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I disagree with the point that as a pure carnage simulator, "Doom is the closest thing you will be to a pure instrument of destruction whose sole function is to

I disagree with the point that as a pure carnage simulator, "Doom is the closest thing you will be to a pure instrument of destruction whose sole function is to search and destroy", and that it stands the test of time as the greatest in the genre. The Serious Sams, Bulletstorm, Painkiller (and others) have taken the Doom experience of finding a horde of somethings and killing them into the modern era, each with their own take. Serious Sam expanded the levels and monster counts to a grotesque scale, allowing for perverse satisfaction in watching and killing off a distant and vast sea of fodder running towards you. Bulletstorm lightened the mood, and as a precursor to the Gears of War series, was the first in my mind to make the action movie tropes of kicking and punching things, coupled with cheesy banter, genuinely pleasing. Painkiller took the heavy metal influences, and merged them with some of the great settings from the previous century of horror novels and coupled it with immersive and creative level and weapon design. I definitely believe that Doom was the original seminal piece in the genre, a Tolkien-esque work. But mankind has improved on the experience in the years since. Try those out too.

ekianjo 7y ago
> Bulletstorm lightened the mood, and as a precursor to the Gears of War series, Bulletstorm did not predate Gears of Wars. It came out way later.
- pvg 7y ago
  I read a Romero comment somewhere pointing out how cover mechanics are a way for designers to slow the game down and also deal with the different constraints of consoles. In that sense, Gears of War is more or less the anti-Doom.
  - Supermancho 7y ago
    The door problem plagues all shooters. https://gamasutra.com/blogs/AndrewYoder/20190808/348237/The_Door_Problem_of_Combat_Design.php https://gamasutra.com/blogs/AndrewYoder/20190808/348237/The_...
    - catalogia 7y ago
      I'm surprised this article doesn't touch on the topic of enemy spawns. Doom 1/2 and 2016 all frequently spawn enemies into an arena only after the player has entered the arena; denying the player the opportunity to cheese the arena from the door. Beyond that, I think it's worth examining the motives of the player. Why do players want to cheese arenas in the first place, when more aggressive play-styles are more fun? Why are players drawn to conservative styles of gameplay, and what can be done to change that? I think if a shooter game is well designed, the player will be eager to jump into the fray as soon as they can, and the game will reward them for that sort of aggression. Doom 2016 does a great job of this; aggressive gameplay is rewarded with more abundant health and ammo drops. Conservative gameplay isn't rewarded; moving slow gets you killed, and staying far away from the enemies gets you killed.
      - pvg 7y ago
        Delayed spawn is a kind of 'hidden information' the article mentions. You could also think of it as a kind of leashing. Doom and a lot of older shooters with discrete levels also tend to offer one way paths - doors get shut behind you, etc. It's a bit odd to say shooters are 'plagued' by this problem given that one of the very first FPS'es puts a great deal of careful design effort into avoiding it.
      - jon_richards 7y ago
        I think one issue is modern AI design. Their chance of hitting you goes down with distance and cover. Speed and surprise might be given some consideration, but you are almost always safest peaking around cover and clicking on enemy heads. I'm not sure if the original Ghost Recon was actually this advanced, but it felt like enemies got more accurate as they got more evidence of your position. You could find a good sniping spot and take out a couple enemies as they fired in your general direction, but the next enemy that came over the ridge (after hearing your shots) would immediately kill you with their first shot. The solution was to use the rest of your squad. Once you got a couple kills on your sniper, you'd hide completely and switch to an assault in another position. The enemy would run over the ridge, but they'd only have improved accuracy against the sniper. That made them an easy fight for the assault. Translated into the position graphs in the gamesutra link, there was a penalty for fighting from the same node for too long. This results in an inherent incentive to capture new territory and turns the "safe" hallway into a deathtrap.
ben509 7y ago
I think Doom isn't a pure carnage simulator as there's also a measure of navigating obstacles and surviving that makes it fun. Serious Sam really is just carnage, and it's to its detriment; you get wave after wave of enemies and I lost interest after a few levels.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Right, Serious Sam is missing the "search" in "search and destroy".
boomlinde 7y ago
I've played the Serious Sam games and I don't see them as improvements on Doom. They take a rather narrow aspect of Doom and make an entire game out of that. Sure, there are times in Doom where you need to clear out big rooms filled with monsters, but Serious Sam is only that. One of the strongest points of Doom IMO is the level design, and that's entirely lost in the Serious Sam games, because at best they're just a sequence of arenas, and at worst there is some obvious collect-four-things "puzzle" in the way of an entirely linear progression. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy them, but they're definitely different beasts rather than improvements on Doom. In my view that's kind of like saying that Gauntlet is an improvement of the experience in Ultima.
- test1235 7y ago
  Serious Sam shifted into a whole new dimension with co-op multiplayer, huge outdoor spaces and huge end of level bosses. Playing with a few friends, the atmosphere of watching your team mates far away in the distance, launching salvos of rockets up at some giant monster, which is even further away in the distance, while running non-stop from hordes of screaming enemies, to the tune of mad techno beats and endless explosions has yet to be beaten in my mind.
  - maury91 7y ago
    I remember playing for years with a few friends at Serious Sam the 2nd encounter (to not be confused with Serious Sam 2), we could play in 4 with just one computer and 2 monitors (you configure it in window mode, and you put the very wide window in the middle of 2 displays). it was a lot of fun, especially the last levels where the horde was immense (and the computer didn't freeze)
  - rangibaby 7y ago
    It obviously doesn’t matter now but at the time Serious Sam ran GREAT on toaster PCs
tines 7y ago
Calling something Tolkienesque, and then saying that mankind has improved on the experience, is a contradiction in terms :)
7thaccount 7y ago
Serious Sam was a lot of fun. The sheer scale of the monsters kinda blew my mind. I had a lot of fun playing on PC and sometimes with friends on Xbox. It's very different than Doom though and feels grander in some ways.
nine_k 7y ago
Doom had a great dark mood. The textures, the level design, the enemies, the sound, the music — they all band together to say: "you are the last human to stand against Satan's forces". This makes single-player interesting. This is then felt in Quake I and II, in Raven Software's Hexen, in Painkiller. OTOH Serious Sam makes fun of it, turning the whole thing into a jolly and grotesque arcade. I think it's a different lineage, just using the same technology of a 3D shooter by a coincidence.
- mercer 7y ago
  I can't explain this other than just personal preference, but I find Doom extremely frustrating in a way that Serious Sam wasn't. I loved play Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and after a long lull, the new Doom games (Doom after Doom 3 and likely Doom Eternal). But for me the hell theme just doesn't work. Chalk it up to my evangelical upbringing, my dislike of horror in general, or whatever, the thematic aspects just don't work for me. It's immensely frustrating because I truly adore the gameplay, but I find it incredibly difficult to play a game where the enemies are demons of various sorts, and the environment is some kind of 'hell'. I have the same issue with the premium Souls-like games. I find it really difficult to play any of the Dark Souls or Bloodborne. I really love the gameplay, and I'd really love to see a Doom game that isn't horror-style Doom, a Souls game that isn't Souls-type-terrifying-enemies. Any recommendations? I wish I could get past the 'esthetics' of said games, but if I can't: what are my options?
  - spookybones 7y ago
    Interesting. Maybe it's your upbringing. The hell aspect is a huge part of the enjoyment for me, including Dark Souls. You could try Sekiro, which is by the makers of Dark Souls/Bloodborne, but takes plays in feudal Japan. It is supposed to be amazing.
    - mercer 7y ago
      Ha, Sekiro was the first game that came to mind as a possible way to play a 'Soulslike' without the demons. Although recently I found Nier: Automata, which scratches a similar itch with a more sci-fi theme (and a dash of horriffic creatures, still).
LoSboccacc 7y ago
> the first in my mind to make the action movie tropes of kicking and punching things, coupled with cheesy banter, genuinely pleasing. thanks to 3d realms we reached the stage were duke nukem 3d was dethroned from the cheesy shooter ladder :(
ReptileMan 7y ago
All of those are more than a decade old, with SS and Painkiller nearing 20 ... humanity has to step up its game.

