Doom has released, my single-player early impressions

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OKAY.

So.

Just a few very quick impressions of early single-player stuff.

So far, this honestly is doing exactly what I want it to.

Firstly: Yes, you can carry every weapon at once. The gameplay here is different from the multiplayer; some people are going to find this more than a little jarring, but as I had said in earlier posts, I understand why they did it and frankly agree with it.

So far, I've got the pistol, shotgun, chainsaw, and assault rifle.

What's interesting about the guns is they've given each one a bit more versatility via weapon mods that you can find; you can have one attached to a gun at a time, so far it seems like there's going to be 2 available for each one. Or at least that's how it is so far. Like the shotgun, for instance, can lob this mini-explosive in an arc (no, I don't know why); you use weapon mods with the right-click, and some of them need charging time, some of them are immediately ready but then require a recharge time (during which you can still fire normally). I'm liking this bit so far, these weapons are all quite fun. They don't have the same feel as the multiplayer weapons, or at least, that's the impression I'm getting.

The chainsaw is... interesting. Melee in this game actually has a bloody point. Firstly the animations are extremely short, but also you cant just kill something instantly with melee. Most demons require that they be stunned first via normal attacks, seems to happen when they get low enough on health. Once stunned, THEN you can do the kill move. Why do this? Because enemies killed this way will drop small health shards. These don't heal for much but they add up quick. Actually pulling this off though isn't easy. Chainsaw is a bit similar; it's distinctly slower but when used causes ammo things to just spray all over the place that you can then pick up. The chainsaw requires fuel though. Different enemies require different amounts to kill. Something can either take 1 unit, 3, or 5. You start out only able to carry 3, so this is a really limited resource. But if used right you can use the chainsaw to keep your OTHER guns filled up better.

Ammo: Really bloody limited! That shotgun for instance can only hold 20 shells, at least for now. Health items and ammo items are frequent, but still, it's easy to run out if you're not careful.

Armor: Works like you think it does, same as it ever did.

Secrets: Yep, it's got them. Not easy to find either, in many cases. Got a lot of them.

Maps: I'm loving these so far. This isn't Doom 3. No super linear areas with jumpscare monsters. These places are complicated and make me interested in exploring them... that's a good thing. I don't feel like I'm getting bored at any point during this. It gives the same feel that the old Doom games gave me: Moments of frantic, berserk combat, spaced out by moments of exploration, looking for secrets, stuff like that. Pretty much the same pacing, at least for my playstyle.

Combat: I almost cant believe it but so far they got this right. No regenerating health, no "iron sights" crap, as stated in the multiplayer bit. Enemies are more than a little berserk; imps leap all over the damn place, can climb stuff, cling onto walls, and throw really fast fireballs at you, there's your typical zombie dudes, exploding zombie dudes which can rocket away hilariously if you deal with them just right, bigger dudes with funky energy guns.... it's all projectiles that you can actually dodge. Not one thing has fired actual bullets at me yet. So far, if it attacks at range, it fires an actual moving projectile. These though are way faster than in the original Doom. I was surprised by this. I'm expecting bullet-users to appear eventually (chaingun seargants, Spider Mastermind) if those enemies are still in the game. The game is very fast moving and trying to hide behind cover just doesn't seem to work; only the zombie dudes are slow-moving, everything else can move around QUICKLY and they will find you, generally very quickly. Enemies come from just every damn direction at once. Also, they hit rather hard.

Found the berserk pack, they didn't screw that up. Punch dude = exploded dude, instantly.

Got the usual exploding barrels of course. Keycards, same as always, labyrinthine levels with many doors to unlock that goes who knows where.

Also I got hit by some sort of mini-train once. That was embarrassing. Don't do that.


Honestly, so far, this is exactly what I wanted out of the game. It's also not stuffed with cutscenes. Sometimes you'll get characters talking at you, but this is always very brief, and if you want a lot of detail into the story, you pick up codex entries and can read those. But it hasn't thrown cutscenes at me yet at all. I am bloody AMAZED by this since I cant remember the last time a AAA game didn't throw piles of those at me.


