11 ms·

Lessons from Doom (2010)

167 points by Kristine1975 10y ago

overcast 10y ago
Can I just say how unbelievably good the new Doom is. That game has single-handedly restored my faith in the first person shooter genre.
- skoczymroczny 10y ago
  What is so good about it? I haven't played it, but from what I've seen it looked like a fairly generic monster shooter, except without a cover system.
  - UK-AL 10y ago
    That's whats so special about it. It's fast paced, highly tuned, simple monster shooter that relies on speed and dodging. There aren't that many games like that any more. They focus on other things.
  - whatever_dude 10y ago
    I think the beauty of the single-player of new Doom doesn't translate well in videos. A lot of the features I thought were not that interesting or downright dumb (e.g. melee executions) actually tie the gameplay in such a way that it just clicks. It doesn't just lack cover, it forces the player to be anti-cover. There's a lot of weapon variation, and the customization (via a RPG-ish leveling up aspect) allows you to play the game the way you want. The level layout (including map system, secrets, challenges, etc) make you really want to go back and play more, explore more, do more. For me, it's a similar feeling to the original Doom, albeit in a very different (one could say "more mature") packaging. It's not trying to be a modern FPS as we know it, it's almost like a parallel universe version of a modern FPS. It's really masterly done, any way you put it, but you only realize it as you play through it. When watching a video, it's too easy to get distracted by the superficial qualities of it and miss the meta-game.
    - ConnorG 10y ago
      Another thing is how pretty the game is. It's hard to get that out of a video, but when you're actually playing the game you realize just how beautiful it is. Part of the reason is they use a lot of colors. It's not just another dark color palette shooter. Plus the frame rate is amazing.
      - whatever_dude 10y ago
        Good point. In a world of 30-fps-locked games, a game that is engineered to run with your framerate just feels right, even if you're "only" playing at 60Hz.
        meroje 10y ago
        But that means the voices get out of sync during cinematics if your fps is too low
        Kristine1975 10y ago
        Not if the cinematics are synced to a global timer instead of the frame rate. Then when the frame rate is too low the game skips some frames to keep up.
        whatever_dude 10y ago
        No, the game uses frame delta times rather than a set tick rate per second. (In general it's how most games already work; it's just that it's normally convenient to set it at a fixed rate to make some things like physics more deterministic, and it gives a nice target performance/budget).
      - corysama 10y ago
        Digital Foundry did a great technical analysis of Doom. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=la0O0SyM3gg http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=la0O0SyM3gg
        10y ago
  - overcast 10y ago
    whatever_dude summed it up pretty well. It's not without its faults(terrible checkpoint system), but the single player is nearly a perfect game. Perfect pacing, smooth and engaging gameplay, the executions don't interrupt the shooting, the weapons feel amazing, tons of customizations and upgrades, the secrets are so well done they make you want to find them, and top it off with a KILLER soundtrack. It's all about action, no nonsense story, or cutscenes. Back to raw gaming. It's just overall the best FPS game I've played in at least a decade. It's THAT good.
    - exDM69 10y ago
      The remix of E1M1 on the soundtrack is magnificent!
  - cableshaft 10y ago
    I got it based on glowing reviews, started it up....and wasn't too impressed initially. But I kept playing, and started getting used to the movement and the shooting and started dancing through the enemies and dodging fireball after fireball while charging headfirst into a room, picking off enemies easily even though I'm using a controller (I know it has some auto-aim assistance but it's one of the best I've seen) and it felt different from every other fps I've played lately. Last game in a long time to make me feel that way was Splatoon. The monster AI is better than in most games too. They chase you, leap onto ledges, climb up ledges and hang from walls, run around to get behind you (sometimes), constantly moving to dodge you and get a better shot at you, not hiding behind cover and then appearing briefly for you to shoot where you've been training your gun for 30 seconds like most games. Not the best I've seen, but better than most fps games. Then there's the secrets. It's hilarious how Doom will show you the secret, either through a window or behind a vent, or a hidden level section will show up on the map, and then it pretty much dares you to figure out how to get there. You go where it looks like you can get there and there's nothing there. It can take a long time to figure out how to get to some of these secrets. That's pretty fun also. The need to shoot people enough that they can be glory killed, and then needing to rush in to get that melee kill because it drops the health you desperately need, or hit them with a chainsaw to drop ammo you need is great too. It's super smooth, and the levels are giant, and puzzly, it's pretty, and just a lot of fun. What Doom should be.
    - unique_parrot2 10y ago
      You made me buy it.
    - beefok 10y ago
      Word for word, your review is exactly how I felt (Though I was also excited from the beginning because I'm a sucker for Doomguy and wished Doom 3 was anything remotely like Doom 4)
- whatever_dude 10y ago
  Agreed. But the multiplayer, on the other hand, is the polar opposite. It has a "more of the same" kind of feeling and is easily forgettable. It tries a few things, but not effectively enough.
  - overcast 10y ago
    What's scary, is that something that was basically an afterthought, became the poster boy for the game before it even released. Couple that without sending prerelease copies to reviewers made everyone extremely nervous. Though all fears were absolved when that first level loaded up, and holy shit!
