Music, Grunting from Demons etc., fast paced shooter and a non bright atmosphere. Why is it so hard to mimic this when they nailed it in wolfenstein? Im not saying the new DooM looks bad but it seems like if your trying to revive a game you start with what made the original game itself. Why is it so hard to just start with those 4 small basic fundamentals ? Or am i tripping? i think the new doom looks pretty good just not good enough for its standards for being one of the best games ever. Just seems so simple, yet so hard....a little disappointing

I think we need to see some standard gameplay first. The first video moved at a pace that was meant to take in how good it looked. I can't imagine that the AI of enemies will be that dumb, nor can I believe that Doomguy and enemies will move that slow.

I could be wrong of course, but I don't think the game will actually be that slow.

I don't thjnk those things are necessarily what makes Doom great. They're just parts, good parts, but not quite what makes the magic.

E1M1

Demons and shotguns.

It'll probably all move like that by default, but may also have a Turbo modifier or something perhaps that speeds everything up. And if it doesn't I'm sure that'll be amongst the first wave of mods for it.

Cacodad's

Non bright.

A game that good looking will probably be limited by framerate when it comes to speed. I think it looks pretty fast anyhow and I think they are doing a good job so far. Needs a bit more ripping guitar though.

I think certain things are just a product of it's time. Wolfenstein: New Order did a good job at keeping the things about old games that are fun (like dual wielding sniper rifles for laughs or headshoting guards from afar with the standard gun without aiming down sights), while still applying modern sensibilities to other areas of the gameplay. But Wolfenstein also has an interesting world concept to build on. Duke Nukem Forever is a good example of someone doing a piss poor job with the same concept.

Doom though, what do you keep from the old games and what do you discard in order to make it appealing to a modern playing. And what elements of Doom makes an interesting wrapper? I mean. It's Mars and Hell. It takes some serious work to make that into an appealing narrative, if you're even going to bother with that.

I'm not personally feeling the game though. It feels all substance. I can appreciate the gruesome finishers, but something about the combat just felt off. As though things just didn't connect together. But I guess it's a work in progress so I can't really judge it too harshly.

My read from the gameplay was that id took a look at the mod Brutal DooM and thought to themselves, "Oh, that's DooM." They were right, but they didn't go all the way. I recognize they were walking slowly through chunks of the gameplay presentation so that viewers could check out the world, but I agree that the top speed should be at least a bit higher.

My bigger concern is with the art, though. I want the shotgun in a DooM game to look like it was pulled out of a police cruiser from the 1970s. I don't know how you would justify vintage weapons in a future setting, but that would beat the pants off the blocky, mostly unrecognizable 'future' look they seem to have given much of the arsenal. I wish the doom guy had a look with more character than the full-body high-tech armor look ala Crysis.

Overall...yep, not a great feeling about it at the moment.

I think the enemies and level design and the fast pace of the combat are the most I could reduce the idea of why Doom is so good. Also, depends if you're talking Doom 1 good (where the player can basically kill infinite enemies because of the design of their attacks) or Doom 2 good (enemies have good hitscan weapons and you can't mindlessly engage too many without dying, generally)

Whatever you think of Doom 3, it at least had the right idea. A lot of what makes Doom great - that is, mechanical excellence, atmosphere, and some secrets - can be found in Doom 3. Some people think that game is boring and others hate it for one reason or another, but discarding everything that game did to bring the series into the 2004 era of shooters would be a mistake.

So what makes 1993 Doom, 1993 Doom?

Getting lost.

Those levels were all mazes and part of the reward is stumbling across secrets. When done correctly, the original Doom games could lead you along a level and open up more and more of it, and along the way you'll find plenty of handy items and, if you're lucky/pay enough attention/ mashed use on enough walls, you'll find some secrets, too! Along with plenty of enemies to shoot to steaming bits with a range of satisfying weapons, all of it moving at ridiculous speeds. The thing I almost never see anyone mention is that Doom is pretty much a dungeon crawler with a first person shooter wrapper. It has an aesthetic to it, sure, but very few things in Doom are really recognizable as resembling anything in the real world - it's purely designed around mechanics and gameplay, and the limitations of the era allowed them to make a game that could be designed without worrying about whether or not this room looks like anything other than "a room in a video game". I think Doom 3 captured the parts of this that it could and put it into what constituted a modern shooter in 2004, but there's not much of the dungeon-crawly maze-y "oh snap, so that's where I go!" feeling in there.

That paragraph alone isn't everything - I think you could say so much about the original games - but I don't think you can really talk about why they were so great without ignoring the level design, and why that sort of level design just can't come across as well in a modern shooter.

If the doors make any other sound, it's not a Doom game.

