Classic Doom Gameplay

[Patrick]

It seems to me that the Doom community likes to focus on cool new level design on other features that otherwise only enhance the environments and the look of Doom, but in the end, Doom is still Doom. Every once in a while we see a mod that changes gameplay (ghouls vs. humans, shotgun frenzy, action doom 2, etc) but not as frequently as map packs. I'd like to make a gameplay mod that focuses on high-octane gun fighting, so here are some of the ideas I've had. If anyone thinks any of these are a bad idea, or can suggest improvements or other ideas, I'm open to suggestion. Remember, the idea is action-packed gun battles.

• Lower Player Health: Force the player to be cautious in gun fights and take cover. 2 or 3 shots should be able to kill the player.
  
  
• Taking Cover: This should be essential to an action mod and the previous suggestion, place lots of crates, barrels, waist high walls so that the player can take cover when needed.
  
  
• Powerful Weapons:No gun should ever be useless by the end of the game, every weapon should be unique and have its own benefits and drawbacks. For example, a pistol will have its benefits over a shotgun and a shotgun will have its benefits over a pistol. Neither should be more powerful than another.
  
  
• Hitscanners Only: Enemies should only fire hitscan weapons (pistols, shotguns, machineguns, etc.) and possibly have the ability to toss grenades. This means that the player cannot dodge slow moving attacks and must think quickly on his/her feet.
  
  
• Vertical Enemy Placement: Corridors and narrow areas will turn an otherwise boring gunfight into a slaughter. Placing enemies on varying levels above the player forces the player to evaluate which targets take priority. I think I may set it up such that guys with pistols will be on the same level as the player, guys with automatic weapons should be placed above the players head, and snipers will be much farther above the player's head and somewhat hidden.
  
  
• Reward the player for good shooting: HotD:O had a cool system where if you hit x number of targets without being hit or missing a shot, the accuracy and damage of your guns would increase. Implementing a similar ( if not the same ) system in doom would encourage accurate shooting instead of spamming everything with a chaingun.
  
  
• Destructible Scenery: The player could potentially just hide behind one particular object for a whole gun battle, so making objects breakable would force the player to move around. Walls, corners, boxes, etc. should only be able to handle a certain amount of damage before it is unusable as cover. For example, a barrel may provide sufficient cover until it breaks after taking x number of shots.
  
  
• More Destructible Scenery: Place props around maps that can only take 1 damage before they explode into clouds of dust and debris. Dust and smoke should be thick enough that it can impair a players vision, making it difficult to hit targets from that area.
  

This is what I'd like to do in a Doom mod. I'm going to put it to the test and I'll hopefull have some kind of demo map up in the near future, but until then, do any of these sound like bad ideas? anything that could be improved? other suggestions?

[myk]

Patrick said:
Lower Player Health: Force the player to be cautious in gun fights and take cover. 2 or 3 shots should be able to kill the player.

I can't say this computes with "action-packed battles". Add a good number of opponents and you can count the player dead soon enough unless he's very conservative.

Powerful Weapons:No gun should ever be useless by the end of the game, every weapon should be unique and have its own benefits and drawbacks. For example, a pistol will have its benefits over a shotgun and a shotgun will have its benefits over a pistol. Neither should be more powerful than another.

This is done in various weapon mods although weapon power can be sided with availability. The pistol is weak, but you always have it, for example. A weapon power ranking is a way of making monsters escalate in difficulty without forcing the player to get much better himself and while still giving the opportunity to face the more powerful enemies with lesser weapons. This is also what contributes to epic battles, since the lesser monsters that required a pistol or shotgun to kill can show up en masse once bigger weapons are provided.

Hitscanners Only: Enemies should only fire hitscan weapons (pistols, shotguns, machineguns, etc.) and possibly have the ability to toss grenades. This means that the player cannot dodge slow moving attacks and must think quickly on his/her feet.

Sounds irritating, especially combined with your first idea. If all attacks are hitscans, you'll be very dependent on cover and player movement will be restricted further.