    - Bromskloss 10y ago
      What is the afterthought you're talking about?
      - overcast 10y ago
        Multiplayer is the afterthought. Not developed by ID, poorly implemented, and yet somehow became the first thing any of us saw.
- edem 10y ago
  Plus you can create a fun Doom map in like an hour? Awesome!
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  Enthusiastically agreed. Doom has owned my free time since I bought it. The art, the gameplay, and the music, sweet jesus the music...
  - MajorLOL 10y ago
    Big time agreement! I was reluctant to buy it, I came across this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua-f0ypVbPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua-f0ypVbPA after watching it, I instantly purchased.
- int_19h 10y ago
  I love the fast movement and large enemy hordes in open-but-not-too-open-spaces mechanics of the new Doom. I absolutely hate the platformer aspect. Seriously, guys, just because you have taught Doomguy to jump, doesn't mean that I want to have a series of random platforms that have to be jumped on in precise sequence to get anywhere. At first I thought it's just a gimmick that they were showcasing in one map, and it'd even out... instead, I found that I'm spending more and more time doing this, and it's getting harder and harder, with the addition of moving platforms etc. The first Hell map was the last straw. If I wanted to play Super Mario, I'd buy that, not something called "Doom".
  - ninkendo 10y ago
    Oh man, I feel so the opposite (of course, to each his own.) To me the platforming is fantastic, especially in mid-fight. It adds to the thrill because you can do a lot of jumping from platform to platform to evade shots, double-jumping and staying above a lot of the fray. Plus they have those jump-lift force fields you can use to launch through the air. Watching some of the better play-throughs shows it pretty well: https://youtu.be/P6J352J_RG8?t=10202 https://youtu.be/P6J352J_RG8?t=10202 Those were some of my favorite parts of Quake 3 too. The maps where you could spring off a jump lift from one end of the map to the other, shooting at people as you soared through the air...
    - int_19h 10y ago
      I don't object to platformers per se, it's just that it's really not what I expect from Doom. Also, I actually liked the (much more limited / less frustrating) platforming mechanics during fights, that just gives you more freedom of movement. Freedom of movement is good and Doom'ish. It's the part outside of them, where you have to hop around in silence just to get somewhere, or get to a juicy item, that's objectionable - because that part is less about freedom, and more about railroading ("No, you HAVE to jump onto that moving train to proceed... and sorry, the last checkpoint is before that fight that you just have - hope you like replaying it if you fail the jump.").
ivl 10y ago
I'm glad the article mentioned movement. Games today make so many decisions when it comes to movement where the goal is to make it feel 'realistic', with sprinting, ducking and the like, but they end up feeling like they don't have any depth. An average player will have fairly similar movement to a fairly good one, with incremental differences on small things, and a player with amazing movement won't hugely stand out. In Quake 3? A player with amazing movement could do way more to control the map. Quake 3 really mastered that depth, especially with how much there was to learn between the two physics rule-sets (with CPM allowing for a bit more than VQ3). And the reason I say that is because the classic arena shooters (Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc) had their movement systems as a key part of the game. It's why Defrag became such a (relatively) big thing. And it's why Overwatch just doesn't feel as fun as it could, to me at least. For a game to look like that, but to leave out bunny hopping? Disappointing.
- rangibaby 10y ago
  I felt the same way when grenades were removed from TF2. In TFC they were hard to learn, but very rewarding to players who did. Conc-jumping was severely OP and fun. I guess they remove advanced gameplay mechanics to make the games more appealing to noobs and lower-skilled players. I think one of the reasons for CS' enduring popularity is even noobs can get lucky or trick a better player and kill them. In Q3? Nope.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    > I think one of the reasons for CS' enduring popularity is even noobs can get lucky or trick a better player and kill them. It's probably better for the better player as well. No matter how good you are, a stray bullet or two could take you out. There was no relaxing, and the game promoted caution enough that if you felt unchallenged, there were risks to take.
    - ManlyBread 10y ago
      >No matter how good you are, a stray bullet or two could take you out. And this is why I never really liked this game: it takes the control out of the hands of the player and gives it to a random number generator. If I'm good at the game, I should be the one who is in control, not RNG.
ifdefdebug 10y ago
"This creates a feeling that’s quite rare in modern FPS: that you are powerful because you are agile, not because you’re a tank." Thanks. I lost interest in FPS and after reading that chapter now I know why.
- ManlyBread 10y ago
  Apparently Reflex is trying to bring the classic multiplayer FPS back, but I have yet to try it.
speeder 10y ago