I think the thing that made the original Doom games stand out was primarily the tech they were built on, in addition to the excellent graphic, level and sound design. I remember being able to play Doom on my slow PC (386SX 16MHz) at a blistering pace because you could control the size of the play screen from filling it entirely to being a (faster running) tiny postage stamp in the middle. John Carmack really is a genius.

There had been nothing that played that well or looked like that on the PC before, aside from Wolfenstein 3D. But Doom was a watershed moment for it's improved level geometry that made the game look far more interesting than Wolf 3D. Also, setting it with alien hell spawn made for more varied enemies than nazis (mecha-Hitler aside).

I like the look of the new Doom and I really liked Doom 3. I have quite a bit of romanticism over the franchise because the original Doom was such a game changer for me. A new Doom could not hope to reach the status of the original, but I know I'll be waiting to buy it when it comes out and get lost in the nostalgia again.

Sort of a tangential to the main topic.

I feel like there is a certain something special about ID's shotguns at their top form, Doom had it at that satisfying feel, so did Rage. Very few games approach that level of awesome feeling for their shotguns.

Doom was such a product of it's time that honestly it's a little silly to try and say "What about that original can we recreate?" No one can recreate what made Doom so special. What was the one answer above? That the levels were often so byzantine that you'd just wander around in them for hours with nothing to do until you found a tiny hallway you missed 4 times? Yeah THAT'S clearly where the magic lies. /s

What? What else is there than what OP listed? That's Doom right there.

@terminatorz: There's the he feel/snappiness of movement, the weapon sounds, the weapon animations, the amount of enemies on screen, the efficiency to actions, the limit of resources, etc. And even these are just parts. How all these parts are put together matters a great deal. There is a reason a lot of games are described as being greater then the sum of their parts. The exact same defined elements can be made into a mediocre game or an excellent one. We see it all the time when certain games try to ape other popular ones and fail.

@tennmuerti: The bottom half of your post is a little exhausting.

OP is saying that if you were to start building Doom again, you should start with the cornerstones of thrash guitars, dark atmosphere, environment noises (grunts etc), and fast paced movement and shooting. I'm pretty sure these are the things we all remember, and what made the game's magic. Yes, the resources should be limited, the enemies should be plenty, etc, I agree with all that too.

The thing that made Doom Doom was it being the first decently playing FPS, not really much of anything else...

Is it strange that I hear all the door openings, monster growls, and gunshots in my head? I really want to go fire up Doom now.

On the new Doom, I couldn't put my finger on what bothered me until I saw the color corrected image that's been floating around. Wow, what a difference. I really hope they consider brightening the palette and adding some color, because that single image went a long way toward getting me really excited about a new Doom.

Edit: here it is...

I noticed from the video - it gradually increased in speed as it went on.

Also theres a particularly great OC Remix Album called The Dark Side of Phobos that would go great with Doom 4.

Demons and Shotguns. That's it.

Looks like DOOM to me.

I think that recolouring looks super fucking amateur. Ugh. More colour pop? Sure, but that would be awful.

Demons. Shotguns. Chainsaws. Provide your own shredding guitar soundtrack if necessary. Doom in 2016 can't be the same thing it was in 1993, but as long as it's fucking -ridiculous-, I'm in.

Ps: I need a Chex Quest reboot mod for NuDoom. CAN YOU IMAGINE?

I bet they'd make a bunch of money if they sold a texture recolour that changed the game to something like that. I don't have the attachment to the series that demands that the game has to look like that, but I think the higher colour contrast actually make it look a little more interesting.

Yeah, contrary to popular belief, Doom wasn't just a muddy brown and dark looking game. It had a pretty varied color palette, and plenty of daylight outdoor areas contrasting against the darker corridors. Everything about that new Doom looks really flatly lit, which is odd in comparison to the original Doom as it could only have one light level per sector, but still managed to get more depth and variety to it's shading.

I wouldn't even say the new Wolfenstein captured the feel of those old shooters, it just was not fast enough. These games needs to be super fast and have large levels with lots of secrets. Better modern examples would be Serious Sam, Rise of the Triad, and Painkiller.

I did write something else above that expanded on my thoughts. There's way more to the original Doom than "thrash guitars, dark atmosphere, environmental noises, and a fast pace". Those are all surface level things that we can notice immediately, but a billion games have done the same thing and few are even close to reaching anything that makes Doom so great.

Is this the post you're calling exhausting? What part of this is difficult?

Random thoughts:

Definition

• Fast, skill-based, first-person shooter where you circle around and quickly engage multiple enemies whilst moving promptly in the cardinal & intercardinal directions.
• Unscripted encounters w/ hordes of unrelenting enemies.

History

Wolfenstein 3D was essentially Escape + 3D Monster Maze; combined with smooth, mouse-driven shooter gameplay and texture-mapped environments.

