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[USEC_OFFICER]

Is it just me, or is anyone else having difficulty making out enemies in the video? They all sorta blend into the background and become vaguely enemy shaped blobs. It's probably something to do with the lighting (or lack of it). Thankfully most of the enemy designs look distinct, even in the murkiness, so that shouldn't be a problem. Besides the visuals, I have to admit that it seems better than I thought it would be. Better than the multiplayer previews that I saw.

[Teneb]

Is it just me, or is anyone else having difficulty making out enemies in the video? They all sorta blend into the background and become vaguely enemy shaped blobs. It's probably something to do with the lighting (or lack of it). Thankfully most of the enemy designs look distinct, even in the murkiness, so that shouldn't be a problem. Besides the visuals, I have to admit that it seems better than I thought it would be. Better than the multiplayer previews that I saw.

Might be because the singleplayer is being made by Id, while the MP is being made by an external team (that previously made multiplayer for Halo (ironically, a lot of people in the steam reviews for the MP beta kept complaining that it felt like Halo, while also implying they didn't know it was a different dev team or didn't know their previous work).

[SalmonGod]

A friend was raving about Doom's single-player, so I caved.

It's... good.  Not great.  So far.  I'm through the first 3 levels.  It's definitely better and more Doom-like than Doom 3 was... but I still don't feel it lives up to the legacy of classic Doom. 

I still can't get over the generic feel of the creature designs. 

It's fast-paced, but in a weird way that's sort of difficult to describe.  There's not much emphasis on fast-paced movement, so much as twitch aim, because many of the monsters engage in a lot of vertical movement.  You don't really do much dodging or make use of cover, and there's extremely heavy focus on melee.  You move from one monster to the next.  Take some damage as you run up to monster while firing a couple shots to put them in stagger, glory kill, gain your health back from the drops, repeat.  It does make for a sense of relentless ferocity to your character, but it leaves out everything that made the combat feel of Classic Doom satisfying.

And I seem to be in the minority on this, but the glory kills are getting old.  I think they'd be fantastic if they were like in Brutal Doom - something you have to go out of your way a bit to do and involves some risk for purely aesthetic reward.  Instead, the gameplay encourages you to glory kill every single monster.  They're literally how you keep your character alive.

Then there's the level structure.  Everything's very compartmentalized.  Each fight is a singular carefully designed scene with distinct breaks in-between.  They never bleed together.  You walk into an area and trigger a bunch of monster spawns.  You're not allowed to leave the area until you kill all the monsters.  Exploration/story bits in-between.  This really drives a modern interactive story feel instead of feeling like a game.  Some of Classic Doom's most interesting levels were the big open ones where you could get all the monsters of the entire level chasing you all at once if you weren't careful.  You had to deliberately work to keep a fight contained and manageable.

So... eh... gonna keep playing.  Just my observations so far.

[Rex_Nex]

One thing I never really understood was how everyone (or, well, at least ID) seemed to decide that the defining aspect of the game was gibbing and ultraviolence. I never really felt like that was what I played the original Doom/Doom 2 to get. Sure, the original Doom games wouldn't have been Doom without that, but there was a lot more going on, some stuff far more important than just the violence depicted.

I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. It just feels like ID has decided "gore + demons + badass marine = DooM". That's not to say they aren't a hell of a lot closer with this release than they were with Doom 3 - Doom 3 was basically just early, bad Dead Space, this at least reminds me of DooM - but I still feel like they missed the mark.

[Teneb]

The gore and violence is because of the massively popular Brutal Doom mod.

[RadtheCad]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spcbuq-6crA

GAMES JOURNALISM AT ITS FINEST.

[Harry Baldman]

The gore and violence is because of the massively popular Brutal Doom mod.

Which itself might have been inspired from the Doom comic at least in part.

[Dorsidwarf]

Level 1:
Constant violence: Yes
Sense of implacable menace from player character: Hell yes
Violence: Yes
Guitar music where I think one break was the lead guitarist actually beating the sound guy to death while he plays: Yes

I love this game

Level 2: Attack of the where did my guitar music go

[nenjin]

And I seem to be in the minority on this, but the glory kills are getting old.  I think they'd be fantastic if they were like in Brutal Doom - something you have to go out of your way a bit to do and involves some risk for purely aesthetic reward.  Instead, the gameplay encourages you to glory kill every single monster.  They're literally how you keep your character alive.

Reminds me of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. The executions were awesome, don't get wrong. But game play was balanced around it refilling your health, so by the end of the game you were having to execute most of your foes just to keep your health up and going under all the incidental damage.

Executions should be something the player can do when they're feeling especially brutal, when an execution would really be the cherry on top of an already perfectly executed attack/fight. Instead, they make it super freaking gamey and the mandatory nature of it robs it of feeling special.

