Wirehead Studios

I want to love you new DooM.. I really do.. But WHAT THE EVERLOVING SPORK IS THIS TRIPLE-BARRELED-COLLAPSIBLE CHAINGUN MALARKY?! WHO DESIGNED THIS?! YYARRAARGHGAHHGLAHDGIALSDHAWEHRH *SPLAT* :wall: :wall:

Probably the same person that put mini rockets on the shotgun?  There was an old Doom mod that had a chaingun sprite replacement that looked somewhat like that though.  I think it was Christmas Doom or something along those lines, so there's some historical basis for that.  The purist in me is going to squawk a little on the guns, but that chaingun isn't a deal breaker for me.  Classic weapons always can (and someone will do it) be modded into the game.  Besides, what we get to do with the chainsaw is just... glorious.  :doom_love:

What I'm seeing that I like is the monsters looking more classic in style in the new vid and the amount of absolutely over-the-top gore that we're getting.  They took the term "ludicrous gibs" and ran with it.  I'm seeing a lot of emphasis on action, action, and... well, action.  I like Doom 3 for what it is, but this is looking more like what I wanted Doom 3 to be... probably what a lot of Doom fans wanted Doom 3 to be.  I'm not going to pre-order because Rage was buggy as spork out the gate - I'll wait for the first patch at least - but this is still on my "want it" list at this point... strange chaingun or no.

Well, I happen to disagree. I'm part of the Doom crowd that was born after Doom released, so I gravitate less towards being a purist. I like Doom as a proper reboot, and not a game that stays too loyal without taking risks. It's nice to see new-Doom, and that multichaingun was cool as hell. Of course, I hope to see innovation beyond aesthetics and gimmicks.

Just from the fact that it's a minigun, I guess there isn't a lot they can do with it in terms of 'upgrades'.. especially in the visual sense since the gun is essentially just a bullet hose. So someone said, "Hey, let's triple the amount of barrels!"
I think I read an article referring to it as a 'mobile turret' upgrade for the gun, or something. Every gun gets an option of two upgrades, so I wonder what the second is...

But yea... the triple-minigun thing seems a little goofy to me. I like miniguns! But.. that's overdoing it to the point of silliness. I might change my mind when I get to actually use it, but eh.

Speaking of...am I the only one here who feels that having a multibarrel/gattling gun in a modern game shooting at under 2000rpm is a complete waste and utter failure?

I can understand why the aesthetic of the minigun would be used in the original Doom games without the technical hurdle of the high cyclic rates. The Doom franchise is also not beholden to 100% realism (and the term "chaingun" is not even correct anyway). However, we all know that you can pump out lower cyclic rates with any ordinary machinegun. The MG42 even got up to 1800rpm in some cases.

So particularly since the new Doom game already has an ordinary single barrel LMG for firing at ordinary rates, it seems totally redundant to implement a minigun in this same low cyclic range. What is the point? We've seen multibarrel weapon models plenty of times. What we haven't seen is being able to actually play with the high cyclic rates; even games with only vehicle-mounted miniguns often get this wrong.

Plus, Doom 4 is already follows the Brutal Doom formula so closely. Brutal Doom did the Chaingun so well...why did Bethesda have to fail on this? High cyclic rates aren't THAT processor intensive, particularly in a single-player scenario, and there are ways to optimize for them if you've planned for it.

Speaking from a purely technical perspective, a slower-cyclic rate on a rotary-barreled gun saves ammunition, and rotary-barreled guns don't overheat very fast.  Single-barreled machineguns need to have the barrel swapped out once you've fired 100-200 rounds, so rotary guns can maintain constant fire for a lot longer.  Caliber could also be a consideration.  If you're firing a larger round from a rotary gun you need a slower cyclic rate to control the weapon.  Not justifying anything gameplay-wise here, just speaking from a real physics standpoint.

That being said, I think Quake 2 is the one (retail) game that really nailed the rotary gun concept dead on.

Muliplayer is HORRIBLE.  I just tried the public beta, and I have nothing good to say about it.  If you're new there's no way to test things out without being in a match.  The only weapons worth anything are the super shotgun and the gauss gun - the latter I only found once - and all the experienced players will always manage to grab the demon spawn.  I picked it up one time off a fallen player and died before I could get more than two shots off, yet every time someone else had it you couldn't do any damage to them.  Oh, more complaints...

Player identification sucks.  You get a red or blue floaty text over someone and that's how you tell your team from theirs.

Rocket launcher is worthless.  I could wound with it, I could hit with it, but you cannot kill with it.  Even detonating rockets mid-air you'd still get a shotgun to the face.  As for the detonating rockets... yes, you have to blow them up in mid-air because shooting the floor doesn't work when everyone is double-jumping constantly.

Sniper rifle-thing has to "charge up" when zoomed.  This isn't TF2, wtf?  That made it useless except for sucker shots - which I ended up on the other end of a lot.

The heavy machinegun did 9 points per hit.  It's not heavy, it's like a default Q2 machinegun.  It was somewhat useful for shooting someone in the back if they were distracted fighting one of your teammates.

Sound... there's a good one.  I think I heard my shotgun go off maybe 3 times.  I was killed by so many silent shotgun blasts it's not funny.

Damage feedback was non-existent!  Honestly, it was hard to tell when you were doing anything to anyone or if anyone was doing anything to you.  Id games have always been great for damage feedback.  In Quake you KNEW when you took a rocket, or if you blasted someone and left them hurting.  Where's all the pain sounds?  Where's the "OH spork THAT HURT LIKE A SON-OF-A-BITCH" screams when you're almost dead?

Finally.... hack modules?  Experience?  SERIOUSLY?