I read other comments here, and would like to point something. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and other early FPS, got the name "FPS", because people saw them as a first person version of shooters, and shooters were those games where you control some vehicle from the top view and would dodge a hail of bullets and shoot back. Currently, most poeple think the important thing about "first person shooter" and "third person shooter" is the camera, and completely forget why "first person shooter" had that name, the "first person" thing was just an adjective added to the base genre, "shooter". Most modern games aren't shooters... I am not sure how I would name them, but the focus is not on shooting or avoiding get shot, the focus is something else. The descriptions I am seeing of Doom 4 single-player and why people are loving it (I am waiting for Vulkan version to try it) are the descriptions of a game that nailed the "shooter" genre correctly, Doom 4 can proudly call itself a FPS, because it is a true FPS. So some people might wonder, what I am calling here an FPS, why people feel it is so fun and whatnot? 1. Base mechanic, is shooting. 2. Movement is very important, both to aim, and dodge. 3. Stealth should be discouraged. 4. Cover should only be part of the game if you dodge in and out of it, it would be acceptable in a FPS with parkour mechanics for example. 5. No Halo-style health regen, this requires you hide, stop and wait, and when you do that you are not shooting. 6. Weapon variety is important, even one of the shooters known to be "minimalist", Ikaruga, has 4 weapons for 4 different uses (dark bullet, light bullet, dark laser, light laser), the point of shooting games is the shooting, even if the only variety comes from using powerups (1942 for example) it makes shooting in different ways possible and interesting. 7. If game has few weapons, it should nail it REALLY well, and the few weapons should solve any situation, games with "realistic" limit of weapons that result in you picking up a shotgun and a pistol and then having to shoot something 3km away is not a shooter. (maybe it is some other genre, war simulator or something, but it is not a shooter). 8. For the thinking part, the important is tactics, not strategy, the player should only be thinking of immediate decisions while shooting, and not stopping to think what path (in the map, narrative or upgrade) he will have to take several hours on from now (unless he is replaying the game for completionism, then it is fine, but usually he will preplan before starting the playthrough anyway).
- boomlinde 10y ago
  > the "first person" thing was just an adjective added to the base genre, "shooter". To be fair, calling them first person shooters wasn't really a thing until a couple of years after the release of Doom. By the time it became the dominant term I think this type of game had already diverged far enough from your concept of a first-person SHMUP that I don't think that your theory on the origin of the term is accurate. Genre taxonomy can't easily be reduced to a simple analysis of the particular words used.
eumoria 10y ago
This coming out in 2010 the new Doom 2016 runs like an itemized list of his explanations of what made the original great. Being agile instead of being a tank. Doging over cover. Low barrier of entry to modding (which the new one didn't totally do but the snapmap system is at least an attempt at that.) Fighting priority of large bosses while kiting around smaller enemies. Great read!
- Asooka 10y ago
  For a less praise-heavy look at the new Doom see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DT7xa-G9bA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DT7xa-G9bA He doesn't dislike it, but highlights the game elements that didn't quite make it in the new one. Plus, he showcases parts of Doom that really couldn't have happened at any time other than the early-90s.
scott_s 10y ago
There's a series on YouTube called "Game Maker's Toolkit" which does an excellent analysis of why Doom worked so well: "What We Can Learn From Doom", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q He hits on many of the same points, but it goes into more depth.
speps 10y ago
From a previous HN link on Doom, I remember discovering this : https://github.com/jmtd/wadc https://github.com/jmtd/wadc
dang 10y ago
Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Lessons%20from%20Doom%20vectorpoem&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Lessons%20from%20Doom%20vector....
sp332 10y ago
The article mentions that the level design was "empowered", but it doesn't mention specific level design decisions. Here's a recent article about that: http://kotaku.com/surprise-doom-is-still-an-incredible-game-1694053532 http://kotaku.com/surprise-doom-is-still-an-incredible-game-... The author has lots more discussion of level design and game mechanics at https://www.patreon.com/DocGames https://www.patreon.com/DocGames
nickstefan12 10y ago
Bloodborne seems to meet all of these pretty well. Especially "speed over tanking", levels not needing to make sense if they're functional, weapon and enemy variety. Cool to read it all laid out why we like certain games so much more than others.
i_c_b 10y ago
Glad to see this article making the rounds again. Here's a little background to the article that might be interesting to some of you, concerning the evolution of shooters. I'm the Nathan McKenzie the blog author thanks at the end of the article. I worked at Raven Software, off and on, from the spring of 1997 through the summer of 2004. I think JP, who wrote the blog, worked at Human Head in Madison, WI for a time. So we were both kind of in the id / fps diaspora, to some degree. I think this conversation took place on JP's old anti-factory blog, way back in the day. Anyway, enough real-life background. The more interesting, possibly, background, is that I carried a lot of the responsibility for the single-player game balance and feel of Raven's and Activision's 2000 FPS, Soldier of Fortune. I basically was responsible for tuning player weapon damage, player input responses, enemy response times, enemy damage, high level enemy logic, enemy style differentiation, overall game progression curves, user settable difficulty levels, etc. I worked with other super talented people, of course, but at the end of the day, I was the main person in Raven's office at 2 am tweaking variables and subtle enemy aiming algorithms and properties to try to make the game match what appealed to me aesthetically. I really didn't work on SoF2 at all, so in so far as the games feel quite different, I would say that at least partially comes down to SoF being