I don't understand the combination of these words: "great set of games", "masterpiece", "disappointing".
Do you guys get that there may be people who do not own the games already and maybe it's good for the site to offer the original games to them?

Are they Good Old Games? -Yes
Are they DRM-free? -Yes
Are they reasonably priced? -Yes
Are they packaged with DOSBox to easily install and play? -Yes
Is there new content created just for another release and more money -No

Since when are we upset that a release doesn't have extras or need to compare it to a Steam release?

I don't see anyone here being upset that the games are available, and I don't see anything wrong with hoping for more than just a simple redistribution of the wad. There is plenty of interesting things related to the development (concept art, level design notes, soundtrack variations, as mentioned above), which are less available unless you know where to look, and which would be ideal extras. Since GOG uses extras as a defining element in their marketing it wouldn't seem too far fetched to think out a scenario where the release was more than just a patched wad.

In all honesty, most people buying the Heretic / Hexen packs are doing so solely to have digital DRM-free copies of the games in case their 20+ year old CD versions rot away.

Thanks for all of the responses guys! I don't know when the forum stopped telling me that I HAD responses. :P

Good Point! I actually did not think of that. I suppose I was being selfish. I'm so used to GoG adopting community patches in the past, I don't know why they wouldn't reach out to GZdoom and the others to try to put together a snazzy package that everyone could be proud of. They've certainly done it dozens of times in the past, and people are more than happy to fork over their cash to get it.

I suppose I've become spoiled by GoG putting in the extra mile in the past, I hope that this isn't a sign of things to come.

I HEARTILY disagree with comparing them to Steam! STEAM made their start by putting a couple of hundred community unlocked abandonware games behind a paywall, then getting permission to host them after the fact. I know because I was one of the developers helping unlock those games back in the day. STEAM can go straight to hell. I've bought games from developers using the Steam platform.. but I have never once in my life caved in and paid Steam one single penny. As a matter of fact I am quite proud of the fact that I still have my Sign-up $5 bonus on the website, still unspent. :D

Dear God, not GZDoom, never ever GZDoom. It's painfully inaccurate when it comes to vanilla behaviour and as of the latest release it requires a 64-bit OS and a much stronger system then one might expect. GZDoom is all about keeping up with modern technologies, not being faithful to the original game and not concerned with portability/ accessabillity. And why are you willing to pay for the wad + GZdoom but not the wad exclusively when you mention you already have both? Why wouldn't you pay for the game, which isn't free, but for the source port, which is?

I mean, you can set GZdoom so it looks and behaves like the originals and you can basically pick your poison when it comes to the enhancements. Personally I go with fullHD resolution and a MIDI soundbank via FluidSynth but disabling all the filters, extra effects and all extraneous controls (jump function, etc depending on the title).

You actually can not. GZDoom behavior will always be different. Most of the time slightly, though.

Pick your engine or mods guys..the point is that GoG could have done SOMETHING to modernize the experience. better resolution / frame rates / audio, or maybe adding community supported features that most everybody enjoys. SOMETHING.

That's my point, really. GoG usually puts in the extra effort to make a game be as amazing as it can be. Here? Here they just threw up their hands at the plethora of community supported patches mods and engines and just said. "NAH."

I WUBS GoG and I wubs the Doom franchise. I was just expecting something special when the two hooked up, that's all.

From what I have seen, improvements such as 'better resolution, frame rates, audio' are not the norm. GOG generally includes more recent versions of DOSBox (compared to Steam) with tweaks to config files and widely-used community patches. It is not often that they implement their own developed solutions.

If you're going to say that 'they could have done SOMETHING to modernize the experience', you could also say that about so many other older releases here. There isn't a clear pattern leading to this expectation of yours.

As time goes on, the end-user often still has to make their own tweaks for older games despite whatever improvements are in place already. That is just a fact of life with PC gaming. It sounds nice and all, but you would have to be naïve to expect a storefront or publisher to do more than ensure the title still runs on OSes that haven't reached end-of-life.

Ask Night Dive to do it if you don't want to run it all under Crispy or something. Even then, it is my understanding that running nBlood is still better (accurate) than their Fresh Supply release.

All of this doesn't matter as much as modern storefronts not including Portal of Praevus and Heretic II. So for now, it's off to the seven seas if you are a newcomer who doesn't want to obediently wait for things to be resolved by Activision Blizzard and Microsoft.