of changing course. You do not find it disconcerting that Golden Souls 3 can run slower than 60fps?, on hardware released 20+ years after Doom's original launch?. The GTX 760 may be 10 years old, but it's still a lot newer than Doom itself, which ran on an Intel 486 with a few megabytes of ram. Golden Souls 3 shouldn't be so demanding, but it is.
I have been playing an MBF21 wad called "Ad Mortem", and it does a great job of providing a more custom experience while being playable on better engines, at far more than 60fps. I believe you can do a Golden Souls game that targets that specification as opposed to ZDoom, and still allow it to stand apart and show your talents as a game designer. Even if it's a one or two level demo, it would be cool to see!.
I'm sorry, I highly disagree.
The Doom comparison doesn't stand because Gzdoom isn't classic Doom anymore, it's a modern engine and has to be treated as such, a 760 can barely run anything nowadays, and so it can barely run Gzdoom like any other modern program or game, it's a ship of theseus situation, there's barely anything that resembles classic Doom code and rendering wise, and it's fair because atleast for me, making vanilla or classic Doom experiences is not what i'm looking for, I'm more into making new games with Doom as a base.
If a PC can't handle Gzdoom, it's not because it's bloated, it's because it's time to upgrade. In fact I'd say the only reason why there's a bit of bloat in the engine is because it has to keep a lot of legacy support not to break things with much older projects, VKDoom, a fork of Gzdoom, drops that and as a result has a much faster rendering pipeline, especially regarding shaders and dynamic lights.
I understand you're trying to defend your choice, but even a GTX 760 can run modern games that look better than Golden Souls 3 at around the same or even higher framerates. And those games also use bloated engines, no less. It's just that GZDoom has gotten so poor, it slows things down to a crawl, and the visual fidelity does not justify the added performance burden. You should not look at this with pride, it actively harms the enjoyability of your game and it means less people can play it.
Just take a look at this benchmark video for the GTX 760 in 2020. Even years after it's sell-by date, it can still play a lot of the newer titles at around the same speed as Golden Souls 3. But look at the difference in visual quality.
I don't think it's being regarded with pride so much as a simple matter of fact. Some people take more to building for optimization and potato machines, some don't. And given this has been built with GZDoom in mind from the ground up, that's likely how it'll stay.
At least GZDoom did finally add Vulkan and OpenGL ES renderers, which accommodates for some older machines. Sure, it'd beneat to get playable framerates out of this on something like an RK3566 chipset, but I'm not gonna hold my breath lol.
Is there anywhere specific I can follow you where you talk more about this project? I've been looking forward to it since the first announcement and demos, but haven't really heard much about it in probably 2 years or so, so I'm just wondering if there is anywhere online that you are more active where I can check out it's progress. Thank you for all your hard work! You really do put out some of the best stuff the DOOM community has ever seen.
If feasible, you should design and add a cyberpunk themed map using the former cyborg, cybernetic imp, cybernetic demon, cybernetic spectre, cybernetic lost soul, machine elemental, cybernetic hell knight, cybernetic baron of hell, cybernetic arachnotron, cybernetic revenant, cybernetic mancubus, cybernetic arch-vile, cybernetic cyberdemon mk. II, cybernetic spider mastermind, and terminator sprites from DRLA (Doom RogueLike Arsenal) if given the author's permission of course. You should also add some easter eggs for System Shock, System Shock 2, and other cyber styled games. This would also just be a cool idea for a small expansion pack if someone were to make addon content for Golden Souls 3.
Any chance of the Golden Souls series getting more vanilla-friendly versions in the future?. These are fine games, but I hate the GZDoom engine. It's incredibly bloated and way too hardware intensive. This game chugs despite running on a laptop with an Intel 13th gen i9 and an RTX 4070. Remember the "KISS" philosophy: "Keep It Simple, Stupid"
Sorry but it's not as simple as flipping a switch, making this work in multiplayer would be a huge if not impossible task. Besides Golden Souls has always been a singleplayer adventure, you can play it technically, but it's janky because it's not supposed to be played like that as many scripts only account for a single player.
I've been playing Demo2-hotfix2, and I had a great time with it.
The weapons are good stuff, I liked the tracers on the automatic rifle shots because they let you know how much spread the gun has. The Trumpet Launcher's projectiles seem to be much faster than in Golden Souls 2, which is a very nice change.
As for visuals and atmosphere, what can i say, it seems to only ever get better in the Golden Souls series. Which means a lot. I noticed loads of really nice looking 3D models. Many of the music tracks are comfy to the point of making me sentimental, and you made Doomguy downright precious.
