The New DOOM Thread (2016)

[Cadmus]

The shoulder mounted RPG is fucking annoying to me for some reason. The proper way to hold a rocket launcher should be the same like a machine gun. They shouldn't have made it an RPG but a Rocket Launcher like in Q3.

 

[Infinitron]

OtherSide Entertainment's producer/level designer on DOOM: https://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=1129.msg18688#msg18688

I cut me teeth on Doom. Its near and dear to my heart, as a player, and the gateway drug into game development. My first animation, creature and levels were all made in Doom.
I played the demo/beta and they did miss the boat, at least in multiplayer. They are Trying to ride the middle - they are not enough 'new shooter' and not enough 'old shooter' and stuck in the middle. They needed to commit one way or another.
There are some simple things that a Doom needs. Tons of enemies, crazy fast movement, simplicity in execution. Doom's fundamental was easy- speed. All things are fast. Enemies died fast, shot fast, and ran pretty fast. The marine is probably the fastest non- modded person in game history. Reload, shooting, exc all fast. You could spew rockets at like once every 100 ms. Crazy. There is no reload to keep things fast. No animations to do anything, to keep it fast. This was the hallmark of all Id games through Quake III. Speed speed speed.
Doom 3 they forgot this. Doom reboot...same thing. The Deathmatch was filled with constraints, only 2 weapons, some weapon kit mechanic outside of the game exc. All fine, but not Doom.
Honestly as a total id fanboi going back to those games...I was a bit sad.

Then I went and played Brutal Doom on nightmare with the Final Doom Wad and felt better.

This is what I'm hearing.
I'll be picking it up for single player...but I still hold to what I said about multiplayer...ooof.

edit--
Also, i was just watching a guy's let's play, and some of what they have done with the single player level design I need to look at more closely. Good use of z space, and how they make a single room a total jungle gym is pretty impressive.

 

[Perkel]

Oh wow. Doom 4 is cool now?

Quake 4
Doom (2016) is Quake 4 we never got imo.
Just seems like good FPS focus on PC rather than slow ass garbage cringe worthy walking sim with guns on console.

I wonder how multi will work over time. Will it gather enough community like other games or it will falter right after.

 

[shihonage]

I still need to finish Quake 4. It was a p.great FPS.

 

[Increasing]

Yeah, this game's action, movement and verticality in level design is way more 90s Quake than Doom. And that is a good thing.

This is what I'm hearing.
I'll be picking it up for single player...but I still hold to what I said about multiplayer...ooof.

edit--
Also, i was just watching a guy's let's play, and some of what they have done with the single player level design I need to look at more closely. Good use of z space, and how they make a single room a total jungle gym is pretty impressive.

He isn't the only experienced designer that expressed his admiration for Doom's level design, and I'm glad for that. Praise from people like him is important, especially in contrast with lukewarm pro review from something like IGN where author clearly doesn't have experience with classic PC FPS design.

 

[Infinitron]

^Hey JarlFrank, take a look at this guy's posting history.

 

[Astral Rag]

... where author clearly doesn't have experience with classic PC FPS design.

That's p funny coming from you.

 

[Space Insect]

Yeah, this game's action, movement and verticality in level design is way more 90s Quake than Doom. And that is a good thing.

This is what I'm hearing.
I'll be picking it up for single player...but I still hold to what I said about multiplayer...ooof.

edit--
Also, i was just watching a guy's let's play, and some of what they have done with the single player level design I need to look at more closely. Good use of z space, and how they make a single room a total jungle gym is pretty impressive.

He isn't the only experienced designer that expressed his admiration for Doom's level design, and I'm glad for that. Praise from people like him is important, especially in contrast with lukewarm pro review from something like IGN where author clearly doesn't have experience with classic PC FPS design.

I'm pretty sure you don't have any experience with classic PC FPS design with these retarded things you say.

 

[JarlFrank]

^Hey JarlFrank, take a look at this guy's posting history.

Oh boy, he's so full of chlorophyll that he produces enough oxygen for the entire Codex.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I still need to finish Quake 4. It was a p.great FPS.

May I offer you to save some time by considering Retro Gamer's recent reader's poll on which Quake game is the best:

Quake 1 44%
Quake 2 32%
Quake 3 24%
Quake 4 00%

 

[Shadenuat]

Watched 3-5 hours of streaming. Seemed like okay shooter (with 10/10 music however), but boring since there were like 3 enemies, or 5 enemies through whole game too (saw in the level designing tool). Levels didn't look that big, combat too difficult or surprising, enemies seemed too few, and too many melees and not enough projectile dodging.

