Hmm... not sure I'd agree. I mean, there's certainly strategy and resource management to Doom. Resource management in particular is a huge part of gameplay. But due to the nature of a lot of enemy attacks (at least in 1), rushing in guns blazing IS the name of the game. At least when compared with the 3d Realms shooters, and with The New Order (which I actually found annoyingly cover-focused).

Sure, it's not as far in the "guns blazing" direction as Serious Sam or Painkiller, but in the realm of FPSs--even FPSs of its day--I'd say it's more toward that.

I understand what you mean but in my experience that's practically just not true. As in, the gameplay of first person shooters is in my experience never actually crippled on PC even if they are multiplatform titles, at least when it comes to shooters co-developed for the X360/PS3 generation or later (I can confirm your thesis for PS2 generation shooters and earlier, however) and I have no doubts that Doom 4 will be a much better shooter than Rise of the Triad and Shadow Warrior in every way, despite the latter two having been PC exclusives. I've played tons of multiplatform shooters and never do I feel that the gameplay is slowed down, too easy, not "hardcore" enough because of the console versions. I'm not sure if the developers do many adjustments for each platform or if console shooters have simply become more hardcore over the years (frankly playing even console exclusive shooters like Killzone it sure is the impression I get, though) but I can't complain at all.

Frankly I think that Doom was pretty open to different play styles, as was Quake 1. To me the beauty of the old ID shooters was that you could play them comparably carefully, going slowly and working systematically, but the gameplay also supported ridiculously fast playstyles where you would indeed go in guns blazing and could largely avoid attacks by maneuvering instead of interrupting the line of sight by using cover. I mean, when I honestly think about how my buddies and I played Doom back in the day, it was an exploration game to us where we had trouble navigating through the maze-like levels and even - in retrospect - trivial challenges intimidated us and resulted in us dying regularly. It took me a lot of experience with Doom to begin playing it the way it is remembered now by the hardcore veterans.

I'm afraid you're mistaken. Mouse aiming was most definitely a thing on PC FPS going back to at least Wolf3D. You may be thinking about freelook which didn't catch on until some time after Quake*.

Here's someone asking John Romero about the subject:
https://twitter.com/romero/status/569772884089901056

M+KB is a big deal in vanilla unmodded DOOM. It's essential for fluid circle strafing and "standing your ground" style crowd control. A smaller example: The pistol is almost useless with just the keyboard because your accuracy is crap. A desperation weapon. With the mouse it's like a lower tier chaingun.


We may have a disagreement about what DOOM is so I'm not going to pick on your DOOM slow pacing comment/ heresy. ;)



*Quake had freelook in its original release but you had to enter a console command to enable to it.

Here's what I like:
The visual design.

Here's what I don't like:
Everything else.

The level design looks pretty bad from a gameplay perspective. I hope that sequence is not representative of the game as a whole.

The framerate seems unimpressive, to say the least. Not exactly smooth sailing.

The weapon selection wheel, including fancy slow-mo effects is horribad.

I sure as hell hope that motion blur can be switched off completely. Damn, that looked awful.

The special takedown sequences get really repetitive really quickly. Why not just shoot the enemies in the face and get it over with?

True. There are some games where I appreciate this kind of stuff but all good examples I can think of are third person shooters and in all of them it contributed to the gameplay in some sensible way. Here it already seemed like a boring nuissance in the trailer, I guess it just can't really work well as a game mechanic in a first person game. It's kinda funny, the first FPS where I remember seeing this kind of stuff was Call of Duty 3, it was novel eye candy that was good for advertising back then but also there it instantly became obvious that it didn't really contribute to the game in any way and thankfully they used it only a few times. It's kinda minblowing that Doom 4 is trying to impress people with that same stupid idea almost ten years later.

I suppose it also depends on which enemies you happen to be fighting. A crowd of imps? Dash in there and go nuts with the shotgun. Archvile? Better find some cover, son. Also depends on the level layout (Doom always did a fantastic job of varying the gameplay with just its level design).

This looks promising.I can't say I care for the amount of highlighting, but at least it looks like they're not fucking the game up like they did with the last one. This at least looks like a Doom game. Or at least what a Doom game would be like with modern hardware.

Doom 3 would have been a perfectly decent game if they had given it a different name, but it was a terrible Doom game.
Mouse aiming wasn't a thing until Quake. There was the option of using a mouse, but in Wolf 3D and, IIRC, Doom, it was coupled to your movements so calling it mouse aiming is a bit disingenuous.

And it was horrible. I'd much rather be using a game pad than try to play like that at the time. I tried it a few times and it just didn't seem to do anything positive. At least with Quake one could see a benefit to it even before learning to do it properly.

Yes, you proved 2 things:
a) M+K combo is more efficient, which is something I never disputed
b) It wasn't until Quake that design around freelook (you're right) started emerging. It's quite logical - even in 1993, usage of mouse wasn't quite as widespread as to rely on your customers both having it and being comfortable with using it to play videogames. I'd hazard a guess that most gamers had their mice even back then, but I don't really have data to back that up.

Look, I love Doom. I still play it - admittedly with Brutal Doom mod, which I would never touch without a mouse since it removes autoaim (or, to put it better, which I set to remove autoaim). Nonetheless, it's just not nearly as fast-paced as games designed around the use of mouse control, such as Painkiller, later Tribes games, Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 etc. And it really can't be - due to hitscan weaponry, unless you know the game very well, rushing ahead into a pack of monsters has a tendency of getting you killed.

That's true, but many enemy types and level portions did support very different play styles, not to mention that the different weapons supported/required them.

Those kill animations... eh, I don't know. Looks like eye candy cumshots for for the ADD crowd. By the time the player will have seen the same chainsaw death animation for the seven millionth time they'll probably be ready to impale themselves on the chainsaw just to make the pain stop.

It'll be like the Mortal Kombat X-ray mode thing. Ask yourself, how long did it take for those to go from 'Holy Shit that's awesome!' To 'Jesus Christ, this skull smasher animation AGAIN?!' followed by *button smash button smash button smash*. Now put that concept in a Doom game where it will happen X=times per level, then multiply that by an order of magnitude for restarts or replays.

I think the software monkeys in the game labs have tried to add too many bananas to the equation.

The game definitely has my attention. When I get a new console (my laptop wouldn't be able to handle it), I will get Doom 4.

Better than DOOM 3. After watching their conference, I guess they have a similar goal to revive Quake too.