ekianjo 7y ago

> Bulletstorm lightened the mood, and as a precursor to the Gears of War series, Bulletstorm did not predate Gears of Wars. It came out way later.

pvg 7y ago
I read a Romero comment somewhere pointing out how cover mechanics are a way for designers to slow the game down and also deal with the different constraints of consoles. In that sense, Gears of War is more or less the anti-Doom.
- Supermancho 7y ago
  The door problem plagues all shooters. https://gamasutra.com/blogs/AndrewYoder/20190808/348237/The_Door_Problem_of_Combat_Design.php https://gamasutra.com/blogs/AndrewYoder/20190808/348237/The_...
  - catalogia 7y ago
    I'm surprised this article doesn't touch on the topic of enemy spawns. Doom 1/2 and 2016 all frequently spawn enemies into an arena only after the player has entered the arena; denying the player the opportunity to cheese the arena from the door. Beyond that, I think it's worth examining the motives of the player. Why do players want to cheese arenas in the first place, when more aggressive play-styles are more fun? Why are players drawn to conservative styles of gameplay, and what can be done to change that? I think if a shooter game is well designed, the player will be eager to jump into the fray as soon as they can, and the game will reward them for that sort of aggression. Doom 2016 does a great job of this; aggressive gameplay is rewarded with more abundant health and ammo drops. Conservative gameplay isn't rewarded; moving slow gets you killed, and staying far away from the enemies gets you killed.
    - pvg 7y ago
      Delayed spawn is a kind of 'hidden information' the article mentions. You could also think of it as a kind of leashing. Doom and a lot of older shooters with discrete levels also tend to offer one way paths - doors get shut behind you, etc. It's a bit odd to say shooters are 'plagued' by this problem given that one of the very first FPS'es puts a great deal of careful design effort into avoiding it.
    - jon_richards 7y ago
      I think one issue is modern AI design. Their chance of hitting you goes down with distance and cover. Speed and surprise might be given some consideration, but you are almost always safest peaking around cover and clicking on enemy heads. I'm not sure if the original Ghost Recon was actually this advanced, but it felt like enemies got more accurate as they got more evidence of your position. You could find a good sniping spot and take out a couple enemies as they fired in your general direction, but the next enemy that came over the ridge (after hearing your shots) would immediately kill you with their first shot. The solution was to use the rest of your squad. Once you got a couple kills on your sniper, you'd hide completely and switch to an assault in another position. The enemy would run over the ridge, but they'd only have improved accuracy against the sniper. That made them an easy fight for the assault. Translated into the position graphs in the gamesutra link, there was a penalty for fighting from the same node for too long. This results in an inherent incentive to capture new territory and turns the "safe" hallway into a deathtrap.