First thought - games like Painkiller and Serious Sam already did more and better at moving "oldschool" shooters forward and excelling at old and new things.

 

[vortex]

Did anyone beat/tackle the hardest difficulty? It spits you like a chewing gum.

 

[---]

Yeah, it seems that some people already beated it at the highest difficult, can't find where I read this.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/05/16/doom-review-pc/

Wot I Think: DOOM (Singleplayer)

I feel sorry for the guys down the metaphorical hall, working on Fallout 4. There they are, stuck making Team Post-America with an ancient engine and the puppety, stilted shooting that seems to entail, and then, from the same stable, there’s DOOM. A new epitome of speed, motion and combat. The fastest gun-game in the West. Press V for VATS? No, press F to rip a demon’s head in half.

I never would have believed it, but DOOM is back.


Back as in really back: not just a name. Back as in fights which go on and on until you think you just can’t handle any more, but you do. Then you breathe and charge into another one. Back as in never stop moving. Not for a second. Back as in Hell.

I never would have believed it because screenshots looked so colourless, and chest-thumping about secrets and kill moves had me fearing triteness. That wasn’t DOOM, pure, clean, colourful, and precise. But this is DOOM. Or, at least, as close as I think anything I’ve played since to that chest-tightening feeling of mingled tension and exhilaration I had when first knee-deep in the dead in all those years ago. It’s a different game for modern control sensibilities, not a retro affair by any means – it recaptures the spirit rather than the actuality. And then goes to newer places with it to.

I’ll come back to good things later, but let’s get a few gripes out the way now. Quite a few of the enemies are dull brown things, and even the more interesting later ones (the vast majority pulled from the classic DOOM bestiary) are disappointingly desaturated and lumpy. This plays into DOOM’s generally pedestrian view of Hell, which I hope you’re not ridiculous enough to believe is a spoiler when discussing a DOOM game, which eschews free reign to be as weird as it likes in favour of rocky canyons, lava and bleached skull imagery.

The classic 80s metal aesthetic yes, and I appreciate there’s an appetite for that, but speaking purely visually DOOM never quite goes crazy – almost to the point where it feels as though the artists were making an entirely different, far less interesting game to what the frenzied, cackling bloodlords in the combat department were. I probably sound like a broken record from 1993 here, but man, a little more colour would have gone a long way.

Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter, because it feels so damn good, and in any case you’ll find your eyes scanning the scene at faster-than-light for specific sights and opportunities during the breathless dance of combat rather than ever worrying that the Cacodemons aren’t sufficiently Fisher Price red.

The other major gripe is that the focus on secrets and collectibles threatens to overwhelm the meat of the game. There were many occasions when I was impatient to get through some huge, impeccably-paced fight because I knew there was a pick-up hiding in a side-room, and if I didn’t find them all I wouldn’t be granted that extra upgrade point for a weapon alt-fire mode that I never used. The trouble is not that the secrets and collectibles are there, but that they’re slathered all over the UI and this creates an anxiety that they must be found, otherwise the experience is somehow incomplete.

Repeatedly hopping around the same four platforms to try and find wherever the hatch hiding another bobblehead is, which unlocks a piece of artwork I’ll never even look at, also kills the keen sense of urgency, that rocketfuel-for-blood which makes DOOM such a damn good time. But maybe that’s just me and my Skinner box: others may have stronger wills. Certainly, even the collectibles which upgrade your guns or other abilities can be found in sufficient quantities to succeed simply by playing normally. Speaking from hindsight, I kind of wish I’d just blasted through once then gone back again on Nightmare difficulty with the aim of finding everything.

Final, smaller gripe because pretending that I’m playing a Doom game for the storyline is completely absurd: the plot and characterisation is total bobbins. Often, it feels as though the narrative has been very wisely chopped right down to barebone so as to not interrupt the action or fake that this about anything more than killing lots and lots of monsters, which I am entirely on board with, but sometimes there are these odd longer sequences where it feels as though someone involved wasn’t quite prepared to kill their dull darlings.

Woven into the jerkily-paced ‘oh there’s this company mining energy from Hell and you’ll never guess what but…” plot are assorted suggestions of wider Doom mythos that links old and new games. It’s sweet to embrace the past like that, but I’m not sure the attempts to transform Doomguy into something more potent than Arnie In A Green Suit achieve much. Whatever the mythological intentions though, and whatever the sporadic interruptions from a quartet of other, more garrulous characters, the blessed reality is that our wordless hero has no time for anyone’s shit, and is only interested in constant, unrelenting shooting, with a side-order of rending. Yep, that’ll do.

