This looks MUCH better than what I was expecting. It's rather fast, levels are big, interconnected and sprawling with locked doors and associated keys; however they are mostly arena-centric and these arenas are mostly static. They don't really open as you go like they did in the older titles. Lots of shit to find though, for example an early level has a whopping 8 secrets.

Monsters so far have only been Imps, Hell Knights and some dudes with shields. There is infighting, hurrah! Also yes, enemies have finishing moves when you die, like a Hell Knight beating you to death. They move around a lot to catch up, which is pretty cool.

Glory kills are, predictably, very repetitive. There is a story but you can mostly ignore it. HOWEVER there is at least two instances in the early game in which you are locked in a room for story purposes. In a fucking Doom game. Like, seriously? At least you could skip that shit in Doom 3 (not in the BFG edition though).

Overall I feel like the Bethesda marketing team completely and royally fucked up marketing this game. The multiplayer bit is abysmally shitty but the singleplayer is really decent so far, at least much better than what I expected and I've been very skeptical since day one. They should've shown the SP portion a lot more instead on focusing on the terrible Halo clone that is the MP bit. 

This Cyberdemon fight looks both hilarious and depressing. It's like Bangbus meets a clown car. But themed like Diablo 3 in so many ways.

Also, every bit of level design I've seen so far... I believe them when they say they're using SnapMap. Some of it looks like it could've been procedurally generated. And I'm still only seeing corridor arena corridor set piece corridor arena corridor. 

yes, rly. 

it's very good :D 

Yep, so far so good. 

How long till this baby reaches freedom huh ? 

So far it seems like you'll be using finishers for 95% of all monsters?! 

Asking this so to know if my laptop can run this in case I want it 

http://i.imgur.com/6HuqgZK.png 

Continuing with the discussion thread/release thread func_tradition and for the same reasoning. 

"They don't really open as you go like they did in the older titles"


Oh come on! Dammit 

- How many more words will it make Kinn add to his Trouser Thesaurus?

I don't know about that, but for what it's worth - and I don't know if it's DOOM-related or not - but for some reason last night my sleep was compromised with one of the most painful cases of trapped wind I've experienced in ages. It got so bad it even crossed my mind I might need to go A&E. I eventually found sleep at around 6am and rose at 11.30am. I was due to pick my mother up from the airport but luckily my sister was able to sub in for me. 

 

the Farteenth. 

fart like hell! 

...anticlimactic.

I hope my whole trapped wind build-up and disappointing gaseous release doesn't turn out to be some great big metaphor of the game that this thread is about. 

OMG! Just met my first revenant and it was awesome. I love what they've done with them. I didn't realise they are so large now, but it really makes them feel more like a mini boss enemy.

Also, the sound is really, really, good. I think my speakers are just shit, because through headphones it sounds awesome. I'm not quite sure how I feel about the music, but it definitely has some great moments, and there are a few parts where it definitely has the classic Doom vibe. Speaking of which, the classic Doom level music sounds great, but still has a midi flavour too it.

oh, and I found tons of secrets. I picked up the SSG on the last level and OMFG is it powerful. I think I'm going to put all my weapon mod points into it for taking down hell knights with.

The Doomguy figure secrets are great. I really feel like I just gotta get them all. When you find the green one there's even a special little animation.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying the game so far. The gameplay is solid and the level design is surprisingly old skool in its complexity. You can totally get lost, and there are key cards and switches and all kinds of different routes and non-linear shit. It's so far from Call of Duty it's not even on the same planet, thank fuck. 

yeah, wow, this game is fun. the visuals are gorgeous and it runs flawlessly even maxed out.

It's just so fun, it feels really good to just play. the feedback is nice, the controls are smooth and solid, the sound is great. Honestly, I'm shocked. Ultra-Violence offers a rather challenging, but fair, experience. I foresee doing a nightmare run afterwards and doing a more thorough sweep of the levels (I'm only doing about 50% right now).

I agree with skacky on the marketing. It's almost like it was intentionally deceptive. What was revealed and in what manner is not indicative of the experience this game provides. at all.

The game isn't perfect, but the flaws are minor. This shits all over rage, and I'm enjoying it considerably more than W:TNO (which I quite liked). The team at id did a great job! I'm releaved :D I almost feel like I was pranked by the marketing. 

OK I'm now really jelli that my options seem to be: 1) attempt to play this on my roughly minimum-spec laptop, or 2) Buy a console just to play this. 

 

Alright, so here's what bothers me with this game.

As stated, the level design in this game is really really fucking good. It's a return to form, something I thought I'd never see again from a AAA FPS. Levels are huge, interconnected, full of secrets and some are non-linear. All of that is awesome, but the game mechanics undermine all of that. Why, you ask?

The game is clearly tailored towards always staying in combat with a pi�ata system that restores health and ammunition (with glory kills and with the chainsaw), making health items and ammunition boxes somewhat redundant. And they are, especially on higher difficulties like UV or Nightmare. Monsters hit so hard on Nightmare and health kits scattered around give so little health that you are encouraged to always use glory kills to get health. This leaves the player with no real incentive to scour for health items, something TB said in his video and his conclusion I hugely disagree with, stating that this system is better and doesn't break the flow of the game, unlike scouring for items. I find this conclusion really simplistic and false; if anything retreating with low health and managing resources is one aspect that makes games such as Doom really exciting to play. A stray fireball or a lost bullet before you reach a precious kit can be your end if you don't manage your resources. With health kits and ammunition to be found in monsters upon death, this whole aspect is lost. Also, and this is down to preference, but the glory kills are really boring and they DO break the flow of the game. You are not in control. Not for very long, thank Satan, but still. UV and Nightmare really make their use almost mandatory if you want to stay alive.

