Secondary fire modes?

The latest Doom 4 videos have shown a few different secondary fire modes that seem to involve choosing between attachments. What are your thoughts on this? Are there any fire modes you guys would like to see in the game?

So far I've noticed:

* There's a small square icon above the ammo counter bar whenever an attachment/ammo type is available. The name of the attachment/ammo type appears briefly when that weapon is selected.

* Super Chainsaw. In both videos, the chainsaw is actually called a "Super Chainsaw" and there's the same icon above the ammo bar. Given that the chainsaw "ammo" counter remains at 6 throughout the footage we've seen, maybe the secondary fire mode performs a unique type of dismemberment that works on higher-tier enemies, but uses "ammo" to do so?

* Heavy assault rifle has a removable "Tactical Scope" and a "Micro Missiles" attachment fire mode. The latter seems to use the same ammo as primary fire and possibly has a cool-down state.

* Shotgun has a rapid fire attachment which fires three shells in quick succession.

* Plasma rifle has and a "Heat Burst" mode/attachment (Hell video 2:50 in, it's hard to see) and also a "Stun Shot" (E3 demonstration video at 5:26, again had to see). I couldn't see any real difference between fire modes in the videos though. Perhaps the Heat Burst mode burns through certain enemies?

maybe with the chainsaw, you can throw it lol(only the blade maybe), it would be fabulous

Kind of uninspired, but I'm pretty sure I noticed the SSG had two fire modes. I'm at work right now, so I can't rewatch the footage to verify.

This mods to weapon or like you call it secondary mode is not for DOOM game in my opinion there are completely unnecessary and should be removed from the game.

to be honest it is one of those thing, that are hated for no reason, and there should not be any problem in adding it, like no reload ecc...

I like secondary fire modes. It's like having 2 weapons conveniently mashed into one, and more weapons is always good.

Let's not forget secondary fire isn't a "new school" thing and it's not "polluting the old school feel" before anyone brings that shit up. Games like Blood and Shadow Warrior had alt fire modes for the vast majority of their weapons.

SavageCorona said:

Let's not forget secondary fire isn't a "new school" thing and it's not "polluting the old school feel" before anyone brings that shit up. Games like Blood and Shadow Warrior had alt fire modes for the vast majority of their weapons.

But for DOOM it will be! new school. Doom 1, Doom II and Doom TNT , Doom plutonia even doom 64 and doom 3 did not have this alt fire mode and they should not change this.

Why? It's such an inane feature to dislike, and only because it's new. It's like hating the spin jump in Super Mario World just because Mario 1 didn't have it.

Not overly keen on them to be honest.

There are some games where I enjoy alt fire modes, especially if they fit within the scope of what the specific weapon's strengths and weaknesses are.

But I never really thought alt fire modes fit Doom all that well unless the weapon has a charge-up shot as an alternative way of firing the weapon like the Doom 3 BFG had - I actually liked that.
I prefer weapons to be simplistic in design and to be particularly good at certain situations, while particularly bad at other situations and then you have the other weapons that can fill in the holes. Alt fire modes often blur this too much for my liking (but there are exceptions).

I'm not sure I like giving the regular shotgun a burst mode, because it seems to encroach on what the SSG is all about (more firepower compared to the regular shotgun); Why bother with an SSG if the regular shotgun can just do that and with slightly better range on it?

Similarly with the Assault Rifle, which seems to fire explosive mini-rockets as an alt mode - why bother with a rocket launcher at all if you have that?

Am I missing something here or do others have these concerns?

pro_zealot said:

But for DOOM it will be! new school. Doom 1, Doom II and Doom TNT , Doom plutonia even doom 64 and doom 3 did not have this alt fire mode and they should not change this.

It's this kind of xenophobic attitude which prevents Doom from ever evolving or changing and becoming a more interesting game. Of course, Doom should not incorporate every modern trend that has come into existence ever since 1994, however, there are some new things that would fit just fine in the Doom universe, alt firing modes being one of them.

Some people aren't so keen on the idea, but the way I look at it is we're getting a bigger variety of ways to kill demons. Works for me!

It seems like this game will not be as tightly balanced as the originals anyway.

Like, there probably won't be a solid system of what gun is best for what kind of situation, monster, etc. It seems like it's more of a "use whichever guns you have ammo for, they have different ways of killing baddies but they're all good". I have absolutely nothing against that. In fact, I've found that having a choice between equally viable weapons makes a shooter more fun. Like Rage, or Turok 2 or something.

Well, it might not seem overly doomy, but since I'm not expecting a survival, scrounging for and saving up ammo aspect in this game anyway, I'm not upset about the possibility of additional firing modes.

Amph said:

maybe with the chainsaw, you can throw it lol(only the blade maybe), it would be fabulous

Or perhaps it can do a horizontal slash like in unreal tournament? Cant imagine the amount of chainsaws the doomguy would need to replace with that attack. ;-)

I've always hated secondary firing modes in FPS games.

I also really dislike alternative fire modes.

Thinking about why I don't like them, I think the main reason is that it introduces more complexity (and hence more decision making) when using the weapons. The primary decision in DOOM or QUAKE is which weapon to use against which monsters -- with alt firing modes, you have to factor in those alternate modes too.

Another big thing is that it requires an extra key or mouse button to use that alternative mode -- the human-computer interface just got wider and hence a bit harder to use.

Lastly from a gameplay perspective, alternate modes are like having even more weapons and the more weapons there are, the harder it is to balance them all against each other and making each one distinctly useful for a certain gameplay situation (as well as in visual appearance and sounds).