Anyone else thinks the character animation and AI is poor?

So after watching the Doom 4 gameplay video one of the biggest problems I have with the game in terms of visuals is that enemy animation just looks too dull. Enemies don't seem to react to the player's shots, they just explode or instantly fall down in a boring fashion. I have a problem with this because in order for gunplay to be good shooting things has to feel good. Do you also think that the animation is perhaps not that great?

Also, is it just me or does the AI look terrible? Like really really bad? Many of the enemies just appear to stand there and get shot. They look even dumber then they do in the original Dooms since at least there they go after you.

I was thinking how good it is honestly. I've had to put up with a lot of awful animation lately with Unreal 4 games. It also looked pretty dynamic. Like shooting an enemy as it was about to fire will make it mess up the trajectory.

You're right. A lot of enemies appear and stand there, just like the original Doom enemies did. I've never really seen any Doom enemies run or head for cover so much as get shot and die. There were a few times in the videos that I saw imps lunge and jump.

geo said:

You're right. A lot of enemies appear and stand there, just like the original Doom enemies did.

I don't know what game you have been playing all these years but the enemies in Doom are not stationary. Most enemies will move towards the player and then fire their weapon every now and then. They don't just stand still.

geo said:

I've never really seen any Doom enemies run or head for cover so much as get shot and die.

Perhaps not, but in the original Dooms the demons were more expendable since they attacked in numbers.

They're not stationary, but just about. They move pretty slow compared to Doomguy. These enemies still moved. There were even horde zombies that came forward at the player.

Not that I'm defending the video, because it looks like half of them do stand still, their AI can be stand still when shooting, then chose to reposition or stand there.

Yes Doom enemies attack in numbers. These will too I guess. We saw a demo. Maybe they should of had 30 enemies on screen at once for the wow factor, even 10 enemies. I'm not even sure I can remember where the vanilla game had more than 10 on screen at once, but someone can correct me.

There were those bigger, bulkier guys in hell (hell knights?) who seemed to charge at the player. The revenants also seemed fairly mobile, at least in the air... until they land and sort of stand there.

I can see where you're coming from hardcore_gamer but I'm not bothered by it, they were dying so fast I couldn't really notice their movements or lack of such.

Although in the post-presentation interview the guy said how they were really trying to make the combat never push the player back, to make the player able to always advance or flutter about in other ways. That's kind of worrysome for me, but for a different reason. But maybe the more stationary monsters are serving that cause?

geo said:

I'm not even sure I can remember where the vanilla game had more than 10 on screen at once, but someone can correct me.

It happens quite often in Doom II levels. Take the big invasion wave of MAP16 for example.

Also in Thy Flesh Consumed, for example all the shotgun guys at the beginning of E4M8.

I was kinda underwhelmed by the gameplay too. The projectiles looked really fast but the enemy targets just kinda stood around and took the heat. Personally I'd prefer slower projectiles and fast moving enemies.

In the video the player seemed to be casually circling around the enemies in the usual doom3guy speed, was rarely in any serious danger it appeared, which made the brutal death sequences at the end look seriously juxtaposed.

The game looks like it features a lot of stuff that gives you the illusion that your character is a badass. The way you can jump toward a ledge and your character knows enough to grab it and vault himself up. By pressing the use key on a corpse tears its arm off and use it for a handprint scanner, or pressing whatever the melee button is on a monster up close gives you a free watch of bone breaking head splitting actions.

Not to imply that these things aren't cool, but the number of premade action sequences in the game that are activated by the player stepping somewhere or pressing a button makes me feel like very little of the cool stuff you see in the game has anything to do with how good the player is at playing the game. It makes me wonder why games even bother with giving the player the ability to move and jump on their own, when they could go for the time crisis or house of the dead rail shooter approach which would give developers full control of the cinematic experience, and all the player would have to do is point and click at the bad guys.