I... cannot find anything good to say.  This is NOT Doom in any way, shape, or form.  I've heard a lot of comparisons between this and HALO.  I've never played HALO so I can't comment on that, but this is the farthest I've seen an Id game stray from the FPS formula.  I've finally seen this for myself, and I absolutely hate it.  I will not be playing the deathmatch at all, and as for purchasing the retail game... I'm going to wait until there's a demo.  If the single player is anything like the multi I'm not going anywhere near this, and it makes me sad because I really wanted to like this game.

Lucky me: Linux on a Thinkpad isn't going to run Doom 4 any time soon :P

But I'm looking forward to "ports" running on (g)zdoom, which might be a good chance to improve Doom 4's gameplay.

I don't think Doom's open beta was that bad, it's definitely got a far more polished and finished feeling than Bethesda's final GOTYGOTYGOTY releases.  The most annoyances i've had:

- weapon balance.  That static rifle feels very useless and the SSG seems to be the only one that gives the traditional time to kill in an id game
- Sound issues.  Getting shot with a SSG means you only hear impact splats and the gun is silenced
- Not enough dance moves
- some of the motion blur is really really excessive (http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/284100092856515172/76CB06DD1F9AB85518E9005662E4D243F12119B6/)
- Voip bugs. unbeknownst to me I was broadcasting my games' audio
- the 2K/Activision preorder-to-win DLC swindle, but that's not really involving the beta so it doesn't count as much. Just strike that as a bethesda executive policy
- it's still called Doom and not Doom 4.  Doom3 nearly made that mistake

It's an okay game in its own right, but let's face it - they aren't going to do a 1994gameplay+AAA game now nor were going to do a 1994gameplay+AAA game 20 years ago (had they made an actual, real Doom 3 instead of Quake) and given the pretentious dorksaster that was ROTT'13...perhaps it's for the better that it plays like quake4 halo of duty demontag edition.  Every sequel id's done since Romero's departure have been in name only anyway, with Q3 having the closest resembelance to a Romero game only for its thematic callbacks and deathmatch emphasis

This isn't doom, this is call of halo. It's floaty, it's slow, and most of the weapons feel like nerf..

And xp/unlocks? Bleh..

Plasma was ok, but there's too much to this that feels like instead of blazing a trail, they stole all of the most focus group popular features of younger titles. This is like the gamer equivalent to the parent at prom who dressed up in their highschool fashion to try and be hip..

If you think that's bad, the plasma rifle does 6 damage! The Doom 1 plasma rifle, Q2 hyperblaster, and Q3 plasmagun all dealt double, triple, or quadrupel the damage of the Doom 1 Chaingun, Q2 MG, or Q3 MG. The hitscan vs. projectile balance is totally out of wack!

6 points for PLASMA?  I couldn't even hit anyone with it the projectiles were so freaking slow.  That would mean someone would have to run into a wall of 17 projectiles to die from 100 health and no armor. 

They also looked like crap.  It's exactly why I didn't use spheroid models for Doom's plasma in Gen.  If I did I know they would have looked better than that.  The plasma in the Doom Beta looked like wobbly blue glass eggs, not destructive energy of death.

You know... I'm starting to wonder if us old-school gamers just got completely trolled with this.  In Doom 1, rockets, plasma, and chaingun were the go-to weapons for frags, with the single-shotty filling in until you could get a heavy hitter.  Doom 2 was all about the SSG, but you had to be close.  Melee was difficult to hit with unless you were berserk.  Now along comes THIS Doom, and what happens?  Machinegun (chaingun - let's face it) is worthless, Plasma is worthless, and rockets are worthless.  Lightning gun - which was a Quake weapon and damned powerful - is worthless.  SSG you can "choke" to hit someone from across the map and silent so you can ninja-shoot people in the back, and let's make the CAMPER weapons - Vortex, Static, and Gauss - do one-shots, melee does an insane amount of damage.  They took the weapon damage for the classics and nerfed them to oblivion except the SSG - which was still nerfed - and make the sniper weapons the only ones capable of inflicting any real damage.

I seriously wonder if these clowns that coded for HALO and CoD looked at this as a chance to stick it to us classic PC FPS gamers because they don't like us.  The HALO/CoD crowd and the classic Doom/Quake crowd do NOT get along.  So what does Bethesda do?  They hire these clowns who then proceed to gut the gameplay of OUR title.  OUR beloved Doom.  Instead of giving us the gameplay we want, we get this abortion of an Arena shooter inflicted on us, while these tools are laughing themselves all the way to the bank.  "Now you got to play OUR WAY, stupid PC elitists!  Deathmatch is dead, suck it!"  That's the vibe I'm getting from this because obviously they're not changing the game to play the way we want it to.  Anyone else with me on this?

I don't know that it was so much sticking it to the oldschool gamers as it was pandering to what's seen as the most popular in the FPS community. The new doom troopers feel a LOT like masterchief--floaty tanks, they even LOOK like Spartan power armors.. The weapons feel a LOT like the halo/COD equivalents, complete with focus on snipe/camp over everything, and I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about rocket jumping being removed (as an id thing, not doom-specific)

I could get REALLY pissy and point out that marathon came after doom, but most halo gamers get all glassy eyed when I mention that title....

On the "heavy" machinegun, I believe it was more intended to play the role of the Q2 machinegun, as there actually is a separate chaingun in Doom 4 which deals more damage at the cost of a windup time. It just wasn't featured in the betas, and may not be included in vanilla multiplayer at all.

Some new demos of Snap Map have surfaced in the past 24 hours, which show how you can make your own maps and gametypes featuring weapons like the Chaingun, BFG, "Hell Shot" and others not present in the multiplayer beta. You could probably even make your own custom multiplayer modes which spawn players with only a pistol, and the necessity to pick other weapons off the map...

