I look forward to playing the SP 

Was when they entered a nice, big, multi leveled arena and then had no vertical combat at all, despite the area having been clearly built with it in mind. Executive meddling at its finest. 

Fact: vertical aiming is highly inaccurate with analog sticks. Horizontal aiming is fine because the player can strafe to compensate. So, console FPSs does have a technical reason to favor horizontal combat.

By the way, that's likely the same reason why Quake only had vertical autoaim � it was designed primarily for keyboards only. 

That's another reason why console FPSes can suck my fucking cheesy dome. 

In a general sense, I agree. But classic Doom & Doom 64 were designed for horizontal combat mostly, so a tendency towards horizontal combat in Doom 4 will help to make it feel more like the classics, which is a good thing.

Even some of the new gameplay features like double jump and mantling will contribute to that, helping the player to get on the same height as the monsters.

So, for a Doom game, that's fine.

Btw, I haven't watched the single player stream yet. 

It's on YouTube now, so I've started watching it.

The thing is Doom/2 had generous autoaim for handling vertical engagements. They wanted you to be looking vertically, even if you don't physically aim up or down - that was likely a limitation on the processing power of the average machine (which I think was a 386 at the time). If I remember correctly, outside of the screen space, there is essentially no precision on the data to render - it's part of the speed it accomplished on those machines, it played quick and dirty with data that wasn't essential. So intermediate solutions like Build's extending the vertical resolution and panning the frame wouldn't have worked because they would've lost those gains.

Anyways, Doom does indeed focus on a 2d input scheme, but they regularly introduced vertical attacks - e1m1 armor room to the side on higher difficulties has former humans on top of the stairs, and I think on every difficulty the first imp is sniping you in the slime room. e1m2 concludes with the pit fight with three alcoves above you where imps attack, but a secret will let you into the left alcove and ambush the normal fighters. e1m3 communicates the secret exit with an imp sniping over the donut bridge, and has multiple points where you get a vertical advantage over enemies. e1m4 opens with a tall room with multiple vertical points of interest, and the right most area has enemies wandering around a high up inset. e1m5 is regularly moving up and down with small engagements between the spaces. e1m6 is probably the least vertical with just the exit, and the overlook of the slime area. e1m7 has the raised computer stations with slits where former humans roam, and you can fight through those lines of sight...

Doom 2 has a lot more verticality because they were even more used to the engine at that point - and I wonder if that one targeted 486s more. Just about every level has at least a few vertical bits, and some have a lot. Sure, your engagement was to move around horizontally to get them on screen for the autoaim to kick in, but it still had you thinking three dimensionally.

The combat I've seen thus far (still early in the stream) has everything coming to your level, or being docile (mostly threat posturing) until you reach their horizontal level. Maybe later on enemies will engage you from different heights?

Until then, no, it's not quite as 3d in gameplay components as Doom/2 is. 

Humorous easter egg, in a document he briefly looked at I see "If you have new suggestions to improve the work environment while working your tenure in Res Ops, please submit suggestion form WAD-E1M4 to your Command Controller."

e1m4's title is Command Control.

Which is a clue that least one person there played Doom... 

Oh and "new advocates must submit a Delta-Q Delta form" dqd. iddqd.

Since this is all so very early on, it looks like we can expect Doom 4 to be just as, if not even more, id self-referential as Rage was. 

is that bethesda stream the same footage as this? https://youtu.be/i92rgRDT0lI 

Yes, but in such cases where the enemies are at a different height, the aiming angle is almost always below 45 degrees, which is more horizontal than vertical. 

That comes down entirely to the room, and entry method - shy of teleporting, you're going to be bound by the 2d limitations there.

My point is that Doom/2 is more 3d in gameplay concerns than we give it credit for. Now the flying monsters do all trend toward your level... but so does the Scrag. But ranged monsters in different areas still provides more 3d concerns than I'm seeing here (or do see in most games). 

Finished watching what Bethesda uploaded to YouTube.

I'm going to try and do a write up of my thoughts tonight. But... holy shit I thought the mp was bad... 

The YouTube footage is from around the 57 minute mark on the Twitch stream. They were talking while playing the game, and the difficulty seems toned down (edit: at 1:10 the guy playing it confirms that he's playing "at an easier setting").

