I didn't get the same feedback as provided in previous posts of this thread... Anyway, a colleague in my company has been "luckily selected" for the Doom Close Alpha testing last week (he got email through steam... and tested the game), and he told me he has been somewhat impressed by the overall quality of the game. Obviously not everything is perfect, he was not as deceived as some of you are.

I guess you'll have as many testers as opinion on the game, and hence quite different opinions...

Anyway, I have been a fan of ID FPS (Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake/etc..) since 90's, so I guess I'll buy the game... and I'll love it as usual :) 

is he a fan of old id games too?
For example, he can be a fan of Duke Nukem Forever, Thief 4 or some other nostalgia-raping title. In this case, him liking D4 alpha would be rather bad sign. 

...isn't the worst game ever. In fact it's very far from the worst game ever. The problem with multiplayer games is that unless they're close to the best thing ever the servers will be empty within a couple of months, and then it may as well be the worst thing ever.

It's just mediocre. 

Doom 4 MP isn't bad because it's bad... it's bad because it's not Doom! It's being developed by ex bungie staff and feels very much like a weird cross between Halo and Unreal Tournament, but it still isn't as good as either of those two franchises either.
It seems the game is having an identity crisis. 

The problem, IMO, is the game is 22 years old as of today! How can you replicate the magic from something 2 decades ago? I think it's something of a fools errand.

Make something new. 

Make something old!!

Seems to working well for a lot of indie devs :) 

You can't just say something is too old and restart it with new ideas, that's how most reboots happen, and most of them feel like rehashes of modern games with the skin of the originals instead of classic ones with a few twists on them to keep them fresh.

We had good remakes, like Resident Evil Remake and Metroid Zero Mission. Those understood the originals and expanded upon them while keeping them intact and fresh. 

...fools errand, Now there was a game. 

If I were making a new Doom (or Quake, for that matter) I'd take the universe (monsters, weapons, thematics etc.) and mash them together with a Left4Dead style of gameplay. I'd also basically throw any sort of storyline in the bin and just allow each level (or maybe set of 2-3 levels) be a sort of mini-narrative that fleshes out the universe a little more but doesn't slow things down with npc's and shit.

And then everyone would internet-hate me, because you just can't please all of the people all of the time. 

 

is he a fan of old id games too?

Yes, and he is an FPS fan in general: I guess he tried all FPS since 90's.. a fucking gamer so far :P


and again, regarding the controversial feedback, the game will be really worth buying..

MP is not my (and my colleague) cup of tea either, as we both really prefer SP campain.. but at least it gives a good indication of what will be the final game...

anyway, it is just a matter of personal feelings. 

By making a good game in it's own right I guess?? And trying to capture SOME aspects of old skool gaming.

WTNOWOTOTN gave it a damn good go, by blending modern gfx and design coherence with a bit of story telling and some reasonably old skool gameplay with OTT weapon loads and constant shooting. 

I assume that jumble of letters refers to the latest Wolf games ... I thought those games were great fun and I enjoyed them a lot. But I think you'd be hard pressed to find parallels between them and the originals beyond "Nazis" and "guns".

It could just as well have been a new franchise ... 

Because it was unique.

The most successful modern franchises (at least in the first iteration of the title) struck out on their own and did their own thing, making cool gameplay mechanics.

Doom was especially successful because it was completely new. Granted there were similar games before it like Wolf, but it hit the nail on the head and invented a completely new genre of games -the FPS.

Clones fucking suck. Clone mashups fucking suck.

However, the real decision makers behind making a product like this are completely averse to innovation.

They either don't have a talented enough team to innovate, or the vision, or the drive to do so.

Doom4 will be mildly successful no matter what a minority of aficionados think - completely validating the business approach.

Doom4 isn't for us. It's for the other 99.9% of the FPS market. 

But I think you'd be hard pressed to find parallels between them and the originals beyond "Nazis" and "guns".

It could just as well have been a new franchise ...

There's a real element of "they changed it, now it sucks" in this, isn't there? This must be a horrible position for the developers to be in; change too much and they get comments like this, not change enough and they get accused of stagnating or recycling the same game over and over (like what happened to id in the late 90s). 

mh

And that's why it's almost always better to launch a new IP. Whenever you try to work within something as long living and well loved as Doom, you're pretty much assured of failure. 

"Doom4 isn't for us. It's for the other 99.9% of the FPS market."

Is it tho? The mass FPS market seems most interested in terrorists and military stuff. Not demons. 

And that's why it's almost always better to launch a new IP

From our purely artistic viewpoint yes, but try telling that to a businessman. 

It SHOULD be clear to a smart businessman as well but ... well, there's that word "smart" mucking up the works. 

TIME TO PRE-PURCHASE 

So, they're going to try and sell it as an ID game, "the studio that pioneered the first-person shooter genre. Sorry, I'm not buying. ID has left the building, a long time ago. 

As long as the game's not moddable there's no chance I'm gonna buy it 

eh... the amount of work required to make anything good in d4........... only the truly dedicated would have a chance. 

It has Doom Snapmap, that's about as much as the layman is going to get anyway. If they released the proper tools I highly doubt people would mod the game.

Also...

http://i.imgur.com/R3uSzTX.jpg 

depending on how good that ends up being, that really seems like the solution to getting user content for longevity vs technical skill and time sink of making said content.