DOOM Eternal Gameplay Reveal Impressions

[DooM_RO]

35 minutes ago, mammajamma said:

I sort of disagree with the people who say how Doom's current direction isn't faithful to how it originally was. It isn't, in tone, for sure, but current id isn't basing doom on how the game was, but how the game itself has evolved.

 

People were scared shitless for sure when Doom came out, but the game itself was incredibly popular from for a solid 2.5 years from the moment it came out to the moment quake did. As they played more of it the scariness factor wore off, and as user WADs took off, barely anybody was creating anything meant to be scary, per se. Very few of the "Doom clones" that were being made at that point were aiming for horror either.

 

The growing popularity of WASD+mouse as a control scheme basically made the vanilla game somewhat trivial to beat, so user WADs compensated by adding more monsters and having trickier placements. The original levels themselves had collection stats an a completion time to beat, giving players the impression they should try to complete the level as fast as possible. When Masters of Doom was published in 2005, it described in great detail how id would remove mechanics or even entire design documents if they felt it would slow the gameplay down. (This explains how Doom is seen as "go fast while killing hordes of demons"; the book is also the basis for the "heavy metal teenage art direction" take, since it talked about the various devs' love of metal, D&D, and in Romero's case, juvenile gross-out drawings involving gore.)

 

The community itself never really took the scariness aspect too seriously either, through constant memes and in-jokes involving mechanics and monsters, in fact the community itself is probably to blame for the whole "Doomslayer is a badass" angle. Either from how most WADs are generally played through, or legions of people getting into nasty comment wars in Youtube videos about whether Doomguy could beat Master Chief.

 

Couldn't have put it better myself.

[DoomMan777]

23 hours ago, mammajamma said:

I sort of disagree with the people who say how Doom's current direction isn't faithful to how it originally was. It isn't, in tone, for sure, but current id isn't basing doom on how the game was, but how the game itself has evolved.

 

People were scared shitless for sure when Doom came out, but the game itself was incredibly popular from for a solid 2.5 years from the moment it came out to the moment quake did. As they played more of it the scariness factor wore off, and as user WADs took off, barely anybody was creating anything meant to be scary, per se. Very few of the "Doom clones" that were being made at that point were aiming for horror either.

 

The growing popularity of WASD+mouse as a control scheme basically made the vanilla game somewhat trivial to beat, so user WADs compensated by adding more monsters and having trickier placements. The original levels themselves had collection stats an a completion time to beat, giving players the impression they should try to complete the level as fast as possible. When Masters of Doom was published in 2005, it described in great detail how id would remove mechanics or even entire design documents if they felt it would slow the gameplay down. (This explains how Doom is seen as "go fast while killing hordes of demons"; the book is also the basis for the "heavy metal teenage art direction" take, since it talked about the various devs' love of metal, D&D, and in Romero's case, juvenile gross-out drawings involving gore.)

 

The community itself never really took the scariness aspect too seriously either, through constant memes and in-jokes involving mechanics and monsters, in fact the community itself is probably to blame for the whole "Doomslayer is a badass" angle. Either from how most WADs are generally played through, or legions of people getting into nasty comment wars in Youtube videos about whether Doomguy could beat Master Chief.

So, Doom Slayer became so Badass because his Previous Incarnation was Mistaken by Fans to be The Badass Incarnate, which was not the Actual Main Point of the Character? Neat.

[mammajamma]

1 minute ago, DoomMan777 said:

So, Doom Slayer became so Badass because his Previous Incarnation was Mistaken by Fans to be The Badass Incarnate, which was not the Actual Main Point of the Character? Neat.

Well if you want to get to the meat of it, the actual point of the character is that Doomguy is YOU. Romero meant him to be a "blank slate" character that players imprint themselves into, and current Doom seems to enforce that through some of the story bits about how Doomslayer is guided by angels in his crusade against the demons. The angels in this context probably represents you, the player, and what we would see as someone being really good at Doom would seen to the demons as Doomslayer having to have someone divine behind him as mortal human struggle greatly against even one demon, let alone dozens, let alone thousands.

[RaikohZX]

I'm not here for survival horror FPS in hell. I've blazed through Hell itself more times than I could ever plausibly count as the Doom Marine, and while I can understand not liking the direction of the new games, going out of one's way to claim them childish, stupid and "selling out" is essentially putting a dunce hat on your noggin for all to see. People bitched about Doom 3 but I can accept it trying to do its own thing, even if I mod the shotgun to not be a plastic pile of garbage, and I had a fun time with Doom 2016, so see these games for their own merits rather than going "but it's not the doom I remember"

 

Things change when they get older and different people handle them their own way. That's just how life works. But i'd say they're at least trying both new things while accommodating for veterans with plenty of nostalgia that isn't just "ha ha look at that it's a classic reference". The changes from 2016 to Eternal are primarily fan feedback and them getting to work their new project their way rather than hastily patching it together from a failed design project.

