I really dislike the collectibles and secrets

I get they're a vital part of the DOOM experience or whatever but I found they slowed down the game so much. People talk about this game being full steam ahead total aggression forward momentum all the time and that is true only in the combat arenas you find yourself in really. Too often I would be traipsing around trying to find a field drone or secret armour pack. Even stuff like the little dolls which should be totally optional give a gameplay bonus in awarding you weapon upgrade points. I feel like the game would be way better if they removed all that junk, it killed a lot of the pacing for me. In the reviews and forum discussions I've read I haven't really seen people mention this much at all? Do other people think they add to the pacing and give a good downtime between the hectic battle sequences? Do people like just looking for little collectibles that much still?

You don't really have to get them all. I enjoyed figuring some out, but didn't do 100%.

I think it adds way more to the pacing. You get through with a siper intense fight and you cool off and prepare for the next one by exploring your environment for treasures and goodies. That's part of what makes Doom so memorable for me, all of them.

You can forego secret-hunting entirely and still get plenty of upgrades just by waltzing through the game. Might find Ultra-Violence and above a bit tougher by the end, but I don't think there's anything in the game that you can't face with starting stats.

Just like classic Doom, it's there if you want it, but you never need it. This one just makes it more clear when you've missed them.

As for me, the downtime is appreciated. A big part of 90s shooters was downtime and item-hunting, and if you're gonna do a faithful throwback, you need that aspect. If it was just circle-strafing and fire-button-hold-downing, the game would be utterly exhausting.

@shagge: A lot of people forget how much of Doom, especially Doom 2, was item-hunting. By comparison, even if you are going for 100%, Doom 2016 is a balls-to-the-wall lighting-strike of adrenaline when put beside Doom 2, which had disgustingly massive and bloated areas filled up with necessary items that were unnecessarily obfuscated. Don't get me wrong, I love Doom 2, but it became more of a scavenger hunt than new Doom ever is.

Don't bother with them until after you finish the game. You can go back and clean those up after you finish the game,if you just want the achievements, with all of your upgrades which makes the early levels a cakewalk.

It doesn't hurt the pacing because you don't have to do them.

I picked up what I came across, but other than that my playthrough was a balls to the wall adrenaline rush. Play the game how you want. It's not a vital thing.

WHAT?!

I don't want to be disadvantaged from a gameplay perspective because I can't be bothered searching around everywhere for stuff

Use console commands and unlock whatever you want, then.

@the_nubster: Yeah, Doom 2, as great as it is, has a pretty strange pace to it. Not necessarily bad, just not nearly as tight as Doom 1. Although, when it's firing on all cylinders, the best of 2 easily rivals the best of 1. I'll never forget the "holy shit" moments of my first Arch-Vile and Mancubus encounters, or the cleverness of levels like Dead Simple.

Man... what a series.

I fucking loved them. But then that's something I love to do in games, and the levels were designed so well that I loved poking all of the nooks and crannies. The game is just a perfect blend between exploration and ridiculously fun action.

You're not really, though. If you don't want to track them down don't and just pick up the stuff you happen across. They're not a vital part of the game, and you're at very little disadvantage for not picking them up. The only thing I'd recommend really trying to grab are the argent shards, since their upgrades to your health, armour or ammo capacity are very helpful.

It's one of the nice things about the game, that you has the kind of breathing room to allow people to approach it how they want. Don't want to hunt collectibles? Don't. Just head for the next objective and kill demons.

If they "removed the junk" it might make a slightly better experience for you, but it would also remove an element that other people fucking loved.

Said it here before, but I'm totally with you. The game is probably one of the best shooters I've played in years, but I just never managed to play it for long (and have yet to finish it) because of how the collectibles killed the pacing for me. While a lot of people will say you can just ignore them, that's not really the problem. I enjoy looking for collectibles, I had fun looking for them in Doom, but when it feels like the core game sections of combat are about 2-5 minutes at most and you spend 15+ minutes looking around for stuff the game starts to feel like just a hunt for collectibles, and that's not fun.

The heart-throb pacing of the game just ends up working against itself. If you look at more traditional collectible heavy games (like AC or Arkham) the balance is completely shifted towards the other side, where the game sections can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or more, but looking for a collectible rarely takes more than a couple of minutes. This makes it so looking for collectibles is your way to "refresh" between game sections, while in Doom the game sections becomes the thing that prepares you for another session of collectible hunting.

The first thing I unlocked in the suit menu was the radar that puts all the collectibles on the map. I enjoyed cooling off between fights and doing minor platforming puzzles to find stuff, but I didn't want to worry about missing things constantly, or bump up against every wall throughout the entire game cuz just "what if". That struck a nice balance for me at least. And I also just really liked playing the game so much I kind of wanted to get everything anyways. In most other games I never even attempt to get any collectibles.

If you don't like going on scavenger hunts then yah I can totally see it breaking the pacing and there is no real solution to this, and despite what others have said it totally does work against you. Do you need the upgrades to beat the game? No. Do they help? Yah, they sure do. Personally I enjoyed the mixed cadence of FRANTIC action arenas, cut with a bit of slow paced exploration. Those who just want to shoot the hell out of everything can certainly still do that, but you won't get to enjoy a lot of the cool alternate firing modes that come with looking for secrets.

I got a few collectibles and secrets upgrades, but towards the latter half of the game I just wanted to chug along to the end. I don't think the game disadvantages you by not finding all the collectibles or completing rune challenges. If you put in the work you do get rewarded, but if you're playing on regular difficulty and aren't going after the collectibles and secrets you'll be fine.