It was a simple design from 1982, reintroduced with the speed and violence afforded by more modern input and graphical capabilities. This design was taken to the next level by Doom with lighting, elevation, better use of positional audio, etc, etc.

Everything else is layered on top to provide challenges, options, fairness, spontaneity, and raw coolness.

Challenges

Games provide five basic challenges: spacial reasoning, hand-eye coordination, resource management, puzzle-solving and social reasoning.

Some new spacial challenges were popularised by Wolfenstein 3D and Doom:

Positional audio

By putting you in from the first-person perspective, positional audio gives you a sense of when enemies nearby, their general location, and how far away they are. It also helps you identify the variety and number of enemies that have been alerted to your presence, as well as hinting towards the location of secret areas. Also, deaf enemies are used for surprise ambushes.

Lighting

blah blah blah

Fairness

• wandering enemies grunt regularly, giving you a sense of their whereabouts.
• enemies flinch upon being hit; strong enemies have higher pain tolerance than weak enemies.
• hitscan-based enemies pause momentarily before firing their weapons.
• enemies that shoot their weapons from darkness are briefly illuminated.
• when hit by an enemy, Doomguy's face will turn left or right depending on the side of the screen you were hit from.

Raw Coolness

Graphics and gameplay novelties, e.g.

Interactive environment

Infighting: enemies that accidently hit each other have a chance of angering them. Infighting is a huge part of Doom's gameplay and it gives players the sense of being in a dynamic world.

Explosive barrels: remarkable for their incidental and intentional usage.

Doors, Elevators, Teleporters, crushing ceilings: sectors with interesting properties can be used by/against enemies, in addition to the player.

Physics

POW! Boop, boop, boop, boop: force and mass are "modelled" so that a shotgun blast can make smaller enemies tumble down stairs, down from pillars, etc. However, large enemies (e.g. the cyberdemon) don't elicit such comical reactions.

Physics also apply to explosive barrels (which are capable of producing chain reactions), as well as the weapons and ammo dropped by former humans.

Bowling with the Super Shotgun: The super shotgun has a wide spread and fires 20 pellets. The effect of each pellet is calculated sequentially, allowing you to dispatch a small crowd of weak enemies with a single blast.

Gibs: weak enemies come apart in gruesome fashion if they receive a significant amount of damage in a single hit (i.e. an explosion).

Alternate Scream

A different scream is used if you receive a critical hit (i.e. an explosion) when close to death.

This article, it's hyperbolic title aside, is pretty good at boiling down what makes Doom Doom I think: http://blog.danbo.vg/post/50094276897/the-most-misunderstood-game-of-all-time

Make it as twitchy as you dare get away with. Although I feel like that sensibility faded with Serious Sam. Its a novelty that doesn't possibly have the legs it once did.

Right, the only game that potentially tops it is the shotgun from the original F.E.A.R. (although that had the benefit of slow-mo gibs).

Hell.

There are a lot of things I identify with Doom. Some of them I didn't fully recognize until I saw them adapted into Doom 4's demo.

One element is enemies dying in grotesque and ridiculous ways. I love how Heavy Weapons Dude explodes apart in Doom 2. Here, they've adapted that by giving you the one-button kill option to an injured enemy, always executing them in brutal and over-the-top ways. It's great.

Another key element for me is level designs that allow you to turn enemies against each other. I deeply hope Doom 4 keeps that. There's a great pleasure to getting into a Shotgun Guy's line of sight behind an Imp, causing one to open fire and hit the other, only to cause a firefight to break out in the room. You feel smart, you save ammo, and watching the combat is always interesting. The best Cyber Demon fights are when you get other hellions to fight him, too.

Monster closets that open to punish you for progressing is an obvious one. For some reason, even in Final Doom, it never got annoying to me. It creates tension as you progress. I loved that the Doom 4 level editor displayed the tools to make that happen.

Increasingly rad weapons, combat that's slow enough to manually dodge projectiles... We'll see.

Personally for me:

• Awesome shotgun
• Music
• Fast pace action
• Running left to right bob
• Hell

Having played all 3 doom games over the course of the past few years I can say what I want to see and what I don't want to see in a Doom game. First off Doom 3 had a shitty shotgun, was slow and the music wasn't very good (at least compared). Why Doom 3 is a bad Doom game.

@fisk0 said:

@baconhound said:

@canteu said:

E1M1

Is it strange that I hear all the door openings, monster growls, and gunshots in my head? I really want to go fire up Doom now.

On the new Doom, I couldn't put my finger on what bothered me until I saw the color corrected image that's been floating around. Wow, what a difference. I really hope they consider brightening the palette and adding some color, because that single image went a long way toward getting me really excited about a new Doom.

