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[Grim Portent]

I might be in a minority here, but I would've been more interested in seeing Rowboat Girlyman employ his famous skills in organisation and strategy

To do what though?

The Imperium is basically using the most optimal strategies given it's logistics and resources, with humans being more expendable than lasguns, it's organisation was already designed by Guilliman during the Scouring, it's at the limits of a lot of it's technology and has a limited capacity to expand or modify its internal organisation without losing massive amounts of territory while productivity is disrupted.

Oh, and half the Imperium has been cut off by a giant warp storm, so the Imperium is in the worst state it's been in since the Heresy. There's not much room for altering the way they handle paperwork in the schedule of constantly fending off hostiles and processing military requirements.

The only things that really can be done to improve their situation are technological advances, which are outside Guilliman's field of expertise and vassalizing some of the less hostile xenos to use as cannon fodder and special forces, maybe letting Beastmen and mutants join the army again to take advantage of their physical advantages.

[Radio Controlled]

Inefficiency and choking bureaucracy are one of the hallmarks of the Imperium, lots of room to improve there. And if they did have to advance the tech, again I would've preferred something else than Space Marines getting some love (though that still might happen of course). Or for the marines 2.0 to look more different than the old ones, they seem a little bit like 'marines +1' right now. Still cool, but I think they could stand to push the envelope more.

[MrRoboto75]

People really hated this one feature that dramatically enhanced the atmosphere of the game, enh?

Atmosphere so great you can't even see it.

75% of the time the game's just pitch black for the sake of being dark, the rest of time it might be concealing an item or two, or a single enemy that you easily kill with the most unsatisfying guns in history.

The darkness doesn't make the game tense, and it doesn't make it scary.  It just slows the game down into tedium.  Either you juggle a worthless weapon around to perform basic FPS functions, or you blindly grope the game to get what you need.

[pisskop]

Yes, because its not like monsters made of fire that teleport in surrounded by fire throwing even more fire can be seen without a torch.



I think its somewhat ironic that the imperium is 'divided in two' when secundus-man is around.  He's on the wrong end of the galaxy if you ask me.
  I get that theyre threatening another 'age of darkness'  to come about, and that would be neat if I thought theyd do it.

[nenjin]

Spoiler: Not 40k (click to show/hide)

Well, it's up to you, but it seems kind of silly to complain it's too easy and refuse to turn the difficulty up. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd argue that it does change the experience, because, it's, well, harder. You have to play better and more strategically if you want to win.

But to be honest thank fuck NuDoom isn't like Doom 3. D3 had, as much as I hate the term, artificial difficulty with being able to hold the light or a gun. It was awkward and stupid, and the entire game was just kind of dull, with constant monster closets and unsatisfying weapons.

Yeah, the new Doom plays a lot smoother and faster. That's kind of the point, really. Doom has always been about being a lone badass ripping and tearing his way through the legions of hell.

If a game requires me to up the difficulty so I don't feel like I'm being pandered to, that's generally a problem for me. Some games, like Skyrim, get away with it because difficulty doesn't cut to the core of the game, there's so much more going on than just how hard it is to fight guys. NuDOOM doesn't have a real exploration, quests, an explorable story, gear or any of that crap. Difficulty is essentially all it has. And if the difficulty isn't satisfying without dialing it up (I'm not the kind of gamer that typically starts games on Hard Mode), where else do you turn to in the game for satisfaction? The exploration is decent but only because they're being extra sneaky with the collectibles, which the automap does a fine job of making sure you can't miss. The visuals are there, except all the daemons look like shit IMO, going from D3's bleeding edge, "realism" textures to these rather low-fi cartoony looking demons that sometimes look cell shaded. Seriously, WTF are the Possessed supposed to be? Because it looks like Thin Man with bubblegum colored skin and an anus for a face.

To me, Doom has never been "Be a huge bad ass sprinting through the levels at warp speed to heavy metal." That came about after D2 was thoroughly modded and people no longer explored Doom levels as they did tore them to shreds.

For me, Doom was always about being outnumbered, outgunned and without a friend to turn to in a world that's going to hell. That's what made your victories special. That and the levels of D2 actually felt like hell was creeping in. D3 almost got this right (there were some incredibly nice visual effects at play), there was just too much obsession with tech and jump scares based on pitch blackness that the illusion didn't hold up. NuDOOM, on the other hand, misinterprets the original Doom experience going the other direction, by trying to make the game so killy and your character such an over the top badass that it's more of a parody of Doom than anything else. Yeah yeah I get it, Doom Marine is the Anti-Hero's Anti-Hero. That's smile inducing at the most, it doesn't really make the game for me like I know it has for some people.