If you're playing Ultra Violence and you're not interested in the collectibles. Well. This is going to come off as pretentious, but I think Ultra Violence and Doom secrets go hand in hand. I think you probably need to be pursuing one in interest of the other. If you really like Doom enough to play on UV, you'll probably not mind the secrets then.

@captain_insano: Even on nightmare, you don't need to hunt for secrets. Only a few weapon upgrades and runes are sort of important to get (they make the game a lot easier) and you get enough non-secret health/armor/ammo upgrades to survive.

I think the secrets are fine in this game. They often tease you by showing the result in a seemingly unreachable area and then it's often a nice little puzzle to actually get there. Yes, it slows the game down when you go for the less obvious ones with help of the map, but like I said, they're not vital.

I just watched a super bunny hop video that is largely about this topic and sums up my feelings pretty well

It's a hard thing to critique and complain about because it does come down to a very personal preference and way of playing games. All the secrets and collectibles and secrets are totally optional and don't have that major of an impact on the gameplay but they shove the fact that they exist and that you are rewarded for them just enough to set off the completionist in me and they impact gameplay just enough to make it feel like I'm missing out by not getting them. But they're also optional enough to make it easy to dismiss the complaint.

If they are there in large part to help the pacing of the game (and to possibly pad out the length, I think it would be a much shorter game without them) I think it's a pretty lazy solution to that problem that other games have found much better solutions to.

And I just don't think the collectibles should have helped upgrade your weapons and systems at all. I should be rewarded for good play with upgrades, like how the weaponry mastery system works and the combat rating system where you can earn up to five weapon upgrades depending on how well you play. For people that want to mix up the pace and have these slower paced sections reward them with more lore and the cool 3D models and stuff like that. Stuff that the kinda people interested in having a break from the action would probably be interested in. I personally didn't really read any of the data logs you can collect because I just didn't care, but I'm sure a lot of the people that went out of their way to explore probably did spend time reading that stuff.

I kind of feel the same way, largely because I'm having trouble finding the secret items. Doom just brings out my neurotic gaming tendencies and it's frustrating poking into every corner to no avail. That's my major malfunction, I guess, but I find myself not playing the game in favor of other titles.

I just beat the game and thought it was excellent.

At the same time, gameplay was somewhat hindered at times as you're essentially limiting yourself by having to play a specific way in order to level up your runes and weapons. e.g. I like the assault rifle but have to run around with the double barrel because I need to get 30 multi-kills.

Huh, I was just thinking about exactly this and I scrolled down and it was top of the recent threads. I've beaten the first two levels so far (a couple of weeks back now) and I really enjoyed them in the moment but I've just not gone back. Part of me is wondering whether I need to crank up the difficulty and part of me thought that perhaps spending all the time wandering around empty rooms looking for hidden stuff might have made it feel slower than it should. That said I did pump all my initial skill points into the secret-finding stuff, so maybe it'll be super straightforwards going forwards? I do like discovering the secrets, but I wonder if it's bringing the pacing down for me in a way that's detrimental. Perhaps knocking the difficulty up will solve that though - if the combat sequences are more intense then the downtime will presumably feel more welcome.

None of the collectables are required if you collect all of them and do the combat scenarios you have more weapon upgrade points than you can actually spend by the end of the game. A lot of these complaints just come across as a lack of self control. You don't have to do them, you don't enjoy doing them yet you still continue to do them? How is that the games fault? It provides ample avenues elsewhere to get weapon upgrade points and the weapon upgrade drones are foreshadowed by showing them flying around in the level before they fly off to their final location where you get the upgrade.

This is like complaining about an RPG not giving you enough xp to get every skill by rushing through the main story quests and ignoring all side ones.

But I don't want cool 3D models and lore and stuff as rewards for my exploration and interest in the environment. I want to find weapons earlier than I'm supposed to and Argent energy cells that upgrade my armor/ammo/health. The lore and stuff's nice, but I don't want that, either. I want stuff that's fun and relevant to the game I'm playing.

Rise of the Tomb Raider had a ton of collectibles, but all of them were of the variety you've mentioned - periphery stuff that isn't really useful and usually feels pointless and I wound up being very disappointed in that game.

Secret-hunting and exploration and stuff has been a part of Doom since the beginning. Part of the reason Doom 2016 was just so damn great to me was because it took everything I liked about the old games and put it in a new, shiny, AAA package, and that includes finding secret areas full of useful bonuses and stuff. All of these throwback shooters that (mostly) lack that exploratory aspect - Serious Sam, Painkiller, etc. - were boring to me.

Have you tried bumping up the difficulty? Most of the encounters took more than five minutes for me to finish, and I rarely spent 15+ minutes looking for collectibles.

First couple of levels are a poor representation, it gets much more hectic the further you get into the game, pumping points into secret-finding does help a lot.

I like secrets and collectibles but i found them dull in Doom, pretty much just follow the map and click the thing. I feel like there was nothing great about the levels to make you want to explore beyond finding the icon on the map, i think good collectibles are in games where you want to run around and experience the world. In doom you just want to shoot the dudes then get the next area to shoot more dudes.

@pie:

I agree with you 100%!!! Those damn collectibles really ruined the overall experience for me. But I still loved the game none-the-less. I just would've loved it so much more if I didn't have to waste so much time looking for those bloody upgrades. Normally I ignore the collectibles, since they are pointless, but in Doom, the collectibles are the upgrades. And I want those upgrades!

I actually liked them quite a bit. The core gameplay is fun enough that going back to levels you've already cleared is not so much of a hassle that you don't enjoy doing it. I need to go back and play it again, come to think of it!