DOOM 4 will focus more on pure action elements

Shaviro said:

What you are describing about seeing them suffer and begging for their lives, well that's over the line and straight into sick.

It's also quite out of characters for them. They're demons and possessed zombies, it's not like they have free will or the concept of pity.

Gez said:

It's also quite out of characters for them. They're demons and possessed zombies, it's not like they have free will or the concept of pity.

That too. Great point.

myk said:

What I'd do if I were them is give the helmet a light amplification function which requires batteries. Maybe it could get damaged if you were to be hit on the head (becoming unstable or even disabled, depending on the severity of the blow); you'd need to find another helmet to regain proper functionality (unless you stored a spare in your backpack). Perhaps the batteries would also be used for other items (maybe as plasma gun ammo and for the computer map).

That's an excellent idea.
I love the idea of sharing resources as well. It gives the player new options and new things to consider before he fires that plasma gun or uses the light amplification device.

Something that bugged me in Doom 3 was that every weapon had different ammo, so you had nothing to consideration really. As you have to do in DOom. Should I use the SSG or the SG? Should I use the plasma gun or he BFG?
Which would let me use the ammo most efficiently?

Well, that and that you could carry 3000 of each.

Maybe they can find a way to recreate that original doom experience.I just don't see how they'd do that without making it feel like Painkiller or Serious Sam.
Maybe if they made the gameplay more like Farcry or something.

Stuff I would like to see:

• First off an interesting but NON INTRUSIVE story. You can put together a decent story without resorting to cut scans and NPCs Flat out telling you what's going on. Just have some neat little details through out the game that would let you piece it together if you want to, or ignore it all together. They can be audio logs, or signs of fights in certain parts or newspaper clippings... The same way the details of the combine invasion was never spelt out for you in half life 2, just there in little pieces.
  
  
• Reasonably open levels with LOTS of Stuff to find. Not just secrets (thought lots of secrets would be cool), but cool little details about the environment you are in. If it's a city level, lets see some cool building and parks that you'd have to go off the main path to find. Have the ruins of the city tell a story. Find where a someone referenced in an audio log made his or her last stand. Far cry had a pretty good idea on how to make out door maps (that they threw out the window as soon as the player went inside). Hell, throw in some hidden monsters, weapons and bosses.
  
  
• Monster infighting. I don't need to explain this one do I?
  
  
• No Squad mates. I don't need the AI doing my job for me.
  
  
• In fact very few NPCs if any at all. One of the things I loved about doom was that lonely feeling it gave me. I guess the occasional radio message or something to get the player to do something other then wander about aimlessly would be ok, but only at the occasional terminals and not blah blah blahing your ear all the damn time.
  
  
• Fucking Gibs Gibs Gibs and goddamn limb loss. I want to blow the legs of a Bull demon and have the fucker still come after me.
  
  
• Cool environmental hazards. Barrels are cool and all, but you can mix it up a bit: Cars can explode to. Oil on the floor? wait for some Zombies to stroll over it and set that shit on fire. Shoot a fire extinguisher and it'll freeze demons near it (dosn't need to be super realistic). Let the player pick up and throw stuff (useful in a pinch if you low on ammo, or set up some explosive traps). Use small objects as a weapons in crysis you could pick up all kinds of things. I had losts of fun knocking a helmet off one troop and beating his comrades to death with it.
  
  
• Not being super generous with the ammo (at least not on the harder difficulty settings). Force the player to make shots count and save the bigger guns for when things really go to shit. careful resource management and clever use of the environment (and monster infighting) should be almost vital on the Hard and Nightmare settings.
  
  
• Add to that, Enemies that have resistances to certain types of weapons. A flame thrower will not work as well on an imp or lost soul, A plasma rifle will really fuck up a demon with cyborg bits (shorting it out) A cyberdemon would shurg off rocket impacts better then a spider master mind. More Strategy!
  
  
• a hundred other things that well never see the light of day.
  

What I think we will actually get is something like Quake 4, which is problby the one thing I'd want to see even less then a Serious Sam clone.

PS Painkiller is OK but it's not what I'd want in a doom game.

Thanks Shaviro for your response.