[explorix]

9 minutes ago, RikohZX said:

I'm not here for survival horror FPS in hell. going out of one's way to claim them stupid.

I've never said any of this. It's, at least to me, not what it used to be.

 

To clarify my point of view:

 

- I don't like the NU DOOM games in terms of art-direction and level design.

- And I'm very sad that modders are no longer considered a part of IDs identity/DNA.

 

I'm convinced that if ID would just release the tools and some basic documentation, we would have amazing stuff 6 months later.

And I don't think asking for modding tools for a game with a still existing user and modding base, is asked too much.

[jazzmaster9]

19 minutes ago, explorix said:

- And I'm very sad that modders are no longer considered a part of IDs identity/DNA.

 

I'm convinced that if ID would just release the tools and some basic documentation, we would have amazing stuff 6 months later.

And I don't think asking for modding tools for a game with a still existing user and modding base, is asked too much.

You do realize that Doom 2016's engine isn't GZDoom. Its not as simple as drawing a sector and raising floors and ceilings anymore. .

 

The devs have already explained the limitations they have in making modding tools for the new id Tech Engine.

So yeah it IS too much to ask.

 

You seem to think that the reason iD's decisions are because of "They dunnot love their fanzz anymore Sellouts!!"

Instead of legitimate technical issues.

 

Hugo has already said many times how he and his team are trying hard to make the engine user friendly enough for modding, But i guess they are just corporate Sellouts who dont try huh.

[SYS]

 

7 minutes ago, jazzmaster9 said:

You do realize that Doom 2016's engine isn't GZDoom. Its not as simple as drawing a sector and raising floors and ceilings anymore. .

 

The devs have already explained the limitations they have in making modding tools for the new id Tech Engine.

So yeah it IS too much to ask.

 

You seem to think that the reason iD's decisions are because of "They dunnot love their fanzz anymore Sellouts!!"

Instead of legitimate technical issues.

 

Hugo has already said many times how he and his team are trying hard to make the engine user friendly enough for modding, But i guess they are just corporate Sellouts who dont try huh.

Instead of friendly, why not the option of "here's what we use as-is, have fun" 

[jazzmaster9]

3 minutes ago, SYS said:

Instead of friendl

Instead of friendly, why not the option of "here's what we use as-is, have fun" 

Dev tools are just that. Dev tools they, are not meant to be used by people outside the company in the hands of people who made them.

Do not under estimate the power of a good userfiendly editor. Or you might end up using DoomCAD instead of GZDoom builder.

[SYS]

Yes, but typically user friendly means it's been made by the community. 

[explorix]

3 minutes ago, jazzmaster9 said:

Dev tools are just that. Dev tools they, are not meant to be used by people outside the company in the hands of people who made them.

Do not under estimate the power of a good userfiendly editor. Or you might end up using DoomCAD instead of GZDoom builder.

Unreal Engine 4 and the newest CryEngine do take a long time to learn, but people still create mods with them.

 

That's why I said "after 6 months". It's obviously gonna take much longer to learn something as complex as a 2018 game engine, but it's

definitely not impossible.

 

The guys at ID don't work with some ridiculous complicated tools, they need to meet the deadline when the game is going to be published

and certainly they can't afford wasting any time. They are under business constraints.

 

The times of "complicated game engines" is over. It has been over since at least 2014, when Epic Games introduced Unreal Engine 4.

Have you never seen how many Indie games are being made with that Engine? You might wanna check out the Steam Store to

believe it yourself, but there are more games being made by "stupid" people than ever before in the history of mankind.

 

Because both you and ID think the same thing: "normal" people are just too stupid to use any sort of 3D-rendering software. But it's not true.

It's in fact the complete opposite. Both UE4 and CryEngine are far easier to use now than a few years ago. You can create more complex things

with much less complexity. Just google "Unreal Engine 4 Blueprints" for example. You don't even need to learn C++, you simply drag n' drop.

 

As I stated before, the tools today just require more time to learn and more people working on the thing, but it's not rocket science.

And as long as ID shares its technology with other beth studios (where the employees also have to learn how to use it and can't afford to lose

costly time because of the profitability of the company), we can ask for modding tools.

 

It is, after all, not asked too much.

