Lessons From Doom
Decisions That Matter
RetroAhoy: Doom

There probably isn't a single person on this forum that hasn't read or seen these, but hey. 

People like what they grey up with, funnily enough.

Kids who grew up with Halo and CoD tend to prefer that style of FPS over oldskool run-at-70-mph twitch shooters. 

Doom 4's target audience was the console audience. The design choices of COD loadouts, slow gameplay, XP systems and levelling up, 2 weapons only...

...are in the 2 out of 6 multiplayer game modes that have been released in the beta, so we shouldn't extrapolate from them to the other 4 nor to the singleplayer game. 

you are correct on that front.

It seems reasonable that what they have revealed so far is very representative of the online experience.

I expect the singleplayer to be more traditionally Doom-like and fortunately for me it's the thing I care about the most. If they screw up the SP then it will be a damn shame. 

Your sarcastic rant actually has a point.
THEY don't know any better.

Imagine a group of dudes (yes, this is sexist example, go with it) who only tried police-station-grade coffee. They would think that this is it, that is how coffee should taste like.

After tasting real deal some of them (manly hairy uber pro ones obviously) would understand that their whole life was a lie. Those would be totally screwed since nobody makes it right nowadays, because new generations grew up drinking bad coffee.

Others would go like "Boo, it increases my heart rate, doesn't have that creamy crap with a raccoon face on top and contains caffeine. I don't like it!" and they have a right to like whichever drinks they prefer, but why call it coffee? 

Ignorance is bliss.

Our rosy innocent aptitude at taking crap for gold has been desecrated by good quality games that try :P

I'll harp on again with this console/PC thing - is it really too much to really differentiate the versions on the gameplay angle instead of just the exact same game but with mouse + fov and no autoaim ?

Engine, assets everything else is good, its just tweaking that is needed there no ? Even if the games end up playing vastly differently - so what ?

Reviews differentiate the version of the game they are reviewing no ? 

I would have liked kditd's post. 

It seems reasonable that what they have revealed so far is very representative of the online experience.

I don't disagree. There's an element of trolling in my posts on this thread for sure; we can call it "exaggeration for emphasis" if you like ;)

I'd still say hold fire until we see what SP is like though. 

I'd still say hold fire until we see what SP is like though.

I fully agree... I don't give a single shit to DM and MP... SP campaign is THE thing to wait for :) 

Bethesda will be doing a SP campaign stream on twitch on the 25th. 

https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/the-web-is-doom 

In late 1995, Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft's new operating system Windows 95, despite million-dollar advertising campaigns for the latter.15

Anyone saying that Doom wasn't synonymous with PC gaming in the 1990's is ignorant on the facts. 

Actually Myst was the biggest PC game of the 90s.

Doom was certainly synonymous with PC gaming in it's own subculture, but so far as the broader public were concerned it didn't exist.

Remember to view this in context - the whole "Doom on more PCs than Windows" thing dates to a time when Windows wasn't actually on a huge amount of PCs. 

I don't know how it was in other countries, but the broader public in Brazil certainly cared a lot more about Doom than about Myst. Doom was everywhere. 

Sales != copies. Surely Doom was pirated way more than Myst. 

In late 1995, Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft's new operating system Windows 95

Everyone was still on DOS or Windows 3.x tho... 

id (and really, Zenimax) is naturally reacting to the market. I'd wager their reaction is a poor one, and one using a short term vision... And all that aside, well, I don't have to be happy about the direction of the market :)

I loved Doom/2 because of the game and level design, the mood and asthetics. What I saw in this beta... I did not enjoy. Sadly, I'm seeing a lot of people get shouted down and out of Doom communities online for not celebrating Doom 4 enough.

As for the topic of piracy regarding Doom, considering the time period, I'd wager file size has more to do with it than popularity outright. I've no clue how large Myst is, but Doom 2 is around 22meg iirc. On a 14.4kbps modem, that isn't a small pill to swallow, but if your connection is stable, it is certainly doable.

Comparing them to the install base of a new operating system isn't a useful metric.

I don't really care about the bigger picture of which game was the biggest, Myst did not prevent Doom from existing or vice versa. Their design trends did not harm one another. 

Back then, most piracy was in the form of floppy disks; one person would download the game, copy and distribute floppies around to several other people, which in turn would make extra copies in other floppy disks and spread it even more. This happened a lot at schools.

Incidentally, this also helped multi-volume archiving tools such as ARJ to become really popular. 

Yeah I'm aware of that, don't copy that floppy, and all that. Does anyone happen to know how large the full install of Myst is?

Yeah this is getting off topic, but it's more interesting than Halo developers branching the worst moment in Quake Live using Doom branding to pad a non-Fallout/non-TES year for Zenimax. 

Btw, I'm really loving the aesthethics and the humor of Doom 4, but if they're going to approach the single player campaign gameplay design in the same spirit of what was done to the multiplayer, that'll be disappointing.

They're really close to making a great game. The art is there, the engine is there, the tools are there. 

... the SP campaign ambience.... if not "a-la-Doom", the game will certainly suffer from this...

/me keep waiting patiently :D 

Doom was shareware and redistribution was encouraged, that had a bit to do with it's initial popularity I think. 

Not only that, businesses were allowed to sell the shareware provided they did their own packaging and artwork. At least this is my understanding... So if they could get some box art done, then everything after that cost was pure profit. High profit margin items get placed in prominent spots. Then id would get the registered mail in purchase because people wanted the rest of the game. 

I forgot about that...

It was a simpler time back then. 

like mad, on discs. Same with all other games that fitted onto that medium. Hell, i remember a guy having a self printed catalogue of all popular programs handy, from PS3 to Novell Suite and a cracked WinNT version and whatnot.
He was the one having a CD-burner and access to FXP stuff back then, it was a short timespan, CD-Burners did cost like a thousand bucks or so then, even the discs were like 5 bucks each .
Goodtimes for us, bad times for the paying consumer i guess.
Not much has changed, what was the thread about?