A decade is an eternity in technology. When Doom 3 released in 2004, Twitter didn’t exist, there were no YouTube celebrities, and Apple had yet to invent the iPhone. In the 11 years since, Activision has released 19 Call of Duty games, the motion-gaming fad has come and gone, and console dominance has shifted from PlayStation to Xbox and back to PlayStation again. But some things are timeless, and regardless of era, seem comfortable in their own skin. Count Doom among those rarities.
The first-person shooter credited for popularizing the genre, Doom introduced many gamers to shareware, 3D environments, modding, and multiplayer deathmatches when it released in 1993. The breakneck pace of its combat, the colorful enemies, and explosive gunplay all left an indelible impression on gamers, becoming so popular that it was estimated to be installed on more computers than the Windows 95 operating system in late 1995. Mothers and politicians raged against the ultraviolence, yet the game’s allure was undeniable. But with only three numbered entries in the 22 years since its debut, it holds a unique position in the genre it started. Few first-person shooters today play like Doom, having grown in new directions by introducing more tactical gameplay, creating open worlds, or focusing solely on multiplayer.
As we sit down in the new Richardson, Texas headquarters of id Software, it’s clear much has changed at the studio in the last 11 years as well. The fiercely independent company joined the Bethesda family in 2009. Legendary programmer John Carmack joined fellow founders John Romero, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack among the ranks of id alumni, leaving the studio to pursue his interest in virtual reality technology by joining Oculus.
While the founders may be gone, Doom still carries forward. After playing extended sessions of the rebuilt singleplayer and multiplayer, it’s clear this game preserves all the signature elements of the original, while modernizing the long-dormant franchise with best-in-class graphics and a new user-generated content system unlike anything the studio has attempted before.
Doom is back, and after 11 years away, it looks poised to shake up the first-person shooter scene it put on the map.
JUMPING BACK INTO THE FRAY
When a game franchise takes this long between releases, the first question that naturally arises is, “What took so long?” With Doom, it’s complicated.
In the years after Doom 3 launched to strong sales and critical acclaim, id Software began working on the follow-up while also creating a new game called Rage. Once Rage shipped in 2011, the company focus shifted back to its most renowned franchise. But development had its hiccups, and when the studio took a step back two years later, it realized the game just “wasn’t Doom enough.” Rather than resuscitate the project, id and Bethesda agreed to scrap it altogether and start anew.
The reboot began in earnest in 2013 with a team led by Marty Stratton, a former Activision QA tester who worked his way up to the game-director role over the course of his 16 years working with id Software. Stratton assembled a team with a healthy mix of id veterans who have been with the studio for decades and new talent. Their first goal? Agree on a new tone.
In the early 2000s, id Software shifted the tone of its big franchises. Both Doom 3 and the Raven Software-developed 2009 Wolfenstein embraced a serious, moody aesthetic driven by atmospheric environments, leaving the comicbook sensibility and sense of humor found in the early titles by the wayside. This decision became a focal point of the reboot conversations.
“When we started talking about it we asked, ‘What are we going to be inspired by?’” Stratton recalls. “Are we going to be inspired by Doom 3 and the more modern Wolfenstein games, or are we going to be inspired by Doom and Doom II? What do we feel like a new Doom should feel like and what should the attitude be? We all just kind of gravitated to that original feel.”
Not only does the freewheeling combat vibe of the original play differently than Doom 3, it also feels unique in today’s shooter landscape. Outside of occasional releases like Painkiller and Bulletstorm, the majority of shooters (think Call of Duty, Battlefield, Gears of War) opt for uber-serious military campaigns about saving the world from doomsday scenarios. Not this new Doom.
“Our mantra for this game is ‘make it fun,’” says creative director Hugo Martin. “We try not to take ourselves too seriously. We’re not a campy game, but we’re not a serious spaceopera game either. We’re sort of in the middle.”
This back-to-the-basics approach wowed fans when id took the veil off the reboot at Bethesda’s E3 press conference last year. The crowd laughed delightfully at the over-thetop gore and cheered the explosive combat. The action felt completely in sync with the original, yet had a modern sheen that made Doom look new again. Leaving the impressive demo, many wondered aloud if id could sustain that breakneck pace of combat over the course of an entire campaign, or if it would eventually succumb to repetition.