Shaviro said:

2. I want blood and gore too, but I want it to be tasteful. Doom/2 got it just right. There were dead, twitching, impaled, hanging, half marines about. Monsters "melted" when they died (caco/mancubus), but it was all done in a tasteful manner. What you are describing about seeing them suffer and begging for their lives, well that's over the line and straight into sick. Let's keep it somewhat tasteful.

Tastfull, off course. I'm not a sadist who gets his kicks from seeing monsters and zombies suffer, but as said before, but maybe being explained better by Captain Red:

Captain Red:Fucking Gibs Gibs Gibs and goddamn limb loss. I want to blow the legs of a Bull demon and have the fucker still come after me.

And then offcourse tastfull. ;-). I think that kind off enemy behaviour would add value to the overall experiece.

Well then we agree :D That would be awesome.
And I agree with Captain Red's excellent post as well.
It does sound like they're taking this job very seriously, which makes me happpy.

Random ideas:

- Helmet with built-in light amplification (L-A). No battery-limit; I hate light sources limited by battery power, I'd want to be able to fucking *see* stuff when I press the fucking light button, not have to wait for the battery to recharge or go searching for spare batteries. At least the D3 flashlight allowed for constant light all the time, anywhere (except when you didn't carry a flashlight).
Maybe reduce visibility when L-A is activated, so you really only want to use it when it's *really* dark.

- Hidden triggers that cause nearby monsters to be alerted/spawned etc. I.e. you activate a non-critical machine (you don't need to activate it to progress, but you don't necessarily know that) and it makes a noise which spawns a few monsters which are scripted to show up and walk around the machine, making sniffing noises or something like that. This could allow for extra exploration/exploiting of the environment.

- Non-critical keycards/keycard-like scripts/objects. Let's say you find a keycard (or it could be a PDA or some other type object that grants clearance to a non-critical area). Said keycard is not necessary to progress, but it opens a drawer/cache somewhere with some goodies. Finding said keycard could also be one of the hidden triggers mentioned above that causes unpredictable things to happen.

- Choice between mission objectives. Say, you get like three mission objectives simultaneously. You get to choose which one you complete or which one you deal with first. The order you complete the missions in can influence a number of things in the game; as long as it doesn't punish the player for picking "the wrong" mission first. I'd hate it if you become unwittingly responsible for the death of a character. I'm thinking more cause and effect in a way that affects number of monsters, location of monsters, which traps, perhaps minor story events that don't feel like the player screwed up. Choice of mission might also unlock different areas of the game (a bit a la what they're boasting about for Wolfenstein) in different orders depending on which mission you picked first.

- Meaningful objectives. Doom 3 had mission objectives just like I had desired since Q2. Trouble is, they were little more than "Go there, press switch" and let's not forget: "Move yer sorry carcass, you worthless excuse for a marine, you shoulda been there five minutes ago!".
Let's get some fun things to do, such as getting to play around with mission specific items (like explosive charges you don't use in normal combat situations - you could get a mission to blow up a machine corrupted by hellish influences).

- Powerful weapons. I mean Powerful fucking weapons that actually kill stuff. Don't even think about making a Doom game with anything less than really powerful weapons, otherwise it'd be called "Quake" and be a vastly inferior carbon copy of Doom. A Doom shotgun is always capable of killing an imp with a single blast when a skilled player is using it. The same shotgun is always capable of making a boss/miniboss howl with pain and put a good dent in their health (unless said boss is invulnerable to conventional means, i.e. Icon of Sin and D3 Cybie). And don't forget a BFG that can kill the toughest non-boss enemies with one blast and clear a room of lesser baddies with ease.

- No AI squadmates and no vehicle piloting. Not only do I consider either element to be a case of "quantity" rather than "quality" (always a big mistake), but I never found either to actually add anything useful to the game I was playing. Keep it simple, keep it straightforward, keep it fun and polished.

- No limb loss. Picturing that in my mind and remembering games that have it implemented only convinces me that it would seriously remove the feel farther away from the classic Doom feel. Doom is all about just shooting and hitting anywhere on the monsters and then watch them fall over with blood flying.

- Absofuckinglutely no alt fire mode. Again, it's a case of quantity over quality and besides, I've never come across a game that could implement that in a balanced way. Instead it makes for overly convoluted weapons. Keep the weapons unique and distinct from each other in appearance and in function, keep it straightforward.

- Better difficulty settings. More ammo conservation on harder settings was mentioned and is duly acknowledged. Medkits more scarce on harder settings etc.

