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[SalmonGod]

Going to jump on the lacking-Doom-feels train.

While it's a huge step up from Doom 3, which was an incredible disappointment for me, it still doesn't do the original justice.  In my opinion, the gameplay looks good.  Nothing terribly impressive, but fun.  The executions are stylistically awesome, but I also worry about repetitiveness.

My complaint is with the art direction.  The original Doom games had some of the most distinct art direction of any game ever.  It had so much goddamn character.  The impression that you were in this place that was being slowly assimilated into a maddening hellscape was so goddamn convincing, and the demons were absolutely top notch creature design.  Each was very convincingly demonic and unique, and had an instantly recognizable silhouette and color scheme.

I don't understand why they insist on trashing those incredibly creative and iconic classic designs.  Update the old ones and make some new ones.  Don't make something that doesn't look anything like a Cacodemon and call it a Cacodemon.  It just doesn't make any sense.

And while this is again much better than Doom 3, it still suffers from what a couple others have already mentioned that seems to plague both games.  The designs lack character so hard, that it's difficult to even tell them apart.  So many plain humanoid forms that can only be distinguished by size and exoskeletal details that can't even be made out clearly in the middle of the action.  It's some seriously fucking lazy shit.  And if you showed me these designs without any prior knowledge or hint that they're supposed to be related to Doom, I seriously wouldn't be able to guess that they're Doom monsters, or even be certain that they're supposed to be demons.  Even the Cyberdemon looks like it belongs more in a Blizzard game than an Id game.  I swear that if I didn't see so many references to the Cyberdemon in comment sections, I would not have guessed that's what the thing even was.  They're the sort of designs I'd expect to see in a sketch thread on ZBrushCentral.  Not professional designs intended to succeed some of the most prestigious game artwork ever.

Classic Doom's gameplay was incredibly well-balanced and groundbreaking for its time, but ultimately not unique.  It's the art that made Doom so memorable, and if they can't ever match that style again, it will never truly be a Doom game to me.

So yeah... I have no hope left that a true Doom successor will ever happen, except from the efforts of fans

Spoiler: Like myself... (click to show/hide)

I did this years ago, but I've fantasized for a while now about putting out a full set of models to be used in a faithful translation of classic Doom into 3d.
I put serious thought into how I could add to the character of the creature without fundamentally deviating from the original design, and decided that the Cacodemon looks to me like a floating mass of guts with a face.  I'm by no means a world-class artist and designer, but this is the mentality I wish they would have in their design approach.


Or, for something less self-promotional, this classic teaser concept art for Doom 3 that had every hyped up before the game was fully revealed.  This is fucking perfect.  WHY WAS IT NEVER ACTUALLY USED.


Where are my eldritch bovidae motifs with cold, menacing eyes that glare at me like I'm an insignificant annoyance???

[Parsely]

Yeah, I'm not impressed. I don't need to bathe and wade in the gore of my fallen enemies, and if they really wanted to take another peg at the whole brown/gray thing (remember RAGE?), well, count me disappointed.

Doom is about bathing in the guts of your enemies though. And when it comes to the palette, I don't think things have improved much since the classic game:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Do we really want bright, oversaturated colors in a Doom game...? o_O

-snip-

The Doom 4 cacodemon in the screenshot I linked looks an awful lot like the classic cacodemon, but less oppressively red. They brought back the big fat stompy dude as well, he's at the end of the second gameplay trailer when they tease the BFG. So that's two classic guys faithfully recreated, and then they had the floaty cyberdemon. He was original AFAIK.

[Spehss _]

(Talk about other DOOM games in general is also encouraged)

So it looks like we've reached a general consensus on Doom 4 not being quite as doomy as we'd all like.

Anyone wanna talk about other doom stuff? cool gameplay wads, level packs, not-doom-4-stuff?

Brutal Doom seems popular here. Has anyone tried Demonsteele?