CRASHING THE DEMON PARTY
Visiting Doom headquarters gave us our first chance to see for ourselves if a hands-on play session could hold a candle to the riveting E3 demo. We join the iconic space marine a few beats after he awakens in a UAC bunker and realizes something is amiss. After making his way across the unforgiving Martian surface, he enters an industrial building that houses a satellite. Once he re-aligns the dish array, he hopes to find out why the halls are flooded with demons and learn where he needs to point his rifle to stop the invasion.
My first taste of Doom combat comes with a few of The Possessed, which are shambling zombies roaming the facility that id Software has playfully dubbed as “fodder.” These undead pose no real threat to the space marine in and of themselves – one shot stuns the fodder, which opens up the opportunity to off them with a weapon, or move in for one of the entertaining glory kills. The player movement is fast and the controls on the Xbox One gamepad are incredibly responsive, which makes it easy to toy with these enemies. I stun one and then push in the right analog stick to initiate a glory kill. The marine rips the arm off the zombie and beats him to death with it. The next foe meets a similar fate as I finish it off by smashing its head into a wall.
“Once you get really good at the game, the fodder is still fun to play with because you are just playing with your food,” Martin says. “We always use the ‘Bruce Lee on a skateboard’ analogy because it’s kind of like in those martial-arts movies where he’s just taking out all these fodder guys any which way he wants. That’s what you feel like with the zombies; they’re just like punching bags.”
As I churn through ammunition taking out a roomful of enemies, I instinctually tap the X button to reload my shotgun or pistol, but this is a wasted motion. Doom sacrifices all at the altar of speed, which means FPS stand-bys like ammo reloading, cover systems, and sprinting are left by the wayside.
Coming to a computer terminal, I open up the blast shields over the condensation-covered windows to reveal the harsh environment of Mars. The UAC complex looks huge, but my gaze is pulled from this sprawling facility to a video recording from Dr. Olivia Pierce, who, based on first appearances, seems to have played a critical role in unleashing the demon presence. “My sisters and brothers, be thankful,” Pierce says. “You will be the first. You will have a seat alongside them just as I will in what will become the new world they create for us. Starting now.”
As I walk away from the console, Pierce continues her zealous rambling over the P.A. system, but my focus has returned to combat. Moving through a locker room, I find the iconic chainsaw buried in the torso of a fallen comrade. The space marine admires its satisfying hum in his hands before resuming the search for the satellite array control panel. A console in the next room triggers a visual recording, which id calls an echo, that shows a shambling zombie making its way through a locked door. I find another way into the room by moving through the ventilation system and vaulting up to a higher level.
The space marine is faster than nearly every demon he encounters, which means movement is the key to offensive strategy as well as defense. This maxim is put to the test as I enter a room housing a gore nest, a fleshy portal that serves as a conduit for the demons to cross into the world. When I rip the heart from the portal to shut it down, all hell breaks loose. Forget the monster closets of Doom 3; this is a demon avalanche. Suddenly, I’m severely outnumbered by more possessed zombies, imps, and hell knights. When the Nine Inch Nails-inspired soundtrack kicks into high gear, that’s my cue to start the bloodbath.
The studio playfully refers to these arena-style battles – which typically feature some element of verticality – as skateparks due to the freedom of movement and opportunity for improvisation it affords the player. But as I find out in my first attempt to clear the room, if you are caught flat footed, you don’t stand a chance in hell. “If you stand still, you’re going to die,” Martin says. “You have to move constantly. It’s about running, circle strafing, jumping, and using movement as a defense. Breaking line of sight with elements in the environment. If you try to hide behind something, the enemies will find you and they will kill you.”
In my second attempt I fly around the room, embracing the art of hip fire, dodging the incoming fireballs, and vaulting up and down the platforms to isolate enemies. Explosive barrels are conveniently placed around the environment, giving players the opportunity to take down multiple enemies at once with a well-timed shot. Ammo inevitably runs low during these encounters, which necessitates the execution of glory kills or the use of the trusty chainsaw. This one-hit-kill machine runs on fuel, and the number of fuel cells you have determines which types of enemies you can use it on. One cell is all you need to slice through fodder, but bigger enemies like the mancubus require multiple cells to do the job. Getting up close and personal with the enemies to hack at them is risky, but the reward is worth it. Each enemy downed by the chainsaw bursts like a piñata with health and ammo.