- Less usage of teleporting monsters. I know they're freakin' demons and I know D3's teleporting effect kicks all manners of ass, but even awesome effects get tiresome to look at and listen to if it's used a million times each level. Let's see some more monsters that walk around in the environment, crawl on walls, hide in dark places etc.

- Good characters. People whose personalities actually matter and allows you to "connect" or "disconnect" with them. You could have a jerk who directly insults the player and assigns them shitty tasks (before it all goes to Hell, supposing D4 even has a non-hostile environment), and/or you could have someone else who is acting genuinely kind towards our character, so that when the shit hits the fan, you'll either really want to save their asses, or let them just fucking die.

- A game world that's clearly going to Hell. I want to see the weather change from normal Earth weather to something crazy (When D3 was in early development, I think I suggested that it could rain with blood - red rain, soaking the environment with blood - this could be an example, just add a few gibs to occasionally fall from the skies, maybe a severed human head). Fleshy walls come alive and attack the player (functioning like environmental traps) would be awesome and realize a wish I've had since Doom 1.

- More scary sounds like in D3. I don't care if emphasis is less on horror and more on action. Doom 4 is still a sequel to Doom 3 and we're still fighting demons from Hell. Consistency. Besides, the atmosphere in Doom 3 is all manners of awesome, so why remove something good just because you're adding extra action?

Gaudy scripted areas aside, areas that feature random but balanced monster/item placement.

It'd be totally cool playing through the game again and having it feel fresh, not knowing where stuff will be.

Thanks DSM for your ideas, very welcome and interesting to read. I would like to comment on your remark on Powerful weapons.

dsm said:
- Powerful weapons. I mean Powerful fucking weapons that actually kill stuff. Don't even think about making a Doom game with anything less than really powerful weapons, otherwise it'd be called "Quake" and be a vastly inferior carbon copy of Doom. A Doom shotgun is always capable of killing an imp with a single blast when a skilled player is using it. The same shotgun is always capable of making a boss/miniboss howl with pain and put a good dent in their health (unless said boss is invulnerable to conventional means, i.e. Icon of Sin and D3 Cybie). And don't forget a BFG that can kill the toughest non-boss enemies with one blast and clear a room of lesser baddies with ease.

I have learned that weapons are very important to a game. I disliked most of the doom3 weapons, escpecially the standard machine gun. So powerful weapons, yes! I want to chaingun down a room full of imps with ease, I want to use my rocketlauncher to blow away a cacao deamon with 2 or 3 shots. And I want the weapons to give Me, The Player that powerful feeling of being a HERO, with unbeatable weapons. Atleast as long as I have ammo.

1. No mission-based levels. Doom 4 should have just normal "find an exit"-style levels. Keys and switches are way enough to add "sub targets" to the levels without any artificial shit like "...kill shit to find wrench to fix the generator to restore power to the lift to reach the escape pod to get to the surface to kill shit..."

2. No lightning equipment at all. The whole point of darker areas in levels (in both atmosphere and gameplay) is ruined when you have some sort of a light source on your person that you could use all of the time. Lack of lightning equipment gives much more power to the level designer (since the player can't fuck up the darker, more intense areas), which is always a good thing.

3. No ridiculously overpowered weapons. If I wanted that I'd launch ZDoom or EDGE with almost any of those weapon mods ever released. Except for the BFG the Doom weapons aren't really overpowered compared to the enemies...sure the RL can massacre the weaker enemies, but the stronger guys balance it all out. More than anything, Doom weapons are balanced.

4. Definitely give us general recognizable monster behavior patterns, like the attack patterns of mancubi and cybies. It gives the game sort of a more arcade feeling, which fits Doom's action. "Smart" and "thinking" enemies like in Farcry just aren't Doom.

Jodwin said:
2. No lightning equipment at all. The whole point of darker areas in levels (in both atmosphere and gameplay) is ruined when you have some sort of a light source on your person that you could use all of the time. Lack of lightning equipment gives much more power to the level designer (since the player can't fuck up the darker, more intense areas), which is always a good thing.

Well, DOOM's light diminishing works kind of like having a limited range lighting device or slight light amplification. If your device has limited range and possibly other limitations (it can break, or you need fuel), it contributes to the sense of immersion, doesn't eliminate the effect of darkness (making it potentially scarier but not a constant problem), and can be considered as an element to play with during design if it's a relatively stable part of the character's equipment.