Reward the player for good shooting: HotD:O had a cool system where if you hit x number of targets without being hit or missing a shot, the accuracy and damage of your guns would increase. Implementing a similar ( if not the same ) system in doom would encourage accurate shooting instead of spamming everything with a chaingun.

Perhaps, but again, this doesn't create an "action packed" environment. To get an action packed game the player needs to be somewhat superhuman and these suggestions are going against that. You'll just spend more time aiming accurately at separate targets than blasting many opponents quickly.

So, all in all, you seem to be going for a more tactical and fire-arm based mod, more realistic than DOOM and less action-packed where the changes inhibit the player, making him more careful and more attentive to the details in each fight.

[40oz]

This kinda sounds like Call of Duty 4.

[DuckReconMajor]

Patrick said:

Lower Player Health: Force the player to be cautious in gun fights and take cover. 2 or 3 shots should be able to kill the player.

I know this must've been done a hundred times before, but I've been having fun romping around in Doom with 1 health.

[Patrick]

@ myk, looking at this, this doesn't really say action as much as it says tactics. honestly, making difficult action in doom would be hard as Doom AI is not too smart. I mean, if the enemies even had the ability to dodge attacks, it could make an action mod much more interesting. I'm trying to make the enemies smarter without making them smarter (you get what I mean)

I don't want to make a mod that's too easy, so you can go rampaging through levels in less than 2 minutes, but I don't want to make it difficult to the point where its no longer fun. In my eyes, a good balance would be to have the players and enemies more or less on the same level. That isn't too possible in Doom given how dumb the monsters are.

[ArmouredBlood]

If I wanted to play doom like that, I'd mod doom3.

Really only 2 points make this awful; taking cover, and hitscanner only. Doom for me is the ability to move fast and dodge like crazy, otherwise it turns into more recent FPSs, which need gimmicks to hold my interest (story, big explosions, hot women ;).

Lower player health is a bit of a relative issue, as just doubling the damage of monsters and removing all armor can make doom extremely deadly.

On the issue of dumb monsters vs. smart players, that's a great recipe for success as far as I'm concerned. If I wanted to fight smart monsters I'd play an FPS online. Now if you want difficult but somewhat predictable enemies, I'd suggest trying to up the speed of some and add some random actions which jump the monster a bit to the side. The evil marines from scythe 2 fit the bill really well.

[Super Jamie]

The concept of taking cover in a Doom map could be interesting, though would end up restricted mostly to maps made specifically for it.

I'm not sure I agree with the fact that all weapons should be equally as powerful. The idea of being able to defeat a top-tier monster or boss with the pistol (or fist?) is kinda ridiculous.

Hitscanners only would be annoying as all hell. Do not want, would not play.

[DuckReconMajor]

All this talk makes me want to play Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter again. It was almost everything the OP describes, but I got annoyed because it was impossible to see these people 1000 yards away on my fuzzy 480p. Now, however, with my 1080i, I wonder why I never tried playing it again.

Anyway, from playing GRAW, I wonder why you would list the things you did, and say you want "high-octane gun fighting" and "action-packed gun battles". You pretty much just crawl around until enemies are in view.

[Abyssalstudios1]

I must agree that only hitscanning enemies would be a bitch to fight. I can barely tolerate chaingunners due to their relatively low health. If, say, and Arachnotron was a hitscanner, I'd download the first mod that changed that.

A non-useless pistol is a fascinating concept. If you could pull that off, I'd really love to see the result. Perhaps having DV-1i style duel pistols with almost perfect accuracy would be a good start.

[40oz]

I don't think doom is the correct game to go for for an all hitscanning gun battle game, particularly because bullets are very easily obstructed by things you clearly weren't aiming for. Especially with what you suggest about hiding behind crates and stuff.

Here's an image example of what I mean

[DuckReconMajor]

Yeah, Doom crosshairs can be crap at times.

Not to mention when stuff like this happens.