After I’m done painting the room with demon blood, I finally get a breather. This downtime can be used to hunt for narrative clues or the various secrets hidden in each level. In classic Doom tradition, you need to find colored keycards to progress through previously closed doors. It’s smart to note the location of these locked doors and backtrack once you have the required clearance to recover armor boosts, character upgrades, weapon mods, and even more advanced weapons you otherwise wouldn’t receive until later in the game. When I ask Stratton if id is taking inspiration from Wolfenstein: The New Order and hiding clever nods to the classic Doom games, he coyly says, “Hmm... Interesting. We have some doozies, that’s all I can say. We definitely pay our respects in many ways.”
After finding a mod that gives my shotgun a grenade-like ranged attack, I move through an airlock and get my first taste of the Martian surface. Another arena battle ensues with a variety of demons, and I’m amazed at how quickly I’ve grown comfortable with the pace of combat. I effortlessly bound up and down the environment, stringing together glory kills and always staying one-step ahead of my enemies. The area cleared, I make my way to the satellite array controls and the demo fades to black.
Before we jump into the second playable section of Doom, Stratton and Martin take us into id’s large stadium-seating theater to see combat from the perspective of a seasoned player. This demo of the Lazarus Facility takes place further into the game. The setting is the deepest, nastiest laboratory in the UAC encampment, where scientists and occultists were clearly experimenting with demonic powers. Demon corpses rest on lab tables and are suspended in large fluidfilled tubes. A public service announcement is blaring over the intercom system, warning that “demonic presence at unsafe levels.” The clean, sparse environment stands in stark contrast to the more industrial section we played through, speaking to the variety of locations id has planned for the game.
For this demo, Martin takes control of the space marine who is equipped with various upgrades focused on dexterity. These enhancements allow the player to swap weapons, mantle, and even execute glory kills more quickly. Each time Martin pulls off a finisher, he’s given a temporary speed gain. This boost is stackable if you execute several glory kills in a row, making this setup seem like a great option for speedrunners trying to cruise through the campaign in record time.
The speed of the combat during this demonstration is remarkable; it makes Call of Duty’s combat look like a senior citizen using a walker. Martin vaults around the environment, swapping between his Swissarmy-knife collection of weapons as the situation dictates and laying waste to the sea of demons in impressive fashion.
Watching stylish runs like this brings to mind all the eyepopping combat clips I’ve watched from skill-oriented games like Battlefield or Dishonored over the years. The combat gives players a lot of freedom of expression, and the feats of skill you can string together makes Doom highly watchable. “I think this game is going to be amazing from a player’s ‘Xbox record that,’ YouTube-posting perspective,” Stratton says.
HELLBOUND FURY
Our second playable demo transports us into Hell. The rocky environments, bloody pools, and stormy skies all call to mind the original environments, but the Doom reboot introduces more elements that wouldn’t feel out of place on an Iron Maiden cover.
This region of hell is called Titan’s Realm, a desolate graveyard to ancient, building-sized demons. The space marine must jump down into the dusty skeleton of one of these buried titans to recover an item called The Crucible. This setting wouldn’t be out of place if it were transposed to Double Fine’s Brütal Legend.
“Rock ‘n’ roll was our inspiration for everything,” Martin says. “There is a lot of heavy metal in our hell, and that is intentional. When you look at the original Doom, we always said it looks like the kind of stuff a 15-year-old would draw on the back of his notebook during math class. We really wanted the world to look like that – to have a certain personality that would shine through in everything we did. So we have a lot of skulls; it’s kind of over the top. A little bit of Castle Grayskull in there; it’s very He-Man.”
I enter through the skull of the giant cyberdemon and plummet hundreds of feet to a templelike building that houses the Crucible. My greeting party is a pair of cacodemons, one of the more advanced classic Doom enemies. To match the more formidable flying foes, I have access to nearly the full assortment of Doom weapons, including the chaingun, rocket launcher, and plasma rifle.
Hell has much more verticality than the UAC facilities, which makes me glad I now have the double-jump for traversal. Using the multiple levels is key to staying alive once the demons roll out heavy hitters like spectres, barons of hell, the revenant, lost souls, pinky, and the mancubus. Teleportals and jump pads are also conveniently placed around the arenas, affording me opportunities to flank unsuspecting enemies for a quick glory kill.
