You’ll want to go into the options and setup your controls etc to your liking. Once you’ve done that, hit launch and GZdoom should start-up, along with any mods etc. wads you want to use and then whatever map. This is found in your GZdoom folder and will allow dynamic lights to work (glow around lamps, imp fireballs etc).

Under source port make sure GZdoom is selected and Doom 2 is selected under IWAD. Setup is simple, just click on the add buttons and point it to the gzdoom.exe and your doom2.wad respectively. Setting Up:įire up ZDL and click on the settings tab. It essentially allows you to switch out maps and mods in a quick and easy way.Īgain just extract the archive into a folder that is convenient. ZDL is a simple little program that will allow you to easily load up your IWADs and PWADs in whatever order you need. Installing it is just a simple matter of extracting the archive to wherever it is convenient. It’s very customisable and will work with just about any Doom mod you throw at it. GZdoom just seems to be the most compatible and stable platform to run Doom 2 mods. These will be things like Maps, campaigns and other game changing mods. PWADs are the additional WAD files that are loaded after the IWAD.

You’ll need to buy the games or get them some other way if you want to use these but DOOM2.WAD will allow you to play the majority of Doom mods that are out there. Other common WADs are Doom 1 (doom.wad), Hexen (hexen.wad), Heretic (heretic.wad) etc.

You can leave it there or put it somewhere more convenient, it doesn’t really matter. If you’ve bought Doom through Steam this can be found in the “base” directory in the install folder. You will need at least DOOM2.WAD in order to actually play the game. There’s a wide range of source ports and various methods to make loading up Doom 2, custom Doom maps and mods a fairly pain-free experience and I’ll detail my favorite way in this post. It’s success is largely thanks to id Software’s (sadly now defunct) policy of releasing the source code to their older titles and the continued support that this has allowed from fans, in the game’s twenty plus years of existence. Doom 2 is the best game that has ever been released.

Brutal doom compatible wads