Anyway, my conclusions so far:

- The maps were made for non-linear combat, with plenty of things to get around, jump on and fall to while chasing and being chased by different kinds of enemies. That's cool.

- Exploration seems to be semi-linear. Non-linearity seems to come in small modularized area segments similar to the SnapMap ones. The map layouts seems quite static, with no long bridges to raise or big walls to open (which reminds me that Doom 3 had some very dynamic map layouts).

- As the automap shows, the level layouts are incredibly blocky, like Wolfenstein 3D levels with floor-over-floor sections added.

- The enemies focus too much on trying to do melee attacks, and it seems they won't try to shoot at the player when they can't get a very clear shot. So we end up getting lots of demons running around doing melee attacks all the time, and only sometimes we get a few demon projectiles to dodge from. This is a bad point, as one of the most fun things in Doom was dodging lots of fireballs while aiming and shooting at the demons.

- Cacodemons won't automatically fly up/down to the same height of the player, so they actually provide some good vertical combat.

- The projectile speed and the firing rate of the plasma rifle are very similar to Doom 64, which I like. 

Or, at least, I feel it's very unlikely. I think at this point it's really up to indie devs to deliver what I think some people (including myself) want out of a 90's styled shooter. It's simply too niche to be viable on such a large scale.

Considering that id needs to appeal to a larger demographic, it seems like they've toed the line quite well. I think what they've done on paper is pretty close to spot on, given the parameters they had to work in. Now, if it works in practice... we'll just have to wait and see.

The SP showing has rekindled my excitement for this game. Granted, some of their marketing and previous showings caused me to set the bar pretty low. I think this game will be good, maybe even great (hey, it can happen) in it's own right.

I think it's evident passionate people worked on this game. It doesn't come across as something simply shat out by corporate, though it may have some of its stink. 

It feels more corporate to me than CoD, honestly. I'm not expecting them to make a 90s fps. Those are harder to make, frankly. I don't need to relive my childhood, but I wouldn't mind some fun again, outside of a few good moments in BlOps2, modded Skyrim, STALKER, and early Minecraft.

Anyways, I did a rough quick post of my thoughts, http://scar3crow.com/2016/04/doom-4-campaign-stream-thoughts/ 

Anyways, I did a rough quick post of my thoughts...

This is pretty much spot-on with mine. The arena-to-arena progression (it's notable that they even referred to the maps as "arenas" in the stream), the knowing gamism, the upgrades and mods system...

At it's heart it's a simplistic shooter for sure, but then it has all this other stuff tacked on which doesn't really seem to add much to the game. It actually seems as though each could quite happily live in isolation from the other. There's something that doesn't quite cohere in the implementation, and that's sad. Even Rage didn't suffer from that, once you realised that you were actually playing a Final Fantasy game. Doom 4 on the other hand feels like they were developing two separate games but decided to slam them together late in the process.

Unlike you I'll probably buy it. It won't be day 1 or even week 1, but I'll pick it up sometime in the first few months. It won't be awesome but it'll fit in for times when I feel like some mindless shooting. 

I just realized the Lost Souls explode on impacting you... So they don't persist. Like the security drones from Duke 3d. Meh. 

There are two kinds of lost souls, the orange and the blue ones. 

What I saw were blue ones who were roaming, then lit up in a bright red/pink with a lot of white, charged, and exploded on impact. When killed, there was the Added to Codex toast which simply called them Lost Soul. So, by their naming, these are the standard. Maybe there are others by some other name which don't detonate on impact? 

Hmm, so I didn't pay enough attention to them.

Yeah, it would be nice if they also added the Doom 3 style lost souls to the roster, and differentiate their combat mechanics. 

hell singleplayer video seems underwhelming, can I say this or are the Bethesda fanatics still ready to pick a fight over any criticism of this game? 

I don't believe there is a single Bethesda fanatic on this forum, you're safe here. 

Unless you can't handle any disagreement at all. :-) 

We're not Bethesda fanatics but we're also (mostly) not haters. If we see stuff that's good we'll call it good. If we see stuff that's bad we'll call it bad. But it will be based on informed reasoned opinion rather than getting an internet hard-on. You OK with that? 

You'll get a better reception here if you don't post anonymously too. HTH.