Spoiler: quick description (click to show/hide)

It's crazy fast doom fun and uniquely different from Brutal Doom. You can hit shots out of the air with your sword. You run fast. The more demons you kill with your sword the stronger your sword is, so that you can cut barons of hell in two with one slice at max power. It becomes a frantic frenzy of running from room to demon filled room, killing as many as fast as possible so you reach as high a level as possible. It's like you're playing as a blender.

Here's a trailer. It explains better than I do. It's an awesome mod with tons of potential for fun and skill and I think it doesn't get nearly as much attention as Brutal Doom. It totally deserves attention.

@GUNIN:

Ye olde Doom totally has a brighter and more colorful palette than new Doom. New Doom appears to be running the "brown is reelism" trope for coloring. Everything blends into an indistinct blur of brown with that scheme. Even Hell is brown.

[SalmonGod]

Brutal Doom seems popular here. Has anyone tried Demonsteele?

Spoiler: quick description (click to show/hide)

It's crazy fast doom fun and uniquely different from Brutal Doom. You can hit shots out of the air with your sword. You run fast. The more demons you kill with your sword the stronger your sword is, so that you can cut barons of hell in two with one slice at max power. It becomes a frantic frenzy of running from room to demon filled room, killing as many as fast as possible so you reach as high a level as possible. It's like you're playing as a blender.

Here's a trailer. It explains better than I do. It's an awesome mod with tons of potential for fun and skill and I think it doesn't get nearly as much attention as Brutal Doom. It totally deserves attention.

Through your link, I found this.

[Spehss _]

Through your link, I found this.

Oh yeah, I watched some of that before. If you liked watching him play bad wads you may like watching him play bad wads and eating fermented peppers every time he dies. He dies alot.

Apparently the dev is making a second character for Demonsteele that plays much differently from the first. This character appears to be a cyborg who stuns enemies with an electric palm and has lots of gun based gameplay. Less sword blenders, more running and gunnin and electric kung fu. Best "Doom mod that isn't Brutal Doom" of 20XX.

[Virtz]

Didn't demonsteele win a cacoward for best gameplay? Like it's not exactly lacking in awareness among the doom community. I think a bigger hindrance to its popularity might be the anime influences.

[Spehss _]

Didn't demonsteele win a cacoward for best gameplay? Like it's not exactly lacking in awareness among the doom community. I think a bigger hindrance to its popularity might be the anime influences.

I had no idea but apparently it did. I just brought it up since I've seen lots of mention on Bay12 of Brutal Doom but nothing for Demonsteele.

Uh. Feel free to talk about other doom stuff if you want, dudes. I thought I could get non-Doom 4 conversation started.

[Gunner-Chan]

I found out about demonsteele through here actually.

Another cool doom thing is doomRPG plus the doomrl arsenal. I think blaze posted some screenshots of that some time ago, it's really nice if a bit overcomplicated at times.

[Spehss _]

I found out about demonsteele through here actually.

Another cool doom thing is doomRPG plus the doomrl arsenal. I think blaze posted some screenshots of that some time ago, it's really nice if a bit overcomplicated at times.

Doomrl arsenal is fun. Toooooons of weapons and items and crap though. Kinda good, kinda bad. I never had to mess with inventory management in Doom until I tried that mod. Still lots of cool options for killing demons and it's fun to find what a new weapon does.

[Gunner-Chan]

I really feel it's at it's best when you're playing larger more difficult maps, PLUS adding the monster pack. Monster pack makes it great.

[Hawkfrost]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That honestly looks like a big wave of paint just washed through the level, or a match of Splatoon just finished and the winning color was brown.

Do we really want bright, oversaturated colors in a Doom game...? o_O

Considering that the first two games made good use of color to both set atmosphere and assist in gameplay, I would say yes.
It's the reason why Doom 1 still looks better than Blood, despite the latter being technically more accomplished and advanced.