Also I can only bear being forced to watch the same clever animation so many times before it starts to annoy me. (I caught a glance of some Doom gameplay, and one execution where like you punch a monster, rip a thing off its body and shove it in its mouth, then jump back before the whole thing explodes. I laughed, then immediately thought "Wow that would get old after seeing 4 times."

[Dorsidwarf]

So far the animations seem to become background noise after the first few times. It helps that they tend to be short.

Chainsaw kills are the best though, like ammo pinatas

[Yoink]

Glory kills/special executions/whatever you want to call them are a pretty annoying trend in videogames these days.

Still, from what I saw in the beta the ones in Doom 2016 are actually really well done!
I'm going to pick this up as soon as I can spare the cash. Anyone playing on PS4, by any chance?       

[Spehss _]

Ahoy has a video on (original 1993) Doom that I think some of you may like. I watched the whole thing, was an enjoyable sorta documentary style of thing. I think it does a decent job of describing how Doom got its atmosphere/style that became recognizable as Doom. He also has a follow up video on Quake. Think SalmonGod may enjoy them, since he seems to be looking for why the modern Doom doesn't quite meet the feel for the original doom and quake games.

I haven't played new Doom yet so I can't comment on gameplay. I'm disappointed in the art direction they went with though. It just feels really generic somehow. Lacks the doom charm. Maybe if everything was more pixel-based I'd have a different opinion. I know 1993 Doom had clay models of all the enemies made, so it would probably have been entirely possible for new Doom to bring the classic doom monster designs into 3D models. But I'm sure because they're doing a reboot they felt they had to reboot designs to appeal to the newer audience.


I think a big factor in the "disappointment factor" of new Doom compared to old Doom is the fact that old Doom was a big technological and creative innovation. The maps were so much better than Wolfenstein before it. And it was a new series with a distinctive blend of demonic occultism and sci-fi. And the FPS game genre was still developing. Old Doom was one of the innovators, with active modding scenes and all that to boot. New Doom, in order to compete in the modern FPS market, can't innovate as much for fear of losing market to competing fps games, isn't as technologically innovative, isn't as fresh or new of an idea, and the gameplay concept of "shoot everything that moves" has at this point been rehashed again and again.

[itisnotlogical]

I'm not sure what the "innovation" people are hoping for and talking about, is going to be. Breaking the fourth wall has been done. Motion controls have been done. Physics-based gameplay has been done, from Jurassic Park Trespasser to Half-Life 2. VR isn't AAA mainstream, but it's not unthinkable anymore, so it's been done. RPG elements have been done. Open-world FPS has been done. Hell, both were done by one of the later Doom clones of the time, Strife. Major modding support from the developer has been done.

Even Undertale, a recent game that gets hailed as "innovative", just puts together some old ideas in an indie-flavored package. Somebody got shmup in my 8-bit JRPG.

Spoiler: On the off chance that somebody hasn't played Undertale or read about it (click to show/hide)

It breaks the fourth wall and plays with the nature of video game storytelling, but Metal Gear Solid beat it to the punch by 17 years. Psycho Mantis is canon, and so is the infinite ammo bandanna as of MGS2.

None of this is to say that Undertale is a bad unoriginal game or that innovation can't happen ever again. But the idea that every game needs to be a drastic, reckless leap into the future is kinda cancerous. I'd rather have a good game, even if it's just a 7/10, than an undelivered promise.

[Jopax]

Yeah, I really don't see anything wrong with not innovating with every damn game. It seems like doom will always be a dissappointment because it won't be a groundbreaking genre defining game with every sequel, which is ludicrious to expect tbh.

If anything, this return to the oldschool shooter formula with some new stuff thrown in is rather refreshing what with all the modern gunwank nonsense that had permeated the FPS genre for the past several years.

[SalmonGod]

I don't expect innovation.  I just want Classic Doom's art direction & gameplay  on a modern engine.  That's really it. 

This game... it's good.  It really is.  I'm enjoying it.  Especially the music.  Fucking awesome music.

I understand that Classic Doom wasn't cinematic or story-driven.  It was pure game.  Nothing to it beyond pure game mechanics and art.  Game mechanics themselves were very stripped down.  Very simple, but satisfying.

Trying to work in a bunch of cinematic elements and storytelling, and more complex mechanics with more impressive monster behaviors and all that stuff... these things are expected of a modern game and limit just how much classic gameplay feel can be replicated.  I get it.  This especially limits what they're able to do with level design, which is what most critically divides Doom 2016 gameplay from Classic Doom.

So objective criticism of Doom 2016 judging it purely for what it is...
1.  Monsters still look more like aliens to me than demons, and the bigger ones look too reminiscent of Blizzard-style design.  This more than anything breaks my ability to see it as a Doom game.
2.  The game encourages you to use glory kills way too much.  They make for a combat style that's flows really smoothly.  Don't get me wrong it's extremely solid.  But it also gets repetitive.  However, I'm finding bigger monsters as I'm progressing through the game that break this up more, so my opinion may be changing.

That is all.