The New DOOM Thread (2016)

[ManjuShri]

http://rome.ro/doomguy

 

[racofer]

The ‘Ultimate’ DOOM – Update 6.66, All DLC Unlocked, Free Weekends

I've just tried it during the free weekend. I couldn't stomach 20 minutes. Holy shit, it's terrible.

 

[HoboForEternity]

i never played any of the old FPSes and think nu doom is good.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Oh yeah, now i remember the closest thing i played are the serious sam 1 and 2 remake, and yes, now i can kinda see where the new doom is lacking.

It still feel too constricted. I think this has been discussed alot, but back then where environmental background and graphics dont matter, you get more room to design level that are pure game without adhering to reality.

In newer games, the level have to look good and makes sense While fun yo play, and i dont think you can get the best of both world at the same time.

In games like this, you just have to focus on the game bits. Consistent, realisitc levels are overrates.

That kind of content are better reserved for rog, immersive sim, adventure even walking simulators where the environment tells a story and they have to make sense geometrically and looks functional so it looks like real people live in this building and you can imagine whats life like here.

In a game like doom, etc this approach to realisn actualky hurt the game. I wantvto shoot stuff in glorious way, and it maybe dont make sense for this town to have these hard to reach platform where loot and enemies spawn on, but i dont care about sense. I want to shoot shit in the face and bigger shit appear and i shoot them with a bigger gun and so on.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Doom movie was so much better than Nu-Doom.

 

[udm]

My main gripe with D44M was that it didn't even emulate the good parts of Serious Sam, much less what made Ultimate Doom and Hell on Earth rock. I only played the two levels of the single-player campaign during the free weekend, so maybe it changes later on? IDK. Back on topic, the levels are the biggest offenders -- beyond offering some interactive environmental objects like barrels and verticality, they don't really alter the rules of the game; in contrast, in Doom 2, once you got to the urban levels, ammo could get scarce and you had to think on your feet how best to handle certain layouts. One fine example demonstrating this player vs environment vs monster dynamic is Sandy Petersen's Tricks And Traps. While playing D44M, I got the feeling that its mappers played some Quake 2 (which, don't get me wrong, was still awesome in its own way), saw some videos of Brutal Doom, decided that Dead Simple was the gold standard for Doom maps, then went ahead with the production of D44M.

But going to comparisons with Serious Sam, even D44M didn't match up to that standard. Serious Sam was an arena shooter no doubt, but it threw monsters of varying abilities at you. With a horde of Kleer Skeletons, you would be backpedalling while gunning them down, but dynamics change once you put the player in a maze-like level with Kleers, Arachnids and Kamikazes, or in an open dune with Mechanoids, Werebulls and Reptiloids. It's chaos that actually forces the player to think on his feet and change the way he plays, which again, from what I'd played in its first two levels, was lacking in D44M.

 

[Durandal]

to say nuDoom's ills can be solely attributed to the level design is a bit of a broad statement, it literally has the original Doom levels with the new enemies but still feels like shit because it rarely throws them at you in large numbers

had nuDoom restricted your ability to move around through more claustrophobic level design like in the originals, you'd have to get creative with what little space you have instead of having all the room you'll ever need to circlestrafe anything and make cybermancubi feel pointless with their area denial attacks

had nuDoom increased the active enemies on screen beyond 6 (the Possessed notwithstanding) like in Serious Sam, then the enemies could have functioned as the obstacles for the level, and the stagger you can easily inflict on demons would have to be used on crowd control instead of being able to easily finish off one single enemy all the time

it does neither, giving you lots of space and an easily manageable amount of demons to fight, making the difficulty of the game laughable
other contributors are also the enemy AI which aren't as effective at using vertical space to get the drop on you (so you can just climb on anything and nullify them chasing you or shooting at you), while being able to behave like the player is one of the hallmarks of good AI

Verstuurd vanaf mijn GT-I9301I met Tapatalk

 

[CreamyBlood]

I actually tried buying nuDoom from Cdkeys.com on day one for fifty bucks instead of $70 because I was in the mood for a shooter. But, there was an 'error' in 'processing' my pre-paid credit card but they took the money. Cdkeys.com said they knew nothing about it to talk to their 'merchant provider'. Turns out the 'merchant provider' is pretty greasy. Complained to Visa, they said it was in limbo, would have to wait a week. Thought I got burned (first time trying a key site) but two months later my cash magically showed up on the credit card.