[Patrick]

These crosshair problems can be avoided by adjusting player height and crouch height as well as making sure any cover in game will accommodate for those values.

I think weapon availability should be a factor too. I don't want to have to make the player wait until the end of the game to get all the cool guns, I think that any given weapon should be available early on.

Granted, there does need to be some incentive for the player to continue, without increasingly larger guns, there needs to be some other powerup that might give the player more of an advantage.

[Super Jamie]

Patrick said:

there needs to be some other powerup that might give the player more of an advantage.

[Kaiser]

Patrick said:

Taking Cover: This should be essential to an action mod and the previous suggestion, place lots of crates, barrels, waist high walls so that the player can take cover when needed.

CIF3 had this feature implemented but zdoom shits itself everytime my ACS-driven AI would take cover. The least they can do now is simply dodge your attacks in certain conditions

Patrick said:

Destructible Scenery: The player could potentially just hide behind one particular object for a whole gun battle, so making objects breakable would force the player to move around. Walls, corners, boxes, etc. should only be able to handle a certain amount of damage before it is unusable as cover. For example, a barrel may provide sufficient cover until it breaks after taking x number of shots.

Again, had this implemented in CIF3 at one time but zdoom basically told me to fuck off.

[Maes]

Hasn't this sort of "realistic" stuff already been done to death (pun intended) in CS?

[Jodwin]

Patrick said:

Lower Player Health:[/b] Force the player to be cautious in gun fights and take cover. 2 or 3 shots should be able to kill the player.

Taking Cover: This should be essential to an action mod and the previous suggestion, place lots of crates, barrels, waist high walls so that the player can take cover when needed.

Hitscanners Only: Enemies should only fire hitscan weapons (pistols, shotguns, machineguns, etc.) and possibly have the ability to toss grenades. This means that the player cannot dodge slow moving attacks and must think quickly on his/her feet.

These are all contradictory to action-packed gameplay. Taking cover when you're low on health slows things down, and not being able to dodge attacks slows things down further because the only way to not get hit is taking cover all the time. One of the reason Doom is the most action-packed fps is that it doesn't have these features, allowing faster paced gameplay.

Patrick said:

Powerful Weapons:[/b]No gun should ever be useless by the end of the game, every weapon should be unique and have its own benefits and drawbacks. For example, a pistol will have its benefits over a shotgun and a shotgun will have its benefits over a pistol. Neither should be more powerful than another.

This is either wrong or correct depending on what kind of gameplay you want thematically. What myk said is correct and good for Doom's current gameplay, but if you wanted to make a mod that doesn't get as epic then you would want to balance the weapons more.

Patrick said:

Vertical Enemy Placement:[/b] Corridors and narrow areas will turn an otherwise boring gunfight into a slaughter. Placing enemies on varying levels above the player forces the player to evaluate which targets take priority. I think I may set it up such that guys with pistols will be on the same level as the player, guys with automatic weapons should be placed above the players head, and snipers will be much farther above the player's head and somewhat hidden.

Vertical level design is just a matter of good design everywhere, but your reasoning is wrong. You should use verticality no matter what as that makes maps more interesting, but it (or its lack of) has nothing to do with maps turning into slaughter. If you had actually played good slaughter maps, you'd see that they use much more vertical monster placement than most other maps do. Also sticking to some monster placement formula like the one you mentioned is bad, because that makes gameplay more predictable ("Hey, the snipers are always up there!").

[Patrick]

To test this, I made a map full of crates with lots of overpowered zombieman and chaingunners mounted above the player's head. This was definitely very slow paced and not as action packed as I had somewhat anticipated.

I tend to agree that these ideas dont necessarily reflect action, but it could make for an intersting gameplay style nonetheless.

After having tested this, it definitely slows the gameplay more than it makes it fast paced. I think that modifying some of the things I stated above as well as adding new stuff would help

• Patterned Attacks: Make enemies have attack patterns that means that they're not always spewing out a constant stream of bullets. Lesser enemies should fire one shot at a time and reload between shots, enemies with automatic weapons should fire in bursts and reload frequently, snipers should take one shot and quickly move to another location (using monster paths maybe?)
  
