Doom, more than any other sequel or reboot in recent memory, is defiantly, well, Doom-like. That might sound like a strange statement to make, but such confident force of identity is surprisingly rare in today’s games. As budgets spiral, and risks get higher, and entire trends are born and die during the length of the development cycle, even the most established of franchises find themselves partaking in a bit of portmanteau design. Call of Duty now contains as much Titanfall and Mirror’s Edge as Modern Warfare. Every Ubisoft game is Assassin’s Creed to some degree, and even Master Chief has learned to doublejump and ground-pound.
So you might have expected this new Doom, coming 12 years after the series’ last entry – and with a cancelled, military FPS-style reboot in the interim – to feel like a modern fashionista dressed in ironic retro garb. Like Kate Moss wearing a £1,000 coat made of poorly rendered guts. But the reality could not be further removed. This is a Doom that knows what its name means. This is a Doom that knows how important, clever and fun Doom can be. It knows that it doesn’t need to be anything lse, and it certainly doesn’t want to be. And so, just like the 1993 original, it is a game simply called Doom that plays like Doom, because it knows that that is enough. In fact, in 2016, it’s about the most exhilarating idea around.
Doom with a view
Not that there’s anything simple or basic going on here. While Doom (2016) impales its colours – mostly red – to the original game’s bloody mast with pride, its reinvention of those values is as intelligent and layered as any major action game design you’d care to mention. And more so than most. There’s a vast amount of depth supporting all of those whirling chainsaws, volleys of plasma and torrents of endless, exploding viscera. You might not notice it as you hurtle around scenery, leap over cover and rain down rockets upon the baying hordes of Hell. But it’s there, every step of the way, ensuring that Doom demands as much strategic, on-the-fly thinking as a well-balanced RTS or fighting game, at the same time that its hectic buzz of action supercharges your adrenal gland to the level of a minor medical emergency.
As executive producer Marty Stratton confirms when we discuss the ferocious intelligence at the heart of Doom’s incendiary combat system, every element of the game is carefully tuned in terms of its effect on the wider ecosystem. Nothing is designed in isolation. Because Doom is as much about how you kill as what you kill. Every weapon is a part of a puzzle and each enemy class a chess piece.
“When you come into a space and you see these pieces, it starts a cycle of thought for you, like, ‘I’ve got to take this person out, or this enemy. Because they do X, and I’m carrying this weapon, so I’m going to do this, and then I’m going to swap weapons to handle these closer-range guys...’
“Really a fundamental part of the fun of the game is that mental chess match you play with the AI. That kind of symbiotic relationship between the guns and the demons has been very organic as we’ve developed the AI, and as we’ve developed the systems behind the game.”
We’re all Doomed
It shows. Everything in Doom has purpose. Nothing exists just for the gleeful spectacle of spontaneous bodily carnage. Okay, not just for that. Take the weapon set. While Doom’s array of legendary remote dismemberment options is vast, and each tool ever-present once you’ve collected it, every gun, no matter how extravagant, is the key to a particular lock. (If keys had the ability to spill the lock’s guts out.)
The rocket launcher, for instance, does what you’d expect, unleashing swift ordnance and considerable splash damage. It isn’t necessarily the instant killer you might expect, however, making it great for longrange crowd control and as a midrange duelling weapon against Hell’s bigger, tougher warriors.
The plasma rifle’s rapid-fire showers of fizzing hot death are a fantastic medium-range spam solution, but the gun’s secondary fire mode unleashes a weighty, area-of-effect blob which slowly murders any Hellspawn that lingers within it. Wade in there immediately afterward with the super shotgun, and Doom’s double-barreled reaper will win the day swiftly and decisively – as long as you can deftly manage the pace and flow of your actions as you chain together shots, reloads and evasions.
Doom is always moving, Doom is always thinking, and Doom is always changing. If you’re going to survive and conquer, you’re going to have to do the same, acting in the moment but also always just a step ahead, as you shape, reshape and direct the flow of battle with every piece of demon-evaporating kit you have.