I'll give the game a few more levels before I decide whether I need it harder. But I spent a few hours last night taking apart the first few levels and just felt....like the game is trying too hard to make me feel speshul. In D2 I remember always feeling like I needed a better gun half the game, even with the Shotgun and Minigun. In the first few hours of D3 I'm getting guns I don't even feel compelled to use because I can literally sit back and snipe with the starting pistol while side strafing pretty much everything to my heart's content. And if I need to actually kill something quickly, why I have infinite grenades and an explosive shotgun grenade launcher with ammo in every single room, and execution ammo drops to boot, to rely on before I even need to pull out the assault rifle or plasma rifle.

I dunno. I can see why people praised NuDOOM for being different, I'm just not sure it was the right kind of different. More like "what's a very surface level approach we can take with Doom to get it "back to basics" after D3."

The darkness doesn't make the game tense, and it doesn't make it scary.  It just slows the game down into tedium.  Either you juggle a worthless weapon around to perform basic FPS functions, or you blindly grope the game to get what you need.

I used to feel this way about D3. But in subsequent playthroughs, with the flashlight mod, I found the game to be a much better experience once my expectations were aligned with it being a slow, atmospheric horror shooter than that "Doom."

The only thing that continually wrecked D3 for me was the entirely predictable enemy spawn patterns. Nothing nothing nothing for room after room, then BAM, jump scare, 3 teleporting imps, one always directly behind you and maybe some other BS, maybe not. Original Doom had levels full of pre-plotted guys already in existence. You heard them, they spooked you, you edged in to an area, tripped a switch, and then 5x as many guys as the placed spawns showed up, from behind walls or teleported in or W/E. D3, there was next to none of that. Levels felt empty until you actually stepped in to a spawn area and THEN all hell breaks loose.

[Dorsidwarf]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I felt that Doom3 was deeply unsatisfying on every level myself, and felt that the sleek flow of Doom 4 was just more fun and engaging in almost all regards(WEAK ENEMIES FLASH being the exception , yuck), escpecially on higher difficulties

[nenjin]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Fair enough, like I said, NuDOOM is so slick it almost hurts. But my immersion suffers. Doom 3, if you weren't completely pissed off by those elements, was an immersive experience that better design could have made magical. But it was coming in late to the whole SP FPS modern design, so by the time it released all its audio logs, the way you're directed by unseen narrators all the time and shit like that felt very tepid and safe. It went totally purist on the "game" side of things because it thought the aesthetics would make up the difference...and it didn't.

Still right now, D3 seems like a serious game to me compared to NuDOOM. And which you prefer probably comes down to what kind of gamer you are. Frankly, the high-speed nonstop action twitch obsessed RAR RAR RAR NEVER STOP MOVING gameplay to me is a turn off. Because the game feels kind of vacuous once those moments end. (Simliarly, I imagine, to that feeling in D3 when shit is happening and it seems super epic and intense....only to learn it's three imps teleporting into a dark room AGAIN.)

[pisskop]

Doom4 is the Duke nukem 3d of doom
D4 is to the doom franchise what Skyrim is to Morrowind and ES

[Grim Portent]

Inefficiency and choking bureaucracy are one of the hallmarks of the Imperium, lots of room to improve there. And if they did have to advance the tech, again I would've preferred something else than Space Marines getting some love (though that still might happen of course). Or for the marines 2.0 to look more different than the old ones, they seem a little bit like 'marines +1' right now. Still cool, but I think they could stand to push the envelope more.

The bureaucracy is not actually inefficient or choking, it's just huge, and mistakes get made when dealing with things on that scale. The average planet's non-local paperwork consists of a rough census, psyker records, planetary tithes and military matters that go through Administratum channels. But all that paperwork is being handled by a couple of dozen people, a bunch of servitors and servo skulls, and that's about it. If your planet is important you get thousands or millions of people trying to process your paperwork, but it's a monumental and unending task just to keep track of taxes and who lives where.

Even just getting paperwork to an Administratum center can take decades or centuries because warp travel is so unreliable. By the time a clerk actually gets to see how many people live on Hydrosia Minor in M34 887 it's likely some other clerk has already processed their census information from M35 352. Some planets don't even send such information for centuries because no one bothers to come collect it. The average Feudal/Feral World has so little of value it can be ignored until someone needs a new regiment of horse riding primitives.

Without improving warp transit reliability and time how do you really do anything about that? Reduce the paperwork involved in taxes? Not feasible nor desirable. Stop having a census? Then psykers and who knows what else will more often go ignored.

Of course reducing internal struggles in the Administratum would be helpful, since they destroy or displace paperwork and result in dead clerks, but those are rare and don't usually occur on a meaningful scale.

[Radio Controlled]

Lexicanum begs to differ:

Billions of Administratum officials on Terra and throughout the galaxy are constantly carrying out population censuses, working out tithes, recording and archiving information, and the million other things that are necessary for the running of the Imperium. Such is its immense size and complex bureaucracy that whole Administratum departments have been lost and forgotten. So dogmatically bureaucratic, whole departments of adepts continue to diligently but purposelessly carry out the role their department was founded for, even after the department has become long obsolete.