The point of that is that I'm glad I didn't pay fifty bucks for it (or get burned). I played the free weekend for 1.4 hours. About an hour was SP, my brother was sort of watching on the projector while strumming the guitar. Had the volume cranked. But after awhile, didn't quite make it to the end of the demo and he was bored, I was bored. That was about it.

My brother and I played the original doom many times together on a couple of AMD 486-DX2's connected with a null modem cable. This nuGame didn't bring back the nostalgia or any kind of fun factor. I don't know, it just felt so flat and boring.

Later on I played MP for a while, until the timer ran out Sunday afternoon. It didn't grab me and I think the QC beta is better although I can't get into that either. From the charts it looks like they made a lot of sales on the free weekend but the demo was enough for me, thanks, Beth. So sad. Can't even get a fun Doom game anymore.

Even Serious Sam 3 in co-op with a few friends for a couple of weekends was way more fun than this was. I'm not surprised of course. Maybe I'll go play the expansion for Doom 3 and buy a bottle of whiskey. I *know* that it'll be more fun than this could ever be.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Everyone rated my post about nu doom being good but not the serious sam comparison

 

[Multidirectional]

I don't see any Serious Sam in it, nuDoom is more like Painkiller. Except less fun of course, with worse atmosphere and less interesting weapons.

 

[HoboForEternity]

I don't see any Serious Sam in it, nuDoom is more like Painkiller. Except less fun of course, with worse atmosphere and less interesting weapons.

i know, just joining the train comparing old fps to the newer ones

 

[Durandal]

Consequent waves spawning in over a set period of time after the previous wave instead of only spawning after the previous wave of monsters have been (almost) eradicated would have done a lot to encourage speedkilling and keep up the pressure on slowpokes (like in Devil Daggers and Greed Mode in The Binding of Isaac) instead of the casual-friendly system we got

I swear sometimes I don't know whether the game wants to make me bleed or make me laugh

Verstuurd vanaf mijn GT-I9301I met Tapatalk

 

[DemonKing]

I think it's probably the same issue Doom 3 had - the engine can't handle more than a handful of enemies on screen at once which is why they are forced to spawn in rather than just being there in the first place. I think they did a better job of covering it up in nu-Doom than in Doom 3 but it's still pretty obvious.

 

[passerby]

To be precize it's not the engine issue but hardware performance vs framerate. For the same reason corpses evaporize in seconds in modern shooters.

Increasing polycount and textures res, returns exponentialy diminishing visual improvements, so we could have few times more enemies and persistent corpses with only slightly worse visuals.
But fun is a secondary issue to how good the game looks on screenshots.

Even as it is, a current top gaming pc could pull 2-3x more enemies, but you have to enforce that features parity with consoles, so the limit is hardcoded, instead of being externalised into config file.

 

[LESS T_T]

Guns. Demons. Speed. DOOM VFR takes the core elements that define DOOM and transports them to a whole new arena. Find out how the team at id Software is bringing the DOOM franchise to virtual reality in our latest video, with new gameplay footage and exclusive insights straight from the developers.

A standalone game custom-built for virtual reality, DOOM VFR puts you in the role of the last UAC survivor of the demonic invasion on Mars. After you’re killed, your consciousness is transferred to an artificial brain matrix. Your new mission? Restore operational stability by any means necessary. The challenge? Rampaging demons are everywhere. Good thing you have an arsenal of powerful guns at your disposal, along with the ability to quickly dash through a level and even “telefrag” demons into a bloody burst of gibs and gore.

“We’re really architecting the gameplay to take advantage of VR,” says Chief Technology Officer Robert Duffy. “It’s every bit as fast. It’s just a different type of movement.”