Graphics: Yes, this is gorgeous. It bloody well better be, it's 50 damn gigabytes!


That's my early impressions from the singleplayer campaign. There's more to it than just that, but them's the basics; I don't have much time for typing right now.


There's also the "snapmap" bit... which for me is where the game's replayability will REALLY come from... and that's very interesting, though frankly I haven't the foggiest damn clue what I'm doing in it yet. It looks good though; I'm expecting to spend a lot of time in there. I'm also expecting to find a lot of very badly made maps by players. That's how it works, always... really, people never TEST their own damn content in things like this. But I'll bloody well test MINE and take my time making them.


So, yep, that's everything for now. Already very pleased with this. I haven't found a game mechanic that I don't like yet. Oh it's possible that there will be some later... but honestly, even the ones that sounded like they were going to be horrible turned out to be fun and to actually have a bloody point when it comes to the actual gameplay.


I will be posting some more in here later for those that want more info; my time with it today was unfortunately limited.


Have any of you played this at all? The single-player, I mean. If so, what are YOUR thoughts?

From what I've seen it looks pretty fun, but my computer just doesn't have the hardware to run that game. I'll have to stick to classic Doom for now.

Will definitely check the new Doom out once I get a new computer in about five years time.

Well, I've sure fallen into lava alot here.

The maps are just as tangled and labyrinthine as the old maps were but now there's also alot of jumping to be done. Plenty of it isnt easy and there's a TON of lava in area 3. Getting secrets or extra items in that map typically involves jumping over or near lava. The good thing is that the controls are very well done.


On a side note, they've changed up a few enemies; in the original game for instance the Hell Knights were basically just smaller versions of Barons, all they really did was throw plasma balls at you. In this one, they're huge berserkers that keep leaping at you with a big smash attack, among other things they can do. It seems most enemies actually have more than just one attack.

Also there's these jerks with shields, reeeeaaalllllyyyyy hate these guys. You cant get close to them because they'll just beat your face in with their stupid shield and you cant really shoot through that with anything but a really heavy attack.

Also some of these secrets are bloody hard to find and there's a lot of them. Area 2 contains a lot of red doors. But I never actually found a red key anywhere. Somewhere, there's a hidden key that opens like 4 doors that go to who knows where. You don't see THAT in games much now; generally if you get a key or item that somehow unlocks something, it's always part of the normal level progression. The old Doom used to do this a lot too, driving you crazy with doors you just couldn't enter unless you figured out where the hidden key was.

I forgot that this was coming out. I might have to give it a go, because I'm a big fan of the original Doom series. Doom 3 was okay, but lacked the feel of the old games. Worth playing once, but that's it.

I think I might wait a little bit until the price goes down a bit, because 60$ is kind of steep for a game that I'm not sure about yet. Thanks for reminding me.

Nice impressions there!
This will probably be the next game that I'll buy, with the problem being the fact that I don't know when I'll have some money left to do this :'(
I'm trying to stay away from videos but from what I've seen there is a lot of movement, monsters, nice music and brutal kills. Can't wait to fiiiiinally play an FPS again!

Yeah, there's alot of running around, shooting, explosions, imps bouncing off of walls, items to pick up, and complicated levels (as opposed to 3's levels, which seemed to attempt to be overly logical and were thus boring). And of course Doom's old trademarked habit of throwing very unexpected monsters at you from odd angles when you least expect it. Imps arent normally that dangerous by themselves, for instance, but their fireballs HURT, and if one surprises you, well, there goes a good chunk of health and armor.

Seriously, the game is an absolute blast. This is what I always wanted Doom 3 to be. And I havent even gotten to the mapmaking stuff yet.

I'm just so glad this turned out so well. I'm REALLY hoping that some developers, AAA or indie, whatever, start making more "corridor shooters" (is what I call them) like this instead of worrying about being stupidly realistic (because, you know, the usual regenerating health really adds realism). Fast action and stuff to dodge instead of hiding and sniping.