much closer to my own tastes. I actually don't remember the conversation in great detail that JP and I had that led to this blog post, but I do know that a lot of what I was saying at the time about Doom was related to my experience of trying to do my part to balance Soldier of Fortune and make it fun and fair, and the challenges I faced in doing that. SoF is a fine game, but I think it occupies an interesting point, historically, for shooters. I LOVED Doom. I just loved it. I played so much of it. It was hugely influential on me. If it had been up to me, I would have just been making more Doom-esque games. But once you're making a realistic, bullet weapon based game with human enemies in relatively recognizable environments, much of what Doom got right kind of HAS to go out the window in the name of realism. Player movement speed. Enemies very strongly differentiated by attacks, properties, and novel behaviors. Enemies very cleanly parsable with strongly different silhouettes to signify that they are of different kinds. Enemies with radically different amounts of health or interesting weaknesses or weak points. Weird, interesting, abstract traps and interactive gadgets that can be combined with enemies to create novel situations. Game pacing controlled by the rate of introduction and variation of these things. Fairly abstracted environments that interconnect in weird ways, custom built to make for interesting combat experiences. Ratios of player size to monster size to projectile size to environment size that maximize player ability to move gracefully. Player interaction styles that maximize the aesthetic appeal of moving through a hostile environment that looks nothing like how real people interact with being shot at (specifically, using cover). There's an entire grammar that Doom and similar shooters from that era rely on that kind of has to be tossed (or at the least VERY dampened down) once you want some realistic verisimilitude. And it just gets worse when you're trying to tell a linear story in the middle of the game and so require hyper linear level flow to make sure all the plot points are hit, and so you have to largely toss exploration as an aesthetic pleasure. And it gets worse still when you have dumb AI buddies that have to stay alive and get in the player's way in the middle of combat, and end up causing players to lose because the AI decided to do dumb things and die. We were in the middle of all these broader genre transitions while working on SoF, and I don't think we entirely understood the consequences of how the individual changes were adding up, nor did the broader industry. It was like we had a recipe for a perfectly good dish, and then said, "Yeah, we're going to totally make that exact recipe again! Except we're not going to use salt, chicken or flour, and we will be adding some grapes and some rhubarb. And no use of an oven!" You might be able to hill climb your way back to a new recipe that works, but there's no guarantee, and once you do, it will be something totally different. The biggest thing that plagued me while trying to balance SoF, and what caused me to look so much more closely at Doom later, was the issue of fairness and legitimacy of challenge. In Doom, because of a variety of very carefully considered factors (many of which JP talks about), when players take damage, it's nearly always because they did something dumb that was avoidable. When you get hit in Doom, it is punishment. Because of this, it's very difficult to get yourself into an unrecoverable state in Doom. No matter how low on health you get, you can almost always finish a level as long as you are sufficiently savvy. And because of this style of design, Doom levels can really ratchet the difficult up while still presenting a fair challenge. And, in turn, the distance between casual play and really skillful play can be pretty immense. I really love and admire that quality in a game. But it really does take a lot of very precisely balanced, often game-y choices to make that possible. I think JP's mention of the player-as-damage-mop versus player-as-one-who-dodges gets right at the heart of this. Obviously most shooters with regenerating health in the last decade or so are fair in some important sense of the word. If you play reasonably, you will probably win. But they're often just... sloppy. The connection between player input and resulting world states is often looser, more chaotic, more often collapsing into a kind of spectacle. Obviously you can ship a game someone can play through with those design choices. But I do think games have lost something in the transition. Given the success of the Dark Souls series, I think there's some contingent of gamers out there how agree. In the end, I think SoF was pretty fun. I was certainly proud of my work on it. It's hard not to look back on it as a kind of intermediatary step, digging its heels in as a traditional run-and-gun shooter as the future of modern military shooters came barreling down. I know there are plenty of people who like the direction that more modern shooters have gone, but for my part, I always lament that I never got to work on a shooter more closely aligned with the original Doom's design philosophy.
Tossrock 10y ago
I disagree on the point of no other games having the same level of user generated content. Specifically, Starcraft and then Warcraft III modding birthed multiple centi-million dollar industries (Tower Defense, MOBAs). Minecraft didn't exist at the time this article was written but obviously it has similar depth of user modding.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  I know what you meant, but "centi-million" is "ten thousand."
  - Tossrock 10y ago
    If you're using SI prefixes, yes. If you're using the latin sense of "centi" meaning "hundred", as in centipede, then it means "hundred million". Dollars are not (yet) an SI unit.
    - kremlin 10y ago
      Why not just say hundred million?
robodale 10y ago
I Love that the author mentioned M.U.L.E. If you have never heard of it, get a C64 ROM emulator and grab a version of the game. It's wonderfully addicting.

