A little more about DOOM.

I am still playing this game. Which is unusual for me these days - to keep playing the same game for weeks.

The main experience that I am loving is big sprawling maps very cleverly designed. The juxtaposition of narrow walkways with open plazas, abrupt elevation changes, areas where you can fall to your death, obstacles... it all makes combat a fast-paced puzzle of the kind I remember from the old Doom days.

To address a few comments about glory kills from earlier in the thread about DOOM:
The glory kills are not an instant win button. As the game progresses and levels get bigger and there are more and varied types of monsters to fight, glory kills become an essential part of your strategy, but they do not erase the challenge. It is an added component to the battles which brings with it one more resource to manage. Yes, you are invulnerable during the glory kill animation, but the half second reorientation necessary when the animation ends counters any big advantage you got. Most glory kills net you very little health. The bigger the monster, the more difficult to get a good glory kill. You have to stagger it but not kill it, and you have to be close enough to initiate a glory kill - all while potentially surrounded by a whole bunch of other monsters. I think the glory kill system is very well balanced.

The secrets are very well done - in some ways even better than the original Doom secrets. No more blindly clicking on every wall panel to see if it opens. I always hated that. Now, it is finding the non-obvious jump to what doesn't quite look like a platform, spotting the exposed ductwork that you might just be able to reach and crawl along, and mostly, just not missing a whole section because you got turned around. The pattern is generally kill all the demons in an area and then explore for a while. I find that on the bigger levels I can find about 40% of the secrets on my first playthrough. I find that a pretty good workable percentage. I find enough to feel satisfied and good, but I am motivated to go back and look harder.

I find that I am playing the levels over and over. To find all the secrets. To play through the whole level without dying. Just like in the old days, I enter a level, get totally smashed because I didn't know what was coming. Then I play again and do better. Then I play again and have a better strategy for weapon and ammo management.
To address another complaint I've heard about DOOM - ammo is not so cheap and plentiful that it does not matter. Almost exactly like the first Doom games, there is always plenty of ammo. It never has been a game about scarce ammo and conservation. It is mostly about which weapon to use when. You'll need the rocket launcher for the Barons of Hell that are up above that ridge, so if you use all your rockets on the Cacodemons now, you will have to use a different weapon on the Barons, and it might not go so well for you. Yes, at the end of most levels, you will find enough ammo and health and armor to be fully restored, but that's part of the desing and balance, not a cheapening.

Another note about weapons - the addition of weapon mods and upgrades is wonderful. More to manage. Augment your playstyle, open up new possible playstyles, gives you another incentive to hunt for secrets - to get more upgrade tokens.

The runes challenges I'm not so crazy about. You find these floating glowing runestones periodically, and you can click on them to enter a one-off challenge arena. Kill 20 demons using exploding barrel damage in under 10 seconds using only your shotgun. That kind of challenge. And in return you get to equip the runestone - which gives you bonuses of dubious quality. The whole thing doesn't affect the balance, so good there. But, it seems besides the point and not as fun as the main game.

tl;dr - I am enjoying DOOM 2016 as much as I enjoyed Doom 2 during college.

Classic. Modern FPSes are too sluggish, limited and dour. Tiny levels, microtransactions, too many sequels, boring action, cringeworthy plots and overly focused on preparing the player for multiplayer.

Alright, here we go.
Wall of text incoming.


1. The bad thing about glory kills is that the health you get from them is based in your current health. Or rather, I think it is a 30% threshold. Yes, if you are very healthy, you will get only 4 health from every glory kill. But do a glory kill when you're below that threshold and you get healed for some nonsensical amount like 60 health. This directly rewards and compensates when somebody is playing bad. If the health from each enemy was a static amount, it wouldn't be so much of an issue and COULD substitute looking for health packs (which are almost completely useless in this game anyway). The only non-combat pickup I was grateful for was armor and the thing that puts you on 400HP (or 200 HP and 200 Armor if you want but armor is just another health bar in this game).