ben509 7y ago

I think Doom isn't a pure carnage simulator as there's also a measure of navigating obstacles and surviving that makes it fun. Serious Sam really is just carnage, and it's to its detriment; you get wave after wave of enemies and I lost interest after a few levels.

catalogia 7y ago
Right, Serious Sam is missing the "search" in "search and destroy".

boomlinde 7y ago

I've played the Serious Sam games and I don't see them as improvements on Doom. They take a rather narrow aspect of Doom and make an entire game out of that. Sure, there are times in Doom where you need to clear out big rooms filled with monsters, but Serious Sam is only that. One of the strongest points of Doom IMO is the level design, and that's entirely lost in the Serious Sam games, because at best they're just a sequence of arenas, and at worst there is some obvious collect-four-things "puzzle" in the way of an entirely linear progression. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy them, but they're definitely different beasts rather than improvements on Doom. In my view that's kind of like saying that Gauntlet is an improvement of the experience in Ultima.

test1235 7y ago
Serious Sam shifted into a whole new dimension with co-op multiplayer, huge outdoor spaces and huge end of level bosses. Playing with a few friends, the atmosphere of watching your team mates far away in the distance, launching salvos of rockets up at some giant monster, which is even further away in the distance, while running non-stop from hordes of screaming enemies, to the tune of mad techno beats and endless explosions has yet to be beaten in my mind.
- maury91 7y ago
  I remember playing for years with a few friends at Serious Sam the 2nd encounter (to not be confused with Serious Sam 2), we could play in 4 with just one computer and 2 monitors (you configure it in window mode, and you put the very wide window in the middle of 2 displays). it was a lot of fun, especially the last levels where the horde was immense (and the computer didn't freeze)
- rangibaby 7y ago
  It obviously doesn’t matter now but at the time Serious Sam ran GREAT on toaster PCs

tines 7y ago

Calling something Tolkienesque, and then saying that mankind has improved on the experience, is a contradiction in terms :)

7thaccount 7y ago

Serious Sam was a lot of fun. The sheer scale of the monsters kinda blew my mind. I had a lot of fun playing on PC and sometimes with friends on Xbox. It's very different than Doom though and feels grander in some ways.

nine_k 7y ago

Doom had a great dark mood. The textures, the level design, the enemies, the sound, the music — they all band together to say: "you are the last human to stand against Satan's forces". This makes single-player interesting. This is then felt in Quake I and II, in Raven Software's Hexen, in Painkiller. OTOH Serious Sam makes fun of it, turning the whole thing into a jolly and grotesque arcade. I think it's a different lineage, just using the same technology of a 3D shooter by a coincidence.

mercer 7y ago
I can't explain this other than just personal preference, but I find Doom extremely frustrating in a way that Serious Sam wasn't. I loved play Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and after a long lull, the new Doom games (Doom after Doom 3 and likely Doom Eternal). But for me the hell theme just doesn't work. Chalk it up to my evangelical upbringing, my dislike of horror in general, or whatever, the thematic aspects just don't work for me. It's immensely frustrating because I truly adore the gameplay, but I find it incredibly difficult to play a game where the enemies are demons of various sorts, and the environment is some kind of 'hell'. I have the same issue with the premium Souls-like games. I find it really difficult to play any of the Dark Souls or Bloodborne. I really love the gameplay, and I'd really love to see a Doom game that isn't horror-style Doom, a Souls game that isn't Souls-type-terrifying-enemies. Any recommendations? I wish I could get past the 'esthetics' of said games, but if I can't: what are my options?
- spookybones 7y ago
  Interesting. Maybe it's your upbringing. The hell aspect is a huge part of the enjoyment for me, including Dark Souls. You could try Sekiro, which is by the makers of Dark Souls/Bloodborne, but takes plays in feudal Japan. It is supposed to be amazing.
  - mercer 7y ago
    Ha, Sekiro was the first game that came to mind as a possible way to play a 'Soulslike' without the demons. Although recently I found Nier: Automata, which scratches a similar itch with a more sci-fi theme (and a dash of horriffic creatures, still).

LoSboccacc 7y ago

> the first in my mind to make the action movie tropes of kicking and punching things, coupled with cheesy banter, genuinely pleasing. thanks to 3d realms we reached the stage were duke nukem 3d was dethroned from the cheesy shooter ladder :(

ReptileMan 7y ago

All of those are more than a decade old, with SS and Painkiller nearing 20 ... humanity has to step up its game.