What happens if you remove randomness from Doom?
For some reason, recently I have been thinking about Doom. This evening I was wanting to explore some behaviour in an old version of Doom and to do so, I hex-edited the binary and replaced the random number lookup table with static values.
Rather than consume system randomness, Doom has a fixed 256-value random number table from which numbers are pulled by aspects of the game logic. By replacing the whole table with a constant value, you essentially make the game entirely deterministic.
I guess, randomness makes AI more believable. Small, unpredictable variations, that force you to react and change your plan, instead of simply executing the best strategy over and over. But I wonder, how differently would Doom play, if it was built from ground up without the random gameplay elements? When I think of games, that deliberately avoid randomness, I'm thinking of platformers and shmups, that focus on high score, speed and memorization. Could be fun in an FPS too.