“I really encourage anybody who wants a fast-paced combat experience to look at DOOM VFR,” adds Game Director Marty Stratton. “It’s going to be different than a lot of the stuff they play in VR. Everybody at id is just thrilled to be bringing DOOM to VR.”

Also Mick Gordon talk from GDC 2017:

In this 2017 session, Doom composer Mick Gordon provides a detailed look into the compositional process, production techniques and creative philosophies behind the hell-raising soundtrack to the 4th installment of the seminal first-person shooter franchise, Doom.

 

[Infinitron]

Tim Willits, servant of the common man: https://www.pcgamesn.com/doom/doom-john-carmack-id-software

How the loss of John Carmack was the making of Doom

The Mancubus staggers. Its hefty frame ripples with blue and white light - a signal it’s ready for the glory kill. Doomguy steps forward and plunges his hand into the demon’s chest, ripping out its heart, before plunging the glowing organ back down its throat.

To turn this into an ever-so-slightly melodramatic metaphor, id Software is the Mancubus. And its heart was ripped out on November 22nd, 2013 - the day news broke that John Carmack had left the company.

Carmack had represented the studio’s connection to its history. One of its two Johns, Doom designer Romero, hadn’t been a part of the company since Quake. But the other had remained - a living legend and link to the pivotal days of PC gaming.

Now id had lost its last rock star. If the inventor of the 3D engine had decided that Oculus, not id, was where he needed to be to push gaming technology forward, then what was the studio even for?

As vice president of PR at id’s parent company Bethesda, Pete Hines saw this existential struggle first-hand.

“Full credit to guys like Marty Stratton, who had been at that studio forever,” he tells us. “Those guys have internet access - they could read all the forum posts and news stories. ‘Oh, Carmack left. RIP id, these guys are done. The Doom game’s gonna suck because these guys aren’t there’. These guys read that stuff.”

At the time, Stratton was game director on a reboot of Doom that fans had already waited nearly a decade for. He remembers Carmack’s departure as a moment of historical significance for the studio.

“Any time you lose somebody who was as impactful as somebody like John, that’s a big thing,” Stratton says. “There’s an immense amount of respect for the guys who were at the company originally. [Doom artist] Kevin Cloud still works at the company, and I’m always going to his office and talking to him. I’m so respectful of the work he’s done his entire life. We have a whole trophy case at the office that’s humbling to walk by.”

From the outside, there was a sense that id had become untethered from its past - that its days of shaping the game industry were over. Soon after Carmack left, however, Stratton came to a realisation: every other videogame company makes games without his help.

“If we cannot hire or if we don’t have the talent internally to make games just like everybody else does, what are we doing?,” he thought. “That’s insane. There’s no reason we can’t do it. We can do this.”

All-stars

Stratton had arrived at id in 2000. Before then he’d been the studio’s producer at Activision, and found himself joining a team of just 12 people. He describes id at the turn of the century as a studio of ‘all-stars’, in which any staffer could have led another studio. In fact, some - such as Alice’s American McGee - would go on to do just that.

“It was just a bunch of young guys making games,” he says. “Really successful games. It’s always been very creative, very cutting edge, people trying to push the boundaries. A little bit rebellious.”

The average id employee back then was self-motivated, autonomous, and probably nursing a bit of an ego. The industry at the time was “kind of like that,” Stratton remembers, especially in first-person shooters. Many of the prominent developers of the day regularly updated .plan files which, as John Romero once put it, were the tweets of the early internet. These missives documented their latest innovations and musings about competitors’ work.

“That stuff was watched so closely,” Stratton says. “What was John doing with his Ferrari that day? Or somebody would be posting about some new game rendering algorithm. There was a bit of a rock star mentality.

“But everybody was super talented,” he adds. “Any time you strive to have the best people in the world work in your company, you’re going to have an element of ego I guess. Which is good - you actually need that level.”

In 2013, however, id found themselves fighting against the rock star image they’d built for themselves. The studio took it as a matter of pride to prove that they were not an outfit built around one person, but a creative group capable of coming together to make something brilliant.