167 points by Kristine1975 10y ago

Can I just say how unbelievably good the new Doom is. That game has single-handedly restored my faith in the first person shooter genre.

skoczymroczny 10y ago
What is so good about it? I haven't played it, but from what I've seen it looked like a fairly generic monster shooter, except without a cover system.
- UK-AL 10y ago
  That's whats so special about it. It's fast paced, highly tuned, simple monster shooter that relies on speed and dodging. There aren't that many games like that any more. They focus on other things.
- whatever_dude 10y ago
  I think the beauty of the single-player of new Doom doesn't translate well in videos. A lot of the features I thought were not that interesting or downright dumb (e.g. melee executions) actually tie the gameplay in such a way that it just clicks. It doesn't just lack cover, it forces the player to be anti-cover. There's a lot of weapon variation, and the customization (via a RPG-ish leveling up aspect) allows you to play the game the way you want. The level layout (including map system, secrets, challenges, etc) make you really want to go back and play more, explore more, do more. For me, it's a similar feeling to the original Doom, albeit in a very different (one could say "more mature") packaging. It's not trying to be a modern FPS as we know it, it's almost like a parallel universe version of a modern FPS. It's really masterly done, any way you put it, but you only realize it as you play through it. When watching a video, it's too easy to get distracted by the superficial qualities of it and miss the meta-game.
  - ConnorG 10y ago
    Another thing is how pretty the game is. It's hard to get that out of a video, but when you're actually playing the game you realize just how beautiful it is. Part of the reason is they use a lot of colors. It's not just another dark color palette shooter. Plus the frame rate is amazing.
    - whatever_dude 10y ago
      Good point. In a world of 30-fps-locked games, a game that is engineered to run with your framerate just feels right, even if you're "only" playing at 60Hz.
      - meroje 10y ago
        But that means the voices get out of sync during cinematics if your fps is too low
        Kristine1975 10y ago
        Not if the cinematics are synced to a global timer instead of the frame rate. Then when the frame rate is too low the game skips some frames to keep up.
        whatever_dude 10y ago
        No, the game uses frame delta times rather than a set tick rate per second. (In general it's how most games already work; it's just that it's normally convenient to set it at a fixed rate to make some things like physics more deterministic, and it gives a nice target performance/budget).
    - corysama 10y ago
      Digital Foundry did a great technical analysis of Doom. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=la0O0SyM3gg http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=la0O0SyM3gg
      - 10y ago
- overcast 10y ago
  whatever_dude summed it up pretty well. It's not without its faults(terrible checkpoint system), but the single player is nearly a perfect game. Perfect pacing, smooth and engaging gameplay, the executions don't interrupt the shooting, the weapons feel amazing, tons of customizations and upgrades, the secrets are so well done they make you want to find them, and top it off with a KILLER soundtrack. It's all about action, no nonsense story, or cutscenes. Back to raw gaming. It's just overall the best FPS game I've played in at least a decade. It's THAT good.
  - exDM69 10y ago
    The remix of E1M1 on the soundtrack is magnificent!
- cableshaft 10y ago
  I got it based on glowing reviews, started it up....and wasn't too impressed initially. But I kept playing, and started getting used to the movement and the shooting and started dancing through the enemies and dodging fireball after fireball while charging headfirst into a room, picking off enemies easily even though I'm using a controller (I know it has some auto-aim assistance but it's one of the best I've seen) and it felt different from every other fps I've played lately. Last game in a long time to make me feel that way was Splatoon. The monster AI is better than in most games too. They chase you, leap onto ledges, climb up ledges and hang from walls, run around to get behind you (sometimes), constantly moving to dodge you and get a better shot at you, not hiding behind cover and then appearing briefly for you to shoot where you've been training your gun for 30 seconds like most games. Not the best I've seen, but better than most fps games. Then there's the secrets. It's hilarious how Doom will show you the secret, either through a window or behind a vent, or a hidden level section will show up on the map, and then it pretty much dares you to figure out how to get there. You go where it looks like you can get there and there's nothing there. It can take a long time to figure out how to get to some of these secrets. That's pretty fun also. The need to shoot people enough that they can be glory killed, and then needing to rush in to get that melee kill because it drops the health you desperately need, or hit them with a chainsaw to drop ammo you need is great too. It's super smooth, and the levels are giant, and puzzly, it's pretty, and just a lot of fun. What Doom should be.
  - unique_parrot2 10y ago
    You made me buy it.
  - beefok 10y ago
    Word for word, your review is exactly how I felt (Though I was also excited from the beginning because I'm a sucker for Doomguy and wished Doom 3 was anything remotely like Doom 4)
whatever_dude 10y ago
Agreed. But the multiplayer, on the other hand, is the polar opposite. It has a "more of the same" kind of feeling and is easily forgettable. It tries a few things, but not effectively enough.
- overcast 10y ago
  What's scary, is that something that was basically an afterthought, became the poster boy for the game before it even released. Couple that without sending prerelease copies to reviewers made everyone extremely nervous. Though all fears were absolved when that first level loaded up, and holy shit!
  - Bromskloss 10y ago
    What is the afterthought you're talking about?
    - overcast 10y ago
      Multiplayer is the afterthought. Not developed by ID, poorly implemented, and yet somehow became the first thing any of us saw.
edem 10y ago
Plus you can create a fun Doom map in like an hour? Awesome!
FussyZeus 10y ago
Enthusiastically agreed. Doom has owned my free time since I bought it. The art, the gameplay, and the music, sweet jesus the music...
- MajorLOL 10y ago
  Big time agreement! I was reluctant to buy it, I came across this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua-f0ypVbPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua-f0ypVbPA after watching it, I instantly purchased.
int_19h 10y ago
I love the fast movement and large enemy hordes in open-but-not-too-open-spaces mechanics of the new Doom. I absolutely hate the platformer aspect. Seriously, guys, just because you have taught Doomguy to jump, doesn't mean that I want to have a series of random platforms that have to be jumped on in precise sequence to get anywhere. At first I thought it's just a gimmick that they were showcasing in one map, and it'd even out... instead, I found that I'm spending more and more time doing this, and it's getting harder and harder, with the addition of moving platforms etc. The first Hell map was the last straw. If I wanted to play Super Mario, I'd buy that, not something called "Doom".
- ninkendo 10y ago
  Oh man, I feel so the opposite (of course, to each his own.) To me the platforming is fantastic, especially in mid-fight. It adds to the thrill because you can do a lot of jumping from platform to platform to evade shots, double-jumping and staying above a lot of the fray. Plus they have those jump-lift force fields you can use to launch through the air. Watching some of the better play-throughs shows it pretty well: https://youtu.be/P6J352J_RG8?t=10202 https://youtu.be/P6J352J_RG8?t=10202 Those were some of my favorite parts of Quake 3 too. The maps where you could spring off a jump lift from one end of the map to the other, shooting at people as you soared through the air...
  - int_19h 10y ago
    I don't object to platformers per se, it's just that it's really not what I expect from Doom. Also, I actually liked the (much more limited / less frustrating) platforming mechanics during fights, that just gives you more freedom of movement. Freedom of movement is good and Doom'ish. It's the part outside of them, where you have to hop around in silence just to get somewhere, or get to a juicy item, that's objectionable - because that part is less about freedom, and more about railroading ("No, you HAVE to jump onto that moving train to proceed... and sorry, the last checkpoint is before that fight that you just have - hope you like replaying it if you fail the jump.").

