The common DOOM misconception

[Szuran]

I often read online how these old shooters are simple or even simplistic, and this is just so wrong.

 

OLD GAMES had simple mechanics, but weren't simple at all.

 

Doom, Duke etc. were easy enough to grasp in a minute, but the levels actually required you to think, mind your surroundings. Every battle was like a mini-puzzle. You had limited resources, limted space, and had to come up with a way to survive. It required a good weapon choice and mastery of the movement.

 

NEW GAMES have extremely complex mechanics, but are actually stupid simple.

 

Sure, you have weapon mods and vehicles and jumping and RPG levelling and whatnot, but in the end the level is usually just an open field. You are slow, so movement isn't really important - just duck behind a wall somewhere and you can stay there for eternity. 90% of guns feel the same, so whatever you choose is fine.

 

I'm talking about the likes of Ubisoft shooters (Far Cry, Ghost Recon), Call of Duties, Battlefields, Battlefronts and whatnot.

 

That's the difference: in Doom, you have to master the game, learn how it works. You're often surprised by what it does, how flexible this perfectly contained framework is.

In new games, there's nothing to discover. If it's hard, just grind more and eventually you'll force your way even if you want to go in a straight line.

 

New games are simplistic. Classic shooters are surprisingly smart.

 

There, I said it.

[Old-Doomguy]

Yeah, agreed.

 

You can't just hide and regen to 100% in these old games. I believe the downfall started with Halo - but Halo had some sense in it because it was a shield that got depleted and repowered.

 

But then CoD took it to a whole new level (no, not Cod1) where you can get hit to the brink of death and then just stay awhile and listen in order to heal up.

 

I don't "hate" on modern shooters though, but I really feel more satisfaction from actually getting in trouble if I screw up. I also enjoy restarting the level either with pistol start or in the same state as when you first entered it. Modern games often lets ju restart on the same place where you died, which isn't really OK in FPS games IMHO, because then it's just trail and error all the time rather than learning and adapting.

[Szuran]

I don't mind regen if it's done smart. I liked how AvP2010 handled it - you lost segments of health and couldn't regenerate above one without a medpack. 

[Old-Doomguy]

19 minutes ago, Szuran said:

I don't mind regen if it's done smart. I liked how AvP2010 handled it - you lost segments of health and couldn't regenerate above one without a medpack. 

 

 

Yeah, some games have that idéa - Riddick for example, and it's fine, but most games a full-out heal after a few moments of hiding, and it sure does make me less carefull as how to approach. I can either hide and heal or die and restart close to where I failed.

[TheNoob_Gamer]

23 minutes ago, Szuran said:

I don't mind regen if it's done smart. 

Spoiler

Far Cry 2 is a good example of this. The health bar is divided into 5 equal parts, and the last 2 parts are automatically regenerated for you, and you have to use portable health syringes to fully heal yourself.

... on topic, I'm glad that NEW indie FPSs exist to remind us about this exact "easy to learn, hard to master" formula of old school FPSs.

[Szuran]

7 minutes ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

... on topic, I'm glad that NEW indie FPSs exist to remind us about this exact "easy to learn, hard to master" formula of old school FPSs.

 

True, however too often they take the roguelike approach, which strips the game of the quality of being fine crafted, varied, and having a good, well designed flow.

[banjiepixel]

Actually I feel that Doom is actually pretty special and much more smarter than even most classic first person shooters. Duke Nukem 3D may have similar level design but by trying to be more realistic, much of the actual gameplay design is less refined. Much of the Doom 1 seems to be designed around the Knee-Deep in the Dead and it makes the gameplay unbalanced and less fun for higher level play but Doom 2 enhanced the basic gameplay design extremely well by adding many new monsters that require unique strategies from the player. Doom 2 is alot like a arcade shooter, easy to learn but actually pretty hard to master and if you reach that skill level, it is so amazingly fun game to play.

 

I feel that Doom 2006 and Doom Eternal are good attempt at doing something similar with more modern gameplay design, they are atleast more arcadey games compared other modern first person shooters. Doom 2006 was very careful while Doom Eternal seems to evolve the same concepts to be much better. But I feel that they are not as easy to learn as the classic Doom was and the chaotic gameplay does work against actually mastering the game.

 

Modern first person shooters are designed to be either more realistic or more cinematic so that does always hurt the gameplay design. This is why Doom has actually more in common with bullet hell shmups and twin stick shooters than actual first person shooters these days. It is the classic arcadey, simple but deep gameplay that makes old Doom so special. It makes classic Doom very unique even when compared to other older first person shooters.

