My biggest complaint about Doom 4 is the recycled monster designs from Doom 3. I thought we were past this stupid "no horns" hell knight design from 2004. Modders created a horned hell baron variant which was 10x better and showed that the Doom3/movie hell knight really was due to be scrapped. The vanilla Doom 3 imp is easier to ignore, but still underwhelming.

The single barrel shotgun spread, despite its lateral crosshair design, appears closer to its crappy Doom 3 width and doesn't inspire confidence. It really should have been closer to the spread sizes of the single barrel in Brutal Doom, Doom 1, and Quake 2.

In general, the wide open spaces are a huge improvement over Doom 3, but it still kinda feels like just a BFG Edition mission pack with brighter lighting and melee executions tacked on. The melee mechanics would have been impressive if Brutal Doom never existed, but I am just over the gimmick by now. I also think this mechanic would be much better if it was dependant on a temporary quad-esqye variant of the berserk powerup. As is, having the ability to rip enemies apart at any time ruins any sense of fear they might otherwise instill.

The slow-mo during weapon switching is silly, because even on consoles, creating insta-binds which work on gamepad is pretty easy (i have played Q3 bots this way). I have a bad feeling that the game will still force you to have a second of slow-mo even on PC when you are insta-swapping with the keyboard, which would pretty much ruin the advantage of a 10 gun system.

Coloring the helmet green instead of blue/grey makes it look too much like Master Chief instead of Doom Guy. Such an obvious, easy mistake to avoid.

The enemy behavior appears faster than Doom 3, but still pretty slow. I don't see imps bouncing off the walls, nor hell knights dodging about as they chuck fireballs...which is pretty much what is needed to maintain a challenge in a modern arcade shooter. In general it seems too easy to gib high level enemies with only one or two long-range SSG blasts.

The lack of puzzles and backtracking reminds me of Painkiller. It seems like you are just running and gunning blindly through the set pieces forever, which omits a major part of what made the original games fun.

The 2D ammo icons dropping off of enemies seems really immersion-breaking and silly to me. Looting realistic ammo boxes off of enemies which actually used those weapons was more logical, AND more challenging, as too many firefights with the wrong enemies could deplete your ammo. It appears that in Doom 4, as long as you keep doing fatalities, you will never actually have to hunt for ammo.

If it has co-op, it will probably be reasonably entertaining, but the lack of a fresh new take on the monsters and weapons makes it all seem sort of mediocre and underwhelming. It's not the brand new re-imagining of Doom we've been waiting for since 2004, it's more like an incremental improvement to the Doom 3 formula.

EDIT - At least they did the cacos right:



But that Hell Knight REALLY needs to go.

Tough crowd we got here.  The purist in me likes that.  I'm hoping they feel the pressure to improve on what we're seeing so far and make it into something you guys can like. 

One thing I will admit, after giving it some thought, is that I may be being too hard about the apparent speed, enemy population and the health drops. There are two key things we don't know right now: What difficulty level is this footage from, and how does the difficulty scale?

A great deal of Doom's first epsode is rather empty on the two lowest difficulties. Higher difficulties are still sparse compared to later episodes and especially areas in Plutonia, but the population does increase notably with your chosen skill level.

And with the health drops... do those decrease in number, possibly to near-zero, as the difficulty rises? Could it be that we'll be required to play at a level comparable to Ultraviolence to get an "authentic" Doom experience?

I'd be fine with that.

Yeah... DooM is seeming more derivative these days and not as original as it once was... Visually I mean, I hope the music is just as good as in the original two games.

I have to agree with the general sentiment; the art design is still essentially Doom 3, which always felt pretty bland to me. Outside of that, the gameplay itself looks promising. I just hope all of the parkour and melee are done by the player, ala Brink, and not semi-scripted scenes.

I still would prefer a proper sequel to Quake, with Lovecraftian beasties instead of Strogg!

I always felt that Quake 4's art direction was very much in line with that of Doom 3, though. I'm not a fan of it in either case, but it seemed to me that they were attempting a similarly sleek look for all of the enemies.

I still like the plot point of becoming a Strogg! Quake 4 had that going for it, at least.

Ah, I can't say I recall much in the way of specific adverts from its lead up. That's pretty sad, though. It's also the exact reason I watch "teasers" in place of "trailers" for films that I'm interested in.

Yeah I kinda wish Quake 2 DIDN'T have a sequel, Or that enemy territory game, both were pretty meh I thought.

To be honest I miss the good old days when a game was just... a game, now everyone's got a story to tell, and that kinda ruins the possibility of co-op.

Guilty.
Kinda sums up how I tend to play coop in the old games.. which I admit does kinda ruin it. But I mean, if I can play the game solo, adding more people into the mix really only makes it easier.
I remember in a Doom coop once with two others, they had friendly fire on. I'm sure I ate more than a few 'accidental' shots for my Rambo antics.. which was indeed confirmed to me later.

Now if they make a specific coop option instead of it just being 'single player with more people'.. then I think things might work better.