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Author Topic: New DooM (relatively incoherent rant within)  (Read 29523 times)
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Angst
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« Reply #20 on: 2016-05-14, 01:57 »

Can't say much for performance, it's decently optimized, though I still get a fair amount of texture pop with my machine (i7 4790, 16gb ram, Geforce GTX 970). Combined with the already impressive motion blur, I actually started getting motion sickness... So some tweaking is in order.

On to the gameplay..

Atmospherically, I'd say it's where Doom3 should have been. It's not classic doom, but they finally added some color to the palette.. I'm not far enough in the story to comment, so it feels a little disjointed as to how/why you're there. Right off the bat the "glory kills" get gimmicky. At this point I'm using it as little more than a way to make short teleport/invulns around while I smash imps (who are actually relatively dangerous, if only because they're short) The weapons are dissapointing thus far. There are no fists by default, the pop gun is meh, the shotgun is loud but meh (spread is too tight compared to the doom shotty) the plasma rifle is blah, and the rocket launcher is less blimpy and less boomy but still SORT of there..?

I found the berzerk, it's not quite as fun, it feels like a permanent glory mode, you go one-shot things with your fists (rip and tear) and it fades like any other powerup.

I saw some commentary on how the steam achievements are fairly lame, and while I agree, they force enough in-game mini-challenges on you to more than make up the difference. Lots of gimmick-your-way-to-upgrades for your weapons.

I'm not entirely happy, and I'm not as angry as the multiplayer made me.. It's fun for now, and there are enough nods to the original series (and some keen sounds for those paying attention) to mollify me a bit.

More as I have more time.
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« Reply #21 on: 2016-05-14, 12:25 »

Regarding hardware... I have a Core i7 3770K and 32GB PC4000.  I typically keep my resolution somewhere between 1024x768 and 1280x960 when gaming.  Being on a CRT requires a 4:3 aspect ratio, and that may be considered "low" by today's standards, but I can't abide LCD screens no matter how "good" they supposedly are.  My only piece of hardware that's at "minimum" specs is my video card:  GTX 670.  Think I can pull a constant 60FPS at that resolution?  I had no trouble with Rage.
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Woodsman
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« Reply #22 on: 2016-05-14, 12:55 »

maybe not 60 but you should get a good solid frame rate
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Angst
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« Reply #23 on: 2016-05-14, 15:23 »

Worst case, I'm pretty sure I can ship a 760 or thereabouts I should have lying around.

Also - This made me smile:

http://imgur.com/gallery/o4hG1kt

From a purist's standpoint, there's a lot to be pissed about, but it's got heart.
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« Reply #24 on: 2016-05-14, 21:50 »

Is OK, don't need you to go to those lengths (video card).  I'll be holding off on buying for a while anyway, so I can wait and scrounge up some change at some point if my hardware isn't pleasing enough.

Re:  Doomguy doll:  That just made my day.
  Doom - Thumbs Up!
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Gnam
 
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« Reply #25 on: 2016-05-15, 17:03 »

I have a Radeon 6950, intel i7, and 4gb ram and Doom runs ok in 1080p with low settings for everything. There are a few bad hectic areas where it slows down badly, but for the most part it's playable and doesn't look too bad. Of course I would rather play with an upgraded rig, but I don't feel like the game's few laggy areas ruin the experience for me.
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« Reply #26 on: 2016-05-16, 06:32 »

Someone posted a full playthrough on Ultra Nightmare difficulty if anyone's interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6J352J_RG8

*Slips back into the shadows.*  Slipgate - Ninja
« Last Edit: 2016-05-16, 06:35 by Kain-Xavier » Logged

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« Reply #27 on: 2016-05-16, 14:46 »

I'll have to pass on that, since that's pretty much 100% spoiler for me... not having the game and all yet.  Nice to see you drop by though, Kain!  Doom - Thumbs Up!
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« Reply #28 on: 2016-05-16, 16:07 »

The game is pretty fun when you first start because Bethesda did a good job dressing it up to seem like more than it is. In the beginning it seems like there actually is a legimate amount of exploration to break up the mindless "arena" segments, and as you keep finding pockets of armor, ammo, and new guns, you fall for the illusion that it actually plays like the old games.