Of all the Imperium's divisions, the Administratum is regarded as the least prestigious, but its high ranking members are among the most powerful men in the Imperium. Despite its massive inefficiency, the Administratum is so integral to the running of the Imperium, that without it, the whole Imperium would grind to a halt.

(Emphasis mine.)

This is corroborated by the wikia 40K wiki. Some choice quotes:

Such is its immense size, that whole departments of the Administratum have been submerged by a sea of complex bureaucracy, becoming lost in loops of paper trails. Other departments have continued to dogmatically operate and carry out their founding function, even if the intent and requirement behind them no longer exists.

[...]

The main resource the Administratum controls, and which the Inquisition often requires access to, is information. It is said that nothing occurs in the Imperium that is not at some point recorded by an Administratum scribe, catalogued, filed, copied in quadruplet, processed in one of the Adeptus' vast datamills and, perhaps many centuries later, archived. Each phase in this process might take solar months, even standard years to accomplish, dependent upon the perceived relevance of the information. Unfortunately, the individuals that determine the relevance do so entirely according to their own set of values, often more concerned with the niceties of data-retrieval systems than with any external consideration. Thus, an incorrectly phrased request for military aid might be returned to its sender to be completed again, while that sender's entire world falls to alien invasion in the meantime.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

There's really no difference between size and inefficiency in this regard.

[Grim Portent]

Those are problems of scale more than efficiency. The former is an issue that arises from the departments carrying out their tasks until told to stop by a higher up, who will probably never hear of the obsoletion of the department's purpose (chances are neither will the department depending on what kind they are) because they have a huge backlog of paperwork to deal with, and the latter is just part of how the feudal delegation system of the Imperium works, each person rules their specific chunk the way they want, even in the Administratum, so overseer clerks wind up able to have people killed for not doing things the way they want, and it's too big to centralise it with any ease or efficiency since orders from above can't always make it through on time, if at all.

How exactly would you reform this system anyway? It's hard enough to send a message from one system to another for everyday purposes, trying to restructure a deliberately decentralised system via Astropathic communications and courier ships in order to conform to a centrally defined standard would be nigh impossible and probably result in the loss of dozens or hundreds of planets as paperwork is lost or mishandled during the process as different areas updated at different speeds or according to incorrect orders passed down. The time and effort it would take would possibly even kill the Imperium as a whole.

The idea is explored in Death of Antagonis, with a manufactorum that mostly makes junk, machine parts that no one remembers the use for and that it just throws onto a big garbage heap. People literally work to death making scrap in this place, but it also makes bolt shells for the Astartes, and without it Chapter's would suffer supply issues and be unable to properly fight their wars. It would take months or years to properly review and refit the factory, and in that time the local Astartes Chapters would be impaired, and because of the delays inherent in warp travel for supply shipments, human error in arranging shipments, mistakes in what gets shipped and so on it could take decades or centuries to make up the deficit of equipment. During this period how many planets would die? Would it be possible to pull out of the death spiral it could cause?

There's really no difference between size and inefficiency in this regard.

It would help if the Emperor's webway project had succeeded. It only taking a few days to transfer paperwork from one side of the galaxy to the other with no risk of it being eaten by daemons would be a massive boon to record keeping. As is anything that gets so much as transferred via Astropath might as well be fed into a shredder, half of it set on fire and the remains glued together to form a document.

[Neonivek]

To me it isn't that the Imperium or even the Emperor isn't interested in reforming the Imperium...

Soooo much that it isn't happening without a civil war (not that they aren't ALREADY suffering constant civil wars... but this would be a bigger one) and they are currently in a war with several galactic destroying super powers... Sooo might want to hold off.

[GiglameshDespair]

Trying to reform it would be the work of generations. Huge, huge amounts of effort would be needed, if it's even possible to fix. Sometimes when the choice is between a sort-of working system and a not-working-while-you-fix-it system you need to just be able to grin and bear the inefficiency.

There's really no difference between size and inefficiency in this regard.

It would help if the Emperor's webway project had succeeded. It only taking a few days to transfer paperwork from one side of the galaxy to the other with no risk of it being eaten by daemons would be a massive boon to record keeping. As is anything that gets so much as transferred via Astropath might as well be fed into a shredder, half of it set on fire and the remains glued together to form a document.

Everything would be so much better, right up until it got sabotaged by the Navigator Guilds.

To me it isn't that the Imperium or even the Emperor isn't interested in reforming the Imperium...

It is pretty difficult to hold discussions on reform when you're dead, it's true.

[Neonivek]

Wait did the new version actually let the Emperor die and he isn't a Lich?