Man, you think that animation was bad? Son, you haven't seen bad animation like I have. Bad animation. It hurts. I've seen shit that makes Sonic Adventure look like fuckin Avatar. I've seen shit. This... this ain't shit. But I just with the plasma rifle wasn't so adorable. Why is it so cute? What were they doing over there at id? They might as well have a fluffy white kitten that spits fireballs at enemies. Like, what.

id has made RAGE which makes me wonder why their animations were not that great this time around. They do have until spring next year to sort their shit out and make it better though.

id always had the best illustrators/animators.

Antroid said:

in the post-presentation interview the guy said how they were really trying to make the combat never push the player back, to make the player able to always advance or flutter about in other ways. That's kind of worrysome for me, but for a different reason. But maybe the more stationary monsters are serving that cause?

In my opinion, encouraging aggressive-style combat is great, as long as challenge is still present. If anyone can win without any skill involved, just by running around in confusion and shooting around, then I call it wrong, except maybe for the very lowest difficulty level. But it's totally not OK for normal difficulty, not to mention hard difficulty, which I expect to be there, stand for its name and be fun.

You're basing this off a highly compressed streaming video... which does give the immediate impression everything looks like ass.

Luckily that's not the case... look at the 4k still in game images that bethesda posted last night. Doom_RO linked them on the other thread here (bethesda reveal).

Once you see those... should change your opinion as it did mine. Gorgeously detailed :)

Buckshot said:

look at the 4k still in game images that bethesda posted last night.

4k screenshots don't say anything about animations or AI. :p

Not that I have a problem with whatever the OP is talking about. It all looks great to me.

scifista42 said:

In my opinion, encouraging aggressive-style combat is great, as long as challenge is still present. If anyone can win without any skill involved, just by running around in confusion and shooting around, then I call it wrong, except maybe for the very lowest difficulty level. But it's totally not OK for normal difficulty, not to mention hard difficulty, which I expect to be there, stand for its name and be fun.

If hard mode is easy I'm quitting modern games

scifista42 said:

In my opinion, encouraging aggressive-style combat is great, as long as challenge is still present. If anyone can win without any skill involved, just by running around in confusion and shooting around, then I call it wrong, except maybe for the very lowest difficulty level. But it's totally not OK for normal difficulty, not to mention hard difficulty, which I expect to be there, stand for its name and be fun.

That's exactly what worries me too, especially considering the utter unbalance of health and ammo.

Jaxxoon R said:

Man, you think that animation was bad?

Well perhaps not bad, just not what I would expect from a Id game. Look at how utterly smooth and lifelike the animation in RAGE is. Now compare it to Doom 4. See the difference?

I myself thought it was pretty good.

I guess I wasn't paying attention to how they reacted when getting shot, but the way they moved around when not getting shot was kinda cool. And the hologram animation, although completely pre scripted, was pretty awesome. The way the demon that looks like the doom 3 hell knight was walking looked good.

I watched the gameplay again but in 60fps and in full HD and this time the animation looked considerably better. I guess the low fps and video quality from earlier videos made the game look bad.

That said, there is something else I am not really sure I like so much which is the art design of many of the monsters. Is it just me or do the demons look like the ones from the Doom movie? Many of them look more like mutants or aliens rather than like demons from hell.

hardcore_gamer said:

I watched the gameplay again but in 60fps and in full HD and this time the animation looked considerably better. I guess the low fps and video quality from earlier videos made the game look bad.

That said, there is something else I am not really sure I like so much which is the art design of many of the monsters. Is it just me or do the demons look like the ones from the Doom movie? Many of them look more like mutants or aliens rather than like demons from hell.

I noticed that, too. They share similar structured heads.

At least we know for a fact there's hell and not genetic experiments.

hardcore_gamer said:

I watched the gameplay again but in 60fps and in full HD and this time the animation looked considerably better. I guess the low fps and video quality from earlier videos made the game look bad.

That said, there is something else I am not really sure I like so much which is the art design of many of the monsters. Is it just me or do the demons look like the ones from the Doom movie? Many of them look more like mutants or aliens rather than like demons from hell.

Well I guess this thread is useless now huh? lol.

Honestly it looked fine to me. The only thing I didn't like were various the animations. They looked fine, I just didn't want them in the first place. Although, I'll base my full opinion of the game when I play it rather than basing it off the reveal.