[flouter]

Well I guess if you guys want the dev tools then ok. I mean, working with a cmd that requries you to use commands for inserting a vertex's X,Y and Z coordinates to make a 4 edge face with a applied baked texture that you have to pre-bake a lightmap onto while pre-setting a load of shader info with commands in a cmd and then rendering the baked lightning texture for that face to finally have a single face is fine. Shouldn't take longer than 2mins if you know what you're doing, but I mean it could take a little longer when you start making rooms. I'm obviously showing this over the top, but this is what I had to work with when I tried out the "mod tools" for some other game. I'm sure the devs also have something along the lines of a 3D realtime map so see where they placed their vertcies or even faces with color/texture, but I didn't have that to work with when I tried out some other dev's "mod tools". Gaming has evolved over the years and with Bethesda and ID trying to make a very beautiful and great looking game that also works on consoles and mid-range PCs its pretty much safe to say they are going out of their way for optimization. Maybe not as crazy as I described here, but definitely along those lines, maybe just with more external tools that help.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm also hoping for Modding Support, but if you think that the devs should just make their tools that they worked with to the public is a good idea then I don't think it is.

 

 

 

(also don't bother replying to me mainly to say that thats not how maps/levels are made because thats not the point. the point is that dev tools are really complicated and most of the time not user-friendly)

[bigbossbalrog]

5 minutes ago, explorix said:

Unreal Engine 4 and the newest CryEngine do take a long time to learn, but people still create mods with them.

 

That's why I said "after 6 months". It's obviously gonna take much longer to learn something as complex as a 2018 game engine, but it's

definitely not impossible.

 

The guys at ID don't work with some ridiculous complicated tools, they need to meet the deadline when the game is going to be published

and certainly they can't afford wasting any time. They are under business constraints.

 

The times of "complicated game engines" is over. It has been over since at least 2014, when Epic Games introduced Unreal Engine 4.

Have you never seen how many Indie games are being made with that Engine? You might wanna check out the Steam Store to

believe it yourself, but there are more games being made by "stupid" people than ever before in the history of mankind.

 

Because both you and ID think the same thing: "normal" people are just too stupid to use any sort of 3D-rendering software. But it's not true.

It's in fact the complete opposite. Both UE4 and CryEngine are far easier to use now than a few years ago. You can create more complex things

with much less complexity. Just google "Unreal Engine 4 Blueprints" for example. You don't even need to learn C++, you simply drag n' drop.

 

As I stated before, the tools today just require more time to learn and more people working on the thing, but it's not rocket science.

And as long as ID shares its technology with other beth studios (where the employees also have to learn how to use it and can't afford to lose

costly time because of the profitability of the company), we can ask for modding tools.

 

It is, after all, not asked too much.

Yes it bloody is. That's not how it fucking works. This post have the naivety of a ten year old. It's not because they think people are stupid, it's because the engine is moddable. If you give people the dev tools, then you're giving them, and rival devs the keys into using YOUR engine for their own ends, with all the corporate espionage that will result in them.

It's way too much to bloody ask.

[flouter]

11 minutes ago, explorix said:

Unreal Engine 4 and the newest CryEngine do take a long time to learn, but people still create mods with them.

 

You realize Unreal Engine 4 and CryEngine were both made with other people in mind right? When you go into the game making community there is a load of talk about Unity, Unreal Engine, CryEngine and a few 2D engines. All of those were made for other people to make games in as a feature. The internal dev tools for standalone engines are not made like that. Especially IDtech. Dev engines like these make UnrealEngine and CryEngine look easy.

[RaikohZX]

They gave out the modding tools to RAGE. Basically no one used them because not only was there a lack of documentation, but to actually mod RAGE in-depth would require so many external tools, finagling with megatexture hell (Carmack's greatest sin in tech development, in my opinion), requiring renderfarm top-of-the-line computers to push anything out at a reasonable rate, and so many other problems.

 

This is why you saw one guy loosely make the Doom 4 Foundry from trailer footage with missing textures everywhere, a rebalance mod, and nothing else for RAGE. It's simply too damn impractical to mod. And now we're at least 2 iterations of IDTech ahead of that and it probably got even more complex to use.

[jazzmaster9]

1 hour ago, explorix said:

Unreal Engine 4 and the newest CryEngine do take a long time to learn, but people still create mods with them.

 

That's why I said "after 6 months". It's obviously gonna take much longer to learn something as complex as a 2018 game engine, but it's

definitely not impossible.

 

The guys at ID don't work with some ridiculous complicated tools, they need to meet the deadline when the game is going to be published

and certainly they can't afford wasting any time. They are under business constraints.

 

The times of "complicated game engines" is over. It has been over since at least 2014, when Epic Games introduced Unreal Engine 4.