Stratton perfectly captures its vibe: “when you’re playing the game, you almost feel like you’re your own fight choreographer”. Doom, you see, exists at the point where creativity and destruction coincide. And it’s a uniquely thrilling place to inhabit. But for all of the speed, noise, fire and fury, Doom is not a game that strives to overwhelm you. Rather, its intent is to keep you running on that bloody knife-edge between death and glory.
“Playing Doom is a rollercoaster ride, and it really should be a rollercoaster ride,” says Stratton. “What we’re trying to create are these moments of extreme power, [but] then you take a couple of hits and you’re like ‘Oh my god, I’m going to die!’ And then you bring yourself back – you pull out the chainsaw [handily mapped to down on the D-pad so you can whip it out at any time] or you pull out your BFG, and you bring yourself back from the brink of death, and then have this overwhelming sense of accomplishment.
“Or you’re halfway through a hard fight, and you think ‘I’m not gonna make it’ because two Barons of Hell just spawned. And then you look over and you see the Quad Damage power-up, and you run over and grab it and defeat them. The game is so thrilling when that component of it works. Really, creating that is just about making sure that all of the pieces are working together and that we’re giving players those opportunities to think, because most of the time that’s the challenge.”
Beyond the core back-and-forth, in-and-out of direct confrontation, Doom’s tactical smarts manifest in the form of its Glory Kills. Hilariously savage melee takedowns, resulting in glorious eruptions of viscera and eyeballs yanked out of sockets, these grim finishers also deliver bigger than usual drops of ammo and health. With shooting a nigh-constant requirement during engagements, and no regenerative health to babysit you through the giddy nightmare, Glory Kills provide an enjoyably tactical approach to survival.
Used all the health packs in the area too soon? Schoolboy error. But look around. Who or what can you kill quickly enough to fix your mistake and pull yourself back into the fight? Which enemy can you soften up fast enough to score the finisher before you drop, and how do you isolate him safely from the pack in order to execute the kill? You have three seconds to solve the problem. Don’t worry about showing your working – it’s not like our special red marking pen shows over the blood.
Once you’re up to speed though – and oh, what dizzying speed it is – you’ll find the power to shape your path across the redder-than-usual planet in less direct ways too. As Doom guides you through its full (very full) box of tricks – introducing things like the correct use of exploding barrels, and why you shouldn’t grab its most potent power-ups before you’re sure you know the full scale of your opposition, and how to use verticality via jump-pads and teleports to both attack and evade – it will also start to hand out the facility to customise your abilities, via points awarded for Glory Kills.
Don’t expect Mass Effect here. As should be clear by this point, Doom is Doom, and the tweaks it makes to refresh itself using (selectively implemented) modern systems and ideas are all to help deliver a fresher, better version of its true essence. It’s as much about making 2016 work for Doom as it is the inverse.
“I wouldn’t say that we’ve taken a step at all towards massive, sweeping RPG-type systems,” clarifies Stratton. “We’ve kept our upgrades and our progression around the types of things that really matter when you play Doom, which is your guns and making them better and more functional, and geared them more towards your personal preferences as to how you like to play. You upgrade these things in different areas, but they really all relate to the way you move and the way you shoot; the core fundamental principles of playing the game and having fun with the game.”
Fruit of the Doom
This stuff isn’t here to quieten down any component of Doom’s roaring combat engine, but rather to allow players to emphasise the elements they like best, once they find their own play style. You might, for instance, want to activate a perk that imparts a speed boost after every Glory Kill, making melee a more fundamental part of your navigation. Or you may switch on bigger ammo drops, if you’re the sort of player who likes to mark out their personal space with a perpetual cloud of bullets.
Best of all, these gameplay mods can be swapped in and out at any given time, in sympathy with Doom’s ever-changing demands. Another reminder that Doom is as much about the strategy as it is the slaughter.