In particular, the "Heavy Assault Rifle" saves a lot of the early game, allowing you to pick off weaker enemies from a distance by tapping off bursts and single shots, instead of going through the same tired shotgun + glory kill routine over and over again. Headshotting imps and possessed soldiers through its scope is legimately fun, when the occasion arises, and supports the illusion that you can actually move through the levels methodically rather than always blindly running and gunning.

However, after several hours the illusion begins to wear off, and the ugly truth of this game's rigid "arena" structure shows through. At its heart, this game is just a series of GOW-style horde mode arenas, with empty "exploration" segments strewn between to make it seem like a real FPS campaign when it's really not.

Despite the "run and gun" cliche ascribed to the original Doom and Quake campaigns, there was a methodic way of playing through them. You wanted to carefully pick enemies off in manageable chunks wherever possible. You learned to anticipate traps, and "slice the pie" to section out safe areas. All of these techniques comprised an overall strategy designed to avoid the exact situation Doom 4 exclusively puts you in, which is to be completely surrounded with absolutely no recourse other than to blindly run in circles around the room shooting haphazardly until enemies stop spawning in.

The arenas in Doom 4 are a lot like the later segments of Doom 3, where the devs couldn't even be bothered to build monster closets into the architecture any more, and resorted to constantly spawning enemies straight into the room at abritrary locations. The only difference is the spawn effect is not so cringe-enducingly long, and they throw a lot more enemies at you at once.

Still the central problem with "spawning in" remains: it eliminates the central player skill of spotting enemy aproaches and ambush points before they happen. Rather than trying to anticipate and watch the door, staircase, or elevator the monsters are going to jump out of, you pretty much just have to turn your brain off and wait till you are coimpletely surrounded to start shooting.

And it's not that Doom 4's "arena" areas are impossibly overwhelming either. If anything it's the opposite. Bethesda has designed the monsters to be so ineffectual that even when you are surrounded from all sides, they rarely hit you at all...even when you stop to make glory kills for several long seconds. When you set the difficulty to Ultraviolence a single hit from even the lowest enemies does a lot of damage, and yet most of the time you survive for ages because the enemies are incompetent.

There is some technique to it, but it's mostly a matter of resource management. You have to remember to glory kill every so often to keep your health up, because there are too many arena waves between the exploration segments to rely solely on health picked up off the map. You have to keep track of your chainsaw gasoline; not because the chainsaw is indispensable as a melee weapon, but because chainsawing badguys replenishes ammo for your other weapons and you'll run dry without it.

You inevitably will die from time to time, and yet it never feels like it's due to a crucial tactical error, or some curveball you could have dodged if you saw it coming. Inevitably when you die it's just due to some random enemy that hit you from behind, which you couldn't have possibly seen coming, because the arenas are always so full of enemies constantly spawning into random locations that you can't possibly keep your back covered ever. All you can do is rely on the incompetence of the enemies to not kill you when you're surrounded, a hands-off approach that works all the time, except when it randomly doesn't.

And that's pretty much the gist of it. The game is not horribly unplayable and for the first few hours it's actually pretty fun. Unfortunately, the arena gimmick just gets really repetitive after a while, causing the firefights to blurr together into a mindless, forgettable mess. The exploration segments are supposed to break these up, but there is no legitimate combat in the exploration segments; just pockets of unarmed zombies which are so harmless you could go take a piss without pausing the game and still come back in time to kill them before taking any significant damage.
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« Reply #29 on: 2016-05-16, 22:56 »

I had a feeling it was going to go that way.  That's one thing I loved about the first Doom game - you were rewarded for exploring, not just with hidden items, but with more monsters to fight, and the way enemies were placed in the levels made sense from a difficulty standpoint.  You also didn't have a clear path to progress.  You might be faced with a locked door and not know where the key is, or there might be more than one path, where one just ended in a monster fest, and another went where you needed to go.  You had to explore not just to find secrets, but to find the exit, and anything could happen in between.  I think the move from pseudorealism to realism in environments is partly to blame for that as well.  Realistic settings are not necessarily fun settings.  You have some flexibility with a sci-fi environment, and hell "breaking through" helped to explain part of the insane environments in Doom/Doom 2.

