It does look like they've buffed the general speed aside from just increasing the FoV, but maybe that's just another one of those upgrades. Although the increased speed does not synergize well with the tighter corridors and arenas.
From what I saw, the player kept running around circles in the arena and just shot everything in front of him. It doesn't look like situational awareness and crowd control plays a large role in nuDoom, when you can just jump over most enemies like a rabbit, there are not enough enemies to pose a serious threat for more tougher enemy types to stand out, and enemy placement is just whatever. Sound design plays a large part in situational awareness, but I can't really tell most enemies apart from their sounds in nuDoom, nor does it seem to be ever required. It's also hard to tell to hear what's going on around you when that noise soundtrack kicks in. Enemy screams blend in better with heavy metal than noisestep.
There doesn't seem to be a whole lot reason to use one weapon over the other, save for the super shotgun, gauss rifle and rocket launcher, outside of running out of ammo. I don't understand why the Assault Rifle exists when there's a chaingun, and the alt. fire to the AR is almost identical to the alt. fire of the shotgun. Usually you'd use a plasma rifle to deal more damage than the chaingun, but now I don't really see a functional difference between the AR and plasma rifle.
Also I'm not sure how to feel about being able to switch weapons when the SS is reloading? It kind of ruins the balance when you consider the risk of shooting a SS in the original, whereas now you can just pump out a short-range burst almost anytime. I guess you could say you could do the same thing in Quake 1, but the RoF of the Q1 SS was already pretty high to begin with.
And most of the time I can't even tell where all the ammo and health is coming from, nor am I probably intended to.
That latest D44M video does look significantly more fun than all the other gameplay videos made on the console, but I'm a bit worried that it will delve too deep into 'mindless' territory. The designers probably wanted to really keep the player in the flow by removing the mental strain of situational awareness and resource management in favor of frantic movement and shooting. D44M is more similar to Quake in terms of gameplay than Doom at this point, but Quake's level design crafted interesting varied encounters using the various enemy types which did require more than two braincells in order to figure out how you were going to deal with it. That, and melee enemies in Quake actually posed a threat.
This should not make me as angry as it should
Mick Gordon is perfectly capable of making good music, but I can't for the love of god understand the direction he took with the D44M soundtrack