• Soften Up Enemies a little: Since the player has the problem of being easily killed, why exclude the monsters from the fun? Enemies should be easy to drop in 1 or 2 well aimed shots.
  

[DaniJ]

Sounds to me like all you need to do is download CS, change the models to look like monsters and job done :P

[Jodwin]

Patrick said:

stuff

The number one reason why gameplay is slow, is that it's easy to die when running straight into the fray. If you can not survive out in the open, everything else will be irrelevant and the gameplay will still be slow no matter what. That is why Doom has fast paced gameplay, because you can survive without sitting in a corner hiding (incidentally, Doomguy is actually pretty weak to most attacks, but Doom still stays fastpaced because it's easy to dodge most attacks).

So, either make the player really strong, or make it easy to dodge attacks while you're still out in the open.

[Patrick]

Jodwin said:

So, either make the player really strong, or make it easy to dodge attacks while you're still out in the open.

I think boosting the player health is a good idea, as my demo map was quite slow to play through. The cover worked quite well, but moving from object to object trying to avoid being hit was pretty hard. I think making health more available and boosting the player's health is the best choice here.

[The Ultimate DooMer]

Doom has it's own built-in gameplay changer as well.

40oz said:

all hitscanning gun battle game

This worked quite well.

[Coopersville]

Take away the (imo) dumb hitscan-only enemies idea, and you've basically got Action Doom.

[doomygecko]

remove the low health and maybe remove the hitscans only and it sounds ok.

Ad bullet time and I'm hooked. (No fucking clue how to do it tho)

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

Patrick said:

Hitscanners Only: Enemies should only fire hitscan weapons (pistols, shotguns, machineguns, etc.) and possibly have the ability to toss grenades. This means that the player cannot dodge slow moving attacks and must think quickly on his/her feet.

Sounds like Wolf3D, minus the grenades.

[Woolie Wool]

Patrick said:

It seems to me that the Doom community likes to focus on cool new level design on other features that otherwise only enhance the environments and the look of Doom, but in the end, Doom is still Doom. Every once in a while we see a mod that changes gameplay (ghouls vs. humans, shotgun frenzy, action doom 2, etc) but not as frequently as map packs. I'd like to make a gameplay mod that focuses on high-octane gun fighting, so here are some of the ideas I've had. If anyone thinks any of these are a bad idea, or can suggest improvements or other ideas, I'm open to suggestion. Remember, the idea is action-packed gun battles.[list]

Lower Player Health: Force the player to be cautious in gun fights and take cover. 2 or 3 shots should be able to kill the player.

Taking Cover: This should be essential to an action mod and the previous suggestion, place lots of crates, barrels, waist high walls so that the player can take cover when needed.

Powerful Weapons:No gun should ever be useless by the end of the game, every weapon should be unique and have its own benefits and drawbacks. For example, a pistol will have its benefits over a shotgun and a shotgun will have its benefits over a pistol. Neither should be more powerful than another.

Hitscanners Only: Enemies should only fire hitscan weapons (pistols, shotguns, machineguns, etc.) and possibly have the ability to toss grenades. This means that the player cannot dodge slow moving attacks and must think quickly on his/her feet.

Take out the "Lower Player Health" bit and this is pretty much what my Mutiny mod does. A lot of the speed of gameplay is preserved because if you have good enough reflexes you can trap the (mostly low in health) enemies in their pain states with the PDW or assault rifle and just tear through them, and most of the really strong enemies use projectile attacks.

[magicsofa]

You should also make doomguy's speed slower, make your accuracy go up when running/walking, add recoil, make vehicles, comrades with sweet AI, cutscenes, footstep sounds, hostages, bandages, how about leaning side to side? oh yeah and different types of armor OH YEAH and you absolutely NEED pixel-hit detection! headshot! and then, at the end of the game when you beat it you get a secret mission called NAZI ZOMBIES! And also you should have a terrorist-bombing map called De_Dust! Also you should have bullets that move in real time! Silencers/scopes! Flashbangs! Airstrikes! Sugar, spice, and everything nice!