Rebirth

The team in Dallas embraced their identity crisis, taking the opportunity to revisit the culture of the studio and reflect on their approach to development. To Hines, the experience seemed “freeing.”

“Certainly for the tech guys, the id Tech 6 stuff was entirely born out of that departure,” he points out. “And them saying, ‘OK, we no longer have to follow one vision. It’s our collective vision of what we wanna do’.”

For years, id had talked about the magic moment during the development of each game when Carmack would produce a new, defining technological marvel. On Doom 3, it was the stencil shadowing that made its screenshots unmistakeable. For Rage, it was the vaunted MegaTexture streaming system. But now, longtime creative director Tim Willits calls MegaTexture the “dumbest technology thing ever.” Ditching it was a key moment in which he knew the studio was on the right track.

“People did step up, and they stepped up big,” he says. “They made the right decisions. That has helped us.”

id retains the same “pretty flat” structure that powered the company through the ‘90s - albeit recreated across a team of more than 100. The company holds true to Willits’ conviction that “everyone has a little bit of genius in them.” But they’ve evolved, looking outside their own walls to discover how modern game development works.

“I feel like we’ve gotten better,” Stratton says. “We really have a great team and I think everybody’s doing some of their best work.”

Internally, id were beginning to feel like they were going to be ok. Programming director Robert Duffy had got id Tech’s new renderer up and running. Glory kills were already in the new Doom and looking, to Willits’ mind, “awesome.” But as far as anybody else knew, the studio was floundering.

“If you rewind to when all that was happening, nobody outside of id believed that was going to happen or was a done deal,” Hines notes. “Everyone in that studio had to work incredibly hard and pull together to make that happen.”

Hines, Willits, and Stratton are unanimous about the point when they knew the studio had found its voice again - and that’s when they first showed Doom to the public, at QuakeCon 2014.

Quake tectonics

“I have a teeny, tiny bit of a sadist streak in me for trolling and fucking with people,” Hines says.

There was no stream running during the Doom reveal. No phones or cameras allowed. In defiance of the current industry standard, the presentation doesn’t exist anywhere on the internet. The only records of what happened on July 17th, at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, are the accounts of those who were in the room.

Stratton had been designated to show Doom on-stage. At Hine’s behest, he began his presentation with a Powerpoint. As slides of concept art slid by, attending press later divulged to Hines, the audience of 3,000 Quake fans grew uneasy. Were the rumours true? Was this really all id had to show for the years lost to Doom 4?

Then Stratton said: “Obviously, the proof is in the pudding and you guys would all like to see the game.”

“We played Doom for 20 or 30 minutes, and the crowd went fucking bonkers,” Hines says, smiling at the memory. “They were just ravenous. You got to hear a room full of people react to the first really gruesome glory kill.”

When Doomguy pulled out the chainsaw and started sawing through imps, the audience collectively lost its mind. And the entire Doom team was in the room to see it.

“I always say QuakeCon is the greatest home field advantage in videogames,” Stratton says. “It was so nerve-wracking, because we had found our voice internally but we just didn’t externalise it. That was the moment of standing up and being like, ‘This is who we are, this is what we’re making, we hope you like it’.”

Doom fans liked it, and then some. The demo ended with a standing ovation. The dev team were surrounded by cheering people - exactly the confidence boost they’d been needing since Carmack left the building.

“If you had been working on a game forever,” Hines asks, “and you’d gone through these changes and these bumps, wouldn’t you want to be there to see how people reacted? It was like a religious experience for those folks - just to be there and to feel that outpouring of energy. That’s something I’ll never forget.”

In that moment, he finally knew for sure that rebooting Doom was going to work. “What we have, on just a very primal, core level, resonates with people,” he thought. “It knows what it is.”

Afterwards, as he left the hall, Hines passed an attendee from a fansite conducting a camera interview with a friend. The man was almost in tears describing the scenes he’d just seen up on-stage.

“We got there,” Hines says, triumphantly. “That thing we’d been talking about and we thought was really cool had the exact intended effect.

“Plus,” he adds, “the satisfaction of trolling everyone.”