These guys captured the right atmosphere. I hope Id will hire the artists.

Wow impressive, it should be seen by ID indeed :P

I bet they'd get foxed, as that looks like something from the Aliens franchise.

Hmm, perhaps they should give it something other than a colour change to make it distinguishable from the HK. The fleshy colour and rotting body give it a weaker feel than the rock solid Knight anyway, IMHO.

EDIT: How about some horns and a regal looking mane perhaps :? Maybe a hand held weapon, like a mace.

That looks awesome. Would be a fine addition to the Doom bestiary.

I hate that demon. To explain it further...

- Restore color. Animals aren't all brown and gray and demons don't need to be either.
- Focus more on natural-looking creatures with human-like traits, sort of like the buff-looking baron or the grinning caco. Throw in some weird mutations inspired by greek mythology if necessary.
- Don't make them look scary (like in Aliens). Make them be scary. How to do this is not straightforward but Doom 2 accomplished it.

I want this game to be so gory that you have to throw up after playing it, I want to fight hordes of monsters not just one or two at a time.And being able to drive vehicles would be nice as well, were on earth after all.

Will the doom marine finally starts talking now, I sure hope so.

I don't have much to ask for...75%action and 25% creepy shit.

@Captain Red:I'm not actually asking for a straight up Painkiller clone,Painkiller had the same perfect Alchemic mix of Action and Horror.
One Example is the Insane Asylum...creepy as fuck but it wasnt all "BOO!" scare tactics,it was shitloads of Lobotomized and Electroshocked Mental Patients trying to maul you.

All in all It's like I said...I think the perfect mis is 75% action, 25% Creepy shit.

dutch devil said:

Will the doom marine finally starts talking now, I sure hope so.

My opinion,it makes him even more badass that he doesn't say a fucking word.

To be honest, looking at all these suggestions, it seems like none of us have equal expectations for Doom 4. Our feature suggestions vary a lot, and hardly any of us desire the same things.

I'd be surprised if any of us agreed on why we don't like Doom 3 as much as Doom 1 or 2. Honestly I like Doom 3. A lot. Ive heard people complain that the gameplay was too repetitive, looking around at everything with the flash light, then when you see something, try to shoot it in the dark. I enjoyed that very much. Exploring dark though cramped areas left a lot of openness. There was a lot to explore, and if the maps were much bigger I wouldn't be able to get anywhere without making sure I checked every single corner. I think that was a pretty impressive feat to make such tiny cramped maps and still have an interesting atmosphere. I think the only things I didnt like were the monsters being vaporized upon being shot by the shotgun. I understand it's tough and all, but it kinda gives me the impression that every zombie i bump into in every other room just simply gets massacred by a single shot, which leaves little to be frightened of. I feel like zombies would need a more deadly weapon, such as the rocket launcher to break them into peices, not a mere shotgun.

I think what Doom 4 needs more than ever is more big ass monsters. In fact, I woudnt mind if it kept all weapons and monsters the same, but it will need many giant monsters that take more than just a couple shotgun shells to take out, and there has to be A LOT of them. The conversion from Doom 1 to Doom 2 was an extreme increase in difficulty, and to be honest, unless you were playing Doom 3 on the hardest skill, the monsters were hardly threatening, and there weren't even a lot of them. Doom 4 needs to be frightening by being an extreme struggle for survival against a tremendous amount of threats.

JohnnyRancid said:

I think what Doom 4 needs more than ever is more big ass monsters. In fact, I woudnt mind if it kept all weapons and monsters the same, but it will need many giant monsters that take more than just a couple shotgun shells to take out, and there has to be ALOT of them.

Haloless0320 said:

I don't have much to ask for...75%action and 25% creepy shit.

Well said.

In the good old days, there was a one hugeass difference between "demons" and "monsters/aliens" and it was the fact that aliens and monsters could be killed by generous doses of lead/plasma/lasers/etc, whereas demons could not.

And it was this that made demons so scary... they couldn't be hurt with ordinary weapons. You had to fight them in totally different ways with totally different weapons (exorcism/binding/prayer/psychic power etc)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Doom should alter its fundamental game style. The reason doom works so well is that everything can be solved efficiently with guns and lots of 'em, and Id would be crazy to mess with that. But I think that it simply makes it harder for a game to be genuinely scary when, in the end, you shoot shit and it dies regardless of how much scary crap is going on around you.

