Since my girlfriend came over last night, I haven't been able to play the game any more since my last post (which makes me sad, because I'm really enjoying it), but I do want to respond to a couple of criticisms from Skacky and Scar3crow.

1. The health packs are kinda useless.
To some extent, I agree, but I actually like the glory kill system. In order to perform a glory kill, you have to get an enemy to very low health, which is not so difficult on weaker enemy, but they don't give you a ton of health back, and during a glory kill you are still vulnerable to attack (I think... it feels that way), so if I'm about to die in a firefight I target the larger enemies because they give a lot of health. To me, this is preferable to suddenly backing out of a fight to look for health because there is quite a lot of risk doing that, and it feels exiting. I've literally clawed my way back from 1% health doing this. There are also health stations, which do give a lot of health, though they are shown on the map.

Also, although the number of animations in the glory kill system is limited, it doesn't annoy me so much, as there are still multiple ways to glory kill each enemy, plus you also have the chain saw and berserk power ups to add to this.

Scar3crow: I kind of agree with you point about spatial awareness being somewhat devalued by the health system. I still prefer the health system here though.

2. The secrets don't contain anything that can change the way you play the map.
Yes they do. They aren't always stocked full of ammo, but I found the plasma rifle and super shotgun in secrets quite a while before I found them in the regular map areas. There is often armor and you sometimes come across supply crates. On top of that, the tokens you get from the elite guards that allow you to upgrade your gear are mostly found in secrets.

3. There is no need to revisit areas you have been to.
Well, this seems to be mostly true so far. The foundry level is incredibly open, and I passed through the same hub areas many times before I finished. The following level also had a main hub I kept ending up back in, but other than that, the only reason to revisit areas was to find secrets. Still, the automap really encourages you to look for secrets, so I've been doing a lot of backtracking personally.

4. Most of the battles are in locked in arenas.
This is something I noticed a lot. There are certainly many areas where you trigger a bunch of demons and can't leave until they are all dead. For the larger fights you usually have quite a large space to move around in though, and there are still plenty of times when you are not locked in. Also, the monsters can relentlessly persue you - try running away from a hell knight for instance. Pretty much everything can climb up or down too, so the combat is far more vertical than in many other games, so the locked doors in many areas didn't bother me so much.

5. The arenas are static and don't evolve
So far this appears to be the case, but the level I was at the end of last night way a giant tower that you have to climb up. It has tons of moving stuff and platforms to jump between. Combat was not really happening whilst it was moving, but it does make me wonder if there will be more of this kind of stuff later on. I'm only 5 hours in, and since I've done so much secret hunting, I can only assume I'm not that far into the game. 

So earlier today I saw hipsters walking around wearing Doom t-shirts.

The game just went from hated, to released, to loved, to totally irrelevant, all in the space of one day.

I joke, of course. But I did see the hipsters. 

Pretty sure you're invulnerable during glory kills, like you are in other canned animations. Also, their snapping you to the target works vertically too. Saw a guy slipping off a cliff by a staggered imp. Bam, back on top, punching said imp. 

pinata is a very bad game play mechanism, having to dodge and conserve your health make combat that much more tense than just clicking to refill your health AND ammo.

people got very pissed off in the other thread when you noticed this.

One thing that also make me a little disappointed is how come the battles in doom 4 are less complex and smaller scale than the best levels and wads from doom 2 onwards? 

and most fights are done serious sam style. 

"and most fights are done serious sam style."

serious sam style is very large outdoor areas with immense amounts of enemies and are usually well designed and interesting fights. With even some elements of territorial control- ie not getting pushed back too much from where the ammo is lying.

Is Doom 4 the same? 

serious sam style is just holding down W and mouse1 for 15 minutes while slowly moving the mouse left. 

No, clearly not. Doom 4 is a lot more arena-based. 

Anyone here playing Doom on consoles? How usable is the editor on a console, can you create singleplayer maps with it and can you somehow export maps created on a console so that PC players can play them and vise-versa? 

I really like it. It's fast, violent, the levels seem awesome, with great flow, and it's got a certain amount of originality with the gameplay that builds on and refines previous Dooms. 

Is it normal for a game this big to be released but have no metacritic reviews yet? (I ignore the user reviews because the vast majority of them at this stage are either "10/10" fake reviews, or "0/10" wanker-with-an-agenda reviews.) 