...of course of that is for nothing is you can't actually fix the weapon balance. No one wants to pick a rocket launcher off the map and have it deal 55 damage, nor a plasma rifle with 6 freaking HP. An id title without solid projectile weapons is not an id title at all.

If there is any ability to edit weapon definitions in the PC version, that could save the game. That's a big "if" though.

On a brighter note: someone showed off a singleplayer snapmap level where you play as a Baron of Hell against other enemies. There was something very gratifying about watching the Baron tower over the Doom 3 Hell Knight, snapping him like a twig.

I ran across this today, focusing exclusively on the single player.  It's a long watch, and spoilers are present.  If you want to see the BFG, it's toward the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txmv2qFRuxI

A few things I picked up from this, without spoiling much.

Chainsaw takes fuel, and is pretty much an insta-kill weapon that gives you a massive ammo dump.  Fuel gets used in increments, so sawing an imp may use 1 cell.  I think you can carry 3 cells max.
A LOT of stuff - like glory kill indicators and even the entire HUD can be turned off via menus.
Glory kills are entirely optional, but do grant health and temporarily make you invulnerable while pulling off the move.  It can actually save a near-death player.
Powerups like Quad Damage and Haste are instant effect, not portable.
There's lots of weapon upgrades - single chaingun to a triple chaingun (final version is known as a "portable turret" and has three sets of barrels, not just two), different ammo types for the shotty, etc.
You can carry every single gun in SP.
Pistol is like the blaster from Q4 - infinite ammo, and charge-shot seconodary.
There's a "rune" system for ability upgrades.
You can get armor upgrades (not just points, but to your suit itself).
Combat tends to be arena-centric, with story and exploration completely optional.
There's a 3D automap that's actually useful.
Cacodemon fireballs are dead-on classic in color.
Saving appears to be entirely checkpoint-based.  I did not see any quicksave option.
Weapons in the SP are MUCH more powerful than in multi.  Rockets gibbed imps and possessed dudes.
Monster in-fighting was not confirmed, but there's videos of it occuring on Youtube.  One has a caco obliterating another monster and not aiming at the player.  Another has an imp pouncing on a possessed soldier before getting shot in the back by the player.

What I'm getting from the single player is this is to Doom as to what Flying Wild Hog did with Shadow Warrior, but without the swordplay.  If that's how this ends up working I think I might enjoy the SP.  I don't mind upgrade paths in games, and the rune and weapon upgrade system actually lets you customize to your preferred fighting style.  I liked that in Tron 2.0 and Shadow Warrior.  If you want to challenge yourself you can play without any upgrades, so that option is available.  I'm in no way pre-ordering, but I'll be watching closely.

Multiplayer... the only hope I have there is Snapmap.  In a previous video they mentioned being able to do a classic 4-player deathmatch, they showed custom demon fights with demons brawling with each other... so I'm hoping that the ability to mod things like weapon damage is built into Snapmap.  If it IS... then REAL multiplayer may be possible, and we know the Doom modding community will be making that happen.  It's going to depend on how the hell server hosting works though.  If there's no dedicated server support that's going to make things very difficult, so I'm not going to hold my breath since we've only seen a BS lobby system so far.  We'll know soon enough.

After watching some of that campaign footage, and a few others posted in the last day or so, all I can say is: I hope Ultraviolent is way tougher than whatever people are posting now.

The way many of these players are completely ignoring major enemies that are right next to them without suffering any damage for it is ridiculous. I have seen players botch a double jump only to wind up humping a revenant in the face on the way down, and the revenant doesn't react till they player's already descended from their floaty moon jump, swinging at the air ineffectually.

The more you watch the enemies at this level, the more you notice how they are whiffing easy shots constantly. A lot of the bigger enemies just start swatting the air randomly around them whenever you get within a 10ft radius, completely missing as if you're a mosquito they can't quite see.

The pinky's huge telegraphing "imma hit you now" charge designed to expose their backs is painfully obvious to the point of being patronizing. You'd have to be AFK to miss those and it's hilarious the way the devs constantly describe this mechanic as "strategic".

So few imp fireballs ever hit the player, it doesn't even look like they're trying to hit you anymore; it looks like they're intentionally missing with razor precision. The possessed humans look so worthless, I think I will have to play exclusively with the blaster for the first few hours to get any challenge out of the game (headshot target practice).

The game could be good on ultraviolence, but it's frustrating that we have to buy the game simply out of good faith, because all the promos are on piss poor difficulty levels. None of the enemies look any tougher than the Elites from Halo 1, which spent so much time pointing and yelling "wort wort wort" that you finished every encounter with them before it even started.

That's why I'm not making a day 1 purchase for sure.  I want to see what happens.  If there's a SP Demo, that will help tremendously.

I'm about 5 hours in now and I like it. It isn't perfect but it has a classic doom feel. Yet i can't help but feel they just made brutal doom with a new engine.

I did just read that it has Denuvo, for those who may dislike that particular piece of software.  I haven't dealt with it myself, but I understand it somehow encrypts the .exe on the fly when loaded to make piracy more difficult.  I'm not sure what effect that may have on multiplayer cheating... hopefully a good one, but I don't really know much about the software beyond that.  I know there's some anti-DRM purists that it's an instant turn-off to, but Steam itself is a form of DRM when you think about it so owning games on Steam and complaining about DRM is kind of strange... even though Denuvo isn't DRM by definition.

Anyway, looking forward to more info on the SP campaign, as well as performance stuff.  I really want then to post a demo so I can see what it does to my hardware before I decide to plunk down any real money.