At the end of the day, it's a game series about space marines in the future fighting against demons spilling out of hell; why about that really screams "needs realism"? It's goofy by premise alone. The Doom 3 path of trying to make the series all gritty and dark was, in my opinion, a bad decision.

[itisnotlogical]

To be honest: speaking purely about the runny-shooty parts, I think Doom 3 was actually pretty good. It was pretty standard, but there's nothing wrong with that. Where it falls flat is all the fucking audio logs and environment puzzles. Once you get into the later parts of the game where those are much less prevalent, it starts to actually feel like a Doom game, albeit one that's suspiciously similar to Quake 2. However, a sickeningly large portion of the game is spent on the "Fight two generic zombies, cutscene, get code from audio log, repeat" formula, which is why Doom 3 sucks IMO.

[Mech#4]

I did enjoy Doom III as an action/horror even though the horror is mostly daemons leaping out from behind doors. The environments were nicely done and pacing was alright, though I do wish enemy count was a bit higher in some areas.

The part I didn't like was the weapon sound effects. The pistol made a soft paff noise and the shotgun a light clinking. It really didn't sound as hefty as I would've liked.

[nenjin]

I didn't really enjoy D3's environments. The Space Lab sections go on way, way, way too long. Yes yes, I know it's basically an homage to the first doom game which mostly took place on Phobos. That was also the demo of the game though.

D3 and now D4 looks like its kind of abandoned the "heavy metal satan" look for streamlined high-tech. I agree with another poster above: where's my pentagrams, goatheads and classic satan-y looking stuff? That's what made Doom a classic to me, it went where many games then were afraid to go because of parents and censors. It had a rebel spirit that came out in the visuals and the music. Later Doom games improved on this with evocative, imaginative levels. Waterfalls of slime, burning cities, hellscapes, you name it. D3 barely scratched the surface of all that, it was a huge let down to get to hell and see it's mostly neo-gothic looking architecture just kind of thrown together. Someone clearly cared more about making a detailed space station than they did making an interesting hell.

If D4 manages to recapture that...gnarly punk metal fascination with Satanic stuff, I'll forgive a lot. The first look isn't giving that impression though. It feels more "hey look at my fancy tech wang. Holograms, machines, LCD displays!"

[SalmonGod]

I didn't really enjoy D3's environments. The Space Lab sections go on way, way, way too long. Yes yes, I know it's basically an homage to the first doom game which mostly took place on Phobos. That was also the demo of the game though.

D3 and now D4 looks like its kind of abandoned the "heavy metal satan" look for streamlined high-tech. I agree with another poster above: where's my pentagrams, goatheads and classic satan-y looking stuff? That's what made Doom a classic to me, it went where many games then were afraid to go because of parents and censors. It had a rebel spirit that came out in the visuals and the music. Later Doom games improved on this with evocative, imaginative levels. Waterfalls of slime, burning cities, hellscapes, you name it. D3 barely scratched the surface of all that, it was a huge let down to get to hell and see it's mostly neo-gothic looking architecture just kind of thrown together. Someone clearly cared more about making a detailed space station than they did making an interesting hell.

If D4 manages to recapture that...gnarly punk metal fascination with Satanic stuff, I'll forgive a lot. The first look isn't giving that impression more. It feels more "hey look at my fancy tech wang. Holograms, machines, LCD displays!"

Exactly.  I liked Doom 3 well enough on its own, also.  It just wasn't a Doom game to me.  And I really really wanted a Doom game. 

What I got was decent gameplay and amazing technology for its time.  Witnessing that level of dynamic lighting was mind blowing in 2004.  I remember coming across a hanging light that I could shoot to make it swing around in an otherwise completely dark room, and spending 10 minutes just admiring the effect of shadows dancing flawlessly.

But other than that, it couldn't have possibly been more generic.  The environment was the blandest representation of an abandoned space station you can possibly imagine, and the monsters were likewise not the slightest bit creative or memorable.  It had no character.

And at first glance, it does look like Doom 4 is going to be a small step in the right direction, but mostly the same deal.