Doom‘s visuals have a timeless quality to them, and the latest version of graphical overhaul mod Beautiful Doom gives them a nice lick of paint, without hurting the original charm.
Version 7.0 of Beautiful Doom was posted on ModDB this week, along with a list of all the changes and updates. The mod enhances everything, weapons, enemies, and environments, revamping the UI, and adding new textures, sounds, and effects that help the flow and immersion of the FPS game. This includes visible chunks when you blow a monster apart, which have now been increased, and a blood red mist in the air after each kill. You can select between having pools of blood under bodies or not, depending on your gore tolerance.
The minigun, assault rifle, rocket launcher, and plasma rifle have been tweaked, and each weapon has three variants – modern, enhanced, and vanilla – you can use. Whichever mode you choose, enemies like the Cyberdemon follow suit. A button has been added to bring up the information and stats on the modded weapons. Mouselook is available, giving you that sweet Y-axis for aiming and movement.
Beautiful Doom is “the grandfather of total enhancement mods”, having been in the works from creator Jekyll Grim Payne since 2008. You’ll need GZDoom to run it, and you can find a full installation guide here. In comments, Jekyll generally advises to “load another mod last (so, after Beautiful Doom in the load order)” if you’re running multiple mods.
Here’s a video of it in action:
Another Doom modder remade a NES Castlevania using GZDoom, and if you’ve ever wondered, you could potentially run the old game on 16 billion crabs. Here’s Doom if it came out in the eighties, if you’d rather wind back the clock.