[fufu]

I agree, i played battlefield 4 story mode some time ago and i was just bored all the way through, but i could easily play doom for hours and never get bored.

[Szuran]

May I also add that it's not because of nostalgia (this argument can't be avoided), because I get into old shooters relatively recently.

[TheNoob_Gamer]

1 minute ago, Szuran said:

 

True, however too often they take the roguelike approach, which strips the game of the quality of being fine crafted, varied, and having a good, well designed flow.

Yet most of the popular ones have levels that are (fully?) crafted by human.

Spoiler

And really, procedural generation can be good if done right. See Caves of Qud, Ultima Ratio Regum. The latter has everything procedurally generated. And they are both traditional roguelikes, but yeah. 

 

[ketmar]

i think that stupid "realism" basically kills all the fun in modern FPSes. because if it is "realistic", then the player is moving slowly, and get more damage from shots. now, you have to compensate for this, and here comes autoregen. combine it all together, and you'll get modern "shoot and cover" formula.

 

somehow, most modern devs seems to forget that we're playing the games for fun, not for "realistic gameplay". and if "realism" kills the fun, then throw that "realism" out of the window!

 

Doom is very far from being "realistic". abstract map layouts, slow projectiles ('cmon, do you expect to dodge the rocket at a short range IRL? ;-), incredibly high player movement speed, etc. it's all done to be fun at the first place. and look! we're still playing Doom after 25+ years, and have new people coming.

[Swordofdanu]

Not a fan of regen health,  I always thought there was more skill involved with either hunting down a pack at 10% health or lower or leaving them for later on,  Half Life also deserves a look in😅

[seed]

I agree with most points that have been raised here, however I still feel like it gets lost later.

 

Retro games are in fact a lot more complex and smart under the hood despite their apparent simplicity, by adopting the "easy to play, hard to master" philosophy, however, I believe people don't give modern games enough credit for what they do. Games have evolved and changed a lot over the years, and have gotten more complex, there are a lot of great modern games out there that show this. There are a few franchises that got progressively worse, but those should not be used for referencing modern shooters because they themselves aren't representative of them. CoD is the most popular example here, and that's a series that went downhill over a decade ago, it is only popular but not representative anymore, it's only an empty shell of its former glory.

 

Some modern mechanics aren't that awful either - even though I usually prefer the classic take instead - notably regenerating health, which is not inherently bad but it's often poorly executed. AvP2010 and Darkness 2 are 2 games where I think it was done right, where hiding into corners, waiting for it to refill is actually punished in many cases - and it doesn't fully regenerate either, it's separated in 3 and 4 segments respectively, and if you lose one or more, it doesn't come back all by itself.

 

Anyway, that's a bit circle-jerky. So tl;dr modern games aren't nearly as bad as one might think, it just depends on where you look - usually not triple-A games as their quality is no longer as consistent or high as it once was, and is now more representative of their budget than anything.

[TheNoob_Gamer]

10 minutes ago, ketmar said:

Realism stuff

Hey, Operation Flashpoint/ Arma games are pretty fun :P

 

Spoiler

pls no kill me for dis

 

Just now, Swordofdanu said:

  I always thought there was more skill involved with either hunting down a pack at 10% health or lower or leaving them for later on

I like Heretic/Hexen/Strife's approach by having portable health packs. I'm pretty annoyed by accidentally or being forced to stepping on a goddamn medkit at 95% health.

 

 

[Nine Inch Heels]

5 hours ago, Szuran said:

I often read online how these old shooters are simple or even simplistic, and this is just so wrong.

 

OLD GAMES had simple mechanics, but weren't simple at all.

I think a pretty common general misconception is to correlate "complexity" and "difficulty". These two "concepts" can exist independent of one another, and quite often they do. I've already said this somewhere else, but some of the more difficult games that were made recently (celeste, jumpking, cuphead, et al, are extremely "simple" in that the abilities the player has are very limited. On the other side of the spectrum is Path of Exile, with a very complex "skill-tree", and a complex skill system to boot, however once you understood the fundamentals and can do basic math, the game becomes extremely easy to "beat".

 

This doesn't mean that the more "complex" a game is the easier it gets, but it's not easy to find examples of complex games which are also difficult, and my best guess is that, as soon as money is involved, developers might want to be aware that having high demands wrt learning and high demands on the side of execution may alienate lots of folks. That being said, I think a good blend of "complexity" and difficulty can be found in the "dark souls corner" of gaming.

