Bethesda E3 Conference - DOOM4 Unveiling

Piper Maru said:

The music seems to kick in when engaging the enemy, otherwise it's part of the background.

Yep. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Painkiller and Serious Sam are the same way. Kind of disappointing IMO, especially since the soundtracks were such an important part of the classic DOOM games and really helped give each level its own personality.

Arclite said:

I don't think the "pause and switch" mechanic will inhibit the flow of gameplay at all, and I don't see how the BFG can't NOT be awesome to witness. Though I do wish the Shotgun was more on the long-range side.

I find it to be the opposite. They emphasize "fast paced" and then have a feature that slows everything down and takes you right out of the action. Remaining vulnerable and hectically dodging while switching weapons is part of the Doom experience.

I just saw the Doom 4 videos and I like it. It's old school and it has the elements from Brutal Doom that I expected to see.

doom_is_great said:

Hopefully they recognize that part of Classic Doom's greatness lies in part in its great and varied level design. Each level had great variety. Some were narrow corridors like the Underhalls, others were open and sand box style like Downtown and Industrial Zone, others were arena type levels like the Courtyard, and some were a mix of different styles. If this Doom is to be awesome, it must have a good amount of variety in its level design.

Well said! We can only hope the levels are even half as varied (and creative) as those in Doom/Doom 2. :-)

Captain Toenail said:

They look very similar to the zombies. Are the zombies transforming into imps?

Getting some Doom: The Movie™ flashbacks here...

I'm pretty sure the levels we saw in the demo were made specifically for the demonstration. The player did have access to each of the weapons etc. I'm hoping for plenty of exploration, but I doubt it's going to be exactly like the early games.

wall of text warning. and ps this is just my honest opinion.

So here are my thoughts of what i saw.
First things first. Overall im excited as shit and cant wait for the games release.

What i liked:

Visuals - the way the UAC environments looks to have amazing potential. It will need some major polish as some textures looked bland/matte and unfinished. But they have a whole year. So im not too worried.

Modding - Huge potential there, that should address my concerns about consoles fucking this up for pc players.

The executions - I like the executions and how you can be executed by demons. They don't slow down game play too much and you aren't forced to do it.

The demons - Some of the demons have amazing designs. The mancubus looked fucking awesome. And i like the movements of the imps( reminds me a bit how the enemies in RAGE moved) (but there are some things i don't like)


The music- from what i could hear the music was pretty good. I do hope for some Doom 64 -like music though.


What i didn't like:

The Hell level - I will have to go back an rewatch this part of the reveal but something just doesnt sit right with me about the hell levels. It's not that they were bad and there will probably be some slightly more varied hell levels, but i was hope for more of a DooM 64ish feel (but im biased as DooM 64 is my favorite of the series and my favorite shooter)

The demons - As mentioned before some of the demons looked great, but many not so much. The barons look like slightly touched up versions of the doom 3 barons but more neutered (in fact other demons looked to be touched up doom 3 versions, big let down). I would have loved to see a more goatman-ish baron. Or atleast make them towering demons like they were in doom 3. And that cyberdemon OH god was that fucking thing terrible looking. Did they ask Blizzard to design this thing? the CD was the biggest disappointment of the whole thing. Not the least bit menacing at all and the only "cartoony" thing i saw in the reveal . I also hope to see more variations of demons ( ie 3 different looking mancubi)

The plasma gun - the impact of the Pgun looks like it has the power of farts. enemies look like they just absorb the shots/goes through them. Maybe more realistic?

Level design - the map layouts (especially the multiplayer maps) screamed HALO

Nit-picks:

pick ups - im not sure how i feel about demons being loot bags. limited ammo/health in the original dooms added to the difficulty. There were many times i had to tell myself to leave that health kit for later. Hopefully in higher difficulties the loot bag stuff will be scaled back or turned off

the power armor - while cool looking and probably would fit with the lore of the game, would make me feel too powerful as a player. One of the nice things about doom was feeling powerless and you only way to make out alive was with OP weapons.

Tricks, traps, and puzzles - Where were they?

Weapon select - There needs to be a fast version of this (and there probably will be). I honestly believe what we saw was a console version of the game thus the weapon wheel. Speaking of which....