The glory kills can also be easily used to avoid damage that would have killed you otherwise, removing any consequence of your bad decisions. Cornered and there are 7 projectiles coming at me with no way to avoid them? Let me just immune them all by glory killing this imp and heal in the process. No, the complete invulnerability during glory kills was a mistake. It should have been a big reduction (like 80-90%) but not a "get outta jail free card".

And the worst offender is that the monsters are basically forced into their "glory kill me now" state unless you kill them with some big weapon (rocket launcher and BFG, maybe SSG). Where you got the notion that making enemies enter the stagger state is hard I have no idea. It is actually hard to kill them outright. The moment you want to just kill an enemy and not glory kill every single one of them with a weapon like the shotgun, the frustration begins as the enemies regain health upon entering and leaving their staggered state so you don't accidentally kill them, preventing fluid combat if you don't want to glory kill everything. It is obvious that the devs wanted you to glory kill through the entire game and any play-style deviating from that is hampered because of that, especially resource-wise.

2. I found 95% of the secrets on my first playthrough. There are also upgrades/map terminals in every level, revealing the entire map/detecting secrets and thus making any exploration void. Meanwhile, new secrets from original Dooms keep popping up to this day.

And no, secrets in the original Doom were not blindly humping every wall. A common misconception of amateur secret hunters. Vast majority of them is signified to you in some way. It could be anything from hearing a distant sound of a platform lowering or a door opening, differently colored wall, misaligned texture, strange light cast on the wall, bloodied wall, arrows visible only on the automap, finding secrets thanks to differently colored lines on the automap, shooting an unreachable switch, rocket jumping, a chain of timed switches and I could continue like this for a long time. Humping every wall in the level is the very last resort if you are adamant about finding that one last secret after you've cleared out the level. New Doom is "walk here, jump here" and you have found 90% of the secrets.

3. Exact opposite here. After 2 playthroughs where I finished the second one just for the sake of it, I have pretty much no desire to ever go back. The horrible checkpoint system probably has a lot to do with it. I'm still grinding my teeth when I think of the second level, Foundry. The save system killed all my desire to experiment with exploration. "Maybe I can jump here? *drowns in lava with no way out* - Damn it!!!.. Wait a sec... no... PLEASE NO, YOU'RE TELLING ME THIS WAS THE LAST CHECKPOINT????? GTFO!! **proceeds to alt-F4 the game**". So yeah, no thanks

4. The moment you have the chainsaw, ammo becomes absolutely irrelevant and that is a simple fact. Combine with the rune that gives you more ammo from kills for hilarious results. One kill gives you full ammo to everything after chainsawing an enemy as they literally explode with ammo of all kinds for some reason. Except the BFG of course but that is only because it is a special pickup.

Yes, most of the original Doom levels were oversaturated with ammo too (especially the shotgun), but you were at least punished for using one weapon all the time. Especially rockets could disappear in the blink of an eye and actually getting a decent supply of them back up took some time. Using plasma or chaingun all the time? Yes, you will have full ammo on everything else but there was no magic button to instantly replenish ammo for the weapons to full and continue using them through the entire game. And it's not like you need to use anything else other than the absolutely overpowered Gauss Cannon in the new Doom. It makes the game so trivial I banned myself from using it. Shoot it until you are out, chainsaw an enemy, repeat ad infinitum.

5. The upgrade system was rendered a joke by the genius checkpoint save system. "Oh, I have challenges for upgrade points. Nice. I just walked over a checkpoint a few seconds ago. Let me get all the challenges in this fight by doing the required things and then commit suicide so I can repeat it until I get them all as the progress for the challenges does not get reset because checkpoints can't handle it :). Good system you have there :)". Not to mention the fact that some of them are outright stupid. "Why yes, I would love to kill a mancubus with a pistol. Now if only that were possible because he is getting perpetually healed as the pistol does not have enough DPS to kill him before he gets out of the staggered state." If they at least didn't ask you to do outright stupid things, it could have been feasible.


Addendum:
At least one thing I can agree with you on. The weapon mods were nice and the fact they actually let you switch between both of them on the fly was very nice.


TLDR: The game is not nearly as good as it seems to be at first, especially for fans of old-school shooters.

Fair enough. Thanks!