But the action in your mod gets the adrenaline pumping as well. I had some quite frantic fights in Serenity Shrine's lava castle. The long jump and wall jump make the game more interesting and varied, and getting armour from gibbed enemies is a really cool addition. Non-lethal pits were honestly such a good choice, they let me be much more daring with exploration and I almost never quicksave anymore.
There were a few oddities concerning the progression inside levels, weapon behaviour and movement though. I wonder if it would be possible for me to talk to you about these mechanics in more detail. This is all very interesting to me as I'm trying to get into the game design field in general.
Regardless, I'm really happy that you're making this mod. Thanks, and best of luck to you!
Alright, here goes.
While going through the starting tutorial room, I read the sign saying that you can press jump and crouch at the same time for the long jump. But I still had to hold crouch for a very short moment to "activate" the long jump (0.3 seconds or so). This may not seem like a big deal, and I may only feel that this is strange since I was trying to long jump like in Half Life (where it's instant). But his resulted in me holding crouch for even longer to make sure I wouldn't mess up, and having to slow myself down annoyed me. I think it would be better to make the delay as small as possible, or even take it out completely. But maybe there is another reason for the mini-delay?
Concerning the weapon behaviour I noticed that vaulting over a ledge cancels all other actions/animations, such as reloading and charging a shot. This was strange to me because normally you're not allowed to switch away from the blaster without firing the shot you just charged, or switch away from the over-under shotgun before automatically reloading after firing both shells. It's useful for saving blaster ammo, but it seems unintended.
Now for the level progression. After exploring Windmill Acres i had 5 out of 6 souls, but couldn't get into the caco tower. Searching around for a way in did me no good, so i begrudgingly left the level and found out that I simply had to enter it again to progress, through the last mission option. This was unintuitive to me since I was able to find the first 5 souls without starting another mission. But I understand that it was probably designed like this because the last mission repopulates the level with cacos to fight before getting to the tower.
Something similar happened in Serenity Shrine. I explored the whole level, but still had to re-enter through the specific mission options in order for Wantopus to spawn the soul and open the gate. I get that this is probably a good way to give players some pointers for where to go. But it makes me feel like exploring the level on my own is pointless since I'm forced to let the game lead me to these secrets again anyway before I can collect them. Maybe there could be some sort of way to include Wantopus leading the way in the "first" mission? Or better yet, let the player collect the secrets on their own and have Wantopus as a backup plan if they don't find it by themselves?
Trying to explain these thoughts in written form is probably not ideal, but I hope they are understandable nonetheless. I look forward to your opinion on them, so until then.
Alright, thank you very much.
To answer the first point, I'm aware of that, in fact wrote an updated version of the tutorial that better explained that you have to crouch first and then jump, but for some reason it reverted to the old one (I probably forgot to replace the graphic while publishing hotfix version 2)
That said the actual tutorial of the game will better explain the long jump and also provide a proper learning curve for the player so that once they reach the first level they're already comfortable with the action, it's very comfortable to use it's just that, I didn't do a proper job of explaining it in the demo and it's my fault for that.
And yes not having a small delay did generate some issues especially when longjumping in narrow spaces.
I could update the demo but to be fair my dev version and the demo version differ so much now that it would be a pain to go back and fix some of the bugs that I noticed (including that the last soul in Serenity Shrine doesn't despawn if you exit the level without collecting it, which is kind of a big bug but it's already fixed in dev version).
Second point, it wasn't intended at first but I don't mind it so it's there, I have no interest in fixing something that doesn't really affect the experience, if anything it might be useful for speedrunners and people that wanna do specific runs and might wanna exploit some of the mechanics, I'm all for that.
I understand the confusion about the last point, which is why if you collect a golden soul in the level it tells you the exact number of souls you can still collect, if there's any, that's a clear indicator of how much stuff there is in the level from the mission you selected. Unfortunately I can't make it so the level automatically transitions to the stages that actually change elements as it would be a real nightmare for me to implement dynamically, not only that but some future stages will also probably change the layout per mission and that would be an absolute nightmare to seamlessly transition, so I guess i'm taking the old fashioned SM64 route where for some missions you will have to re-enter the stage.
Yeah, if the long jump delay is there to prevent other issues then it's of course a good thing.
And the vaulting animation cancel doesn't happen much during combat, so like you said, it's not a big problem.
Now that you mentioned that golden soul indicator, I remember seeing it after collecting each soul, but at the time I just wanted to keep playing and quickly clicked it away. Then I briefly thought "Hey, did that just say 4/5? Earlier I read that the level has 6 souls." Apparently I just didn't get the hint right, and then assumed I had misread the counter.
Can't wait to check out those changing level layouts, sounds quite interesting!
It's nice to get a bit of insight into these aspects. Smooth sailing to you.