Accessing your full arsenal is key to surviving these more frenzied encounters. The plasma rifle mod that temporarily stuns an enemy is a great boon when surrounded by powerful enemies. Pulling up the weapon wheel also slows down time momentarily, which can help you get your head around the combat scenario before jumping back into the action.
Each enemy has a particular weakness you can exploit to make short work of some targets. For instance, pinky is fully armored in front, but when it charges you can double-jump over it and unload the super shotgun on its backside.
The demo ends in a flurry of attacks from barons of hell, spectres, and a summoner. I barely escape alive, which makes me marvel at the possibility of running through this area on the infamous nightmare difficulty.
DEATHMATCH REVIVAL
Doom may have introduced players to the term deathmatch, but if you didn’t play the first two entries in the mid ‘90s, you likely don’t associate the series with multiplayer. While the early Doom games allowed players to connect with each other via a network to face off head-to-head, id’s later series, Quake, is better known for popularizing competitive multiplayer in first-person shooters.
“When you look historically at what we’ve done, we haven’t done an internal multiplayer game or something we created or directed from the beginning since Quake III,” Stratton says. “Doom 3 had some multiplayer, but it wasn’t as widely played. The single-player content was what we were most concerned with.”
For the reboot, id is jumping back into the arena with an approach that captures what players loved about Doom I and II. The contemporary shooter landscape offers a lot of variety, from the tactical skirmishes of Counter-Strike to the fast-paced, close-quarters shoot-outs of Call of Duty. Doom eschews these modern approaches in favor of a speedoriented skirmish style that calls to mind the arena-shooter era when Quake and Unreal Tournament ruled the day. Why go with an old-school approach that seems at best marginalized and at worst abandoned in today’s market?
“It’s what we like to play,” Stratton says. “If you love what you’re doing, you’re going to do it really well.”
Along with its internal development team that drives the creative decision making, id Software enlisted the help of Austin-based studio Certain Affinity to build this new approach to multiplayer. Having designed maps for both Halo and Call of Duty, Certain Affinity is no stranger to the competitive shooter landscape.
As you would expect from an arena shooter, Doom multiplayer is hyperkinetic and bombastic. The six-on-six skirmishes also stand out for their time-to-death ratios. If an opponent gets the jump on you, that doesn’t necessarily spell your doom, as you can take much more damage than you do in a game like Call of Duty. This is not a one-shot, you’re dead experience; id wants engagements to feel more like a back-and-forth duel.
This approach shined through in our hands-on time with the multiplayer. Matches feel decidedly old-school, with quad damage and invisibility power-ups and weapons littered across the maps. Many firefights turn into dances between individual opponents as you whittle away each other’s health bars. Players can also collect a power-up to assume the role of a demon – we saw the revenant and baron of hell as options in the matches we played – to chalk up some rapid kills.
The first mode we played, Warpath, has both teams vying for control of a mobile domination point that drifts around the map at a steady pace. Each player is outfitted with two weapons and a piece of equipment like a grenade, threat sensor that highlights nearby enemies through walls, or siphon grenade that sucks health from the enemies in the blast radius and gives it to you.
Before jumping into a match, the player can choose their loadout and up to four hack modules. These timer-based perks are earned through the progression system and are meant to give you a quick advantage in battle. The four available for our match were Power Seeker, which highlights the closest power-up for 120 seconds; Retribution, which highlights the location of your most recent killer for 30 seconds; Supply Timer, which shows the respawn timers for all nearby power-ups for 120 seconds; and Armor Plating, which gives you a +10 armor boost for your next life. You can choose which hack module to use before each respawn.
The majority of these hack modules are meant to emphasize your awareness of the surroundings to make you more effective. “None of these throw off the competitive balance,” Stratton says. “None of these affect how powerful your gun is or anything like that.”
The second multiplayer mode we played was Clan Arena, which is essentially a best-of-five team-based Last Man Standing experience. Each player only has one life, and the team that executes all of the competition first wins the round.
The multiplayer arsenal extends beyond the suite of weapons available in the single-player mode. Among the new guns we see on display during battle are a sniper-rifle like vortex rifle, a selective-fire battle rifle called the repeater, and the static cannon, a slow-firing beam rifle that gets more powerful as you run. The heavy assault rifle and lightning gun were also added to the rotation for these matches.
