Something's been bugging me, so I'm going to let some smoke out.
I'm relatively new to Doom, and even newer to community made content. One thing I keep seeing over and over is how just how SO far Doom mapmaking has come since the dreadful 90's. We just know so much better now than we did back then. Even the people who will recommend you 90's wads will do so with a castrated attitude, "Yeah, y-you should t-try this, i-it's not as good as what we have today, b-but it was good for a 90's wad."
So after perusing opinions around the web I decide to try the highly touted "Ancient Aliens" WAD, a recent megawad that people claimed was one of the best creations to come out of 2016. Naturally, I decided to give it a shot, after all, this WAD was the culmination of over 24 years of map design, something that would make me look upon 90's creations and never be able to touch them again. Except, it wasn't that great, no, not at all. Now, don't get me wrong, it wasn't the worst thing I've ever played, but it wasn't some transcendent masterpiece that brought together the collective knowledge of level design and monster placement. A lot of the encounter design is literally just lazy monster spam, or slaughter, as it seems to be called. I wish I was just oversimplifying things, but that is honestly all a very large portion of it was. No, impeccable monster placement, no constrictive map design to complement the monster's attacks, just a lazy, giant arena that's only difficulty comes from the numbers of monsters. The last 2 levels (not the 'thanks for playing' level) in particular were complete and utter dogshit. One of my friends watched me playing The Floating Arena map and remarked that he was no longer interested in trying out Doom mods after seeing that.
Now I'm not saying it was all bad, I'm just saying that if this is the best of what modern WADs have to offer then I don't buy for a second that 90's WADs have been rendered obsolete. I remember, after having beaten Ancient Aliens, vividly thinking, "THIS is what has supposedly made early WADs obsolete? THIS is the kind of thing that makes people prostrate themselves when recommending old WADs? THIS is what people have learned about encounter design after all these years? THIS?!"
Maybe I missed something, but I've played Memento Mori as well, and I honestly enjoyed it more and would easily play it again over Ancient Aliens. It has its own duds as well, but not near as bad as Ancient Aliens, but according to what I've read over various Doom communities this shouldn't be the case. The really old stuff is supposed to be obsolete.
Maybe it's just my limited experience, maybe Memento Mori is exceptionally good for its time, maybe Ancient Aliens is just an exception for its time as well, but I didn't play a map near as well thought out as Speed, a 90's map, from Plutonia. Speed gives me every bit as trouble as anything from Ancient Aliens, but it does so without spamming a ludicrous amount of monsters at me.
That's my ramble. I imagine most of you have been around Doom longer than I have, so you might possibly know if I'm just not getting it, or maybe my suspicions that the phrase, "this would have been hard in the 90's", is a code way of saying, "not full of lazy slaughtershit."