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quakke

Let's talk about the difficulty in DOOM 4

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What do you expect, what would you hope to get, is there a compromise that pleases you?

I would like to get that classic DOOM/FPS experience where movement is used as weapon but no gameplay that is just cheap where player forexample dies from one hit.

Hugo Martin
"When you're playing on hard, one hit and you're dead"
http://youtu.be/A12sET6EXKI?t=1m50s

I don't like the sound of that..

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"One hit and you're dead" generally only works if the levels are short enough. A game like Hotline Miami, as an example, kills you in one hit but the levels are so short that death doesn't set you back very far. This doesn't really work out too well in a standard Doom environment, with longer maps and hitscanners aplenty. I suppose Doom has quicksave, but (assuming the new Doom has it) this would turn "one hit and you're dead" mode into a savescum fest.

For difficulties, I would like standard Doom difficulties (more enemies on higher difficulty settings, and I guess more damage to the player on higher settings? Not really a classic Doom thing but I suppose it'll make things more challenging). I do think that a sort of ultra-hard this-wasn't-meant-to-be-a-serious-difficulty Nightmare mode would be fun, just as long as they keep one hit deaths out of it.

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The thought of one hit kills in a game mode is tempting for me because I'm kinda masochistic when it comes to games. :P

I do worry a bit more about the whole piƱata thing and how it might take away a lot of the challenge because you get health just from killing enemies. Enemies didn't drop health in the originals and I liked that better but we'll wait and see.

But of course a game can be too hard for bullshit reasons like poor game design and deliberate traps made just to troll your audience, I hope that won't be the case here.

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I'd love to see them make the hardest difficulty so punishing that one mistake can kill you. So long as you still have mobility as a defense, and so long as low level gun-toting monsters can't pin you down behind cover with unavoidable instakill bullet attacks, I think it'll be fine.

As an example of what I'd ideally like to see, Ninja Gaiden Black on Xbox provides very tough yet fair gameplay on its highest setting. One mistimed maneuver can mean instant death, but if you know what you're doing, you can play aggressively and still avoid almost all damage.

Because the depth of combat is more about practice and precision than the twitchy 'cheapshot' combat in Hotline Miami, longer stages with multiple tough encounters between save points still work fine in NGB. There is a way to counter anything that can kill you; if you die, it generally means you screwed something up, or you need to practice more on a lower setting.

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A shotgun guy in classic Doom at point blank range can take off a big chunk of your health if you lack armor. I think maybe that's what he means. Could be a hyperbolic statement, like Carmack originally promising there'd be some 30 demons coming at you at once. I don't think he was ever intending that to be expected except in rare cases. Similarly, one hit kills are probably not as extreme as we might assume. I can't imagine a COD type situation where you're just being offed instantly multiple times in a short period.

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I can see maybe projectiles being instant kills since you can actually dodge those so it basically becomes like one of those bullet hell games. Personally, though, I'd rather they take the Classic Doom approach and just have more monsters at higher difficulty levels and they can get creative with this, too, like have monsters in more ambushy positions on higher difficulties. Maybe an Imp spawns in front of your face on Easy and behind you on Hard.

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Mithran Denizen said:

I'd love to see them make the hardest difficulty so punishing that one mistake can kill you. So long as you still have mobility as a defense, and so long as low level gun-toting monsters can't pin you down behind cover with unavoidable instakill bullet attacks, I think it'll be fine.

As an example of what I'd ideally like to see, Ninja Gaiden Black on Xbox provides very tough yet fair gameplay on its highest setting. One mistimed maneuver can mean instant death, but if you know what you're doing, you can play aggressively and still avoid almost all damage.

Because the depth of combat is more about practice and precision than the twitchy 'cheapshot' combat in Hotline Miami, longer stages with multiple tough encounters between save points still work fine in NGB. There is a way to counter anything that can kill you; if you die, it generally means you screwed something up, or you need to practice more on a lower setting.


From what I've seen we might not even get hitscan enemies at all. The zombieman just shots very fast projectiles that you can dodge. Not sure if I like this or not.

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The first action Doom pissed me off beyond belief because of that one hit death bullshit. The formula works great in Contra and totally blows in Doom. I actualy IDDQD'd my way through all of the first Action Doom just to enjoy the cool stuff the WAD had to offer without dealing with the headache of actually playing it.

That said, more difficulty customization than we had in Doom1 and Doom2 would be pretty cool. Like a little scale where setting it to max or near-max causes one hit deaths and other bullshit that only pros would enjoy playing with. Hell, thats what "Nightmare!" is essentially ain't it?

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Im gonna asume that he's talking about the "Nightmare" Dificulty, and if such is the case, i have no problem with it not being remotely fair.

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As long as there are plenty of checkpoints or a way to save anywhere they can make it as hard as they want. I'm looking at u Bloodborne. Making a game extremely difficult with high damage rates and the constant testing of your reflexes is cool. But i don't want to play the same map from beginning to end every single time I die. Seriously brings on the monotony and the annoyance of seeing the same exact stuff over and over. I'm sure they'll do a good job of setting up the difficulty settings to act just like their titles.

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I don't think you should worry about a difficulty where everything kills you in one hit. This sounds more like a standard PR statement to reassure people "it'll be hard, you guys". Just like in classic Doom a cyberdemon can kill you in one rocket if you're unarmored, there might be strong enemies taking you out in one hit in certain situations.

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