Have you never seen how many Indie games are being made with that Engine? You might wanna check out the Steam Store to

believe it yourself, but there are more games being made by "stupid" people than ever before in the history of mankind.

 

Because both you and ID think the same thing: "normal" people are just too stupid to use any sort of 3D-rendering software. But it's not true.

It's in fact the complete opposite. Both UE4 and CryEngine are far easier to use now than a few years ago. You can create more complex things

with much less complexity. Just google "Unreal Engine 4 Blueprints" for example. You don't even need to learn C++, you simply drag n' drop.

 

As I stated before, the tools today just require more time to learn and more people working on the thing, but it's not rocket science.

And as long as ID shares its technology with other beth studios (where the employees also have to learn how to use it and can't afford to lose

costly time because of the profitability of the company), we can ask for modding tools.

 

It is, after all, not asked too much.

You obviously have no ideas how this works.

"Unreal Engine 4 is easy to use so Id tech 6 must be easy to use right? Right? LoL"

Again you really love shoving words in the developers mouths huh.

No one here said that "normal "people are stupid aside from you. As a programmer i know how different Internal devtools are compared to editors released in the public.

 

Lets take Doom 3. How many mods have been *Completed* for Doom 3? A game made in the early 2000s.

 

Different engines require different tools. Unreal Engine was made to be user friendly. Id tech 6 was made for one thing only. To run Doom. That streamlines production when you only have to worry about your engine doing specific things that Doom needs.

 

It IS too much to ask and it is completely ignorant to think otherwise.

[DooM_RO]

@jazzmaster9

 

I'm curious to hear how actual dev kits are. I've always thought they are like UE4 or Unity or the Creation Kit. 

[flouter]

2 minutes ago, DooM_RO said:

I'm curious to hear how actual dev kits are. I've always thought they are like UE4 or Unity or the Creation Kit. 

 

I obviously don't know everything, but what I do know is that unlike UE4 or Unity if you decided to look at what a level programmer or a mapper is doing you would probably have no clue what is going on.

[DooM_RO]

Just now, fant0m999 said:

 

I obviously don't know everything, but what I do know is that unlike UE4 or Unity if you decided to look at what a level programmer or a mapper is doing you would probably have no clue what is going on.

 

Why don't the make development like UE4 or Unity in the first place? Seems unnecessarily complicated to me.

[flouter]

4 minutes ago, DooM_RO said:

 

Why don't the make development like UE4 or Unity in the first place? Seems unnecessarily complicated to me.

 

How am I supposed to know. I'm not a professional game dev. They probably obviously have some sort of editor that is making the process faster and everything, but they are obviously aiming for optimization, they confirmed that in the interview. Optimization comes with crazy stuff like Carmack's Megatextures. It's just reaching more and more for shortcuts that make the game more optimized for consoles and PCs while still allowing the game to work and look good.

[ENEMY!!!]

I think the idea of snapping prefabs together has a lot of potential but snapping whole rooms together a la SnapMap results in it being very difficult not to produce maps that are very similar to what everybody else is doing, so I'm hoping for editing tools that are closer to the likes of Skyrim's Creation Kit, allowing us to snap prefabs together to create rooms.  Either that or more advanced tools for creating custom geometry, including resolution of the AI pathfinding problems.

 

As for the gameplay, when I first started watching the video I was unimpressed, thinking it looked like a slightly enhanced version of DOOM 2016, but it grew on me as I watched more of the footage.  The more varied locations and the wide range of places to explore particularly stood out, and it didn't strike me as being strongly arena combat focused (which was one of my main issues with DOOM 2016).  If implemented well, the lives system may also end up being a plus, as one thing that deterred me in DOOM 2016 was getting through a series of battles but not triggering a checkpoint, exploring in search of secrets, mistiming a jump, dying and then having to re-do the battles again.  I also actually liked the "cartoony" emphasis, as I always think of the original Dooms as being relatively "cartoony" and with plenty of bright colours (although I know this was mainly a limitation of the technology at the time).

Edited August 12, 2018 by ENEMY!!!

[whirledtsar]

7 hours ago, explorix said:

Some people have mentioned, that if ID had the Technology of DOOM III when they created the original, the game would have looked
just like DOOM III. I'm on that boat as well. I'd even say, if they had the technology of Quake, the original would have looked much
more sinister and dark, rather than what we have today. Not in it's colors, Quake being different than DOOM, but more realistic and horrifying.

 

What leads you to believe that? Many series undergo stylistic changes over time, it doesnt imply that the more technologically-advanced entries are what the devs intended the originals to be like. Id could have made Doom a more dark/slow/atmospheric game with their technology, but they didn't.