[Aurelius]

Though the fact that realistic FPSes have overtaken the market is not really the fault of the developers, but because it is what the general gaming public wants. At some point when people started making more realistic shooters, they seemed to become the more popular category, and ultimately the market shifted in that direction and hardly looked back. Why else would it make sense to make these mass produced games like CoD over and over again? Hell, people even by the NHL and Fifa games over and over. It just happens to sell. Sure, Doom Eternal is gaining hype and 2016 was well received, but it's still nothing compared to the sales of the more "realistic" FPS juggernauts. It'd be great to see a renaissance of old school shooters in AAA form, but there needs to be a flagship title to make that happen. I'm skeptical, though.

Sometime earlier I posted about why I think Doom is still relevant for budding FPS game designers, and it's because of all the things you can do with the base mechanics are extendable to modern games. Nothing much has changed in terms of FPS games if you look at the top sellers. Sure there are games with fancy new mechanics, but often those mechanics just aren't employed to their full potential. Sometimes you find a new item/mechanic that only serves the purpose of removing one type of obstacle you previously couldn't overcome - with no added benefit beyond that, making it just glorified "key-to-a-door".

I don't think Doom is any "smarter" than newer games, it's just that it gives you a simple and polished set of tools with which you can effectively overcome challenges in many different ways without any of it feeling like any of it is designed for some particular "action". Even simple mechanics can be used to create complex scenarios, and this is where creativity blooms. And like OP said, complex mechanics that are not fleshed out appropriately lead to simple gameplay. Doom however has the advantage of having thousands of levels developed and tons know-how being passed on for the past 26 years, out of which many highlights have been catalogued and are easily available for future players and mappers to learn from. This kind of commitment for quality custom content is hard to find in any other video game, much less with any of the AAA-titles nowadays which are by design made to be experienced only a handful of times, so that you can move on to the next product.

[Linguica]

One of the reasons Doom mapping has stuck around so long is that the game places the burden of fun squarely on the level designer. In lots of sandbox games, "looter shooters" etc, the world is mostly meant to provide the setting and to gate the player in a video gamey way, but the actual level design is generally a lot more utilitarian and the majority of the creative effort is on the interlocking systems of enemies and guns and NPCs and skill trees and whatever. In Doom however you have a basic stripped down "minimum viable FPS" with a bestiary and weapons / items that provide for a solid, well designed foundation, but the creative effort is in crafting the level and the encounters. Doom can support wow.wad and it can support Lost Civilization, and the only real difference is the skill and dedication of the mapper.

[banjiepixel]

18 minutes ago, seed said:

Anyway, that's a bit circle-jerky. So tl;dr modern games aren't nearly as bad as one might think, it just depends on where you look - usually not triple-A games as their quality is no longer as consistent or high as it once was, and is now more representative of their budget than anything.

 

If we don't limit the discussion to only first person shooters, there are tons of modern games with amazing design. It is just that it seems to me that japanese games often do it better. There's always indie games made in the west too as they aren't afraid to take risks more than bigger games do.

[ketmar]

13 minutes ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

I like Heretic/Hexen/Strife's approach by having portable health packs. I'm pretty annoyed by accidentally or being forced to stepping on a goddamn medkit at 95% health.

in k8vavoom, i implemented optional "health accumulator": pick stimpack or medikit, and everything above 100% goes to "accumulator". if your health is lower than 100%, accum slowly injecting you with 1% (roughly once per second), because why not. and if your health dropped below some threshold, accum gives you a "health boost" up to ~80%, and then it cooldowns for quite a long time. it is not instant, tho, so you still can be killed when you caught a rocket, for example, or staying onto lava.

[ketmar]

12 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

Though the fact that realistic FPSes have overtaken the market is not really the fault of the developers, but because it is what the general gaming public wants.

if you have nothing else to choose from, then "public choice" is not representative. "aaa shoter with cover, regen and 'modern' graphics", "retro-style FPS with 'retro-style graphics'", or nothing at all. i wouldn't say that this is a good spectrum to decide what public really wants. D2016 tried to get an empty niche of "retro-style FPS with modern-style gfx", and suddenly, public wants such games too!

[Aurelius]

33 minutes ago, ketmar said:

if you have nothing else to choose from, then "public choice" is not representative. "aaa shoter with cover, regen and 'modern' graphics", "retro-style FPS with 'retro-style graphics'", or nothing at all. i wouldn't say that this is a good spectrum to decide what public really wants. D2016 tried to get an empty niche of "retro-style FPS with modern-style gfx", and suddenly, public wants such games too!