I had been concerned, based on the first few hours, that the desaturated rabbit warren design of the initial levels bode poorly – I wanted to spend my time fighting, not traipsing back and forth looking for that one door or switch I hadn’t been through yet.

Fortunately, it turns out this was just a casualty of the earlier stages having comparatively few enemies (though still more than most of its contemporaries) and so preferring smaller rooms and corridors in which to house them. By around a third of the way in, DOOM’s cranked things up so much that the level design becomes more about vast, multi-tier arenas that you sprint, double-jump and plunge around as part of a beautiful, widescreen cat’n’mouse chase.

Only one where there are, like, 50 lions and tigers and jetpack-wearing panthers and one mouse with a selection of experimental weaponry. And that mouse can double-jump, mantling and perform infinitely long drops without injury, which it very much needs to be able to do because the maze it’s being chased around is now enormous.

One trick DOOM most overtly borrows from its noble forebear is to introduce you, earlyish on, to a huge foe that is far more monstrous and challenging than anything you’ve yet faced. The battle is tense and difficult, and you’re relieved when it’s over – a boss fight, basically.

Fast forward forty minutes and you’re routinely fighting three of whatever it was at once, with half a dozen Imps and a couple of Hellknights charging around too. Fast forward eight hours and OH MY GOD EVERYTHING. The idea that I felt threatened by a single Mancubus or Revenant simply seems laughable now. OK, maybe not quite Doom II at its most sadistic ‘everything’, but given that many of the enemies have a particular set of skills which makes them far more dangerous than their earliest incarnations, the challenge level is right up there.

As to what changed, it’s a combination of my own skill improving (you really do learn movement, weapon capabilities and enemy vulnerabilities on the job, through the natural course of play) and my weapons and hitpoints amping up hugely through assorted upgrades. I opted to bat away a suspicion that enemies are made slightly weaker later on in order to deal with the ever-growing hordes, but my character really was a death-machine by that point, plus ancient circle-strafing experience had awoken fully.

Coming out of DOOM, the world feels as though it’s in slow motion. It’s not as simple as the character’s rollerblading-at-an-ice-rink movement speed, but about how that enables double-jumps, clambering onto far ledges and dropping to the ground like a stone to get out of dodge for a heartbeat. The mantling, oddly, is one of the keys to it all: traversal from the high to the low and back again, but with a sense of physicality attached, rather than Mario-floatiness. Then there’s the melee system, aka Glory Kills, which enable you to insta-murder a temporarily stunned monster after you’ve unloaded enough lead or plasma into it. This yields health (and other stuff depending on upgrades), which means it becomes the game’s key survival technique rather than just a show-off effect.

Recharging health would kill the pace, scavenging for health packs would make you too vulnerable, so the solution is to make the act of killing also the act of recovery. It works beautifully, but even when a health top-up is not required, charging towards a blue-glowing demon then slamming F when you’re close enough that the glow turns golden is compulsive and thrilling. It’s the act of victory, and the gruesome animations make that very clear. It’s also a part of movement, as Glory Kills activated from a slight distance away drag you right over the beast, and if you find the upgrade which expands this range, it becomes an oddball but effective way of hopping around the arenas.

I had a whole host of notes stored in a draft version of this post, made after my first five or so hours with the game. I deleted them all, because they were essentially talking about a different game than the one I discuss above. There’s an argument to be made that DOOM has too slow a start – depending on how much you explore and secret-hunt, you might be looking at as much as eight hours of what is, essentially, a shooter a bit like the recent Wolfenstein sequels, but played at speed. The second half, which lasted me another good eight hours, is so different, but in a way I didn’t realise until I sat back and thought about my journey through Mars and hell. I’d learned so much. I thought differently. I moved differently. I played DOOM, not just a first-person shooter.

My drafted gripes were deleted because I realised only then that DOOM had been gradually training me – training for a frantic, kinetic way of play that simply is not the norm in today’s focus-tested, handheld shooters. It’s a great shame that its training wheels involve making cramped and dour maps for that first half, because even revisiting it on Nightmare or Ultra Nightmare, as I will, can’t solve that problem, but at least there’s freedom to choose levels once you’ve finished them.

