DOOM

[Misery]

OKAY.

So.

Just a few very quick impressions of early single-player stuff.

So far, this honestly is doing exactly what I want it to.

Firstly:  Yes, you can carry every weapon at once.  The gameplay here is different from the multiplayer; some people are going to find this more than a little jarring, but as I had said in earlier posts, I understand why they did it and frankly agree with it.

So far, I've got the pistol, shotgun, chainsaw, and assault rifle.

What's interesting about the guns is they've given each one a bit more versatility via weapon mods that you can find; you can have one attached to a gun at a time, so far it seems like there's going to be 2 available for each one.  Or at least that's how it is so far.  Like the shotgun, for instance, can lob this mini-explosive in an arc (no, I don't know why); you use weapon mods with the right-click, and some of them need charging time, some of them are immediately ready but then require a recharge time (during which you can still fire normally).  I'm liking this bit so far, these weapons are all quite fun.  They don't have the same feel as the multiplayer weapons, or at least, that's the impression I'm getting.

The chainsaw is... interesting.  Melee in this game actually has a bloody point.  Firstly the animations are extremely short, but also you cant just kill something instantly with melee.  Most demons require that they be stunned first via normal attacks, seems to happen when they get low enough on health.  Once stunned, THEN you can do the kill move.  Why do this?  Because enemies killed this way will drop small health shards.  These don't heal for much but they add up quick.   Actually pulling this off though isn't easy.    Chainsaw is a bit similar; it's distinctly slower but when used causes ammo things to just spray all over the place that you can then pick up.   The chainsaw requires fuel though.  Different enemies require different amounts to kill.  Something can either take 1 unit, 3, or 5.  You start out only able to carry 3, so this is a really limited resource.  But if used right you can use the chainsaw to keep your OTHER guns filled up better.

Ammo:  Really bloody limited!  That shotgun for instance can only hold 20 shells, at least for now.  Health items and ammo items are frequent, but still, it's easy to run out if you're not careful. 

Armor:  Works like you think it does, same as it ever did. 

Secrets:  Yep, it's got them.  Not easy to find either, in many cases.  Got a lot of them.

Maps:  I'm loving these so far.  This isn't Doom 3.  No super linear areas with jumpscare monsters.   These places are complicated and make me interested in exploring them... that's a good thing.  I don't feel like I'm getting bored at any point during this.   It gives the same feel that the old Doom games gave me:  Moments of frantic, berserk combat, spaced out by moments of exploration, looking for secrets, stuff like that.  Pretty much the same pacing, at least for my playstyle.

Combat:  I almost cant believe it but so far they got this right.  No regenerating health, no "iron sights" crap, as stated in the multiplayer bit.  Enemies are more than a little berserk; imps leap all over the damn place, can climb stuff, cling onto walls, and throw really fast fireballs at you, there's your typical zombie dudes, exploding zombie dudes which can rocket away hilariously if you deal with them just right, bigger dudes with funky energy guns.... it's all projectiles that you can actually dodge.  Not one thing has fired actual bullets at me yet.  So far, if it attacks at range, it fires an actual moving projectile.  These though are way faster than in the original Doom.  I was surprised by this.   I'm expecting bullet-users to appear eventually (chaingun seargants, Spider Mastermind) if those enemies are still in the game.  The game is very fast moving and trying to hide behind cover just doesn't seem to work; only the zombie dudes are slow-moving, everything else can move around QUICKLY and they will find you, generally very quickly.  Enemies come from just every damn direction at once.  Also, they hit rather hard.

Found the berserk pack, they didn't screw that up.  Punch dude = exploded dude, instantly. 

Got the usual exploding barrels of course.  Keycards, same as always, labyrinthine levels with many doors to unlock that goes who knows where.

Also I got hit by some sort of mini-train once.  That was embarrassing.  Don't do that.


Honestly, so far, this is exactly what I wanted out of the game.  It's also not stuffed with cutscenes.  Sometimes you'll get characters talking at you, but this is always very brief, and if you want a lot of detail into the story, you pick up codex entries and can read those.  But it hasn't thrown cutscenes at me yet at all.  I am bloody AMAZED by this since I cant remember the last time a AAA game didn't throw piles of those at me.


Graphics:  Yes, this is gorgeous.  It bloody well better be, it's 50 damn gigabytes!


That's my early impressions from the singleplayer campaign.   There's more to it than just that, but them's the basics; I don't have much time for typing right now.


There's also the "snapmap" bit... which for me is where the game's replayability will REALLY come from... and that's very interesting, though frankly I haven't the foggiest damn clue what I'm doing in it yet.  It looks good though; I'm expecting to spend a lot of time in there.   I'm also expecting to find a lot of very badly made maps by players.  That's how it works, always...  really, people never TEST their own damn content in things like this.  But I'll bloody well test MINE and take my time making them. 