Well I think it's sensible to use the available products and their sales as a metric for determining what the public wants instead of trying to guess what they "really" want - which we can't really gauge very accurately. Now Doom 2016 sales were pretty good and brought positive attention to the less realistic and faster paced shooter genre, but they were still significantly lower than something like Battlefield V or CoD: MW sales (based on google search results). Here's to hoping Doom Eternal does well in that regard and we could see more AAA-developers looking outside the Battlefield/CoD bubble.

[reflex17]

8 hours ago, Szuran said:

 

Doom, Duke etc. were easy enough to grasp in a minute, but the levels actually required you to think, mind your surroundings. Every battle was like a mini-puzzle. You had limited resources, limted space, and had to come up with a way to survive. It required a good weapon choice and mastery of the movement.

 

 

Instead of Doom and Duke3d, you can put Doom 2016 in and it still makes sense, so it's not the most convincing argument.

 

Your first sentence says you read things online, there's your problem right there.

Edited February 20, 2020 by reflex17

[Swordofdanu]

1 hour ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

Hey, Operation Flashpoint/ Arma games are pretty fun :P

 

  Reveal hidden contents

pls no kill me for dis

 

I like Heretic/Hexen/Strife's approach by having portable health packs. I'm pretty annoyed by accidentally or being forced to stepping on a goddamn medkit at 95% health.

 

I always forget I have them in Duke😂

 

[ketmar]

1 hour ago, Aurelius said:

I think it's sensible to use the available products and their sales as a metric for determining what the public wants

nope, it isn't. it never worked this way. what you can sell to people is not always what people really want. PR and brand market lifetime creates a huge distortions here. as i said, it is hard to tell if people want something when they simply cannot buy it. D2016 shows that "modern shooters" are not  the kings of the hill, people just didn't had a choice. now, D2016 simply *crushed* (considering their branding and PR) all those long-time franchises, which couldn't be possible if most people really prefer "modern FPSes". of course, it is way more complex, but the core of my PoV still stands: people were buying "modern shooters" because they had a fake choice of "modern shooter or nothing". it doesn't show that people wanted mostly "modern shooters".

 

that doesn't mean that "modern shooters" will fade away, of course. there are alot of people who like them, only now others have a choice too. Eternal is doomed ;-) to be successful, because it simply has no competitors.

[Aurelius]

1 hour ago, ketmar said:

it never worked this way

Every company makes decisions with regards to their products based on how they sell, and have done so for as long as companies have existed. You can make predictions about what the public wants all you want, but you need actual statistical data to back it up or otherwise it's just "a feeling". Many companies have ceased to exist because they made the thing they "thought" the public wants, but were wrong.

Sure, innovations can bring products to light that the public did not even know they wanted, but there is no accurate way to predict this. Hindsight is always 20/20, and a lot of people who see these kind of "miracle products" emerge think they could've figured it out themselves as well, but someone "beat them to it" (there is an amazing book called Thinking Fast and Slow by the Nobel prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman that talks about the overconfidence people have about predicting the future because they understand the past). Companies that want to stay afloat play it safe, quantitatively analyze sales figures from them and their competitors and make decisions based on that information. 

 

1 hour ago, ketmar said:

what you can sell to people is not always what people really want. PR and brand market lifetime creates a huge distortions here. as i said, it is hard to tell if people want something when they simply cannot buy it.

And that is why it's rather pointless to talk about what people really want, because there is no way to measure that.

 

1 hour ago, ketmar said:

now, D2016 simply *crushed* (considering their branding and PR) all those long-time franchises, which couldn't be possible if most people really prefer "modern FPSes"

It did sell (again, according to google searches) 3.6 million copies from August 2016 to the end of the year, which is not bad I suppose, but then again two years later Battlefield V sold 7.6 million copies from November 2018 to the end of that year, and it was considered a commercial disappointment (mostly due to the prominence of the battle royale genre). Not to mention that CoD: MW released in 2019 has made over 1 billion dollars of revenue. So I don't really know how Doom 2016 "crushed" anything, since it's existence didn't seem to make a single bit of difference to EA or Activision who are more concerned with Fortnite stealing their spotlight.

 

1 hour ago, ketmar said:

Eternal is doomed ;-) to be successful, because it simply has no competitors.

I'm hoping to see it be successful, but expecting a paradigm shift in the type of shooters the bulk of gamers want to play is optimistic to say the least.

 

 

Edited February 20, 2020 by Aurelius

[ketmar]

15 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

So I don't really know how Doom 2016 "crushed" anything

i didn't meant "eradicated", i meant "it had sky-high sales, if you consider that it is the newcomer, first in the line, and others were there for decades".