ivl 10y ago

I'm glad the article mentioned movement. Games today make so many decisions when it comes to movement where the goal is to make it feel 'realistic', with sprinting, ducking and the like, but they end up feeling like they don't have any depth. An average player will have fairly similar movement to a fairly good one, with incremental differences on small things, and a player with amazing movement won't hugely stand out. In Quake 3? A player with amazing movement could do way more to control the map. Quake 3 really mastered that depth, especially with how much there was to learn between the two physics rule-sets (with CPM allowing for a bit more than VQ3). And the reason I say that is because the classic arena shooters (Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc) had their movement systems as a key part of the game. It's why Defrag became such a (relatively) big thing. And it's why Overwatch just doesn't feel as fun as it could, to me at least. For a game to look like that, but to leave out bunny hopping? Disappointing.

rangibaby 10y ago
I felt the same way when grenades were removed from TF2. In TFC they were hard to learn, but very rewarding to players who did. Conc-jumping was severely OP and fun. I guess they remove advanced gameplay mechanics to make the games more appealing to noobs and lower-skilled players. I think one of the reasons for CS' enduring popularity is even noobs can get lucky or trick a better player and kill them. In Q3? Nope.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > I think one of the reasons for CS' enduring popularity is even noobs can get lucky or trick a better player and kill them. It's probably better for the better player as well. No matter how good you are, a stray bullet or two could take you out. There was no relaxing, and the game promoted caution enough that if you felt unchallenged, there were risks to take.
  - ManlyBread 10y ago
    >No matter how good you are, a stray bullet or two could take you out. And this is why I never really liked this game: it takes the control out of the hands of the player and gives it to a random number generator. If I'm good at the game, I should be the one who is in control, not RNG.

ifdefdebug 10y ago

"This creates a feeling that’s quite rare in modern FPS: that you are powerful because you are agile, not because you’re a tank." Thanks. I lost interest in FPS and after reading that chapter now I know why.