If all these considerations sound exhausting, don’t worry. The gang at id remember that, despite the stereotype, the old-school FPS was as much about thoughtful exploration and intricate environmental details as it was clearing wave after wave of vicious Hellspawn. While it’s highly unlikely we’ll see the return of red and yellow keycard hunts, or sniffing around the edges of rooms for those invisible doors, nu-Doom is bringing that more sedate, cerebral element back too. And it looks like it’s doing it with a fair amount of creativity.
Imbuing Doom with a narrative was always going to be a tricky process, and an entirely unwelcome one were Doomguy ever to be forced to stop his rampage for a lengthy bout of emoting. Whatever opposition he may face from the denizens of Hell, it’s easy to imagine that his greatest enemy might be the cutscene. Hard to Glory Kill a .mov file, too. And so id seems to have taken inspiration, at least in part, from that other purveyor of undead arcanery, Dark Souls. If you stray from the beaten track and solve an environmental conundrum or two, you’ll find that Doom delivers backstory and information without ever pushing its tales in your face, as Stratton is keen to emphasise.
“We’ve tried to keep that out of the way of a player that just wants to have the music turned up through the game and blast through and kill demons,” he says. “But if you do slow down and you take those moments between combat to really discover what’s been going on – in the various ways that we present that information – there’s some really interesting stuff there that I think people who want to do that will discover.”
Those ‘various’ ways certainly look very Doom indeed at this stage. At one point in the campaign, Doomguy finds a locked door secured by a handprint scanner. He can’t activate it, but he can trigger a hologram recording of recent events in the room, which plays out for all the world like a sci-fi version of one of Dark Souls’ warning phantoms. A hapless marine appears in front of us, and is then immediately torn down and dragged away by a Hell Knight. If we follow the recording to discover the marine’s place of rest (in pieces), we can remove his hand and use it to open the door. Don’t ever think Doom’s downtime is going to be dull.
However fast or slow you take it, Doom’s campaign will eventually finish. There is, however, a solution. In fact, much like in the case of Mars’ reanimated zombie soldiers, the end is really only the beginning. Doom has a thing called SnapMap, and SnapMap might just be the most exciting thing to happen to the FPS this generation.
Essentially a very powerful suite of content creation tools, not dissimilar to Halo’s Forge, SnapMap evolves that functionality to deliver the nearest console gaming has to the PC’s modding scene. You’ll have all the expected, modular elements of the game’s design to play with – all the architecture, and the monsters, and the hardware. But you’ll also be able to define behaviour, game logic and event triggers. And as such, you’ll be able to build almost anything. Scripted, linear campaign levels, full of secrets and surprises? Easy. New multiplayer maps and multiplayer modes? No problem at all. Custom cutscenes? When the machinima community gets hold of this, you can expect YouTube to be flooded with hundreds of short films, each making up for the disappointment of the official Doom movie in their own way.
Old Doom, new tricks
Of course, as Forge’s pancakeflipping multiplayer mode has shown us, the true power of any creation suite is proved by how possible it is to fly in the face of the original game’s genre and intent. SnapMap has already thrown up non-violent memory tests and tower-defence modes. Stratton confirms that the system is going to be supported longterm, in-keeping with id’s plans for the whole game as a platform. In fact he sounds genuinely excited about it.
“If you were just to do a singleplayer DLC or a single-player extra mission or something like that – or even a multiplayer mission – that’s cool and everything, and we have plans along those lines as well,” he says. “But to be able to create more tools and more content that somebody else is going to expand on, and do things that you didn’t even think about when you were creating it, that’s really where it gets cool. And it’s where, as we feed the community, we’re excited about the life of the things that we create being extended and manipulated by somebody else.”
An infinite Doom generator, then? Like its own Hellish invasion, the game is busting rudely back through into the modern world, taking over hearts and minds, and then becoming a spawnpoint for potentially endless waves of its hectic, ingenious, intoxicating bloodbath. Like everything on show, that’s utterly, typically Doom. And after 23 years, we really wouldn’t have it any other way.