I think Mr. Rancid said it pretty good. If guns are gonna be the solution to everything, then you gotta make the monsters seriously badass and tough in order to scare anybody.

P.S. Dutch, I'm not sure I want to be throwing up all the time. Perhaps you could eat some week old seafood just before you play Doom 4. If its any consolation, none of your Doom levels have ever made me want to throw up either... :P

I want Doom 4 to be fun. Need I say more? seriously, Doom 3 was a task and hardly "fun."


Let id do whatever they want, as long as it is... you know ... fun. A slightly more powerful shotgun would be greatly appreciated too.

JohnnyRancid said:

I'd be surprised if any of us agreed on why we don't like Doom 3 as much as Doom 1 or 2. Honestly I like Doom 3. A lot. Ive heard people complain that the gameplay was too repetitive, looking around at everything with the flash light, then when you see something, try to shoot it in the dark. I enjoyed that very much. Exploring dark though cramped areas left a lot of openness. There was a lot to explore, and if the maps were much bigger I wouldn't be able to get anywhere without making sure I checked every single corner. I think that was a pretty impressive feat to make such tiny cramped maps and still have an interesting atmosphere.

Wow, someone who feels something I feel about Doom 3! I'm impressed, and I agree. I liked Doom 3 because I felt the darkness made it special as opposed to all those bright cartoon shooters that were all around then. The atmosphere was dark and subtly evil in a way that reminded me about aspects of the classic Doom gameplay in ways the design of weapons and monsters could never do. Only this time, dark areas never pissed me off, because I actually had a goddamned ligth source that didn't run outta batteries.

Also agreed with more "heavy monsters"; Doom 3 didn't use the real toughest anywhere near enough and I felt it helped make the game a little more repetitive than I'd have liked.

Anyways, to business, your's truly has a batch of new suggestions and some things from my previous post that I've thought over a bit more carefully.

Previously on channel dsm:

- "Limp-loss". I said previously that I wouldn't want any, but I considered that perhaps it could be nice if you could blow a Zombie's head to pieces (D3 had headless zombies, you just couldn't "create" them yourself), but unlike D3 (and typical popular zombie rules), headshots don't do more damage vs body shots. Seems kinda stupid in D3 that there are zombies that are 'functional' despite missing their fucking head, and yet you can kill them faster by aiming at the head.

One of my concerns about traditional dismembering is that if I blow off an imp's leg, it would reduce it's agility/mobility and reduce its combat efficiency. Personally, I wouldn't like that because I remember Doom as a game where you could fill a monster with a lot of lead, and still they wouldn't get "tired" or worn down, but still go after you with no speed reduction whatsoever.

I also considered the possibility that the dissolving demon animation/effect could be improved, by making the demons "fall apart" and lose limbs in the process; I'm thinking watch the corpse blacken, whither, and then it dissolves a bit like it does in D3, but this time around, you see limbs and body parts fall off before they burn away entirely. Considering that D4 will be real hardware requiring and likely have more monsters than D3, I'm afraid we better prepare ourselves for another round of "disappearing corpses". But if the effect is really awesome, it could take away some of the annoyance at watching corpses disappear.

- NPCs/story. I thought I should mention that should id decide to have another central "human" villain head honcho, better not make him predictably so. Tim Willits claimed that it would improve the gameplay to have a straightforward villain.
I've no clue why he thinks/thought that as it is my experience that an interesting story doesn't have anything straightforward about it, and I've no clue why being attacked by a bunch of hostile aliens that turn out to be beings of pure evil isn't straightforward enough a motive to keep the player focused and interested enough that the story leaves room for unpredictable human characters. After all, Hell will always be the main villain, regardless which of the humans have chosen to betray all creation.

Well, if there is such a "Betruger" type of character, try to at least make him seem like an unlikely villain, i.e. acts nice, is popular right up until he reveals his true colours, yet not to the extent that he can immediately be classed as The Enemy by the more astute players, because he/she is "too nice to be for real").

Monsters and monster behavior:

Aside from more dynamic ai, there's a few things I'd specifically like improved over D3.