ManlyBread 10y ago
Apparently Reflex is trying to bring the classic multiplayer FPS back, but I have yet to try it.

speeder 10y ago

I read other comments here, and would like to point something. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and other early FPS, got the name "FPS", because people saw them as a first person version of shooters, and shooters were those games where you control some vehicle from the top view and would dodge a hail of bullets and shoot back. Currently, most poeple think the important thing about "first person shooter" and "third person shooter" is the camera, and completely forget why "first person shooter" had that name, the "first person" thing was just an adjective added to the base genre, "shooter". Most modern games aren't shooters... I am not sure how I would name them, but the focus is not on shooting or avoiding get shot, the focus is something else. The descriptions I am seeing of Doom 4 single-player and why people are loving it (I am waiting for Vulkan version to try it) are the descriptions of a game that nailed the "shooter" genre correctly, Doom 4 can proudly call itself a FPS, because it is a true FPS. So some people might wonder, what I am calling here an FPS, why people feel it is so fun and whatnot? 1. Base mechanic, is shooting. 2. Movement is very important, both to aim, and dodge. 3. Stealth should be discouraged. 4. Cover should only be part of the game if you dodge in and out of it, it would be acceptable in a FPS with parkour mechanics for example. 5. No Halo-style health regen, this requires you hide, stop and wait, and when you do that you are not shooting. 6. Weapon variety is important, even one of the shooters known to be "minimalist", Ikaruga, has 4 weapons for 4 different uses (dark bullet, light bullet, dark laser, light laser), the point of shooting games is the shooting, even if the only variety comes from using powerups (1942 for example) it makes shooting in different ways possible and interesting. 7. If game has few weapons, it should nail it REALLY well, and the few weapons should solve any situation, games with "realistic" limit of weapons that result in you picking up a shotgun and a pistol and then having to shoot something 3km away is not a shooter. (maybe it is some other genre, war simulator or something, but it is not a shooter). 8. For the thinking part, the important is tactics, not strategy, the player should only be thinking of immediate decisions while shooting, and not stopping to think what path (in the map, narrative or upgrade) he will have to take several hours on from now (unless he is replaying the game for completionism, then it is fine, but usually he will preplan before starting the playthrough anyway).

boomlinde 10y ago
> the "first person" thing was just an adjective added to the base genre, "shooter". To be fair, calling them first person shooters wasn't really a thing until a couple of years after the release of Doom. By the time it became the dominant term I think this type of game had already diverged far enough from your concept of a first-person SHMUP that I don't think that your theory on the origin of the term is accurate. Genre taxonomy can't easily be reduced to a simple analysis of the particular words used.

eumoria 10y ago

This coming out in 2010 the new Doom 2016 runs like an itemized list of his explanations of what made the original great. Being agile instead of being a tank. Doging over cover. Low barrier of entry to modding (which the new one didn't totally do but the snapmap system is at least an attempt at that.) Fighting priority of large bosses while kiting around smaller enemies. Great read!

Asooka 10y ago
For a less praise-heavy look at the new Doom see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DT7xa-G9bA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DT7xa-G9bA He doesn't dislike it, but highlights the game elements that didn't quite make it in the new one. Plus, he showcases parts of Doom that really couldn't have happened at any time other than the early-90s.

scott_s 10y ago

There's a series on YouTube called "Game Maker's Toolkit" which does an excellent analysis of why Doom worked so well: "What We Can Learn From Doom", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q He hits on many of the same points, but it goes into more depth.

speps 10y ago

From a previous HN link on Doom, I remember discovering this : https://github.com/jmtd/wadc https://github.com/jmtd/wadc

dang 10y ago

Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Lessons%20from%20Doom%20vectorpoem&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Lessons%20from%20Doom%20vector....

sp332 10y ago

The article mentions that the level design was "empowered", but it doesn't mention specific level design decisions. Here's a recent article about that: http://kotaku.com/surprise-doom-is-still-an-incredible-game-1694053532 http://kotaku.com/surprise-doom-is-still-an-incredible-game-... The author has lots more discussion of level design and game mechanics at https://www.patreon.com/DocGames https://www.patreon.com/DocGames

nickstefan12 10y ago

Bloodborne seems to meet all of these pretty well. Especially "speed over tanking", levels not needing to make sense if they're functional, weapon and enemy variety. Cool to read it all laid out why we like certain games so much more than others.