The new id

In the history books, they’ll refer to the id BQC 2014 - that is, Before QuakeCon 2014 - and the id after. The reveal was a pivot point, and a sudden shift in vibe was tangible at the studio from that day onwards.

“Screw those guys that said id was dead or we couldn’t move on,” went the new attitude. “Now we’ve got to keep it going. We’ve got to recognise what got us here, and try to improve and do even better.”

Like a quad damage power-up, the backing of the public brought a new energy into the studio. It powered id through the remainder of Doom’s development - and Doom’s subsequent success injected life and confidence into Quake Champions too.

We are in an upswing, my friend,” Willits smiles. “The success of Doom has made Quake Champions way easier to make, make no mistake. And we’ve been rolling with Champions, a big Doom update with the multiplayer, Doom VFR. It’s a lovefest at the company right now. I’ve been there for 22 years, and this is a lovefest.”

Rock stars

When asked about the perception that id was all about its rock star developers, Willits suggests it’s more complex than that.

“The fact that we have become much more successful without them goes to explain a lot,” he says. “And you can quote me on that.

“I say ‘them’ - I’m not throwing anyone under the bus when I say that,” he adds. “But the proof is in the products. Everyone has a different story, everyone can say their viewpoint, and you can look at it from the inside or the outside. But what it really comes down to is the games which we make. And we win. It’s been a good couple of years, you have to admit.”

Willits recounts an anecdote told to him by John Hill, id’s esports manager and a former pro, about esports athletes and their groupies. “You know how many groupies we have as game developers? None,” Willits told Hill.

The point is that id are no longer the rock stars - their players are. The pros who competed at QuakeCon this year for a $1,000,000 prize pool are the characters they care about nurturing.

“Sometimes I think personalities have gotten in the way of what we were truly doing,” Willits says. “You’ve got Rapha and Cooller - those are the personalities people care about, more than us. That’s why we want to build an infrastructure and community to foster those human stories. Because no-one cares what Tim Willits thinks, they want to see Cooller vs Rapha.”

It sounds as if, having had a front seat to the invention of the rock star game developer, id’s creative director is kind of over that at this point.

Yes,” Willits laughs. “I want to see Team Liquid win it. I want to watch that guy from the BYOC win it all. That’s what people care about, and that’s what makes Quake Champions shine. It’s not us.”

The id that Stratton joined 17 years ago housed some of the biggest personalities in games. But since its last rock star left, the studio have come around to a different perspective.

“Even the greatest all-stars within id, they couldn’t accomplish what we accomplished in Doom without the team,” he says. “You can’t just go out by yourself and do that. The sum of the parts is always greater, and making sure everyone remembers that [is important]. We will always do better work together than anybody can do individually.”

The biggest thing for id now is making sure that the studio remains less ego and more confidence.

“Confidence in each other, confidence in our abilities, confidence in the talent that we’ve hired, and confidence in our ability to deliver a game that people like,” Stratton says. “And that’s it.”

 

[TripJack]

“The fact that we have become much more successful without them

poor guy's delusional

 

[lightbane]

“I have a teeny, tiny bit of a sadist streak in me for trolling and fucking with people,” Hines says.

At least he's honest. That would explain The Shivering Isles.

 

[KateMicucci]

I liked DOOM a lot. The only thing that bothered me was that some of the guns like the pistol and plasma squirter felt weak and uncool. They should have used some huge revolver and big blue laser instead.

 

[Durandal]

this was posted on id's Twitter before being deleted 20 seconds after


EDIT: this is a fake, I fell for it

 

[Tytus]

this was posted on id's Twitter before being deleted 20 seconds after

Mongol Horse Archers will save the planet.

 

[DraQ]

this was posted on id's Twitter before being deleted 20 seconds after

Mongol Horse Archers will save the planet.

Would explain Doomguy's movement speed and carrying capacity.

 

[Bigg Boss]

Next Doom set in Hong Kong.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Command and Conquer: Tiberian Doom

 

[nodar]

Glad to see that Bethesda isn't giving up on this genre. Doom reboot was stellar, looking forward to sequel.