Unlike most games, no review copies of this game were given out before release so gaming publications have only begun playing the game and making their reviews. Gamespot says that their review will be out "early next week". 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHlvQcozDAA 

I was forced to pause my 8 hour marathon session. Because apparently, if you have an erection for that long, it's bad for your health and they might have to drain your penis. 

I woke up around 4am needing the loo, but with a super boner that wouldn't go away and had to think really hard about boring things in order to fit it under the toilet seat. That NEVER happens. Normally I don't even wake up in the night. I think it might have had something to do with Doom. I also vagely remember dreaming something Doom-like, but it was too vague.

Anyway, I played a bit more and just got the BFG.

It's weird that of all the enemies I've met so far, the one I seem to have most trouble dealing with is the pinkies. I always seem to get hit by them when I'm trying to get behind them. This is unrelated to the first part about boners.

Will play some more soon. Really want to finish it, but I have a standing desk at home and my knees hurt :/ 

"serious sam style is just holding down W and mouse1 for 15 minutes while slowly moving the mouse left."

not true 

If you're going to be reductive about Serious Sam, at least say S. W is just going to get you destroyed almost immediately... S buys you like, another 30 seconds. Kleer Skeletons, Sirian Werebulls, Headless Kamikazes, Reptiloid homing projectiles, Minor Biomechanoid lasers, the Harpies flight and projectiles, among other things all move faster than you do. So, backpedaling is just a start, you need to move in almost figure eights while periodically making a hard turn to stay in reach of the available resources. And that is just for flat open areas, without considering obstacles, platforms, pits, etc.

Doom 4's arenas are not really like Serious Sam's fights, they're more akin to Painkiller's. 

Going the beat'em up route instead of the traditionnal "A->B in an almost believable environment and killing enemies i soptionnal" is kind of baffling since this is Doom's mark, and that design makes fighting monsters very repetitive. 

and I've been finding it fairly easy so far. Fun, but easy. 

 

SPOILERS: REFERENCES TO LATEGAME LEVEL DESIGN IN POST

I have to agree w/ Skacky wholeheartedly that the level design is quite good, much better than expected. Certain levels fare much better than others, and the level after titan's realm in particular felt like a proper little doom level in its structure.

While I enjoyed my time in the game, I feel like it's approach to enemy placement (though I suppose enemy timing might be more apt) is it's biggest downfall.

The arenas are generally all pretty well designed and unique. However, they can lead to being overly complex, and enemies enter them rather chaotically(via teleportation). The pre-release video from a few days before release mentioned how the enemies were all like chess pieces that worked together, but after playing the game, there were 2 archetypes, enemies that fire a projectile at you (imps, mancubii, revenants), and enemies that jump on you (hellknights, barons). Enemies that had the potential to be quite interesting and really change your approach to a fight/the way you dodge were underutilised or weakened by the insane verticality of the arenas (summoners, hellrazers). Also, because of the way enemies spawn in in waves, as well as the complexity of the arenas, you don't really get that sensation of tightly designed encounters. It's just frantic chaotic fighting in multilevelled arenas. This is fine, its fun, but I feel like it leaves you wanting, and makes the game feel very samey the whole way through.

This comes back to the arena > corridor > arena design; combat and exploration seem to occur as 2 seperate experiences. There's no real sense of progressing through hell, fighting your way through a horde; you simply move from *isolated arena fight A* to *isolated arena fight B* with very little in the way of interest inbetween. You could say that secrets help add interest to these areas, but I feel like that would be missing the point.

In general, while the vertical levels are fun to move around in, I don't feel that they necessarily end up being as fun to to fight in. In particular, the final level's triple arenas felt a bit cluttered: you didn't really have room to move around and dance on the floor because there's so much elevation variation. Also, because a lot of the arenas are so complex, you get the chance to isolate enemies a lot just by chance, meaning you can take a lot of encounters 1 on 1. Maybe other people had a different experience, but I feel like its worth pointing out.

Additionally, the lack of ambushes and dynamic arenas (as skacky mentioned) is a real shame. The armour ambush in Titan's realm brought a grin to my face, and I was hoping it marked a shift in gameplay mechanics towards classic doom gameplay, but this midgame flourish of more doomish level design was shortlived.

This post is a bit rambling and wandering by my own admission, but I have this sense of frustration with D44M after playing it that I'm trying hard to articulate. I enjoyed it on its own merits as a new shooter and a fun little journey (w/ a shocking story) but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The same levels w/ reworked enemy placement and encounters could shine, but as it stands, it feels half baked. However, they got enough right that I feel a sequel or expansion (perhaps The Old Blood style where it cuts back on the RPG-lite progression) could be quite good.