i_c_b 10y ago

Glad to see this article making the rounds again. Here's a little background to the article that might be interesting to some of you, concerning the evolution of shooters. I'm the Nathan McKenzie the blog author thanks at the end of the article. I worked at Raven Software, off and on, from the spring of 1997 through the summer of 2004. I think JP, who wrote the blog, worked at Human Head in Madison, WI for a time. So we were both kind of in the id / fps diaspora, to some degree. I think this conversation took place on JP's old anti-factory blog, way back in the day. Anyway, enough real-life background. The more interesting, possibly, background, is that I carried a lot of the responsibility for the single-player game balance and feel of Raven's and Activision's 2000 FPS, Soldier of Fortune. I basically was responsible for tuning player weapon damage, player input responses, enemy response times, enemy damage, high level enemy logic, enemy style differentiation, overall game progression curves, user settable difficulty levels, etc. I worked with other super talented people, of course, but at the end of the day, I was the main person in Raven's office at 2 am tweaking variables and subtle enemy aiming algorithms and properties to try to make the game match what appealed to me aesthetically. I really didn't work on SoF2 at all, so in so far as the games feel quite different, I would say that at least partially comes down to SoF being much closer to my own tastes. I actually don't remember the conversation in great detail that JP and I had that led to this blog post, but I do know that a lot of what I was saying at the time about Doom was related to my experience of trying to do my part to balance Soldier of Fortune and make it fun and fair, and the challenges I faced in doing that. SoF is a fine game, but I think it occupies an interesting point, historically, for shooters. I LOVED Doom. I just loved it. I played so much of it. It was hugely influential on me. If it had been up to me, I would have just been making more Doom-esque games. But once you're making a realistic, bullet weapon based game with human enemies in relatively recognizable environments, much of what Doom got right kind of HAS to go out the window in the name of realism. Player movement speed. Enemies very strongly differentiated by attacks, properties, and novel behaviors. Enemies very cleanly parsable with strongly different silhouettes to signify that they are of different kinds. Enemies with radically different amounts of health or interesting weaknesses or weak points. Weird, interesting, abstract traps and interactive gadgets that can be combined with enemies to create novel situations. Game pacing controlled by the rate of introduction and variation of these things. Fairly abstracted environments that interconnect in weird ways, custom built to make for interesting combat experiences. Ratios of player size to monster size to projectile size to environment size that maximize player ability to move gracefully. Player interaction styles that maximize the aesthetic appeal of moving through a hostile environment that looks nothing like how real people interact with being shot at (specifically, using cover). There's an entire grammar that Doom and similar shooters from that era rely on that kind of has to be tossed (or at the least VERY dampened down) once you want some realistic verisimilitude. And it just gets worse when you're trying to tell a linear story in the middle of the game and so require hyper linear level flow to make sure all the plot points are hit, and so you have to largely toss exploration as an aesthetic pleasure. And it gets worse still when you have dumb AI buddies that have to stay alive and get in the player's way in the middle of combat, and end up causing players to lose because the AI decided to do dumb things and die. We were in the middle of all these broader genre transitions while working on SoF, and I don't think we entirely understood the consequences of how the individual changes were adding up, nor did the broader industry. It was like we had a recipe for a perfectly good dish, and then said, "Yeah, we're going to totally make that exact recipe again! Except we're not going to use salt, chicken or flour, and we will be adding some grapes and some rhubarb. And no use of an oven!" You might be able to hill climb your way back to a new recipe that works, but there's no guarantee, and once you do, it will be something totally different. The biggest thing that plagued me while trying to balance SoF, and what caused me to look so much more closely at Doom later, was the issue of fairness and legitimacy of challenge. In Doom, because of a variety of very carefully considered factors (many of which JP talks about), when players take damage, it's nearly always because they did something dumb that was avoidable. When you get hit in Doom, it is punishment. Because of this, it's very difficult to get yourself into an unrecoverable state in Doom. No matter how low on health you get, you can almost always finish a level as long as you are sufficiently savvy. And because of this style of design, Doom levels can really ratchet the difficult up while still presenting a fair challenge. And, in turn, the distance between casual play and really skillful play can be pretty immense. I really love and admire that quality in a game. But it really does take a lot of very precisely balanced, often game-y choices to make that possible. I think JP's mention of the player-as-damage-mop versus player-as-one-who-dodges gets right at the heart of this. Obviously most shooters with regenerating health in the last decade or so are fair in some important sense of the word. If you play reasonably, you will probably win. But they're often just... sloppy. The connection between player input and resulting world states is often looser, more chaotic, more often collapsing into a kind of spectacle. Obviously you can ship a game someone can play through with those design choices. But I do think games have lost something in the transition. Given the success of the Dark Souls series, I think there's some contingent of gamers out there how agree. In the end, I think SoF was pretty fun. I was certainly proud of my work on it. It's hard not to look back on it as a kind of intermediatary step, digging its heels in as a traditional run-and-gun shooter as the future of modern military shooters came barreling down. I know there are plenty of people who like the direction that more modern shooters have gone, but for my part, I always lament that I never got to work on a shooter more closely aligned with the original Doom's design philosophy.

Tossrock 10y ago

I disagree on the point of no other games having the same level of user generated content. Specifically, Starcraft and then Warcraft III modding birthed multiple centi-million dollar industries (Tower Defense, MOBAs). Minecraft didn't exist at the time this article was written but obviously it has similar depth of user modding.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
I know what you meant, but "centi-million" is "ten thousand."
- Tossrock 10y ago
  If you're using SI prefixes, yes. If you're using the latin sense of "centi" meaning "hundred", as in centipede, then it means "hundred million". Dollars are not (yet) an SI unit.
  - kremlin 10y ago
    Why not just say hundred million?

robodale 10y ago

I Love that the author mentioned M.U.L.E. If you have never heard of it, get a C64 ROM emulator and grab a version of the game. It's wonderfully addicting.