MY biggest concern

Consoles - if there is anything that is going to hold back this game it will be the "power" of the consoles. I know i mentioned that the visuals looked good, but it needs alot of polish, something i think could hurt the pc version because of how shit consoles are. Where were the hoards of demons? no doublt cut back because of the weakness of consoles, but modding should give pc players the ability to create maps with shit tons of monsters (my rig will be ready).

I watched the gameplays from the delayed live stream. They looked OK. It really reminds me of DOOM 3 though. Its hell levels looked nice.

However, it comes with a default map editor. Nice. Maybe I should remake my mods and maps I made for DOOM 2 as shown in http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/files/doom2/j2doom/j2doom.html ... J/K!

doom_is_great said:

Or how it should translate into the modern era.

That's what I was trying to say, but I was in too much of a hurry to dispense my oh so valuable opinion :I

And yeah, echoing the hope for a more varied level design than huge open spaces you can hop around and lazily shoot everyone in.


People say the old dooms were cartoony, but surely for at least some of us they were also intimidating and scary. In parts they were also amazingly atmospheric with the moody music and strange, imposing locations.
I honestly can't see any of that being the case with this new one. It's more arcadey than ten serious sam games and the demons are a joke. Your character is obviously some kind of superhuman badass who doesn't give a shit and just wants to RIP AND TEAR. Funny, actually, based on some other threads I thought more people would share my opinion on the general mood of this.

But in the end, really, no matter how much I would've liked to share the majority's opinion for once in my life, it's better that everyone (but me) likes it than if noone ended up liking it at all. This way at least the doom franchise lives on and might be relevant again, twisted and misinterpreted though it seems to be.

Honestly, they should have showed this clip instead of the teaser about a month ago. This clip would have generated a lot more hype for the reveal in my opinion:

The music I will have to hear more of, as some have stated it was too much in the background to be noticeable, but it didn't sound bad.
Additionally, while I want some open areas, I do NOT want some Painkiller-esque arenas all over the place. Now this may sound cliche, but Doom needs balance: Some open area zones with surrounding Imps and Chaingunners, and then some tight claustrophobic corridors where you have to exercise some twitch reflexes against enclosing Hell Knights (Doom 3 had too much of the ladder).

SYS said:

I find it to be the opposite. They emphasize "fast paced" and then have a feature that slows everything down and takes you right out of the action. Remaining vulnerable and hectically dodging while switching weapons is part of the Doom experience.

Well when I think about it, if that's the only weapon switching option and if they permit you to spam it whenever you please on any difficulty-level, then you're right, I suppose it could be bad. But I don't think I would use it too often in combat really, since I'm used to prepping my gun before fights when it comes to Doom.

Scuba Steve said:

Post conference interview: "This is an arena shooter".

Oh no. Did somebody really just say that?

SirKicksalot said:

This video was posted in March and mentioned the editor and the release date. He also says a remake of Doom 1 will be DLC.

Oooh. I wonder how good that will be! I hope they do DOOM 2 too!

The gore seemed waaaaay too gratuitous and over-the-top to me. While there was certainly a lot of gore just for gore in the original Dooms, that was mostly in the enemies, wasn't so in-your-face, and the non-enemy based gore was usually played for atmosphere, if not horror then tension at least ( the wall-splattered Baron textures come to mind ).

The mooks also seem very visually indistinguishable - although if none of them particularly threatening then I suppose that's not too big of a deal - and the chainsaw just looks obnoxious to use. The fact that the game seems to be based around a lot of face tanking unpunished by tons of health drops from enemies is also kind of iffy. Also, so much yellow.

Other than that, it all seems pretty good. Definitely different, but I guess that's to be expected. Really like the return of the Doom 3 Hell Knight, and I imagine the weapon switch slowdown is due to it being played on a console version; there's really no reason at all to have that on a computer version. The level editor also looks pretty sweet; seems pretty versatile, even if it might mean more in-depth modding tools are unlikely.

Anyone else find it weird, though, that they're hyping up the revenant so much? One gets the player kill in the first level and there's a powerup to turn into it in deathmatch. Just seems odd considering it's always been a mid-level enemy.

@Antroid;

I get what you're saying. But Doom was cartoony, but at the same time it was dark and intimidating. And that combination was the charm of the original Doom games. And I feel that this new Doom captures that. I'm satisfied with what was shown at the demonstration but not everybody was and that's okay as well. Everyone has their ways.