You always had more than one way to fight as well.  You could hang back and pick off enemies with the chaingun, or run in and shotgun stuff point blank, spam rockets, or go on a chainsaw rampage.  Then there was the infighting.  One thing I missed in Doom 3 was the serious infighting you could get like in Doom and Quake.  A few monsters in Doom 3 will attack other monsters - notably the Revenant and Cacodemons - but most monsters, even when getting hit by fire from other monsters, keep focusing on the player.  I had a machinegun Zsec accidentally hit a Caco and that gave me the achievement in D3BFG for infighting, but despite the Caco pounding on the Zsec the Zsec just kept shooting at me.  Imps and Maggots were the same way.  I got an imp to fireball a Maggot straight in the back and it just kept coming towards me.  Granted, Doom 3's limit of facing a few monsters at a time (unless it was a Trite swarm) made it hard to set up infighting situations at all, but it would have been a nice touch.

I guess Serious Doom it is then.  I'm sure I'll get some enjoyment out of it.


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Angst
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« Reply #30 on: 2016-05-17, 14:33 »

Seconded on the arena fights. I think I made a crack about feeling like I was playing a DooM/SMASHtv mashup at one point.

My current rune build has me almost literally chain-glorykilling just about everything in sight, I've given up the pretense of controlling fights and now I just kind of soften things with the upgraded combat shotty and then get all friendly with their insides.. I'll grant that this doom is "fast" only because the enemies tend to be faster than you are. I was doing a lot of jumping so that the inertia from attacks I could not move fast enough to dodge would knock me back and give me some space.

Also, I'm going to have to bind the weapon-select wheel because the default number binds are ALL jacked up...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

All in all, at the end of the day the campaign is more worthy of the Doom name than Doom3 was. Enemy attacks are more fluid, and with the exception of OBVIOUS fodder characters they remain relatively dangerous throughout.

My primary remaining gripe is that it periodically REEKS of me-too-ness.

Former humans (posessed) - Somewhere between covenant elites and GoW's locust horde. Complete with *point-wortwortwort*

The Doom Marine's storyline is a bit too masterchief-y for me.

Hayden.. *sigh* Ultron..

The powerups and their artistic direction... Visually, they're bland and/or incomprehensible, and DooM never needed Quake powerups...

What they DID seem to get right is the tone of Mars and the Hellscape.

I ran into an old friend, and that fight was fun--though formulaic, and utterly devoid of the nostalgia I was hoping for.

I'm not quite done, but I seem to be nearing the end as the plot becomes increasingly thin and I'm running out of things other than the optional mission challenges that pose a serious risk to my health (turns out I AM the most dangerous thing in Hell.. to everyone/thing involved)

Also, eyestrain and motion sickness issues have not been resolved yet, more tweaking to follow. The increased focal-and-motion-blur to hide texture pop is painful, and utterly unnecessary with my hardware.
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« Reply #31 on: 2016-05-19, 23:55 »

Has anyone tried SnapMap yet? I've been tinkering with it a bit the last few days, but some of the limitations are really annoying.

For one, everything in SnapMap is limited to only 12 monsters alive at any one time. So rather than simply snapping some prefab rooms together and dropping some enemies in as advertised, you have to set up a ton of logic to manage spawners which trigger when players enter the vicinity, and somehow ensure that everything is dead before they are able to move on to the next area.

So basically you are largely limited to making generic AAA linear funnel gameplay where players enter rooms one at a time and get locked in until they clear it. If you jump through a ton of hoops in theory you could hide all this to create the illusion of an oldschool Doom map with enemies persistent on the map at all times, but it's a LOT of additional effort, and there will always be holes and severe limitations.

Even if you're making a campaign/co-op map, you are limited to the Halo-esque two-weapon inventory from multiplayer. Equipment pickups are not included, so you have to set up extra logic to allow players to buy them from "vending machines" (if you care about equipment). The same goes for weapons; only the generic multiplayer versions are available and extra hoops must be crossed to access the mods for alt fires. Some weapons, like the blaster and chainsaw, are not available to use in snapmap at all.

There is one hack to allow players to access all weapons simultaneously by changing loadout pairs when a certain button is pressed, but then you'd have to do even more work to "disable" those options until the player reaches specified points on the map (like a pickup process). There is also just one pool of ammo for everything and just one generic ammo pickup no matter what.

Maybe the worst part is AI appears to be locked to one of the lower difficulties (Hurt Me Plenty or lower) so they're not even up to the low standards of the campaign's Ultraviolence or Nightmare mode, and there's no way to fix that. You can up their health or damage, but they will continue to act like they've been lobotomized.