What game is this for?

[Patrick]

Heh, i think the general consensus is that I'm trying to make Doom more like counter-strike. This was not the intention, but it seems to be more the case. My test map showed me that this is more an exercise in frustration than anything else. Low health + lots of hitscanners isn't a good idea without some other balancing factor. Here are some other gameplay modifiers I might want to apply, and a few revised ideas from above. This style of gameplay aims to focus on exploration as well as action.

• Lower Player Health: The player should initially start with fairly low health, but this ought to change in-game. The player should be able to pick up health modifiers that increase overall health (think energy tanks from megaman x) Health modifiers ought to be difficult to find
  
  
• Healing System: One thing that pisses me off in modern games is regenerating health. Make health packs scarce, but make them pickup items so one could carry health packs for use later.
  
  
• Patterned Attacks: Enemies should use a combination of hitscan, melee and projectile attacks in patterns (for example, firing in bursts, throwing grenades when player is close, pausing to reload, etc.)
  
  
• Cover System: Same as above, maps would have to be tailored to accommodate taking cover. Cover ought to break easily and force the player to move around.
  
  
• New kinds of secrets: Making secrets that can only be revealed through use of a certain powerup. For example make certain secret doors only visible through night vision goggles.
  
  
• Upgrade System: This seems to be a fairly common trend in modern games that I do like. Most weapons, inventory items, etc. can be upgraded. Adding this to the exploration aspect, make hidden areas that contain upgrades for certain weapons. Give the player incentive to explore for secrets.
  
  
• Limited Weapon System: This is directly inspired by Halo. Give the player 1 fixed weapon slot and 2 'open' slots. The player will always have one moderately powerful gun at all times that cannot be dropped (like Doomguy's pistol) and have 2 slots open for weapons.
  
  
• Maps made to explore: Make a large portion of the map purely for exploration purposes. While action-packed gun battles are 1 aspect, the player should also have lots of room to find secrets. I would suggest that 50% of any map should consist of secret areas.
  

This style of gameplay incorporates the crazy action I love in modern games (I guess I'll go ahead and say I've been developing a profound appreciation for the far cry games as well as the Halo series. so what?) I also love the expansive open environments from oldschool games like metroid and zelda.

[Super Jamie]

Now it's starting to sound like Strife.

[Jodwin]

Patrick said:

Patterned Attacks

For tougher enemies you could have multiple optional patterns, which might even be very similar but still with some possibly fatal differences. For example, the mancubus attack is definitely patterned, and more experienced doomers are easily able to dodge it even at close range (left, right, left). However, instead if mancs had two patterns where the first and second shots alternated randomly, fighting them at close range would become really hard since you'd have to be able to determine the current pattern and dodge accordingly very quickly (left, right, left OR right, left, right).

Of course doing that manc thing in Doom might be a bad idea, but the point is that you could (should?) give alternate patterns for tougher enemies, and they don't really have to differ a lot to be significantly different.

[gggmork]

Jodwin said:

(left, right, left OR right, left, right).

I was analyzing super punchout gameplay once and this type of thing was quite interesting to me. What punchout does is give the player a quick pre-attack hint of how the enemy will attack. So a skilled player has to quickly decode what the hint stands for (like in the random manc case, maybe its left eye could glow just before it shoots left, and vice versa, giving the player just enough time to respond to it on their toes, but they have a pre-warning instead of immediately random).
Also punchout often tricks the player with these hints which can be interesting. Like a pre hint stance in a certain pose means they're going to throw a left hook, but the same stance with some slight subtle change means it'll be a fake punch and require an opposite response from you or something.
Similarly with the manc, a glowing eye might be too predictable so every once in awhile maybe both eyes glowing instead of one (or some subtle change like that) could warn of a new attack where both dodging left or right are both the wrong response.