Any word on how they are going to "improve" the level design? They were talking about how the arena style design of the first one was too limiting, but i have no idea if that means they are going to actually gives us real level design this time. My gut feeling says they won't, but then why mention the arena style of the original had to be improved upon.
Arena style is great.
It's better than popamole but it's not "great" by any stretch of the imagination. It's why shit like Serious Sam or Painkiller can't hold a candle to Doom or Quake or any classic FPS game, even though they can still be fun in their own right.
I don't like this line of reasoning because it implies that for an FPS to be really good it must have non-linear secret-filled exploratory level design with an emphasis on resource management and handcrafted enemy placement and colored keys, because all FPS games that were really good also had non-linear secret-filled exploratory level design with an emphasis on resource management and handcrafted enemy placement and colored keys, which is quite frankly circular reasoning and only restricts the genre to a single design philosophy, whereas other genres hold multiple design philosophies with good games. It's like saying only shmups with environmental hazards like Gradius can be really good unlike bullet hell shooters like Dodonpachi that can only hope to be merely good because lol i dunno
nuDoom isn't trying to be like those boomer shooters (gameplay-wise), but rather tries to marry character action games like DMC and God Hand to the FPS genre, games which also focused on combining different expressive enemy behaviors rather than their place in the level. It's the difference between platformer level design where the threat of an enemy differs depending on where its placed, compared to 2D beat 'em ups like Streets of Rage where the stage is always flat and the 'level design' is often purely a matter of spawning enemies from the edges of the screen, but the threat of an enemy in beat 'em ups depends on the other enemies it's accompanied by. This is essentially the same approach to level/arena design that nuDoom took, but with a greater emphasis on platforming since you can shoot while moving in an FPS while attacking in a beat 'em up usually locks you in place. Nobody ever complains about arenas in beat 'em ups, and I don't think that the argument of "but they're different genres" can sufficiently explain why it wouldn't be able to work in a FPS.
I view nuDoom as more of an important rather than a good game because it's the first FPS to really apply the beat 'em up/character action design philosophy to FPS enemy design. Rather than focusing on enemy numbers like Serious Sam or placement of simple enemies like olDoom, it's about complex enemy behaviours and enemy interplay with a touch of platforming. Or at least it tries to. nuDoom drops the ball hard because the enemies can't effectively restrict the ridiculous amount of mobility you have, which makes it easy to avoid them for days and makes a lot of encounters play out the same. Good unpredictable enemy behavior and enemies that ACTUALLY PLAY OFF OF EACHOTHER is how good arcade beat 'em ups can remain interesting with each run. W/r/t arena design I also would have loved to see more environmental hazards or other interactive elements to diversify things a little in a way that actually affects gameplay, rather than arenas always being an assortment of platforms. Though the limited movement techniques in nuDoom also gimp what can be done with the arena design, which Eternal seems to work on by adding in air dashing and grappling hooks.
To then say the solution is to go back to what worked when 'what worked' is part of an entirely different design philosophy is holding back innovation (and coming from Lyric Suite, predictably traditionalist) and why the only half-decent FPSes released in the past decade were sorta clones from a game released 25 years ago. Imagine if the only decent platformers that got released nowadays only lightly strayed from Super Mario Bros.' formula. Wouldn't that be a sad state of affairs? olDoom already has a zillion WADs and mods that elevate the base gameplay to perfection. If they were to make a true sequel to Quake 1, it's not going to be compared to Quake 1, it's going to be compared to Arcane Dimensions. There's nothing to be done there that will truly wow people unless you bring something radically new to the table, and just because nuDoom shares its name with olDoom doesn't mean it's beholden to the same design philosophy. So you might as well try an entirely new direction to establish an unique identity instead of trying to be like what was before.
Meanwhile, the FPS genre has yet to see actually good boss fights, it has yet to toy around with the idea of projectile elevation (the absolute basic idea of only being able to dodge a projectile by jumping over or sliding under it) since circlestrafing still runs supreme, it has only barely seen an integration of Japanese arcade-focused game design like in Devil Daggers since the FPS genre is primarily Western, and so on. You can still make a boomer shooter that excels over its predecessors, two years ago we got Overload which I consider to be superior of the first two already good Descent games and the best FPS of the past decade for that matter, but by this point the genre has become so stagnant with boomer shooters and open world drivel. Meanwhile the idea of 'DMC/NG/God Hand but first person' as attempted by nuDoom and DESYNC begs to be explored, and for that reason I think it's counterproductive to think of arena level design as something inherently bad when we've yet to really explore it.