I can give you some good insight into the performance stuff. My system was technically below the minimum system requirements in that i have a radeon r250 video card, but that is apparently close enough to the  radeon HD 7870 the minimum system requirements stated.  My processor is an AMD FX 8320 and my system has 20 gigs or ram ( though i use windows 7 home so it only uses 16 gigs of it). With some tweaking i was able to make it run well enough. If you turn down the resolution you can play it without sacrificing alot of other visual features like texture and shadow quality, which i always prefer to do because high res shit still looks like shit. If you disable mouse smoothing that seems to help dramatically.  Of course it still takes a million years to load it each time, but eh what the hell. I didn't have 400 dollars to spend on a video card like when i did when doom 3 came out ( my radeon 9700 pro, awesome card worth every penny ) but i didn't have 3 kids then either.

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.

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.

maybe not 60 but you should get a good solid frame rate

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.

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_thumb:

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.

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

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

*Slips back into the shadows.*  :ninja:

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_thumb:

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.

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.

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...


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.

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.

*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*

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.

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.

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:

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.

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...

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:

I ran across this article today:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-06-09-id-takes-back-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.

DOOM (4) demo's out!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/479030

There have also been several announcements regarding DOOM's multiplayer and the SnapMap feature.  Lastly, id has announced their next game. :ninja:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ2uqjOTrp8

http://www.polygon.com/e3/2016/6/12/11915662/doom-e3-2016-bethesda-softworks-id-software


Thank God. It's so dumb that there were no Hell tiles and no singleplayer inventory on release. I had already used just about every existing prefab...

Not sure how I feel about Quake following so close on the heels of Doom. In addition, I just saw news that id is going to go back and "fix" multiplayer - they claim to have outsourced multiplayer entirely, so we'll see...

Demo I will get!

I played the demo, and it does seem to have a few minor issues... namely it says "Press to continue" and shows a picture of the right mouse button, but it seems I have to alt+tab out and back in to get out of loading screens.  Either that or the level loads are long and it's coincidental.  I also noticed a bug in trying to scroll text in descriptions of enemies, etc.  The slider doesn't always work right.  I hope that's not an issue in the main game.  I'll have to look at comments I suppose.  I was surprised at the level of information present in the game.  Doom 3 had a lot of stuff on the PDA's, but this is up there at Serious Sam level of text walls for enemies, items, and what not.

The combat is definitely different.  Plenty of run and gun, but at the same time it's hard to pick up where enemies are teleporting in, especially on the Martian surface.  Imps certainly like to move around a lot, but I was surprised at how easy it is to just melee them.  In previous Doom games, melee + imps = you take damage.  These guys are wimps when it comes to clubbing them with your gun until they become glory kill fodder.  Try as I might, I could NOT get imps and possessed soldiers to in-fight, despite an imp taking about 5 rounds to the back.  That was disappointing.  The shotgun with explosive rounds was NOT disappointing.  I found that a lot more useful than the 3-round burst feature.  The pistol is decent for sniping possessed civvies from a distance, and peppering a single foe if you're low on ammo - pretty much like in the original Doom.

It seems the sound is just a bit off for some reason, like some sounds are not nearly as loud as they should be to offer a cue as to where an enemy is when obscured by cover, and other sounds - such as the growling of the possessed civilians - can be excessively loud when they're in groups, as if they're all playing at the same time.

Performance-wise I was pleasantly surprised by how well my system is handling it.  With adaptive vsync I was hitting 75FPS most of the time at 1152 x 864, which is where I have the refresh set to.  If it dropped at any point during combat it wasn't really noticeable.  Very smooth, and that's on a GeForce GTX 670 with 2GB video ram with everything turned to max except motion blur which I disabled because I hate it.  CPU is Core i7 3770K with 32GB of Corsair Dominator DDR3 2400 for memory.  I think the 32GB of ram running at that high a clock helps more than anything.  Playing it in Windows 7.

Visually the game is fantastic as far as the environments and texture quality go.  It's not uberdark like Doom 3, but you do need to turn the brightness up higher than the menu says to be able to appreciate the scenery.  I also like the variable FOV.  I found 90 is a bit too narrow for the way the demons come at you, even though it's what I'm used to, still being on a 4:3 display.  110 was too wide, but 100 seems just right as a balance for getting a little more peripheral vision without distorting the view horribly.  I'm sure widescreen gamers love having wider FOV's available, but I can't stand to look at LCD displays so I'm still in CRT land until OLED or Qdot (not LCD with Qdot backlight, but emissive Qdot) become a viable option.  The Praetor suit and weapons look great as far as texturing and overall appearance.  I'm still kind of "meh" on the visual style of the monsters so far, but it's satisfying watching the shotgun blow them into a red spray.  I can't really find much fault in the visual area quality-wise.  The Martian surface looks great, and it's nice to not have to run around looking for oxygen tanks and missing the scenery because the UAC can pack gigawatts worth of plasma into a soda can but couldn't make a space suit with an air supply that's good for more than 30 seconds.  I'm looking at you, Doom 3.  The exploration aspect is nice, and I managed to find all the secrets without assistance.  The automap is a very nice addition for helping with that.

Speaking of weapons... since I found a certain secret I was able to give the chainsaw and rocket launcher a try, even though they're not part of the campaign portion of the demo.  The chainsaw is just absolutely sick fun.  Visually the model is gorgeous, and eviscerating imps with it is just too satisfying.  The rocket launcher pretty much did what I hoped and expected - turned imps and soldiers into red mist and gibs.  I'm glad it actually KILLS stuff in the single player because it sucked horribly in the multiplayer test demo.

Lastly, looking at the weapon/suit/powers upgrade system, I think it's a good addition.  It's become a common element in more recent shooters, starting with Tron 2.0 and going forward with Rage and Shadow Warrior (remake).  Yeah, it was in Quake 4 as well but I don't really like that game.

Anyway... It definitely seems worth a buy to me.  I never pay $60 for a game so once it goes on sale I'll get it, probably at the $40 mark.  Anyone that hasn't tried the demo definitely should check it out.