 

17 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

expecting a paradigm shift in the type of shooters the bulk of gamers want

there is no "paradigm shift", D2016 just took the market nobody else dare to step into. people who want FPS with "retro-style gameplay", but with "modern graphics" simply had no such thing to buy. and now they have. D2016 sales figures shows that this market is huge, and it will only grow bigger, because D2016 got almost everybody who wanted such type of a game for a long time, and Eternal will start to get some "converted players". "modern military shooters" won't go away, but they will definitely have some harder times now, because people finally have a choice. those who were into "military shooters" just because there was nothing else now can get something else.

 

this is good for "military shooters" too, becase let's be honest -- they're basically the same game again and again now. i hope that "military shooter" devs will finally bring something new to the table.

[Fonze]

I think this is kinda one of those things that comes down to just being a poor comparison. Some old games were simple, and some new games are simple, just as some old games are difficult and some new games are as well. Being retro isnt even an indicator of either, though I would assume that retro games would trend to using more simple systems and the interactions between them to reach their levels of complexity.

 

Complexity adds to the strategies of the game and is what is going to give a game its depth. Most games that expect to hold a players time have some level of complexity, be it in the form of the interactions between systems or as merely wrinkles in the flow. Even the basic run and jump games add layers of complexity by adding a crouch mechanic, different types of obstacles, and upping the speed as you play for longer. 

 

NiH brought up a great example with cuphead: simple systems, boss attacks, enemy patterns, level designs, player controls and abilities, etc. all come together to make for complex encounters through the way they are balanced around one-another.

 

Modern games have the capability to be more complex than older games, but I think at some point human attention span comes into play. The good thing about the complex interactions of simple systems vs compounding complexity onto already complex systems is that it is easier for people to wrap their head around what is going on, what to do, and what affect their decisions have on the game when the basics are easier to learn. Much in the same vein as what has kept chess relevant over the years, even to today when we have actual video games; simple systems leading to complex interactions, which can be used to create constantly new situations for players to adapt to and adding to replay value.

 

Further study on this can be found in these very interesting videos:

 

 

 

Granted this second video focuses on the story-telling elements of these complex interactions between systems vs scripted storytelling, but I think that the parallels to gameplay and how this type of stuff affects gameplay are clear.

 

Further, applying this to doom, there are many simple things at work, but it's how they all interact that is what gives a map its character and that's the reason why people are still making unique content 25+ years later.

[Linguica]

I think one reason Dark Souls ended up being the biggest critical darling of the 2010s is because it took the 2000s trend towards greater systematic complexity (e.g. 2008's Far Cry 2, which set a high water mark in that series for its world-sim aspects) and married it with excellent and memorable level design which had become an underappreciated part of game design by then (post Modern Warfare, games started leaning into greater bombast and hand-holding, when they weren't open world sandboxes). The game further strengthens this by making much of the game's lore very cryptic, which dovetails perfectly with the world of Lordran itself, which is all about exploring new areas and discovering connections between them. Heck the lore behind Sen's Fortress is basically that Anor Londo decided to make Doom 2 MAP08 IRL:

 

Quote

Sen's Fortress was constructed, to serve as a test for those who wish to enter the City of the Gods, Anor Londo. Filled not only with swinging blades, pressure plates, traps and deadly boulders, Serpent Men and Prowling Demons lurk behind every corner.

 

[Szuran]

55 minutes ago, Fonze said:

I think this is kinda one of those things that comes down to just being a poor comparison. Some old games were simple, and some new games are simple, just as some old games are difficult and some new games are as well.

 

I'm talking specifically about old shooter and new shooters. "Doom is so basic" etc., while "look at all these system in Far Cry, level ups, crafting". Well, I don't think they make a game better. I think they muddle it. We have very few new games that focus on a basic set of mechanics and base levels around them. Maybe throwback platformers, but I'm talking about shooters.

 

Show me one major new game that is simple to control, has you just pick up weapons and shoot (and jump and duck, why not), and at the same time does anything interesting with its levels.

 

The closest to this would be Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, it has simple and super fun shooting, but the changing environment is used just as a visual gimmick. This game is basically a straight line, and it could've been so much more. Level design DOESN'T EXIST anymore in shooters, often even in those that try to emulate old school games.

[GarrettChan]

12 minutes ago, Szuran said:

level ups, crafting

I personally don't enjoy these too much when it comes to FPS games. Borderlands could be an exception since it's more like an ARPG, rather than an FPS. Anyway, I do agree that these muddle the gameplay (if I comprehend your point correctly). Doom could be a simple game, but there are a lot of depths in it, rather then new players viewing as a plain game without too much into it.