Piper Maru said:

@Antroid;

I get what you're saying. But Doom was cartoony, but at the same time it was dark and intimidating. And that combination was the charm of the original Doom games. And I feel that this new Doom captures that. I'm satisfied with what was shown at the demonstration but not everybody was and that's okay as well. Everyone has their ways.

I hope you're right and this new one actually does capture the dark and intimidating feeling. I didn't see that in the videos at all - to me it seemed like some sort of power fantasy game, whereas I always saw the old ones as much closer to straight up survival.

Hopefully they just arranged the gameplay this way for the demonstration because let's be honest, something slow and moody would not have flown as well with the crowd.

If this video isn't super representative of how the final game might be (like if there's an ability to turn off some visual indicators, to completely forego fatalities and chainsawing, more varied environment styles, etc), I'll probably still like it a lot. heck, I'll get it and beat it no matter what anyways.

I'm sure there's shitloads of stuff they didn't show us. What I'm hoping for is that they include Phobos and Deimos too, and bring back some of those pitch black dark rooms with flashing lights back from the old games.

Those enemies with guns in the first gameplay demo look too Strogg. Mancubus too.

I thought it might be interesting to compare my immediate thoughts from today's reveal with whatever impression I get in 2016 after I've played the game, so here comes yet another juicy wall of text. Major apologies to my future self for being wrong about [X] and not mentioning the obvious in [Y]: I was young, I was dumb, and I was full of... eagerness to write!

Disclaimer, also: I'm typing here with respect to Doom 4 as a game with strengths and weaknesses relative to the originals. As a standalone game, I'm guessing I'll view it much more favourably. Like Doom 3!

So. I had being trying my darndest to avoid talking about the game unless it was on Doom Radio or something, and certainly I wasn't holding any reservations or working towards building an expectation. Going down that road I'd only be setting myself up for disappointment, being familiar with what made the first games work. When I noticed how basically fast-paced the action was, however, at least relative to modern shooters if not to Doom (hah!), my mind bolted in anticipation of the other Doom fundamentals like exploration, gameplay-shifting monster design (think archviles, pain elementals, mancubuses; monsters that force an awareness of space, environment and movement in unique ways) and environments that enable interesting combat situations. I didn't find them. Marty didn't talk about them! I guess it's possible that these sorts of things are still a big part of Doom 4 and that because it's a "reveal" catered towards certain viewers that they'd forego showing them off in favour of spills 'n' thrills, but there were little hints dropped throughout the battle sequences that suggested they probably weren't. Literally dropped, by the way: Having assorted pickups scattered from every kill suggests to me that you get everything you need to play the game out by killing whatever's put in front of you on the Yellow Brick Road: bad news for any necessity of exploration, never mind your discussions on non-linearity and sandbox environments. A bit of a turn-off.

The actual combat is neat until the crowd-pleasing consolisms and fatalities roadblock the flow every other second. The fatalities will probably get old fast, but I'm not going to complain too much about it if the option is there to simply gun things down, and it looks like it is. Hopefully I can just hit a key bind to swap to the desired weapon, and if I want to go into IMAX mode I can pull out the chainsaw, which looks like a fatality generator. I don't really take issue with that either, just quietly; the original chainsaw is there more as a gimmick than a legitimate go-to weapon. Thanks, Evil Dead.

None of the monsters really seemed to change the way that player approached the situation, which could turn out to be the most disappointing oversight. Doom isn't just fast for the sake of being fast and pumping adrenaline, it's fast because movement is a weapon needed to combat intelligent monster placement and unique monster mechanics. In the reveal, I think the closest the gameplay came to emulating this strength of Doom's was the jetpack revenant's laser sight attack, requiring the player to get behind cover; something akin to the archvile attack, at a guess, but not nearly as interesting or critical to avoid. The mancubus was a door with health - a beefed up version of the Doom 3 mancubus - and could be approached similarly to most of the other monsters. The lower tier stuff, interestingly, seemed more like food for fatalities than actual opposition... but I'm honestly not sure if this a bad thing, just yet. It's tempting to say that the game's combat might be made or broken off the back of its middle tier, but I'd be surprised if chopping up imps and zombies didn't comprise the vast majority of the experience, and at that point, based on what we've seen so far, we'd be leaning toward mere cinema in the guise of a computer game.