I've played it a bit and I have to say they nailed the feel of the old Doom perfectly with this one. It's clear that Id went back to their old design philosophy and modernized it rather than trying to do another "this is our take on the standard modern FPS" that they attempted and failed with Doom 3. All of the things I liked about the original Doom are present and now there's new things thrown in to like as well. Yes, there are people complaining about things like the glory kills but I like them and I have to say most of the additions make sense in a twisted organic sort of way.

In any event I do highly recommend this game to any fans of the original.

Yep, totally agreed.

As it is I just finished a long, long, long second go at the second level. After about TEN THOUSAND YEARS I finally got every damn secret on that level. Seriously, they were DEVIOUS with these. Kinda like in the old games. There are secrets that then have more secrets in them. Found the plasma rifle too. And finally figured out what those weird doors are, the grey ones that look all techy that have an obvious area behind them on each map. I'll not spoil what they are, but what's inside them was one heck of an awesome surprise. There's one on every level and good luck getting the damn things open. Got 2 of them opened.

Also, screw those shield guys. Really. I just fire a full pack of mini-missiles at them every single time I find one (assault rifle weapon mod). Even the Hell Knights arent THAT bloody irritating.

This is pretty funny, though https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status ... 3214880768

How... how would anyone even notice that....?


Well, on my end, I've spent some time in the editor.

And just.... wow. I was expecting much simplicity based on alot of the stuff they said. That's... not what they gave us.

Example:




To explain what's going on there:

The Doom logo appears and disappears when you hit a switch that's just under the view there. The bits at the very bottom are some simple logic circuits (since all it does is one action in this case), and the huge array of a squillion blue lines points to every object that is a part of the logo; they are show/hide nodes and are what causes the thing to form when the switch is pressed. The logo isnt some pre-built thing, it's made of tons of objects and is fully solid and interactive (as in, it's not some phased out thing, it's a solid object that conforms to that exact shape).

The jumbled white box is a table and chairs. The logic bits above it control what happens; when you shoot the table, it explodes, because why not, which removes the standing chairs and replaces them with the fallen over ones. You can just have the chairs be physics objects, but that's not useful for showing off circuits.

And the bit on the far wall causes a constant slow counting to appear on the screen. Goes from -1 to 5 and then repeats. There's a variety of comparison nodes, variables, and the message thing down there that prints the number onto the screen.


And that's just the start. I went and had a look at some of the example maps for the game, and they get really interesting.

The editor is very well designed; considering the sheer complexity that it's capable of, it's very easy to actually interact with. This actually reminds me ALOT of LittleBigPlanet's editor, particularly the logic nodes, which look EXTREMELY similar and are created and interacted with in almost exactly the same way. Which actually is why I know what I'm looking at, I didnt go through tutorials to explain all these objects to me. But it's easy to click on them and see what they are.


Needless to say the editor isnt going to be for everyone. For someone like myself that's been into this sort of thing since WAY before it was even remotely user friendly, this isnt hard to understand yet can create some damn awesome things. For those not used to it, this is going to be brain-melting.

And making GOOD maps is going to be TIME CONSUMING. Seriously, it'll take awhile, and it's going to take some real practice to get good at it.

Maps can be designed to be played solo, or you can make co-op or deathmatch or... whatever you can come up with. There are things like scoring systems (not just in multiplayer, but for defeating enemies or doing other things too) to add to it so that it's not just a win/lose thing.


All in all... I'm just amazed. The last AAA game I encountered that I liked THIS much was Anno 2070 (which is another game that's just STUFFED with possibilities). And the LittleBigPlanet series also.

It's pretty obvious if you look at the "light source" on the texture, generally it shouldn't be coming from the floor.
The bigger question is how the heck someone could have flipped or rotated it on accident.



So the entity editor is pretty decent, but the real question is how brushwork is handled. Halo (3, I think?) just gave you simple prefabs for things like walls and floors, and let you place them wherever you wanted inside of a giant boxmap.



Yeah, I'd rather just use an actual map editor on the PC, although I know that's not exactly feasible on a console game.
Have official tools been released yet, or are they waiting a little while on that?
I wouldn't be surprised, though, if Beth is giving up on the whole "open source" thing, now that Carmack is gone =|

I had a look at Halo's forge thing; it's kinda similar in some ways.