Edit: here it is...

Yeah, contrary to popular belief, Doom wasn't just a muddy brown and dark looking game. It had a pretty varied color palette, and plenty of daylight outdoor areas contrasting against the darker corridors. Everything about that new Doom looks really flatly lit, which is odd in comparison to the original Doom as it could only have one light level per sector, but still managed to get more depth and variety to it's shading.

Not only the environments, but it allowed for easier visual identification of enemies, which is a big deal when you're fighting 30+ of them and need to remove the most immediate threat(s) to you.

Here's the thing. A lot of the things in Doom simply don't hold up. For example, the keycard collecting objectives of every level weren't the most fun thing in the mid nineties and I have no interest in anything related to hunting down keycards these days. Doom levels were cool in how open they were but that openess and the lack of direction made some levels incredibly frustrating and at times nearly unbeatable.

I think one of the absolute key differences between Doom and modern shooters is how in Doom enemy projectiles moved slow enough to be dodged (or you moved fast enough). These days shooters use realistic physics that make such a format impossible but to capture the feeling of Doom you need to be able to dodge enemy projectiles. Without that it isn't Doom. Outside of the speed of movement I think the main thing that made Doom popular was the violent and atmospheric nature of the concept. Thing is that so many games have taken both violence and atmosphere to levels so far beyond what Doom did that simply recreating similar levels won't feel special.

If anything, I think this game felt a little too much like Doom. Cause the simple fact of the matter is that game design has evolved in leaps and bounds since Doom came out. Look at what Id did with Rage or what MachineGames did with Wolfenstein. Single player shooters need to have more than dozens of levels of the same handful of enemies in the same handful of areas. Cause when it comes down to it, Doom was repetitive as all hell. The only change to the gameplay came from the addition of new weapons and the very occasional introduction of a new enemy. Every level from the first to the last played out almost exactly the same. These days where shooters have numerous unique objectives and one-off encounters, a game where you collect keys for 20+ hours is just not going to fly.

@fisk0 said:

Yea, that piece really summarized Doom and why some fans hate Brutal Doom(and by association Doom 4). I once read that Doom has more in common with a twin stick than a modern shooter. Its less about the actual act of shooting and more about the placement/vareity of enemies ,the level design, and how they work together. Geometry Wars and Doom both have deliberate enemy design, in a way that the enemies complement each other to make up for the fact that they're not actually smart. This is amplified in Doom with level design, placement/scarcity of pickups, enemy spawns, etc. Things like that are what make Doom really Doom.

That said I actually kinda liked Doom 4(and Brutal Doom) and I bet it'll be fine, even if its not Doom as we know it.

Yeah, I'm a little sad that they seem to have taken most of their inspiration from Brutal Doom, but it'll probably be a decent Serious Sam or Duke Nukem style thing, even though it doesn't seem to get what the original Doom games were really about.

What they showed look weirdly heavy and unwieldy, but I'd have to play it to say anything else. The quick time animations though, ugh.

Best thing about Doom was that we thought about which weapon would be good for the next encounter. You took the level design and the enemies into account. Think FF X (I know, weird comparison, but it works!) Every character in FF X was useful, each of them had a talent for killing a certain type of enemy. This made the player cycle through the characters and swap them in-battle. Same goes for Doom weapons.

We'll see.

Fast movement, slow projectiles, ripping guitar, and the devil.

@iamterics said:

Great article, I could write one myself about my experiences with the original. And yes, I hate Brutal Doom (well, not hate, but it's dumb in a way I don't appreciate.) Gosh, it's the worst.

Mazes and monster closets

I think people expect way too much from anything that says Doom on it. I think many people have an emotional reference point to the first games in the Doom series, steeped in nostalgia, and expect any new games to hit that spot. It won't. It can't. The original Doom was a product of it's time.

In our time, because people are always trying to push graphical limits on consoles that are increasingly limited, there are going to be some limitations on the game. Can Doom be Doom with a maximum of 6 enemies on screen (which is all i saw in the demo), or even a max of 15 or 20? I hope people have an open mind when Doom comes out and i hope it's good in it's own right. I can't ask for more than that.

Not being jumpscared every 5 seconds. If they want horror fine by me make it suspense or psychological horror, but not cheap jumpscares.

Also chopping demons in half is noice.

I can't believe we've got to the point where the Diablo III 'fixed colors' argument is in reverse. I can't wait seven years for the whole thing to start over.

Popular web comic site Penny Arcade commented on the controversy, as well as presenting a comic about the issue.

We tried to imagine the sort of person who takes world-class design, changes the contrast, and then calls themselves the artist. It wasn't especially difficult.

It needs MIDI, and WAD files.