I want to believe that the potential is there, but there's just so many strikes against the game.
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Angst
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« Reply #32 on: 2016-05-20, 15:40 »

*nods*

This is a huge bone toss to the console crowd, but the PC is left feeling.. Well, left out; again. We're used to a LOT more from a product..

In the end, I liked the campaign, warts and all. But I feel let down as a whole.

Angs7's review in numbers -

Campaign - 8.5/10
Multiplayer - 2/10 (I may end up playing some more of this eventually, just for achievements, I see zero redeeming value here)
SnapMap - 5/10 (feeling generous, this is a pretty basic/crappy mapper for anyone familiar with classic modding, but it's a pretty big deal for the console crowd)

Sound (8/10):
Campaign music is a pretty solid merger of Doom3 and Doom Classic. Plenty of nods to the classics (secret unlockable texture issues aside), and a ludicrous amount of audio easter eggs slipped in. I'm not quite sure how I feel about the very NiN spin on the dynamic riffs, but allowances can be made for trying to bridge generations.

Weapon audio makes me sad here, it's just.. limp.. The organic noises are decent though.

Gameplay (8.5/10):
Let's get this out of the way first: L-I-N-E-A-R... If you miss/forget a secret, there is often no going back.
Ambush spawns and secrets are a bit on the weak side, I think there was ONE proper item trap that I can recall that ended up being remotely dangerous.
If you snipe, pass on this title. If you are expecting to progress a map tactically, pass on this title. Enemy spawns are semi-random, and often things are often such that map design has a negligible effect on combat (pigs do, in fact, fly... and that BOTHERS me..)

They managed to capture the feeling of getting up in the demons' faces and dancing. THIS they did right, and I heartily approve. With a couple choice runes, I was having a blast. Without them, things would occasionally be annoyingly slow. I dislike PLANNING firefights, or rolling with a hit because it's not adequately dodgeable when I'm not hopped up on haste or rune speed. They compromised between skill and growth-based gameplay--I'm not 100% happy, but there's enough for all so I can accept that this wasn't a title made for me specifically (which seems to be a lot of the negative reviews)

I do have to admit that I essentially ended up picking two favored weapons and largely ignoring the rest. Upgrading them just because I could, not because I had any real use for them until I had to saw something open for more ammo. Once your weapons are fully upgraded, there's almost zero reason to do otherwise, damage seems to be flat across the board.

If you still have muscle memory tied to any prior weapon bindings.. For the love of Romero, CHANGE THE DEFAULTS.. Whoever did this seems to have set them based roughly on when they're obtainable, it's like they never touched a keyboard or played a previous id shooter.

*/part1*
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« Reply #33 on: 2016-05-26, 16:18 »

After learning a bunch of workarounds for the 12 monster limit, I've had some success at creating some oldschool campaign/co-op levels in SnapMap:

1) All enemies are spawned off-camera rather than teleported right around the player, so their physical location within the level design always plays a major role in combat. There is still some "arena" combat, but spotting enemy perches, clearing rooms, and taking fallback positions in ambushes is once again part of gameplay.

2) No room lock-downs, only locked doors opened with keycards or switches

3) No possessed civilian zombies, because they are too harmless and unchallenging to make it worth wasting any spawns on them

3) Enemy health is reduced for lower level enemies, so the single barrel shotgun and assault rifle take down soldiers and imps from similar ranges and hitcounts as the shotgun and chaingun in original Doom.

4) These lower level enemies deal more damage, so despite their low health they are more challenging. If you ignore them and take stray hits you will lose BIG chunks of your health.

Even though the generic rooms they give you are limited, I've been able to start a Phobos/Techbase-style slime map, a Deimos/Shores of Hell type of map, and a Doom 64-style dim and dingy level. The Doom 64 one is the furthest along simply because I didn't feel like I had to be as precious about it. Overall it's surprisingly fun despite the limitations, and goes a long way to delivering the Doom gameplay missing in the Bethesda campaign.

The main problem I'm running into is that the monster pathing system doesn't work reliably. You can have a group of monsters run in circles around the room they spawned in, but if you actually want them to do something useful, like go through a door into an adjacent room, they frequently get stuck and ruin the entire flow you had planned.