You have prefab "rooms", which are linked via door/link/whatever points; the rooms sorta "snap" together, which is where the name comes from. Lots of rooms are things that are more like pieces of a hallway, or stuff like that. Within any given room you can place objects wherever the hell you want; objects and things do not snap to any sort of grid or whatever.

If you want to create your own structures, you use smaller bits to do it; you could use "player blocking volumes" (what a mouthful) which are basically solid "wall" spaces that you can set specific sizes and such (any size you want, you're not choosing pre-set sizes or something) to to create a "room" within a larger space. I went through a map just now that's basically E1M2 but built in this. Rooms that fit at least somewhat were selected to make up the base of the level, and the "volumes" and other things like crates, barricades, and other whatsits were used to add walls and floors and such where none existed previously. There's a room in E1M2 with a tangled walkway right over a slime pit; simple room, there's no monsters in it, you just traverse the idiotically shaped bridge. There's no room like that in this game, so a very basic and pretty empty small room was chosen, acid/radiation squares/blocks/something were placed, and a path that mimics the path in the original game was created out of shaped volumes. There's another similar room in that level where there's acid around a pillar, but this small floor area ringing the pillar; in the original game you zoom across to "jump" to that small floor, and if you go around to the other side, there's a switch on the back that opens up a secret. That's in this designed map too; floor plates and such to create the little island, something else to create the pillar in the center, and the switch then attached to the back. And more acid/radiation/whatever just like in the original.


So you can get really creative like that and do things that otherwise arent really there. Hell, you could take a huge and mostly empty room and create your own entire little house or something in there with multiple small "rooms" made by you out of thingies if you wanted. That sounds like annoying effort, but doable. Hell, you could have the house actually slowly phase into existence, piece by piece, in front of the player if you wanted to. I can think of a way to do that. It'd take 20 damn years to make, but I could still get it to do that.


The thing about it though, you have to A: actually be creative, and B: know what you're doing. Plenty of players will use JUST the basic prefab rooms without then modifying them via volumes and objects to make them more unique. It's not that you cant make a good map with that, because of course you can, but it's more interesting when you take those spaces and really make them unique.


That being said, I've seen some very interesting things now.

For example, someone made a tower defense map. It's kinda crude in places, but it's complete with monster spawn points, pre-set waves monsters that actually cross the room along proper paths, ignoring you, to race towards their goal, and even a shop where you can buy things (with a "currency" that the map gives you as you defeat monsters and such) during the timed period between waves. There's barricades and traps that can be set, and monster allies to hire.... it's pretty impressive though it looks like it could be taken alot further than it is.

Someone else made some sort of music making/playing map, and... yeah. There's been some very funky stuff in there.


Really the only thing that bugs me in the editor is with those "volume" things; sizing/shaping them is done in a very tedious way. WHY, I'm not sure. I can think of other ways to do it that'd be faster. Considering the sheer versatility of the things, they have a ton of possible uses, so a convenient way of setting them up would be really nice... But that's a minor gripe and has nothing to do with the actual end result.


As far as official tools? I have no idea. Do developers of big games like this do that all that much anymore?

They honestly couldn't afford to screw up SnapMap. Doom has one of the most dedicated and creative mod communities out there. In fact you could honestly say that the Doom mod community is THE granddaddy of gaming mod communities. They would demand that a development tool gives them options since they can't directly mess with things the way they used to with the old WAD files.

Id was smart it they offloaded the work they weren't experts in to people that were so they could make the best overall experience possible. I know some people have been hating on the multiplayer but let's be fair about this and understand that Doom has never really been known for its multiplayer, that was always Quake's big thing. What you have is the standard multiplayer experience for modern FPS which is a hell of a lot more robust than what the old Dooms had and even then you still have some of the classic MP modes thrown in for flavor.

Finally I'm glad that Id seemed to be able to effectively ward off the publisher interference of Bethesda/Zenimax. Neither company has any business telling Id how to build an FPS and as a result of this we have the way the relationship between a developer and publisher is supposed to be: The developer creates their vision and the publisher helps to get it out to the public with none of this publisher demanding certain features because the data analytics their marketing department crunched through says "This is what's popular with the general gaming populace and therefore it needs to be in the game".