Edit:  Just found out the PC version is on sale on Amazon for $40.  :doomed:

Nice find on the sale :D

As for the slider bug - That's present in the full release. Agreed on the sound, it just feels weirdly off, ESPECIALLY with headphones. I kept slipping them down to my neck because of the drastic overbalance in places (here's looking at YOU ricochets being louder than gunshots with the chaingun)

I gave the demo a spin as well, and was pleasantly surprised by it overall.

I will say, though, I also had the weird "Press to continue" issue. Except mine said [SPACE] instead of showing a picture of the right mouse button. I sat around for bit and randomly hit the spacebar on occasion with no success. Alt-tabbed out to do a search and see if anyone else was having the issue (I couldn't find any).. and when I clicked back onto the game, it loaded fine.

After that annoyance, I was passively impressed. The game played better than I was expecting it to, and it looked gorgeous. I wasn't 'wowed' or anything, but very few titles can manage to do that to me these days.

Shotgun felt a little quiet to me, though.. and was the first thing I pretty much noted to myself upon testing it out.

Unlike Pho, I did not find all the secrets.. missing one somewhere along the line. Oh well. :/

..I'll definitely pick it up at some point. Need to let the ol' wallet regenerate a little first, since I've been giving in to spending urges a bit lately.

It's worth mentioning that due to the game's weird button prompt issues I never figured out how to get into the "dossier"; the game never told me the right button and I couldn't find it either by hunting through the keyboard or through the key config menu. Consequently I never figured out how to activate the weapon upgrades (not the mods you get from drones) until just before the final boss.

I say this because after finally trying them out, I decided the upgrades for the pistol and explosive shells are the most worthwhile in the game and you should buy them all ASAP. They reduce the awkward warmup and cooldown times for those features, so it's much easier to use them on-the-fly without sitting and holding rightclick for an undue amount of time. Without the upgrades, the single-barrel shottie begins to feel obsolete midway through the game, but instant explosive shots really make it handy and usefull again.

I had this same experience with the civvies and hated it. They actually drown out the sounds of larger monsters making it easier for them to sneak up on you. That's actually the only reason to bother killing them because otherwise you'd have to go AFK for them to do any significant damage.

It's worse in multiplayer apparently, because the sound engine prioritizes multiple smaller sounds over singular heavy booms. Consequently, an enemy can fire the SSG right behind you, and you won't notice because the engine decides to omit the firing sound to make room for the 20+ pellet impact sounds coming from the wall some distance away. Popular youtubers like Total Biscuit were complaining about this before the game was even released.

Anyway, it's part of the reason in my co-op maps I'm only including the possessed with the orange projectiles and the red beam. The civvies just make excessive noise without contributing anything meaningful to combat.

Yeah, in-fighting is mostly limited to scripted sequences later in the game and - I just learned - to a few specific monsters which are more prone to it.

When I was working on a co-op map last night, I was trying to troubleshoot a bug where random amounts of monsters midway through the level were just not appearing. Then I began to notice pools of blood in these empty areas and occasional noise as if combat was going on in adjacent rooms.

Eventually I figured out that Hell Knights and Barons resort to bullying other demons if they don't have a player to chase and haven't been assigned to any other specific actions. Consequently you rarely see Hell Knights in-fighting during campaign where all encounters have been tightly scripted, but if you drop a hellknight in your level without keeping him in a monster closet till the player shows up, he will begin systematically exterminating the rest of your monsters.

This was only a theory, until I walked into a room to find a hellknight stomping around in circles trying to punch a lost soul that was hovering just above his reach. This must have been going on in loop for the preceding two minutes because I could hear the noise and saw the ground shaking from the other end of the map.

In fact I wonder if it's exclusively Lost Souls which send other monsters into a frenzy. There is a sliver of lore in the dossier which mentions that they have a "bottom feeder" status in hell and are loathed and looked down upon by the other demon classes.

Still, the lack of in-fighting in other situations becomes a problem because larger monsters are so prone to blocking the fire of anyone behind them. In OG Doom, pinkies would take stray imp fireballs and immediately retaliate, living on to chase you down. In my Doom 4 co-op maps, pinkies that charge out in front of imps frequently just die from all the friendly fire they're taking without sticking up for themselves (particularly since they have a crit box IN THEIR BACKS).

I finished Doom the other night, and played UAC on Ultra-Nightmare tonight.  Here's what I think.

Graphics:  Very well done overall.  I didn't find much low-resolution stuff.  Effects looked good, texturing looked very good on pretty much everything.  I can't play at super high-resolutions and I had to tone down some settings to keep the framerate smooth, but I was able to maintain 60FPS on a GeForce 670 at 1152x864.  I keep the FOV at 90.  I'm on a CRT screen still since LCD's cause me problems, and that's a comfortable resolution to balance detail with performance.  My lack of a wider screen hampers peripheral vision in combat quite a bit, but I'm used to that from Quake.  I couldn't test Vulkan against OpenGL since I have 2GB video memory on Windows 7, which is unsupported.

Sound:  This is one area where there was a lot of room for improvement.  The weapons sounded OK, with some sounding excellent, but the monsters suffered a lot in this department, along with ambience as well.  Some monsters like the aforementioned possessed made a lot of noise, pinkies were definitely noisy, while others made hardly any sound.  This was a serious step backward from Doom 3, where the sound made 50% of the game's atmosphere.

Environments:  I'm a bit mixed on this one.  There were basically 3 types of environment:  UAC standard tech, Mars outdoors, and Hell.  The UAC environments were OK, though I felt there should have been more variation, and the Hell environments were just completely off.  It felt like two colors were used:  Yellow for the lighting and sky, and light grey for all the rocks and bone (and people complained about Quake being brown!).  One area being like this would be fine, but Doom 3's Hell was more convincing, and Doom 1/2 had variations between marble, wood, stone, and what have you.