This is unfortunate since one of the best ways to get more than 12 monsters fighting in a big room is to have a second wave which comes running in from a previously-locked room as first as the first group is wiped out. If I can't find a fix for this, it will kill the project.
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« Reply #34 on: 2016-05-27, 01:35 »

You'd think having something as basic as decent monster AI pathing would be simple by now.  Hell, the Trites in Doom 3 were stupid for being spider-type monsters, but they could at least follow the player's path.  Legendary had some of the best AI pathing I've seen.  Werewolves would climb over pretty much anything and jump from object to object to get to you.  You couldn't hide from them, they'd ALWAYS find you.  Why couldn't a SPIDER-type creature do this?  Lazy AI programming, that's why.  I'm sad to see that's still an issue in this day considering how many other games - and especially older games - have very good AI.
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« Reply #35 on: 2016-05-27, 05:33 »

A little off-topic, but I've been playing through Doom 3 BFG Edition to get achievements, and I just finished Doom 2 on Ultra-Violence in a rather unusual way.  While riding up the lift to shoot rockets at the Icon of Sin, I decided to lob a rocket at it while diving forward to get a radiation suit.  I timed the rocket right and it did damage.  I rode the lift up a second time and missed the rocket on the way up, so I dove forward again, lobbed a rocket in and...

The explosion from the Icon dying killed my Doomguy!  The game still considers it to be victory even though you're dead - just so long as the Icon goes boom.  Pyrrhic victory is fitting for me I suppose, but that's the first time I've managed to die at the same time I've blown up the Icon.
  Doomed
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« Reply #36 on: 2016-06-04, 00:15 »

Something similar happened to me the first time I beat Nihilanth. He killed me just as I fired the fatal shot and I ended up lying on the deck while G-Man stood talking over my corpse.

You know what? I'm claiming it.
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« Reply #37 on: 2016-06-07, 21:22 »

I eventually solved the AI pathing problems I was having, and half the problem basically just came down to consolization. Since SnapMap was optimized for gamepads, the keyboard shortcuts aren't very intuitive and in some cases you are methodically pressing every key on the keyboard not able to find the command you're looking for.

So at some point I plugged in a 360 controller and suddenly everything was much easier. In the worst case scenario if you have to try every button to find something by process of elimination, there are much fewer buttons to check through than keys on a keyboard. More often though, the correct buttons just become obvious in a way that doesn't happen so smoothly on keyboard.

So apparently my process of drawing AI paths with mouse and keyboard was just "wrong". Once I started pathing on gamepad, it worked every time. o_0

Luckily for the most part, Doom 4 monsters can actually figure their way to a player on their own once he has their attention. The main issue is that since only 12 monsters can be alive at a time, in order to stage larger encounters you have to make them come out in waves, and the only way to do that without making them appear out of thin air is to script them to come running in from a off-camera spawn point outside the combat zone.

The other part of the solution was that I realized that you just can't force certain monster types into certain type of paths. You have to take their behavior into account and use the "right" monsters for the path you want to execute...

For example, Cacodemons are so big that they "dislike" squeezing through tight spaces, so you just have to give up trying to path them through any standard-size doorways or over any catwalks with low ceilings. Soldiers and Hell Razers will steadily follow a path, but they're slow to react and slow to move, so they are bad at making suprise entrances. Imps are the fastest at rushing into a room by surprise, but they're so aggressive that they don't always stay where you want when assigned to camp specific places.

Once I began assigning the monsters accordingly, I got better results and spent less time troubleshooting monster paths that just wouldn't work. I now have my techbase map 99% close to being done, provided I don't decide to entirely rearrange it again...
« Last Edit: 2016-06-07, 21:38 by Gnam » Logged
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« Reply #38 on: 2016-06-08, 01:17 »

Yikes, that's some complicated work for something that's supposed to be simple and easy.  I'm glad you're figuring it out though.  Once I (eventually, after it goes on sale and I have some money) get Doom 4 I'll be giving whatever you cook up a try for sure.  Doomed
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« Reply #39 on: 2016-06-09, 21:14 »

I ran across this article today:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-0...control-of-doom-broken-multiplayer-on-pc

Apparently Id has some fixes on the way for multiplayer, including adding bot support and support for private matches, though not necessarily private server hosting.
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