- Speed. Zombies in D3 are slow and laughably easy to deal with. I actually view them more as target practice rather than any viable threat. I personally prefer zombies to be weak (i.e. weapons are powerful enough to take them down quickly), simply because I'd like to maintain the Doom feel of mowing down zombies in droves with the weaker weapons. But suppose D4 tells us that the zombies gradually "evolve" - they start out slow and laughable, but some of them (i.e. "all of them" later in the game) have the ability to suddenly move in bursts of speed.
So you have a fatty zombie moving sluggishly and slowly towards you and you laugh your head off: "Hey slowby, looking for me?", while you take your sweet time pulling out your pistol. Suddenly, fatty lets out a snarl and rushes/flings himself at you with surprising speed and catch you with your panties down (and in a bunch).

Similarly with the Revenant. Personally, I could deal with the Archvile being slow, but the Rev, I was genuinely disappointed with (especially after having watched the 2003 trailer where it *fucking rushed at you*. All right, so it fires a bunch of homing rockets at you and moves slowly, but deliberately at you to instill (some) players with a bit of psychological warfare. Fine, but I'd still want to experience the D3 Revenant (now looking even more detailed and possibly a little scary this time?) fire its rockets, then suddenly emit a high-pitch scream (a la its original D2 sound) and then suddenly rush at you with great speed and punch you in the face, sending you flying/reeling backwards.

- Melee monsters. The pinky was pretty cool, except A) used too little in the game and B) was far too easy, namely because it would suddenly halt and roar in the middle of a charge as if to say: "I'm here, shoot me dammit!". The roaring would be cool (and scary) if it could roar without stopping. The Wraith is my least fave D3 monsters and I halfway expect it to be replaced by something new in D4, but should id decide to put it in anyway, I'd like its phasing in-and-out of reality to be smoother; instead of stopping each time it phases, it should continue moving forward, so as to give the impression that it rushes out of a hidden gate each time. The Wraith would also work better if it came from multiple directions.

- Infighting. Let's face it: infighting is cool because you get to kick up your legs and watch the bad guys tear each other apart. For D3, id apparently felt that it was time to try something new - nevermind the fact that this new idea wasn't terribly entertaining, because you don't have time to watch the fun, because one of the combatants is deliberately ignoring his assailant.
I wouldn't mind if *some* lesser monsters act like this, as long as there are other monsters that wouldn't think twice about hitting back even when their assailant is of "superior rank". The interesting part of this would be to find the right types of monsters to go up against the right types of opponents, as long as it's not too difficult or time consuming to figure out.
It would particularly be cool if the monster ai prevented the infighting monsters from just walking up next to each other and tear eachother apart (an imp would keep its distance from a Hell Knight and bombard it with fireballs to reduce the risk of it getting wacked too quickly, while the Knight would do its damnedst to get close and personal).

- Cacodemon/Pain Elemental. I'd like to see the D3 Caco back in Doom 4, but some of them have a "mutation" about them. These "special" Cacodemons will appear like typical Cacos, but then they will close their many eyes and a central, large eye will open up and glow (looking a good deal more like the classic Pain Elemental when it does). The Cacodemon will then proceed to spit out three Lost Souls (it teleports them in; its mouth acts as a gateway), but one at a time, so it will spit them out in rapid succession. When done, it has three Lost Soulies to harass the player with, so the Caco "converts" to its normal Cacodemon form and attacks the player with its usual energy orb attack, until the player wastes the three Souls, or until it feels like summoning more.

Level design

- Themes. I don't think I mentioned this in my previous post, but this is an aspect that's rather important. Doom 3 tended to be rather repetitive to look at, not because of its selection of textures (as there was a lot of texture variation), but because of its overall theme. Almost all of Doom 3 was essentially a Classic Doom E1 themed game and it got boring eventually, if not real quick. Hell had a little bit of classic E3 and there were a few scattered instances of minor classic E2 influences late in the game (fleshy growth, wall panels moving away to show lava and bones etc.).
Doom 3 was essentially a very well-done reinterpretation of Classic Doom E1, but it just doesn't give the classic Doom the justice it deserved, because the other themes were underplayed.
Classic Doom had three distinct visual themes:
E1: standard base, though with a few hints of hellish influences.
E2: Wacky funhouse with remnants of what was once a base, sprinkled with devilish, medieval-type dungeons and other oddities. Occasional skulls and fire.
E3: Brimstone, flesh and bones.

