Chattycast 93: DOOM ED
Doom! Doom! Dooooooooooooooooom!
Doom is due out this week, marking the first attempt at a franchise revival since Doom Resurrection. The franchise helped popularize the FPS genre, but this reboot appears to be taking some notes from its descendants.
This week, the Chattycast takes a retrospective look at the Doom franchise, as well as a look forward to this new installment. What are some of your favorite memories of Doom games? What qualities define a game as fitting of the name? Is there space in the FPS market for a throwback? How does Doom stay relevant?
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, Watch the Chattycast get DOOMED at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT
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Doom has a faux hawk?
NBA is less popular today than it was in the 90s?
I just rage quit the Chattycast. -
My favorite Doom moment was when the monster came out of the closet.
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Heck I'll take a swing at the questions.
Favorite memories: LANning the multiplayer with other guys in my research group, using SGI workstations out in the temporary trailer where we had our offices. The campus network admin got on our case at one point because the earlier versions of Doom multiplayer had a problem that would cause it to flood the local network with traffic, and we were playing... quite frequently.
That was the first online multiplayer game I really got stuck into. I still remember the quirks of some of the players, like the guy that would always charge straight at the nearest player without picking up any weapons, and the guy who always hung back and created a wall of those slow rockets. Also the one guy who was head-and-shoulders above the rest of us and eventually convinced us to switch to using the mouse for aiming. It sounded crazy, but it worked!
I didn't really dig into the singleplayer until many years later, but Entity's answer is pretty good. There's an early level (E1M2?) that has a dark maze with some flickering lights that was unusually tense. Also the snickery-garbly-snuffly noise of monsters somewhere around the corner or behind a nearby wall, super spooky. The "right" way to play singleplayer Doom these days is like an arcade shooter, but initially I kind of played it like Alien Isolation.
A new game doesn't have to be a Doom clone (ha ha) to be "fitting of the name". For my tastes it mainly just needs to have a lot of monsters with varied behaviors, including weak enemies that you can OHK. Guns that are satisfying to use. A minimum of RPG-ish choices or anything else that pulls you out of paying attention to the level. Topologically interesting levels and a map to fill out.
To get finer-grained, this is a good video if I'm remembering correctly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q (although I haven't rewatched it recently)
Some interesting links in that video description too, particularly Matthias Worch's talk about Doom 2 combat ( http://www.worch.com/2014/03/23/decisions-that-matter/#more-17 ).
There's plenty of "space in the market" for a "relevant" game that hits those notes, and it doesn't have to be a "throwback" in the way you're probably meaning it.
New-Doom is going to be different from Doom in a lot of ways, and there's no way it can be genre-defining like Doom, but it still has room to be a good fun doom-y game if id/Bethesda is up for that. Fingers crossed.
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