So, yep, that's everything for now.  Already very pleased with this.  I haven't found a game mechanic that I don't like yet.  Oh it's possible that there will be some later... but honestly, even the ones that sounded like they were going to be horrible turned out to be fun and to actually have a bloody point when it comes to the actual gameplay.

[Aklyon]

THIS IS 50 FREAKING GIGABYTES IN SIZE!!!




My connection (when it's working) is stupidly fast, but this... this is madness.  This will take awhile to download.


Also, the game is out.

Its goddamn larger than Xcom2? WTF.
(although technically its only half the size if you include the modding tools, which take up as much space as the game itself does.)

Also, that sounds excellent. I'd still probably be terrible at it though, since I haven't actually played doom myself.

[Mánagarmr]

What in the glowing ball sac of Zeus? 50 gigs??? Holy...Um...that's...that's interesting.

[Misery]

So far, honestly, it's bloody worth it. 

I have no idea where the size comes from exactly.  As I said the game isn't chock full of cutscenes and dialogue and such, so it cant be that;  hell, the opening scene is "You're strapped to a thing, get up from thing, now you have a gun, here's monsters, have fun". It doesn't bother telling you how to use the gun (as most games would have annoyingly done).  And in the first bit of dialogue (which comes from a screen) the talker only gets a very short way in before Doom Guy just grabs the thing and launches it at the wall (which is pretty much what I would have done and which is also absolutely hilarious). 

I'm told that a good chunk of the size may be from the "snapmap" thing;  oddly, starting that mode actually causes the game to COMPLETELY RESTART, which it warns you about.   I'm not sure just why but I may get some ideas when I mess with that later today.

But yeah, so far, I'm very pleased with this.   The multiplayer was a little bizarre; but then it was made by a different studio.   I'm still confused on WHY, but.... whatever.   The singeplayer plays like Doom.  Constant chaos and fireballs everywhere and places to explore and lots of guns.


On a total side note, if you fall into lava and die, Doom Guy does the Terminator 2 thumbs-up thing. 

[Misery]

Well, I've sure fallen into lava alot here.

The maps are just as tangled and labyrinthine as the old maps were but now there's also alot of jumping to be done.  Plenty of it isnt easy and there's a TON of lava in area 3.  Getting secrets or extra items in that map typically involves jumping over or near lava.  The good thing is that the controls are very well done.


On a side note, they've changed up a few enemies;  in the original game for instance the Hell Knights were basically just smaller versions of Barons, all they really did was throw plasma balls at you.  In this one, they're huge berserkers that keep leaping at you with a big smash attack, among other things they can do.  It seems most enemies actually have more than just one attack.

Also there's these jerks with shields, reeeeaaalllllyyyyy hate these guys.  You cant get close to them because they'll just beat your face in with their stupid shield and you cant really shoot through that with anything but a really heavy attack.


Also some of these secrets are bloody hard to find and there's a lot of them.  Area 2 contains a lot of red doors.  But I never actually found a red key anywhere.  Somewhere, there's a hidden key that opens like 4 doors that go to who knows where.  You don't see THAT in games much now; generally if you get a key or item that somehow unlocks something, it's always part of the normal level progression.   The old Doom used to do this a lot too, driving you crazy with doors you just couldn't enter unless you figured out where the hidden key was.


Oh, and something I'd mentioned in the multiplayer writeup was about the ammo.  In that, ammo seems universal; doesn't matter what you have equipped, ammo pickups are all the same.

In the singleplayer, it works like the old games, there's different ammo items for each type.  That's a good thing to see for this mode; the universal bit makes sense for multiplayer but would be uninteresting for singleplayer.

[Wingflier]

Well, after looking through the Steam reviews, this game is the most critically-received FPS I've seen since Half-Life 2. I think it's the perfect reboot for the most iconic first person shooter of all time, based on what everyone is saying.

What makes it even more amazing is that people continue to give it glowing reviews IN SPITE of the fact that the multiplayer was so badly received. In fact, after reading ~200 reviews, the multiplayer portion hasn't even been mentioned. It's the elephant in the room. In other words, the SP portion of the game is so amazing that people don't care that the multiplayer is almost universally disliked. That's incredible. Most games would get a bad review even if the SP portion was par, because multiplayer in the year 2016 is such an important part of any kind of modern shooter. So the fact that it can still get endless praise in spite of that is...nothing less of miraculous.

[Misery]

Oh, it gets better, at least for me.

I just spent some time in the editor.