Weapons:  The weapons were pretty solid, though the pistol and shotgun felt comparatively weak and lacking at the beginning.  I think this is primarily due to the soldiers requiring too many hits to bring down.  I'll break down each weapon:

Pistol - OK for softening up Possessed.  The charged shot, once upgraded, was very useful for distant headshots and setting off barrels.  It's worth upgrading as without the upgrades the charge time is abysmal.

Shotgun - OK for blasting imps up close, a bit strong on Possessed (they gib easily), and a bit weak against Soldiers unless you're point-blank.

Charged Shot Upgrade - Useless, except to deplete your ammo.  It uses 3 shells when your ammo supply is limited to 20, and in a large fight you'll be back to using the pistol before you can blink.

Explosive Shot Upgrade - Absolutely awesome.  This upgrade is still useful late into the game since it basically one-shots Imps and Soldiers at a distance and is quick to use.

Super Shotgun - Really, really important to surviving once you start running into Hell Knights.  It behaves just as you'd expect it to.  Upgraded it's even better.  I found that with weapon mastery it only uses one shell per shot but has the same spread.  This effectively doubles your ammo capacity, as well as allows for quick follow-up shots.  This became my go-to gun for a lot of situations.

Heavy Assault Rifle - Kind of like the old Doom Chaingun, but without the first-shot accuracy.  I found it mainly good for when I was low on shells and needed to still shoot stuff.  It was also good when in close-quarters and using explosive shells was a bad idea.

Scope Upgrade - OK I suppose.  I rarely used this except to get a good look at a distant spot, as in most fights you're on the move and zooming is a bad idea.  For something really distant I'd use the pistol to snipe it since it doesn't use ammo.

Mini-Missile Upgrade - This was a fun toy, especially after getting mastery.  Since the missiles kind-of track, it made it possible to soften up a charging Hell-Knight or a distant Caco before they got into SSG range.

Rocket Launcher - Absolutely fantastic for obliterating Imps and Soldiers.  In later fights I'd get tired of them chewing my armor off by flanking while I was trying to deal with a larger monster as I favored a certain rune that gave me unlimited ammo - so long as I had enough armor.  I found that splattering these pests then going after the larger prey helped tremendously.

Remote Detonation Upgrade - More useful than I thought, especially after getting mastery since it allowed a double-dose of splash damage if timed right.

Homing Lock-on Upgrade - I didn't use this, except to get Mastery achievement.  Like Charged Shot, it's an ammo siphon and you sacrifice splash damage for homing ability.  Since everything gets close to you at some point I found this to be fairly useless.

Plasma Rifle - Pretty much the projectile hose it should be, though I did not care for the projectile model or the firing sound.

Heat Blast Upgrade - I did not find this to be very useful.  You had to use a lot of ammo to charge it up, and switching weapons causes you to lose the heat charge.  With Mastery it did enough damage to wipe out a bunch of lesser monsters, but the other upgrade seemed to be a much better choice.

Stun Bomb - I think I used the Plasma Rifle for these more than I did actual plasma.  This was a GODSEND for dealing with Summoners, and was a great tool for turning pretty much any other demon into a bullet sponge.

Gauss Cannon - I actually liked this far more than I expected.  It's a railgun, let's face it.  Normally that wouldn't belong in Doom, but after playing Quake so much everyone's used to having one.  This was the #1 weapon for dealing with Possessed Security since it obliterated their shields.

Scoped Upgrade - More useful than the scope on the Heavy Assault Rifle.  Any time I needed to hit big on something far away it was helpful, thought I liked the other upgrade better.

Siege Mode - Made you a sitting duck without upgrades, but once upgraded it could one-shot a Caco and drill a path through just about anything else.  I felt this was superior to the Scoped mode because the damage output was just huge.

Chaingun - The mild spin-up time restricted its usefulness to concentrating on one monster at first.  Once it was up to speed you could level it at its comrades and shred them pretty quick.  Ammo hungry though, but worth it at times.

Gatling Rotator - Allowed you to spin the gun up before firing... That's fine except that it's spinning without firing.  Since most demons spawn in during a fight, this was of limited use.  Upgrades might help, but I used the other upgrade most.

Portable Turret - Turned the slow-firing Chaingun into a Strogg-style high-speed death blender.  Basically you got 3 chainguns for the price of 1, but at triple the ammo cost and it would overheat - until you got Mastery.  The firing rate was the draw here, especially because I used the Rich Get Richer rune so I'd have unlimited ammo.  That rune paired with this gun, as long as I avoided incoming fire I was able to shred everything in my path.  With Quad it was absolutely sick how destructive this upgrade was.  If I lost some armor I'd use the Armored Offensive rune, switch guns, and glory kill weak enemies until I had enough armor again to switch back to this gun.  To me, the only thing more destructive was the BFG, but it lacked the infinite ammo capability.

Chainsaw:  Do I even need to explain this?  What the chainsaw did to monsters was nothing short of beautiful.  I wish the alt-fire could have been used to make the chainsaw work "old-school" where it would just hurt stuff like in old Doom without doing the ultra-death move.  Still, great for when you needed to one-shot a strong demon or just needed an ammo replenish on a weaker one.

BFG9000:  It didn't work like the old BFG9000... in fact, I'm not sure exactly how it works other than the tracer beams and impact damage, but it cleared rooms and saved your ass when getting overwhelmed, as would happen late in the game where you had 20 demons on you and half of them were Mancubi or tougher.  The ammo restriction helped reign it in, and it felt balanced in that respect.  It also had the ability to stun boss-level enemies so that you could hammer on them with impunity for a few seconds.