IT’S A MOD WORLD
In addition to a single-player campaign and full multiplayer suite, id Software wanted to make sure the Doom reboot featured another core element that speaks to the series’ legacy: modding.
The Doom franchise has a long history with the mod community; in the mid ‘90s, many of the best gaming experiences I had were from playing the deep collection of PWAD files you could download for Doom. These user-generated mods transported players to many familiar universes, from The Simpsons to Aliens. Even Star Wars: Dark Forces, one of the seminal shooters of the era, was preceded by a Star Wars PWAD. Lots of game developers found their way into the industry via Doom mods, but building and sharing these files was a cumbersome process.
For the Doom reboot, id wants to open the creative process up to more than just modders with advanced programming skills. “When we started with the initial concept for what we wanted to do with Doom, there was no doubt that we wanted to provide players with the opportunity to create their own content,” Stratton says. “It is part of the heritage and legacy of not only Doom but id. We’ve done it for years releasing our source code, allowing people to create maps and modes, but we knew we needed to do it in a way that allowed everybody to do it and not just restrict it to people with experience or special expertise in these areas.”
Enter SnapMap. This suite of creative tools essentially gives players all of the Lego pieces from the Doom campaign and arms them with a toolbox for building their own single-player missions, cooperative game modes, or multiplayer experiences. Detailed tutorials and reference maps give newcomers the foundation to begin the creative process in less than 15 minutes, and the technology is flexible enough to allow advanced creators to build rich experiences.
To develop SnapMap, id Software brought on Escalation Studios, which it had worked with previously to build the mobile title Doom Resurrection. Escalation proved to be a great fit because of its president, Tom Mustaine, a long-time developer who cut his teeth creating PWADs for Doom and Heretic.
“Back then, you would push up against the limits of the tech, and it was hard to find stuff,” Mustaine says. “You had to log into FTP sites and all of this craziness. Now, with the technology available today, and what we are doing with SnapMap, you have the same kind of ability of creating something from nothing, but you don’t need the experience of being a hardcore level designer, and read tutorials for days or weeks on end. You can build something within 10 minutes.
“You can make extraordinarily cool content, and easily make gameplay in it. Or you can dig a little deeper and make more advanced content. It’s on par with actually writing code. I think [SnapMap] is the first of its kind – a full in-game tool that, regardless of the platform, you can create content and share it with your friends and publish it to the world for multiplayer, co-op, and single-player. You can also make stuff that is just fun.”
The variation the studios have seen thus far when putting SnapMap in the hands of developers is impressive, from tower-defense modes and moody single-player missions to VIP escorts and racing challenges. Stratton has always worked on the production side of the equation, so given his lack of programming know-how, he considers himself a litmus test for how intuitive the creation suite is. “After 20 years in the industry, it’s given me a new outlet in how I feel I can do cool things” he says.
Rather than continue to extol the virtues of SnapMap’s flexibility, id drops us straight into the four-part beginners’ tutorial. In a few short minutes, I build a simple monstercloset scenario where a demon spawns to attack after you press the button on a computer console. In my second project, I fill a room with demons and explosive barrels, signaling the horde to attack full bore once they spot the player. Another sequence introduces me to A.I. automation, which I use to drive several randomly spawning enemies in a corridor. From object placement to assigning logic to the various enemies, the system is easy to learn, though it definitely has an advanced layer of systems that will take time to master.
After our tour of the suite ends, we’re dropped into a four-player cooperative experience built with SnapMap that pits our team against waves of increasingly difficult enemies. Between rounds, we can use the currency earned from kills to reinforce defenses and purchase new weaponry from a store we access through a portal. This feels like a fleshed-out game mode, and it was created in 12 hours.
All of the user-created content is surfaced via the SmartHub. Discovery should prove easy thanks to the various sorting categories like top rated, featured, newest, and most played. Your friends’ creations are given a dedicated page as well, or you can search by name or tag to find content that doesn’t rise to the surface. The studio is also curating playlists of usercreated multiplayer matches for the various modes, giving players another place to find competition. Best of all, downloading these new experiences hardly takes any time at all.
“Because everybody already has all the parts and pieces, there’s nothing that has to be uploaded or downloaded other than this really small instruction file,” Stratton says.