What I've seen in videos of the new game looks really boring and one note, and visually bland. But I'm interested in trying it. I'm not a Doom fan but I enjoyed the first one, and the publisher's last FPS effort, Wolfenstein: The New Order was incredibly good. If they make a demo then I will try it, otherwise I'll wait to see how the game reviews after the initial post launch hype and maybe pick it up at a heavy discount. Right now it is absurdly expensive, far beyond what I would ever pay for any game.

Considering what damn near every FPS released in the last 10 years looks like, I have a hard time thinking up "visually bland" in comparison to THOSE.

As for "one note".... it's Doom. It plays like Doom. You shoot demons. Explore mazes, find secrets. Then you shoot some more demons. Repeat.

If you need story in your games... indeed, this is NOT the game for you. I cant even tell you how happy I am to be able to say that about a AAA game. I haaaaaaaaaaate how obsessed with story and @#%$-ing cutscenes people have become. Cant even emphasize my hatred of those two ideas enough.

Doom is a game that doesnt pretend to be more than it is, and just outright sticks to it. It's more geared towards those such as myself that remember when this used to be the norm. Except for the multiplayer....

As for the price.... it's the same price that every big game releases at. Not that that isnt expensive, mind you. Anyway, you wont be seeing this one on anything resembling a discount for a long, LONG time, I'd bet.




Oh, they've still got people complaining about the snapmap thing. Typically these people seem to be the ones that noticed why it's called "snap map", in other words, the way rooms are selected and linked, and decided "Well if that's all you can do, that's so dumb!" without, you know, looking into it more... It reminds me of the same reaction some people had when Mario Maker was about to come out, they looked at it and said "What, that's going to be so dumb, most of the stuff from the series isnt in it, why wouldnt you just go and use SMBX or modding tools instead?!?" and then later those same people are on that game since it's bloody fantastic.

I mean, really. You're not going to get dev-level tools with something like this. You arent. It's a pack-in editor that needs to be easy enough to understand to get people to actually DO things with it. Coming up with easy to understand ways to create maps in a 3D space is VERY hard. The tools they give you beyond just the room snapping allow you to make up for deficiencies by simply being creative.

But that editor seems to be doing well; people are already making tons of very interesting things and showing off some of the loopy stuff it can do. I have my own ideas and will likely start on some today.


As for multiplayer, yeah, I agree. And honestly? There's nothing really WRONG with it. I had posted a different first-impressions sort of topic when the multiplayer beta came out; I tried it out, and wrote up opinions and info. And you know what, I think it's just fine. It's a bit like Doom/Quake/Unreal with some modernized elements added (loadouts and related things). I didnt go into it all biased and annoyed, and had fun with it, and it just outright works. Is it perfect? No. But if people would stop looking at the older games with rose-tinted glasses they might notice the MANY, many many problems that those older games had in multiplayer; seriously, there were a ton of issues, and those issues arent in this one. The multiplayer back then.... as you said, nobody bought the game for that, and that's good, because the multiplayer was very "blah" at best. It was literally tacked on, when you think about it.

The game looks decent. I might pick it up when its cheaper in a month or so. Every big release gets some sort of discount in a month or later. I doubt this game will be any different. I'm calling it now- by August or September, the game will be $5 to 10 less on various sales at big stores and websites. Then by November or December- the same discount or even higher. Big name games rarely stay full price for too long.

For shooters, I don't expect great plots but I don't expect a mindless shooter either. Plots are a big part of nearly every major game now, even if you don't like it. ALSO.. if people want to whine about the plot (or any part of the game)- that is their right. You complain a ton about stuff, but when others do it.. its suddenly wrong? That's hypocritical and a double standard. It doesn't affect you, so why does it need to bother you? Enjoy the game you bought, that should be the only thing that matters in the long run. Ugh. Way too many gamers take complaints way too seriously/personally.. when they don't need to. Guess what- everyone has a right to their own opinion. If everyone thought the same, it would be boring.