26th January 2017, 6:52 AM
I recall playing the original Doom and getting bored with it. I just wasn't very good at it, frankly, and gave up and cheated my way through both 1 and 2 (which are, basically, the same game). I've gone back to those games after being very surprised by Doom 4 and can report my opinion on it has entirely reversed. Firstly, I reconfigured the controls into something more modern and actually used a mouse to aim this time. Between my experience and the better controls, I've gone from barely surviving the lowest difficulty to generally trivializing Ultra-Violence (I still don't think I'm ready for Nightmare). When I'm not running through walls as an invincible god, I find I can actually appreciate the level design.
That's the crux of all this. I can now appreciate Doom (1 and 2) for it's level design, and it's that level design that kept me from getting bored through roughly 70 levels. A large part of this comes from treating the enemies as building blocks to make unique encounters across the whole game. When I move around an arena the way the designers intended me to (that is, without sucking), I can see how each one is intended to flow, and how to balance the threats and manage the large crowds. I also can appreciate Doom 4 for capturing this design so well. In spite of what others have complained about with Doom 4, it also became clear to me that Doom has ALWAYS had platforming elements, but they work pretty well. There's no jumping, but there is "vaulting" across gaps and working across very narrow paths, and a lot of it. Generally it's balanced pretty well and that leads to the design of level puzzles and secrets. With few exceptions, once I started learning the "language" of Doom's secrets, I started finding them far more easily and learned the "tells" the game uses to indicate them. There's only a few times when a secret came across as entirely too obscure for anyone to notice without randomly grunting into the walls. From using oddly lit patches on the ground to oddly textured walls to (my favorite) simply using the overall layout of an area to hint at a specific spot in it (sometimes literally forming arrows out of sections of the map pointing at one), the game has a very informed idea of how to make a secret.
It became clear that the designers really "got" level design. Much like Miyamoto and Zelda dungeons, this was a time when id too was coming up with a general design philosophy, and both Miyamoto and Romero came up with some of the same solutions. For example, the central "landmark" room is a modern staple of Zelda that started with Link to the Past and continues to this day. Doom too uses this same idea. I also really appreciate that if I can see a location, there's always a way to get there. Very little is purely "decorational" (aside from the occasional monster alcove that clearly has nothing in it worth reaching).
They also do a great job slowly ramping up difficulty and introducing concepts only to iterate further on them later in a level. Each level has a general "theme" with concepts you get taught and which later get taken to greater heights, such as one that starts out in a small room before "opening up" like an inverted Matryoshka doll into a much more massive level, with greater and greater numbers of enemies in each layer. The only exception to a general good flow from easier to harder levels is in the extra "bonus" episode in the first Doom, which unfortunately places it's two toughest levels at the very start (and they are ROUGH, especially the second level which dumps you into a massive room filled with cacodemons from the very start).
This game has earned my respect after years of me mocking it as a dumb shooter. If you never really got into it or grew out of it as a game that's "only interesting because it's gory", I'd give it another chance on it's own terms.
That's the crux of all this. I can now appreciate Doom (1 and 2) for it's level design, and it's that level design that kept me from getting bored through roughly 70 levels. A large part of this comes from treating the enemies as building blocks to make unique encounters across the whole game. When I move around an arena the way the designers intended me to (that is, without sucking), I can see how each one is intended to flow, and how to balance the threats and manage the large crowds. I also can appreciate Doom 4 for capturing this design so well. In spite of what others have complained about with Doom 4, it also became clear to me that Doom has ALWAYS had platforming elements, but they work pretty well. There's no jumping, but there is "vaulting" across gaps and working across very narrow paths, and a lot of it. Generally it's balanced pretty well and that leads to the design of level puzzles and secrets. With few exceptions, once I started learning the "language" of Doom's secrets, I started finding them far more easily and learned the "tells" the game uses to indicate them. There's only a few times when a secret came across as entirely too obscure for anyone to notice without randomly grunting into the walls. From using oddly lit patches on the ground to oddly textured walls to (my favorite) simply using the overall layout of an area to hint at a specific spot in it (sometimes literally forming arrows out of sections of the map pointing at one), the game has a very informed idea of how to make a secret.
It became clear that the designers really "got" level design. Much like Miyamoto and Zelda dungeons, this was a time when id too was coming up with a general design philosophy, and both Miyamoto and Romero came up with some of the same solutions. For example, the central "landmark" room is a modern staple of Zelda that started with Link to the Past and continues to this day. Doom too uses this same idea. I also really appreciate that if I can see a location, there's always a way to get there. Very little is purely "decorational" (aside from the occasional monster alcove that clearly has nothing in it worth reaching).
They also do a great job slowly ramping up difficulty and introducing concepts only to iterate further on them later in a level. Each level has a general "theme" with concepts you get taught and which later get taken to greater heights, such as one that starts out in a small room before "opening up" like an inverted Matryoshka doll into a much more massive level, with greater and greater numbers of enemies in each layer. The only exception to a general good flow from easier to harder levels is in the extra "bonus" episode in the first Doom, which unfortunately places it's two toughest levels at the very start (and they are ROUGH, especially the second level which dumps you into a massive room filled with cacodemons from the very start).
This game has earned my respect after years of me mocking it as a dumb shooter. If you never really got into it or grew out of it as a game that's "only interesting because it's gory", I'd give it another chance on it's own terms.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)