I'm eager to see where Doom(4) winds up and I'll no doubt find a way to enjoy it even if all these observations ring true. For the time being, it looks like a game pandering strongly to some misconceptions but not without style and identity, which is more than I can say for many FPS games on the market today, and probably tomorrow. The combat looks like it's almost where it needs to be for feel and pace, but a little extra knowledge of what made it work in Doom 2 could have lifted it to another level.

2016 Alfonzo, please score your early assessment based on what you now know about the game:

Score: [__/10]

LANEGRACABRA said:

I'm sure there's shitloads of stuff they didn't show us. What I'm hoping for is that they include Phobos and Deimos too, and bring back some of those pitch black dark rooms with flashing lights back from the old games.

Those enemies with guns in the first gameplay demo look too Strogg. Mancubus too.

i was getting the same vibe as well with some of the enemies. the "zombiemen" that shot the plasma rounds looked like they were ripped straight from Q4.

Alfonzo, once again taking something I'm struggling to express and saying it much more eloquently while being more fair to the discussed material.

Although I definitely did see a few pre-placed medkits in the gameplay (they glowed yellow, of course). Maybe there's other things hidden as well.


By the way, in case anyone here played serious sam three. What with it's nearly straight up mancubus and baron of hell ripoffs, and a monster with an attack close to the archvile's, and chanigun-wielding hitscanners, and all that. Does anyone who played serious sam 3 now think that it's much closer to the old dooms than this? I mean sure it was hordes, open spaces and all that (though not immediately), but it seems like some things Alfonzo here brings up were totally present in SS3. There was some exploration, some monsters were much more "situation outlook changing", it was just more serious, as ridiculous as it is to say about a game from that series. I want to replay SS3 now.

The new trailer gives me hope the music will be good.
There is some classic music in there which sounded pretty awesome.

I think the demos should have been a lot faster with more enemies on screen.
Players know there will be quiet times when you can trickle through the level and study everything, but we wanna see fast demos.

If what they showed is as intense as it can be, it looks like a walk in the park.
Seriously, it looks like a console game, where the number of enemies has been reduced so it plays better with a controller.

I would have liked to see footage of a PC player in a really intense battle.
Circle strafing and a real sense of being totally overwhelmed.

There wasn't a single moment that looked like it was challenging.

I think it shows a lot of potential, but i just hope it features some nice large outdoor areas and some Serious Sam moments of intense circle strafing just to survive.

Its really hard to gauge the gameplay until we get to play it ourselves. We might be able to rush through and set the pace ourselves. Fingers crossed.

I wasn't too impressed with the enemies. They all looked like cyborg imp things.
The Mancubus looked pretty cool, but the emphasis on a techno cyborg art style for everything is a bit of a turn off.
Are these demons or strogg?

Why are we seeing Doom 3 style hell knights?
No thanks.

I honestly think that footage could have been shown to an unsuspecting audience and unless there was an eagle-eyed doom fan who spotted the hell knight and a few other things, no one would have said "it reminds me of doom".

The modding tools are simple. Dont be fooled.
You have prefab rooms you can arrange and fill with a variety of objects, but there was no actual construction of unique geometry.

We can only hope an exclusive PC editor will be released so we can develop our own mods, make our own models and textures etc.
If its uses the megatexture tech, then there's probably no chance that will happen.

It's a shame, cause the engine looks really good, and i'd love to use it for my DoomHD project.
I think we'd all love to see the classic demons brought to life in super high detail.

Doom Pinky Demon WIP by Doom HD, on Flickr

Doom Pinky Demon WIP by Doom HD, on Flickr

Hopefully they will have a simple editor and a more advanced version for those who want to do more than design levels with prefab rooms.

However, I am glad that they recognized that the reason Classic Doom still has a strong and vibrant community is due to the ability to create custom content. What they are trying to do with snapmap is definitely a step in the right direction.

These shots are looking pretty nice:

http://www.dsogaming.com/screenshot-news/doom-first-official-4k-screenshots-released/

@Alfonso

They talk about the level design in an interview at around 1:40:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KApp699WdE

s13n1 said:

The new trailer gives me hope the music will be good.
There is some classic music in there which sounded pretty awesome.