Other various thoughts; rune trials, praetor suit progression, and the rune equips don't really add anything and I feel kill the pacing. I quite enjoyed the weapon mods, thought I would kind of prefer it was just about finding the robots and there was no progression after that. 

"There's no real sense of progressing through hell, fighting your way through a horde;"

this is unacceptable. Shame on you id, shame on you.

"Additionally, the lack of ambushes and dynamic arenas (as skacky mentioned) is a real shame."

"[...] the lack of ambushes and dynamic arenas [...]"

UNACCEPTABLE

my impression from what I have read is that this game is a few steps (back) in the right direction, but they are still far from "Nailing it". 

I really enjoyed it and like pretty much everyone is saying, it really exceeded my expectations in how close it feels to the original Doom.

Still, I can't help agree with Danrul about the combat in some of the later levels being a bit too chaotic and arenas too complex. It seems like imps and other weaker enemies are spawned like crazy in order to keep you on your toes, but I really wanted at least one arena without these distractions so that I could just fight the large enemies and have a bit more time to understand the space. There only were a few times in the game where a large enemy would make an appearance in a really awesome and quite memorable battle which wasn't cluttered with annoying cannon fodder (Baron of Hell intro maybe?), but these were few and far between.

I think the problem with some of the arenas in the game is that they are fucking huge, so you end up learning a little area quickly and waiting for the enemies to come to you. There were some arenas that were so vertical, that I didn't even know about half the space was navigable until after the battle had ended and I had a chance to explore, or if I was knocked down by an enemy.

Also, a few more enemies spawning outside of the main arenas would have been nice. The Foundry level was quite good at this, with the odd Hell Knight spawning to keep me on my toes, but most levels were a bit too predictable. It felt like one of the strongest images of Doom the designers had whilst making it was of seeing a switch, or item and then all hell breaking loose when the player gets there. I like that, but it was a bit too overused.

Whilst the earlier levels have a lot of interconnectivity, the game seems to get gradually more linear feeling the further you progress. This annoyed me a bit because it meant that I'd enter an arena, have 5 minutes of fighting, and then never see battle in it again after I'd become a bit more familiar with it. It also meant that I would sometimes go past a secret and not be able to get back to it later, which was annoying (I got all but 2 doomguy collectibles.... grrrr!)

Bosses were not bad, and didn't rely on annoying environmental puzzles to figure out, just keep firing and learn the bosses attack patterns so you can avoid them. Hopefully we'll see some of them cropping up as regular enemies if id makes a sequel (I hope they will!)

By the way, I don't know if anyone else noticed this, but it seemed that when I staggered an enemy, the enemy was vulnerable to glory kills, but I couldn't seem to kill them with normal weapons at all, or it was very hard. I noticed this in particular with cacodemons, because they would often be out of reach, so I'd try to finish them off with regular weapons and it just wasn't happening. VERY annoying, but maybe it was a bug, or maybe it was because I had a rune that made it easier to stagger the enemies, so in actual fact they had a ton more health than I though. Anyone know if they regenerate health after recovering if you don't glory kill them? 

*more enemies active at once CHECK!
*better, more satisfying weapons CHECK!
*COOP < most important thing Yes, but only in snapmap levels
*larger environments CHECK!
*more evilness CHECK!
*more varied environments CHECK!
*better level design CHECK!
*no cutscenes Well, there are no out of helmet cutscenes.
*heavier monsters used early on CHECK!
*no shitty zombie commandos that can do somersaults and backflip behind cover. I don't mind the mutant ones with whip arms etc. but the regular z-sector ones were so annoying and not fun to fight. CHECK!
*better AI on the more significant hellspawn creatures. CHECK!
*mutant owl neck syndrome toned down CHECK!
*monsters have finishing moves when they kill you, like in the first doom 3 leaked shakycam footage where the hell-knight eats the player's head. That kind of thing. CHECK! Kinda rare to see though
*the ability to use a flashlight and proper gun at the same time. N/A
* No shit story involving an evil scientist. Hmmm... It's still better than Doom 3's
* Don't give it to Raven to develop. CHECK!
* Properly fucking visceral weapons. CHECK!

Overall, id has done a great job of checking off items on my list. 

Enemies do recover health if you dont' finish them in the glory kill state, they aren't harder to finish in the staggered state though, they should drop fairly easily.