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. 

$60 for Doom 4? No. 

As for SnapMap, I'm hugely skeptical that snapping together prefabbed chunks is going to result in anything worthwhile but I guess we'll see. 

seems like something to allow console gamers to feel like they can be modders too, but anybody who's ever done any proper modding or developing will find it ridiculously limited. 

Games are long past the point where one person could create a worthwhile mod. If a SDK was released there still wouldn't be a Plutonia for Doom 4.

SnapMap is like Super Doom Maker, and assuming there will be enough variety in the prefabs and the environments available, that's fine.

Only idiots preorder games though. 

Pre-ordering on Steam allows me to preload the game so ... why am I an idiot? If it's something I KNOW I want, like Fallout 4, I don't see the problem. 

Pre-orders have been given a bad name by things like DeusEx-Gate and other instances of publishers deliberately holding content back to incentivize early/extra spend, but the basic concept of ordering something before it's released is fine if it would have been a day-one purchase anyway.

Bloody politics. 

Open world games get tons of incredibly complex mods. I'd say the problem is more with zero incentive to replay many games which is different for fucking around in an open world setting. 

I Preordered Binding of Isaac because it was reduced in price - that's a good incentive.

Preordering to get more content is retarded, even if you really want the product, because even if for you everything goes well and you eventually get the product you want, other publishers are going to think that that particular format for pre ordering is valid.

Voting with your wallet.

Moving on..


Snap map is not a new idea. Timesplitters did it back in 2002 with their map builder - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimeSplitters:_Future_Perfect

It's the exact same concept as far as I can tell, although SnapMap allow you to place your greebles just how you want them rather than on hotspots.

I made a couple of levels in it and got bored. Maybe social gaming will solve that - which is what Bethesda is pinning their hopes on most likely.

I suspect the outcome will be pretty much what you get in Mario Maker though - the most popular levels will be 50% gimmick and 50% hardest level everz. 

...if Snapmap is Zenidthesda trying to avoid criticisms from the hardcore Doom crowd. "Oh you guysh don't like our slow-paced fancy gfx ledge-mantling takedown-move-sim?? Well just stick a bunch of corridors and arenas together and put 18,000 monsters in and hey presto Doom4 slaughtermap" 

They want to get back to the ideals of what Doom originally stood for - massive player community who continues making content to empower their IP and.

But, actions speak louder than words. And the reactions here at least (from people who should be interested in such a long term goal for a beloved franchise) have been lukewarm at best.

Because Doom had other things going for it that made players want to mod it - shareware sales format and an open code base that was built to be picked apart and re imagined by players. 

and throws a stupid amount of money at them.