I think the demos should have been a lot faster with more enemies on screen.
Players know there will be quiet times when you can trickle through the level and study everything, but we wanna see fast demos.

If what they showed is as intense as it can be, it looks like a walk in the park.
Seriously, it looks like a console game, where the number of enemies has been reduced so it plays better with a controller.

I would have liked to see footage of a PC player in a really intense battle.
Circle strafing and a real sense of being totally overwhelmed.

There wasn't a single moment that looked like it was challenging.

I think it shows a lot of potential, but i just hope it features some nice large outdoor areas and some Serious Sam moments of intense circle strafing just to survive.

Its really hard to gauge the gameplay until we get to play it ourselves. We might be able to rush through and set the pace ourselves. Fingers crossed.

I wasn't too impressed with the enemies. They all looked like cyborg imp things.
The Mancubus looked pretty cool, but the emphasis on a techno cyborg art style for everything is a bit of a turn off.
Are these demons or strogg?

Why are we seeing Doom 3 style hell knights?
No thanks.

I honestly think that footage could have been shown to an unsuspecting audience and unless there was an eagle-eyed doom fan who spotted the hell knight and a few other things, no one would have said "it reminds me of doom".

The modding tools are simple. Dont be fooled.
You have prefab rooms you can arrange and fill with a variety of objects, but there was no actual construction of unique geometry.

We can only hope an exclusive PC editor will be released so we can develop our own mods, make our own models and textures etc.
If its uses the megatexture tech, then there's probably no chance that will happen.

It's a shame, cause the engine looks really good, and i'd love to use it for my DoomHD project.
I think we'd all love to see the classic demons brought to life in super high detail.

https://flic.kr/p/uyKr9FDoom Pinky Demon WIP by Doom HD, on Flickr

https://flic.kr/p/tBUkyxDoom Pinky Demon WIP by Doom HD, on Flickr

That looks better than anything shown in the demo IMO. Nice work. THAT is DOOM! PINKY! At least give us something similar and known...I agree, the enemies look like the Doom 3 Hellknight. Terrible.

So it's basically Brutal Doom 3. Great.

s13n1 said:

These shots are looking pretty nice:

http://www.dsogaming.com/screenshot-news/doom-first-official-4k-screenshots-released/

You know, they do. The enemies look much better in them than they seemed in the videos. I particualrly like the hole-in-the-head zombie things in the last two ones. Seems like maybe posessed humans were halfway turned into hellish monstrocities. Cool. And the revenant looked interesting, seemingly different from the teaser one. Maybe there's variations?

Although the rocks - in the first of those screenshots - really do look like wet plastic. That's pretty terrible.
Otherwise the screenshots seem good.

Honestly I think some people are letting the nostalgia cloud their objectivity. From what I saw they put a lot of effort into making it feel like Doom whiling bringing it into the HD era.

http://www.dsogaming.com/screenshot-news/doom-first-official-4k-screenshots-released/

Also who said the Cacodemons look bad? I think they look way better than the Doom 3 ones.

The screenies really do make it look much better IMO. Although I still really dislike the cyberdemon design, the general look of the hell terrain (the rock material mostly), and the total lack of truly dark and oppressive moments. The cacodemons are cool, that's true.

Arctangent said:

The gore seemed waaaaay too gratuitous and over-the-top to me. While there was certainly a lot of gore just for gore in the original Dooms, that was mostly in the enemies, wasn't so in-your-face, and the non-enemy based gore was usually played for atmosphere, if not horror then tension at least ( the wall-splattered Baron textures come to mind ).

The mooks also seem very visually indistinguishable - although if none of them particularly threatening then I suppose that's not too big of a deal - and the chainsaw just looks obnoxious to use.

Agree on both points. Beyond a certain point the video just made me feel sick with nothing but constant ripping enemies apart into mincemeat. And I couldn't tell any of the low-level enemies apart visually, they all looked like indistinguishable creepy humanoid figures.

Watching the gameplay video left me with an impression of "yet another bog-standard first-person shooter". Agreeing with Alfonzo's notes on level design - but then again, Doom's mapping style has gone out of fashion these days; if you forced the players to re-visit an area, it would be probably treated as "blatant filler".

Overall, I'm completely uninterested.