And just.... wow.  I was expecting much simplicity based on alot of the stuff they said.  That's... not what they gave us.

Example:




To explain what's going on there:

The Doom logo appears and disappears when you hit a switch that's just under the view there.  The bits at the very bottom are some simple logic circuits (since all it does is one action in this case, but you could have a single switch do a bazillion things at once if you so desired), and the huge array of a squillion blue lines points to every object that is a part of the logo; they are show/hide nodes and are what causes the thing to form when the switch is pressed.  The logo isnt some pre-built thing, it's made of tons of objects and is fully solid and interactive (as in, it's not some phased out thing, it's a solid object that conforms to that exact shape). 

The jumbled white box is a table and chairs.  The logic bits above it control what happens; when you shoot the table, it explodes, because why not, which removes the standing chairs and replaces them with the fallen over ones.  You can just have the chairs be physics objects, but that's not useful for showing off circuits.

And the bit on the far wall causes a constant slow counting to appear on the screen.  Goes from -1 to 5 and then repeats.  There's a variety of comparison nodes, variables, and the message thing down there that prints the number onto the screen.


And that's just the start.  I went and had a look at some of the example maps for the game, and they get really interesting. 

The editor is very well designed; considering the sheer complexity that it's capable of, it's very easy to actually interact with.  This actually reminds me ALOT of LittleBigPlanet's editor, particularly the logic nodes, which look EXTREMELY similar and are created and interacted with in almost exactly the same way.   Which actually is why I know what I'm looking at, I didn't go through tutorials to explain all these objects to me.  But it's easy to click on them and see what they are.


Needless to say the editor isnt going to be for everyone.  For someone like myself that's been into this sort of thing since WAY before it was even remotely user friendly, this isnt hard to understand yet can create some damn awesome things.  For those not used to it, this is going to be brain-melting.   

And making GOOD maps is going to be TIME CONSUMING.  Seriously, it'll take awhile, and it's going to take some real practice to get good at it.

Maps can be designed to be played solo, or you can make co-op or deathmatch or... whatever you can come up with.  There are things like scoring systems (not just in multiplayer, but for defeating enemies or doing other things too) to add to it so that it's not just a win/lose thing.  I mean, really, they seem to have thought of EVERYTHING here.  Every conceivable gameplay idea can be implemented and controlled within this.

And I'm calling it now:  Someone, at some point, is going to build a full calculator in here.  Seriously, it's going to happen.  It's just a matter of time.


All in all... I'm just amazed.  The last AAA game I encountered that I liked THIS much was Anno 2070 (which is another game that's just STUFFED with possibilities). And the LittleBigPlanet series also.



As for the multiplayer, honestly, it'll probably do fine.  The people that disliked it were the ones that expected it to pretty much BE the old Doom's multiplayer, or more accurately, Quake (a lot of the things complained about actually DID NOT come from Doom, but came from Quake).  I still think it's pretty fun and good.  Perfect?  No.  But it's still good, and it's not hard to get matches.  It's just that you have to know what to expect from it.  My own opinion of it remains as stated at the start of this topic.

But as many people have said.... even back then, you bought Doom for the singleplayer.   There was lots to do on the main maps, and then the whole map-making and modding scene just outright EXPLODED.   The multiplayer that the game had was practically a tacked-on afterthought.  Not that it was bad or anything, it's just that the vast majority of players didn't care (and couldn't play it anyway).  Later games like Quake obviously changed this, but with Doom... it was about the singleplayer.

[Misery]

Addition to the editing bit:

I didn't mention it before, but something that struck me as odd was that, when I was testing the maps and such, the controls and style reverted to that of the multiplayer, complete with loadouts and such. Two weapons at a time, all that.  I forgot to explain this in my post just there.

But, it seems... even that stuff can be turned on and off.  Even that is entirely up to the mapmaker's preference.

They REALLY thought of everything.


....I haven't the foggiest damn clue HOW to do this, but.... well, no, actually I have sort of an idea as to how it probably works based on some of the node types. 


The ONE problem right now:  Some players are experiencing some very strange bugs with editing.  Granted, this is honestly kinda expected.  But still, they are there.

That's fine though, honestly.  There can be a few bugs and they will likely be cleared up fast.  The game as a whole is just... so damn polished.  I've encountered MAYBE two very tiny glitches while playing the singleplayer.  That's it.  A funky and obviously messed up visual effect in one spot, and at one point I had a possessed engineer (zombie dude that explodes and/or rockets away when shot) sorta slide through a wall for no apparent reason.   Other than that, no problems.

