Art direction and sound design

I just watched that "Final Level Sneak Peak" and that video seems to have better sound than the others. Sounds more crisp.

I don't know, the imps and the hell knight seem to be completely silent when they die there too and the chaingun can be barely heard. That sucks.

Xerge said:

I don't know, the imps and the hell knight seem to be completely silent when they die there too and the chaingun can be barely heard. That sucks.

The vanilla chaingun is loud and punchy, but the "moving turret" mod seems to have more of a humming sound effect that gets gradually louder. It's definitely odd to have such drastically different sound effects for the same weapon. I'll see if get used to it when playing.

As for the Hell Knight, it definitely seems like its pain sound effects are just flat out missing, especially after watching that new Lazarus Labs video. The Hell Knights in the E3 demo had some badass snarling sounds when shot, which seem to be missing now.

GoatLord said:

On to sound design. A game this detailed and action-heavy needs a lot of sound effects, and there's certainly no shortage of that. But when the carnage gets heavy, it seems like something is off. Some weapons sound too low in the mix while less powerful weapons are much louder (rocket launcher versus shotgun for instance). Enemies doesn't seem to react to damage too much; I keep wanting to hear armor being chinked or painful groans to be emitted, but there's not a lot of that. Sometimes an enemy would go down or an explosion would go off and either a very weak sound would be heard, or there was no sound at all. I find this extremely distracting. It's like watching a movie where the foley guy fell asleep halfway through!

Also, it's not that difficult to record multiple sounds for the same action and I think far too often we hear the exact same sound effect, and that's just plain silly for 2016. It's also silly that in all of the footage, not once did I hear even the slightest attempt at creating a realistic sense of propagation of sound. Sound gets distorted not only by reverberating off of walls, but your relative distance from the sound's origin can cause minor phaser effects. The fact that these effects can be heard in classic Doom source ports but not here is a bad sign.

I agree. This might be my biggest gripe with the game. The sounds themselves I don't have a big problem with (taken on their own), but the way they mix (or don't mix) turns to mush, especially when there's a lot going on. I frequently back up into enemies and don't even know they're attacking me until I die or turn around (you lose health fast). This is kind of annoying and it seems like even older games like Quake 1 didn't have this problem.

It might be that if I turn the music off in the settings i'll hear things better, but it seems like the 3D-ness or surround quality (on headphones, at least) is lacking. I wish on PS4 they'd release some Gold Headset profile like a few 1st party games get. That might help. I'm not using that headset though.

Some games provide different mix profiles in the settings for TV, big speakers, small speakers, headphones, etc. Killzone: Shadow Fall does that with the "small speakers" thing.

I will say though that it's louder than most games, which is nice.

After playing it extensively, I've gotten used to the sound issues, but I'd really like to know why the problem exists in the first place. I don't think I've ever played a game where the sound mixing is this problematic. It's very strange how unstable it is.

Looking at the game, there was a particular quality to a lot of its tech that I couldn't pin down, but seemed vaguely familiar somehow. Then I learned that one of the main concept artists was a fan of mecha. Now, I think I see it in a way, but I'm not all too familiar with the tropes to figure out if that's really the contributing influence.

I really can't see why you'd think Hell in the new Doom has anything remotely resembling hell from Doom64. The ambience, tone, colour paletes and soundtrack are world's apart.
The level design for Hell in Doom64 felt like the temples and shrines were built FOR the demons and that souls of the damned would be tortured for eternity. Like giant rooms with flesh hanging from the ceiling and demonic portraits that double as booby-traps. Demonic cathedrals built with brick and wood, a very medieval feel. Which is ironic when the Doomslayer is the leader of the 'knight' sentinels.

This new hell has more of an alien dimension vibe with pentagram's stuck on it. I don't feel at all trapped in a biblical interpretation of Hell. For me there was zero horror or fear in this new vision of hell. Cool place to double jump and kill demons, but nothing scary.

...could just be me though.

Well, they explicitly stated that they wanted a more badass interpretation, as in more brimstone-and-volcanic fog vision of hell instead of opting for the moody/atmospheric type of hellish setting many times before.

That said, I do see some similarities to doom 64's atmosphere in some parts but wouldn't be able to pinpoint them out precisely for the life of me. The ambient music does a lot, though and I would say they took some direct inspiration from Aubrey Hodges himself for the lot of them.

[on topic] I noticed the imps in the e3 demo, alongside the hell knights and mancubi, all had distinct pain/death sounds that didn't make the cut. What gives?