But, there are secrets to be found, and indeed, there's lotsa secrets. The problem is that they're not filled with precious items such as Mega Armors or Soulspheres, but with collectibles or small items. Items scattered in secrets like this were made to reward an observant player and help them considerably in the fight. Now they're mostly (not always) here to increase your collection of collectibles and whatnot. I find this quite disconcerting. The level design clearly isn't at fault here; the game design is.

I've seen some people compare the automaps to Doom 3 levels and I cannot disagree more. The levels in that game were as small, as linear and as narrow as they come, with little to no exploration. They gave Half-Life 2's levels a run for their money. Doom 4 has the balls to provide big interconnected levels in a world of dreary AAA FPS titles filled with dull linear maps so the average dumbfuck gamer cannot get lost. I'll take Doom 4's sprawling levels over Doom 3's tiny linear levels any day of the week. This level design, however, is further undermined by the absolute abundance of arenas in which you're locked in. Now, closed arenas are not an issue when used sporadically. I used them in my Quake maps, the gold key arena in my Jam 2 map being a prime example, but the game constantly throws these at you and they become quite boring. Now the level design is clever enough not to be corridor-arena-corridor, and that's a very good thing, but these arenas are still much too prevalent to my taste. I want to move around the map at my leisure and collect items.

Another thing with arenas is that they never evolve, at least not the ones I've seen. You trigger the arena, waves come in and that's about it. No moving walls to expand the arena, make it more interesting or reveal cool shit. You kill monsters and then you can proceed to the next static arena.

Now, does that make it a bad game? Hell no, it's a pretty good game and it's much better than what I was expecting, it's more worthy of the Doom title than Doom 3. But this clash of schools of game design end up being detrimental to the amount of awesome work put in the level design. Were this pi�ata system not there at all and the maps filled to the brim with items and ammo to find, the game would've been even better. Still, the level design clearly is going in the right direction and is extremely refreshing. 

So it turns out that the aspect of the game that everyone least expected to be done right (level design) was actually done right. 

Can you believe that more years have passed between Doom 3 and Doom 4 (12) than between Doom 2 and Doom 3 (9)?

Wow that makes me feel like an old fart. 

I took the day off to play doom yet I somehow found myself driving my wife up to an orchid festival in miami. Now I'm surrounded by blue-hairs and men with fanny packs instead of imps and hell knights. 

That TB video has made me doubt his input on... every video I've watched of his on a game I haven't played. I knew he was wrong on some, because I knew the games, but... He made very specific game mechanic statements in this one.

"I find this conclusion really simplistic and false; if anything retreating with low health and managing resources is one aspect that makes games such as Doom really exciting to play. A stray fireball or a lost bullet before you reach a precious kit can be your end if you don't manage your resources. With health kits and ammunition to be found in monsters upon death, this whole aspect is lost."
It also devalues spatial awareness and recollection, and favors linear level design. You don't need to note that health pickup you don't need right now, because you won't really need to go back and get it - and thus the general space around you right now stops having any value in your performance. Out of sight, out of mind, and thus the area you are in is a decoration for the current fight.

The Glory Kill system seems like a sickly stepchild of Ryse's execution systems (which also used the environment, and could handle two targets, I will say) which was used to demonstrate your character's leadership role in the story, but also had input tests to determine how beneficial the reward was (and you set the reward type). The thing is, it was mechanically similar to the core gameplay loop of rhythmic employment of blocking and striking. This is pressing a button once when they flash.

"Levels are huge, interconnected, full of secrets and some are non-linear.
...
This level design, however, is further undermined by the absolute abundance of arenas in which you're locked in."
I've watched a lot now, and I've only seen two levels that weren't corridor-arena-corridor in design, and both of those still had some degree of gating based upon killing every enemy. Sure they had little bits here and there, but I haven't seen a proper sized non-mandatory area, like we saw with the blinking tech area in e1m2, or the database room leading to the soulsphere secret in e1m3 - or much of e1m4 as a whole... Maybe I've been very unlucky in my watching?

Yeah a lot of it is better than standard AAA level design - but that is hardly a goal to shoot for... And, an aside, this is one of the first big studios to make a multiplatform game that didn't support the 360/PS3, that also hasn't done primarily just that, so they don't have that culture ingrained just from previous works to a heavy degree. When people talk about recent AAA games, they're talking about recent multiplatform games which 98% of the time supported the 360/PS3. Rather old, fixed hardware, but with a playerbase that expects improving visuals between releases. How do you do that when you run out of optimization tricks? You unload everything behind the player, which means locking off access, which means the level designs available without sacrificing minimum visual fidelity for the player base is... Forward.

We might see more involved level designs again in AAA, and I'm sure some will credit Doom 4 on that, but, they do have room to stretch their legs again, for the first time in many, many years. And then the cycle will repeat and their range of choices in design will become curtailed in the same way. The real X factor is if they can break out of their own molds long enough to appreciate the current standard of visuals for the fixed hardware's capability, before that standard encroaches their choice again.

Okay that was a big "aside". Might be worth a blog post.

Anyways, nothing I've seen makes me lament my old machine yet. My desire to tinker with UE4 drives my need for a new video card thousands of times more than what I've seen of Doom 4 so far (especially not that Cyberdemon fight, ugh...).

I think I'll enjoy more spending my gaming time on checking out the major Doom releases from the past two years, actually finishing Arcane Dimensions, and getting to know Trenchbroom until my wife needs me to help with something.

Doesn't mean I won't refresh this thread regularly though, I'm a sucker for player data and impressions of mechanics.