To be continued....

Picking up where I left off...

Monsters:  Overall, the model work was well done, as well as the texturing.  I didn't notice the texture seams present in the Doom 3 models.  Animations seemed fluid and fitting.

Possessed Civvies/Unwilling:  They looked strange and were noisy.  Threat-wise they were a non-factor.  I found that they pretty much existed for two purposes:  Glory kills to get health and armor (or ammo, depending on rune usage), and for weapon mastery challenges.

Possessed Soldiers:  A lot more dangerous than I expected.  The spammy nature of their guns and a relatively high health for such a low monster made them a problem early in the game when ammo is sparse and you have no runes.  On Ultra-nightmare (I played just The UAC to get the achievement), I found 90% of the death markers from other players were from these guys, with an occasional imp thrown in.  In later levels they're still a nuisance as their projectile spam invariably finds a way of chewing your armor.  I used explosive shells or rockets on these guys whenever possible.

Possessed Security:  Serious pain in the ass, and thank God they're rare.  It takes an insane amount of damage to knock their shields down, and it takes half a second for them to reboot the shield - pretty BS on that part.  If more than one closes in on you then you're toast.  The Gauss Cannon was my favorite tool for killing these guys... otherwise you have to try to get a grenade or rocket behind them.

Possessed Engineers:  Easy frags, and useful for blowing up other Possessed.  Unless you're an idiot they'll never get close enough to do any damage.  Pistol is great for taking them down, or just lob a frag grenade and they'll pop.

Imps:  Individually weak, and easy to kill.  Much more mobile than I expected, and their fireballs fly pretty quick.  They're not much trouble alone, but they have a tendency to flank and attack from multiple directions.  They can be very good at sucker hits when fighting larger monsters, whittling down your armor.  If you know where one is it's not dangerous.  They tend to attack from where you don't expect at times, which is where they become more of a threat.  I'd say they have the best AI of any of the monsters.

Hell Knights:  I wasn't expecting these guys to be so fast at first, or melee-only since they look like the ones from Doom 3.  Once you know how they attack they're not difficult to put down, so long as you don't get cornered.  I liked the fact that they'd always come to you instead of hanging back and spamming projectiles.  They really help to mix the action up and keep you moving - either to get away so you can make a clean shot, or to get in close and chainsaw them.  Health-wise they felt about right for toughness.

Hell Razers:  Visually intimidating, but beyond that, they really were not much of a threat unless you stood still and let them target you.  I think these guys should have been more dangerous.  Great concept but poor execution, especially next to the AI for the Imps.

Pinkies/Spectres:  Noisy, ugly, and only dangerous if you let one run into you.  The main problem with these guys is only being vulnerable from behind, and tending to charge at you while you're dealing with another demon.  Alone, they're not hard to sidestep.  I've seen other monsters in other games with the weak spot on the back - Minotaurs in Legendary, and Berserkers in Shadow Warrior - and I think the Pinkies rank at the bottom for threat level compared to those guys.  Spectres were far too easy to see as well.  I expected them to be more invis than they were.

Revenants:  This has to be the most overhyped of the monsters.  In the multiplayer beta I'd get wasted by whoever was the Revenant pretty much constantly.  I expected them to be extremely dangerous.  I found the reality to be that the monster versions can't hit anything, their damage is weak, and they go down pretty easily.  The Revs in Doom 3 were more dangerous even though they were much slower.

Lost Souls:  I think they took our LSOV and ran with it.  They die easy, though getting hit by one hurts.  I really didn't like what they did with these visually or behavior wise.  The Lost Souls in Doom 1/2 were the best by far.

Cacodemons:  I'd say these top the list for nostalgia.  They behave as close to an original Doom monster as possible, actually make some noises when hurt, visually look the part, and do exactly what you'd expect a Cacodemon to do.  SSG'ing these felt like Doom.  I just miss the "bliblubrrbloblibble!" sound when they die.  The first time I heard that playing Doom I cackled for several minutes before I could continue.

Mancubus:  Damage sponges, but surprisingly not very dangerous unless you got in flamethrower range and stood still like a dolt.  The Doom 2 Mancs would spam fireballs like mad, which made them dangerous.  Doom 3/4 Mancs just don't have the damage saturation of the originals.  I was actually disappointed in how non-dangerous these were.

Cybermancubus:  When I saw this, I was expecting more than one type of monster to get cybernetic upgrades.  I thought... Ok, cyber Imps, cyber Hell Knights... what else might they have?  Nope, only the Mancs got it.  The acid puddles they shot were actually dangerous, but other than that, just a Manc with more health.

Baron of Hell:  Hell Knight Mark II, with some nostalgic appearance and some classic green fireball action.  I don't think one ever killed me as their size and threat level made them a primary target, but they definitely were dangerous.

Summoner:  This seemed to have replaced the Archvile as an enemy.  Why they changed the appearance and made it floaty I'm not sure, but its behavior screamed Archvile.  Not too tough, and I don't remember taking damage from one, but they were slippery to corner.  I found the Stun Bomb from the Plasma Rifle followed by some point-blank SSG dealt with them better than anything else.  I think aesthetically they should have stuck with the Archvile and made him run around fast again like in Doom 2.

To be continued again...

Runes:  I'm not going to itemize the entire list, as the runes are self-explanatory, but I'll list my favorites.  I did upgrade all my runes.

1:  Dazed and Confused.  Staggering the demons for longer not only helps with glory killing, but keeps them out of action longer if I can't get close enough to glory kill.  That helps in just about every situation.