[eRe4s3r]

You actually sold me on this game (not on the season pass mind you)

35€ was the price I found.. legit key received and downloading.. only 20 hours ~.~

[Mánagarmr]

I'll pick it up when I get bored of Stellaris.

[Misery]

You actually sold me on this game (not on the season pass mind you)

35€ was the price I found.. legit key received and downloading.. only 20 hours ~.~

I notice the stupid season pass only has multiplayer stuff in it so far, seems like a lost opportunity.  They'd get more interest right now out of more single-player maps, and more Snapmap content (additional rooms/objects, the more the better).

Instead.... it's all multiplayer maps/skins.

[eRe4s3r]

I'll pick it up when I get bored of Stellaris.

Happened to me in the time it took deciding whether to buy and then downloading this.. so yeah

[Misery]

So, more time with the game today, and all of it was spent in the Snapmap mode.

Spent a ton of time playing maps that I found on there... some of them were very traditional maps, others were weird stuff like that tower defense map; regardless of what they were though, when I was playing one that had actual effort put into it (as opposed to, say, the one that drops the player into a room ringed with flames and then just spawns 10000 imps in a blob) it was great fun.  I'm finding that playing these really can be every bit as good as the normal singleplayer.

And I don't think I mentioned it before, but these maps can be played in multiplayer, too.  People complain a lot about the game's multiplayer as a whole, but a simple fact is that you can always create your OWN maps, setups, and rulesets, and then get people playing them, not having to deal with the usual stuff.  Of course this is best done with friends, as while you CAN certainly play with randoms even on these maps, it's like playing with randoms in LittleBigPlanet in that you first have to figure out just what is being played at the time.  Not all maps can be played multiplayer though, it's entirely up to the designer.   Co-op, though, is available with these maps too, it's not just competition.

Not that this bit means all that much to me, I'm in it for the singleplayer experience and anything I make will be set up as such.


Spent more time in the editor too, went through all of the tutorials and now am doing the puzzles, which are interesting; you're given a basic map setup, and a goal.   A variety of things will be in there, with some logic nodes and objects being set in stone so you cant edit them, and other specific ones able to be edited; you cannot place new things.  You check out the logic-blobs that are already in there to figure out what you need to do, and then figure out just what you need to do with the editable ones to make it happen.  It's an interesting way of teaching concepts in here.  I've seen this done before elsewhere.


Also did I mention that the shield guys are total asshats?  Really, those have got to be the single most irritating monster in the series.  Always want explosives to get rid of those guys.   Encountering a few powered up ones (more HP and stuff) in a couple of maps just... made them even more "fun"....

And Pinkies (the pink things with huge mouths that bite you) are stupidly fast in this game.  So are Spectres.  And both hit like trucks, are huge, and have a lot of HP (the combat shotgun's triple-blast mod is very good against them).   Which is good, they were one of the least threatening monsters in the old games since they were just too slow to get close, so I like that change.  Though they're not as wildly berserk as Hell Knights and don't traverse difficult areas nearly as well.   I like their redesign overall though.


Missing though (unless they're campaign only) are things like the Cyberdemon.... not quite the same without that guy around.   Spider Mastermind doesn't seem to be here either.  Not that other monsters don't make up for this, of course.

[eRe4s3r]

Cyberdemon is in the game ...

Enjoying this game a lot.. 5 levels 100% and the others.. well some of those secrets I am gonna need a guide for ;p

Gauss Rifle + Siege mode + all the perks for that is an absolute beast Since you can bring your weapons with you on replays the game also becomes a lot more fun. You can (re)play from level 1 onwards with all your stuff if you want.

[Misery]

Ah, yeah, I heard about the Cyberdemon yesterday.  Though it seems it's a "special" encounter (like the old Icon of Sin) not a mobile enemy unit with it's own enclosed AI (meaning it cannot just exist in any old area, it must exist in an area very specifically made for it).  So for now at least, it wont appear in any other maps.  It's not in the Snapmap list.   Though I hear that the devs may do a separate version of the Cyberdemon that can work anywhere.

I'm not hugely far into the campaign yet myself; I typically don't leave a level until I've found every secret.  And then I go through the classic maps once those are unlocked immediately after beating the level they're in.

I've spent a ton of time in the snapmap stuff though.  There's lots of fun & challenging (or bizarre) things out there now, been having a blast playing those.  And am working on one of my own, and the more I use the editor the more I'm impressed by it's capabilities, and the more ways I find to customize any given room.   It really is a lot like LittleBigPlanet to me; if it SEEMS like the game engine might conceivably support an idea, it probably can be done... you just have to figure out how.

Though I doubt I can produce some sort of crazy bullet-hell boss fight this time around.   That worked in LBP but I cant conceive of a way to make it function here...