I should also note that the game runs remarkably well given how high-tech (if dour) it looks – there were a few dips, but most of the time I was seeing the hallowed 60 at 2560×1440 and medium-high settings on a GTX 970. I didn’t feel I was missing out on any high-end effects and, most of all, it felt lightning fast throughout, although I wouldn’t argue that the new generation of id Tech powering it feels like a big leap forwards from what we saw in the last couple of Wolfenstein games.

Multiplayer and map-making I’ll be covering in a seperate feature, by the way: this was a surprisingly long campaign mode and I simply haven’t had time to look at the other options on the menu yet. So, for now, I’ll leave you with this: DOOM is the most satisfying singleplayer shooter I’ve played since Wolfenstein: The New Order, and easily eclipses it when it comes to movement and gunplay. The noisenik soundtrack and demon theme entirely disqualify it from any thinking person’s shooter accolades, but it does not want to be a thinking person’s shooter and nor do I want it to be one. It is a shooter. It is the shooter, returned.

Not a replacement for Doom the first, no, but, at last, a true companion to it, and if I am going to accuse it of intelligence, it is to say that it has clearly thought long and hard about what extrapolating Doom’s values to 2016 really means.

Propulsive, thrilling and breathless, DOOM is the triumph I never expected. I just can’t see there being a better shooter this year, I really can’t.

 

[Bubbles]

So it's officially the best shooter of the last 10+ years now?

 

[Somberlain]

from the same stable, there’s DOOM. A new epitome of speed, motion and combat. The fastest gun-game in the West. Press V for VATS? No, press F to rip a demon’s head in half.

I never would have believed it, but DOOM is back.


Back as in really back: not just a name.


Recharging health would kill the pace, scavenging for health packs would make you too vulnerable, so the solution is to make the act of killing also the act of recovery. It works beautifully, but even when a health top-up is not required, charging towards a blue-glowing demon then slamming F when you’re close enough that the glow turns golden is compulsive and thrilling.


I didn’t realise until I sat back and thought about my journey through Mars and hell. I’d learned so much. I thought differently. I moved differently. I played DOOM, not just a first-person shooter.


It is a shooter. It is the shooter, returned.

:1up:

 

[Increasing]

So it's officially the best shooter of the last 10+ years now?

Easily.


Also, so this is what you guys meant with those "plant" comments. As I've said, I wish my actual job was anything close to that. I should mention that giving insulting tag and avatar to user purely due to him disagreeing with the current hivemind consensus (and it is not like I am the only one who enjoys the game here) doesn't create a very flattering picture of your site.

 

[Space Insect]

So it's officially the best shooter of the last 10+ years now?

Easily.

Have you played any shooters beside D44M in the last 10 years?

 

[Increasing]

So it's officially the best shooter of the last 10+ years now?

Easily.

Have you played any shooters beside D44M in the last 10 years?

So what of worth was released in the last 10 years? Would you call CoDs, Killzones, Halos... better shooters than Doom? As an old school, PC-first shooter, Doom is the best one we got in a long time.

 

[Somberlain]

As an old school, PC-first shooter, Doom is the best one we got in a long time.

Heineken is the best wine I've had in a long time.

 

[Kingston]

Watched 3-5 hours of streaming. Seemed like okay shooter (with 10/10 music however)

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

How does it compare with nuWolfenstein? Is it better?

 

[Bubbles]

How does it compare with nuWolfenstein? Is it better?

By around a third of the way in, DOOM’s cranked things up so much that the level design becomes more about vast, multi-tier arenas that you sprint, double-jump and plunge around as part of a beautiful, widescreen cat’n’mouse chase.

Only one where there are, like, 50 lions and tigers and jetpack-wearing panthers and one mouse with a selection of experimental weaponry. And that mouse can double-jump, mantling and perform infinitely long drops without injury, which it very much needs to be able to do because the maze it’s being chased around is now enormous.

My drafted gripes were deleted because I realised only then that DOOM had been gradually training me – training for a frantic, kinetic way of play that simply is not the norm in today’s focus-tested, handheld shooters.

 

[Daedalos]

I guess Battlefield doesn't compare into the strictly "shooter" category, right?

Otherwise, Battlefield 3+4 would win along with SW: Battlefront. Easily.

 

[Bubbles]

I guess Battlefield doesn't compare into the strictly "shooter" category, right?

The Battlefield games were focus-grouped shooters. They even released "reaction videos" from participants. RPS is revealing that D44M doesn't seem to be focus grouped at all - it's just an immense labour of love.