2:  Armored Offensive.  Since armor is a 100% damage absorb, having armor is very important, and getting it for free by ripping apart some Possessed or Imps is very useful.  It's also important for my favorite rune, which is

3:  Rich Get Richer.  There's nothing better than having infinite ammo with which to shred demons with, especially bullet sponges like Mancubi.  Sure, you can chainsaw a demon to get an ammo restock, but this really helps going into a big fight where you need to save the gas for use on a larger demon later.

That's pretty much my favorite combination.  The other runes had their places, such as Saving Throw when fighting a boss.  I'd replace Dazed and Confused with Vacuum to help get items at range, and I'd replace Armored Offensive with Saving Throw if I took a bad hit.

Overall Gameplay:  The combination of fighting monsters and exploration did hearken back to old-school Doom, even if the bulk of the big fights were spawn-in.  There were spots where you'd find monsters just wandering around, but typically those were Possessed.  In-fighting was limited, and I saw most of it when there were high-level and low-level demons mixed and out of range of the player.  Typically the high-level demons would attack the lower level ones.  I didn't see much in-fighting when the player was in the fray, which was kind of a let down.  The addition of rechargeable grenades was helpful in a pinch, and the siphon grenades really helped in big fights where you could tag a Manc pretty easy for some health, or in boss fights where health was extremely sparse.  The hologram didn't feel that useful... certainly not nearly as useful as a Holoduke would be.  It lasted too short a time, and being stationary didn't provide much of a diversion.  A temporary invisibility would have been much more fun.

The use of runes, weapon upgrades Praetor Suit upgrades, and Argent upgrades added more depth to the gameplay.  The first FPS I saw add RPG-style elements like this was Tron 2.0, and it did it extremely well.  The reboot of Shadow Warrior also did this to good effect.  I think this was a plus for the game, as it let you adapt your playing style along the way as opposed to just "find bigger gun, fight bigger monster, got all guns, fight lots of bigger monsters".  The presence of Quake-style powerups was a twist.  Haste and Quad Damage in DOOM?  My favorite powerup was Berserk, which gets me to the subject of glory kills.  Some people said it's a rip from Brutal Doom.  I must admit that I've not gotten around to Brutal Doom, so I'll have to take their word on it, but I found glory kills to just be addictively fun, especially when I learned that they're situational depending on what part of a demon you targeted and if you were near a wall.  The Berserk kills were just fantastic.  You actually literally rip and tear demons apart.  The first time I saw an imp's head get ripped open and watched those green armored hands rip out an imp's heart I was in heaven.  Sadistic?  No, they're demons.  They deserve it, especially considering what they do to you if you die.  Personally I like the glory kill mechanic, and even more that it grants you health along the way.  You get rewarded for taking down demons and it keeps the fight going.  The mechanic works in that respect.

Story and Flow:  This is where the game is weakest I think.  Doom 3 had a believable storyline, the teleportation experiments fit in with classic Doom lore, and it felt more like a real future.  Doom 4's story felt very disjointed.  The UAC's "cult" mindset was a bit over the top.  There was very little NPC interaction, which I was OK with.  Where I had a bit more trouble was with the concept of Argent energy being a kind of McGuffin.  In the previous Doom games it was the teleportation experiments that led to the demonic invasion, and that was enough.  Same with Quake (Slipgates led to Lovecraftian horrors invading) and Half-Life (aliens instead of demons).  The mission flow wasn't as clean as in Doom 3, and the environments reflected a lack of dedicated purpose in many places.  The combat and pure slaughter of hellspawn makes up for this, but it would have been nice to see some more interesting and varied purpose-built environments.  Doom 3 just kills Doom 4 in the story department.  The addition of the collectibles and classic levels was a great nostalgia nod, and having the built-in model viewer as a reward for finding the collectibles let me examine the model detail.  Pretty impressive on the guns, thought I do have a nitpick on the Heavy Assault Rifle model:  They installed the front iron sight where the rear sight goes and vice-versa, and also the sights don't clear the top of the gun.  OOPS!  :smirk:

Multiplayer:  I haven't played it since the public beta, so no comments there.

Snapmap:  I haven't messed with it, so no comments there.

Final Thoughts:  Definitely worth the purchase to slaughter hellspawn this way.  The combat is fast paced, the guns don't suck, and there's plenty to discover if you want to look around.  I'm looking forward to seeing what they do from here in the campaign department.  Hopefully a mission pack DLC is coming at some point.  They left the ending open for one.

I rolled with Blood Fueled(almost non-negotiable for Angs7 :doom_love: ) and whatever resource I was currently having issues with (Ammo Boost, Armored Offensive, or Seek and Destroy)

There was a big update to SnapMap last week. Aside from adding highly publicized hell modules and option to exceed the paltyu 2-gun inventory, there were a few lesser-known benefits:

1) A variant of the campaign's energy pistol is now available for custom maps. Instead of infinite ammo, it consumes plasma cells, and in return it does a lot more damage. I had to retune the health of all the enemies in my maps to compensate, but overall it's an improvement over the burst rifle I was using as the starter on my maps.

2) The "glory kill stagger" can now be turned off completely. This allows FAR more lattitude in balancing enemy health values, as before they had to be padded to compensate for the fact that they would basically stop fighting at ~33% health. Now that they continue fighting to their last breath, you can make enemies which are far more challenging without resorting to lazy bullet sponge design.

3) Overall, AI seems to have been silently adjusted in Snapmap to be more mobile and spend less time just standing around staring.

These points allow for much more interesting gameplay in custom maps. For a while I actually had to playtest my levels on a gamepad because the Snapmap AI was just too dumb to be challenging on mouse and keyboard. Now I can play on mouse and still suffer brutal deaths from low-level enemies despite their health levels being much lower than in Id's default campaign.

It sounds like they're actually listening to some complaints there.  I'm glad to see they're updating and supporting this instead of just leaving it "as-is".  Two gun limit sucks.