[Linguica]

5 hours ago, mammajamma said:

in fact the community itself is probably to blame for the whole "Doomslayer is a badass" angle. Either from how most WADs are generally played through, or legions of people getting into nasty comment wars in Youtube videos about whether Doomguy could beat Master Chief.

 

I remember wondering about this back in 2015/16: the idea that the character attributes of the Doomslayer were probably derived from the internet's interpretation of Doomguy as an insane demon slaying machine, which was never really present in the original games. Heck in Doom 3, the Doomguy was just a normal marine, and at the end Doomguy is literally rescued by a rescue party. But at some point between 2004 and 2014 the meta-discussion surrounding the Doomguy rebranded him as an instrument of endless slaughter, and I have to believe that was brought about by the Doom community, the wider internet gaming community, and the power of memes and branding. I wish someone had gathered Doomguy memes and so forth that were created before Doom 2016 was announced, to more easily back up this argument, but oh well.

 

Also the characterization of the Doomslayer obviously takes a lot from the Doom comic, which was the first piece of media to depict Doomguy as a demon slaughtering maniac, and I think the Doom comic's interpretation of the character probably fueled a lot of the memeing directly or indirectly.

[Touchdown]

6 minutes ago, Linguica said:

But at some point between 2004 and 2014 the meta-discussion surrounding the Doomguy rebranded him as an instrument of endless slaughter

 

Oh come on, we all know what happened in that time, don't we? A certain mod that had this kind of portrayal, overhyped to unbelievable levels by the community, big YouTubers and gaming media.

[Linguica]

7 minutes ago, Touchdown said:

Oh come on, we all know what happened in that time, don't we? A certain mod that had this kind of portrayal, overhyped to unbelievable levels by the community, big YouTubers and gaming media.

 

Are you suggesting that Brutal Doom "invented" the modern characterization of the Doomguy? If so you will need to present evidence that people weren't doing it before that, or that Brutal Doom directly influenced the evolution of how people conceive of the Doomguy.

[RaikohZX]

1 minute ago, Linguica said:

 

Are you suggesting that Brutal Doom "invented" the modern characterization of the Doomguy? If so you will need to present evidence that people weren't doing it before that, or that Brutal Doom directly influenced the evolution of how people conceive of the Doomguy.

I won't claim it to be so, but Brutal Doom caused a resurgence in people quoting and memeing about the comic since it directly references said comic, and Doom 2016 itself borrowed at least a couple loose ideas in inspiration (enough so to make he who shall not be named lose his marbles and rant about how Id should hire and pay him). I wasn't in the community that deeply or that far back when all this really started, but until BD, I always mainly saw the Doom Marine as a badass and kind of unhinged survivor diving into death, destruction and insanity because no one else would or could. Now everything is about how badass the Doomguy is.

[Touchdown]

That's just my take on it. Of course I haven't been documenting what people have been saying about DOOM/Doomguy over the years. But I certainly don't remember folks throwing terms like 'rip&tear' or 'badassery' all the time. There were talks about the number of enemies and how it should be much faster than DOOM3 but that's about it. BD re-introduced DOOM to a lot of people and many treat it as a replacement. I personally think there must have been some influence at least, considering its popularity.

[Stale Meat]

I wouldn't go as far to say that Brutal Doom invented the current characterization of Doomguy, since even Mark says the entire mods mood is based on and a homage to the infamous Doom comic, but it isn't a stretch to think that Brutal Doom had a helping hand in perpetuating and popularizing this kind of characterization in the minds of people unfamiliar with Doom. How much of an effect Brutal Doom had is certainly debatable, but I think it may have had some level of impact regardless.

[Shanoa]

Glory kills were probably one of the direct influence caused by brutal doom. Although we can't prove how much influence BD had on 2016 there was some influence for sure. Personally I love how Doom Guy is portrayed now, something refreshing about playing a dude who's feared by demons everywhere instead of the typical "everyone fear the demons". This personality also makes him one of the more interesting protagonist without ever needing to say a single words. His demeanor and body language oozes personality.

[bigbossbalrog]

All the people yelling about the Doomguy being a coward and "not badass" are proven wrong by this single image.

Doomguy has always love killing, and has always been an axe crazy beserker. 

Edited August 12, 2018 by bigbossbalrog

[Touchdown]

3 minutes ago, Shanoa said:

Glory kills were probably one of the direct influence caused by brutal doom.

 

Actually that's not necessarily true. If you look up the Noclip series about DOOM4, they have some footage from the version they've been working on initially, back in 2008 and they have been prototyping melee executions way back then already.