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Gnam
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http://www.polygon.com/e3/2016/6/12/1191...m-e3-2016-bethesda-softworks-id-softwareThe game's SnapMap tool will get new construction models, a new Hell visual theme, as well as new props, weapons and other items. Doom SnapMap will also get new logic options that will help enable "true single-player experiences" and bring the campaign's weapon wheel over. 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...
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Angst
Rabid Doomer
Team Member
Elite
  
Posts: 1011
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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...
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"Who says a chainsaw isn't a ranged weapon?"
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Phoenix
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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. 
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« Last Edit: 2016-06-14, 22:51 by Phoenix »
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  I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
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Angst
Rabid Doomer
Team Member
Elite
Posts: 1011
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Nice find on the sale  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) |
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"Who says a chainsaw isn't a ranged weapon?"
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Thomas Mink
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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.
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Gnam
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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'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. 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. 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. 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. 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). |
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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....
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Phoenix
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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...
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Phoenix
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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! 
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.
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Angst
Rabid Doomer
Team Member
Elite
Posts: 1011
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I rolled with Blood Fueled(almost non-negotiable for Angs7  ) and whatever resource I was currently having issues with (Ammo Boost, Armored Offensive, or Seek and Destroy) |
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Gnam
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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.
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« Last Edit: 2016-08-02, 22:38 by Gnam »
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