To put it simple: Doom 4 needs a bunch of distinct themes, so that the entire game doesn't feel like the same damned location. I suggest the following:
Wasteland.
City.
Industrial/base - the base theme needs to be a heck of a lot cleaner and look more like "desirable living/working quarters" as opposed to the Mars base which was cramped and generally unpleasant/depressing.
Hell (explored in greater depth and preferably not made into a bunch of castle dungeons and caves this time around).
Hell mixed with either of the previous themes.

That's all for now - I'll probably think up/remember more ideas later.

Zoost: that pic reminds me of one of the Doom 3 trailers in which there was a pre-rendered Hell Knight at the end. That HK looked very much like the art you posted, and it was awesome.

Channel dsm sure is detailed. Better than CNN. You should be on foxtel.

Some really good ideas too. Particularly liked your suggestions about the level design. That was spot on. And the mutating cac was cool too. And monster infighting..ie having the imps keep their distance from the barons etc.

Shaviro said:

Important parts of Doom2:

• (...)
  
• Environmental challenges and puzzles
  

I think you're really overrating Doom 2 "puzzles" :D

dsm said:

(...)At least the D3 flashlight allowed for constant light all the time, anywhere (...)

How the fuck do you explain a flashlight on a super advanced planetary station in the 22nd century?

dsm said:

- Powerful weapons. I mean Powerful fucking weapons that actually kill stuff.

Doom3 already had some of these. Shotgun, to name one. Once picked up it stays the best weapon to the end of the game. Even thought it's useless for long range, Doom3 does not have long range fighting, and all mosters (sans for armed zombies) run towards you to get their faces mowed down with one or two well placed shells. Imba at it's best.
What point exaclty would weapons that can clear the enitre room have? No skill requirements to use.

dutch devil said:

I want this game to be so gory that you have to throw up after playing it(...)

You're sick. And I'm sick of sick people.

dsm said:

- Speed. Zombies in D3 are slow and laughably easy to deal with. I actually view them more as target practice rather than any viable threat. I personally prefer zombies to be weak (i.e. weapons are powerful enough to take them down quickly), simply because I'd like to maintain the Doom feel of mowing down zombies in droves with the weaker weapons.Zoost: that pic reminds me of one of the Doom 3 trailers in which there was a pre-rendered Hell Knight at the end. That HK looked very much like the art you posted, and it was awesome.

I would love to see zombies, that are really zombies, that have difficulties dying. You would either need to gib them, or mutilate pretty hard to stop them. That would make them scary and dangerous even if they were slow.
Imagine you're backing up, fighting some monster, and you fall into a zombie you thought you killed a few minutes ago. If well implemented, that would really make you shit your pants.

Kyka said:

I think Mr. Rancid said it pretty good. If guns are gonna be the solution to everything, then you gotta make the monsters seriously badass and tough in order to scare anybody.

I'd like to finally see some smart enemies, that really look for cover (and they are not scripted to take cover behind box A, but they would never consider hiding behind box B, because the map author did not think of that), can strafe and dodge when you make "obvious" attakcs, and they don't need 3 seconds to fire their weapons/spells. Even a retarded kid, playing backwards on the keyboard has enough time to find cover, or react in any way.
I'm really fed up with "extremly smart AIs" that can surprise you perhaps twice during the whole game, and take only a few encounters to fully understand and learn their behavior.

ellmo said:

You're sick. And I'm sick of sick people.

Always an pleasure, anything else I can do to make your life more misrable.

Anybody who thinks Doom had anything in common with Serious Sam is as thick as fucking shit. Was there even 100 monsters in all of E1? how often in the original Doom or even Doom 2 did you get locked in a room and swarmed?

Also how close is Painkiller to Serious Sam? because i fancied buying it (at long last) but if it's more of the same there's no point.

Also no more stupidly vanishing monsters in D3 kplzthx. And no shotgun gibbing either, i always used the pistol on the zombies simply so they woldnly stupidly turn into melting skeletons.

Painkiller a more creative, dark, and gorier version of Serious Sam. The levels are more realistic and you won't find yourself in weird situations (remember the trampoline room in Serious Sam? None of that.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW4sg7Ty48o

Oh, and the bosses are BIG.

I don't know if this has already been said, but its confirmed that
Doom 4 will have gibs.