WHAT’S OLD IS NEW AGAIN
When a game franchise takes 11 years off, it sounds a lot of warning bells in my head. But based on my experience playing Doom, none of my initial apprehensions feel relevant. In an era where the shooter genre has morphed in so many directions, it’s surprising how refreshing and unique Doom plays despite its steadfast dedication to preserving so many core elements of the original.
From my hands-on time with the single-player campaign, multiplayer, and SnapMap user-creation suite, this series looks to be heading on the right trajectory for its spring release. Like the 2014 Wolfenstein reboot, this id Software franchise looks to be poised for a major return to form, and should attract longtime fans and newcomers alike.
“It feels like we’re going to be introducing a whole new generation of players to what Doom is all about,” Stratton says. We have a strong feeling they’re going to like it.
KNOW YOUR ARSENAL
The hallmark of Doom weapon design has always been power. From the iconic shotgun to the BFG9000, these weapons get the job done. This carries forward in the new reboot.
“Doom is about fighting an onslaught of demons, which means you’re often in the midst of a pretty massive fight,” says game director Marty Stratton. “Having stopping power is really important and it makes it pretty fun.”
To increase that stopping power, id has introduced a new weapons-mod system that gives the guns more flexibility than they’ve ever had. For instance, the rocket launcher has a remote detonator mod that allows you to trigger the explosion when it’s most effective, and the heavy assault rifle has a barrage of micro missiles as an alternate-fire mode. Players gain access to these mods by finding delivery drones in the world, and you can hot swap them on the fly with the d-pad.
“If you’ve found all the mods, you can end up with a configuration that ends up with the effectiveness of 15 or so weapons – depending on what you find – all a flick or a push away,” Stratton says.
Holding the right bumper on a controller brings up the weapon wheel, but once you memorize the position of a weapon on the wheel you can quickly access it by tapping the RB and flicking the right analog stick in the direction of the weapon. This makes swapping guns on the fly a seamless process.
Because the BFG and chainsaw are typically used in special circumstances, id removed them from the weapon wheel in favor of giving them their own dedicated buttons. Tapping down on the d-pad pulls up the chainsaw for a quick finisher, and when the situation gets out of control you can bring up the BFG by tapping the X button.
PUTTING STORY IN ITS PLACE
Story has never been a cornerstone of the Doom franchise, which we all learned well with the horrible 2005 movie adaptation. The team at id Software is comfortable with narrative taking a backseat to the action, but that doesn’t mean you can’t piece together the mystery of what happened at this UAC facility.
“Story isn’t something big in a Doom game, and we’ve taken that approach,” says creative director Hugo Martin. “It’s not what people come to Doom for; they come to kill demons and blow s--- up in amazing ways. That’s really been the focus for us. That said, we’ve definitely infused some pretty good mystery and some fun things for players who want to find it and want to dive in and explore it a little bit.”
By finding environmental clues and reading data entries, players can piece together what happened at this demon-infested UAC facility and learn more about the space marine as well.
ALL GORED UP
Doom looks to match the unique melee finishers introduced in Wolfenstein: The New Order and raise the stakes with its impressive glory-kill system. These popcorn-horror finishers aren’t just fun to watch; they yield more spoils than a typical weapons kill.
After you do enough damage to an enemy, it becomes highlighted. When in this staggered state, you have a window to move in for a glory kill. These animated execution moves are contextual, meaning you will see different finishers depending on where you target the enemy. The versatility is impressive; through our playthroughs we targeted the limbs, torso, back, and head to see unique glory kills. Some of our laugh-inducing favorites included a death-from-above attack, and ripping out a mancubus’ heart and shoving it down his throat so he chokes on it.
INTRODUCING UPGRADES
Exploring the environments in Doom isn’t all about finding new weapons mods; players can also uncover three tiers of upgrades to improve their space marine.
If you stumble upon a white chest, grab the glowing orb contained within. These items, called argent cells, allow you to increase your armor, ammo, or health capacity.
The second type of enhancement is a performance upgrade, which improves various general capability categories like equipment effectiveness and agility. These are gained by finding enhancement tokens on fallen elite guards. The final type of upgrade is a rune, which can be combined to tailor your skills to particular play style. If you find yourself dying a lot, activate a saving throw that momentarily slows down the action when you drop under 25 percent health. If you are gunning for a speedrun, choose runes that increase your dexterity when executing glory kills or swapping weapons.
The rune system is not an RPG-style skill tree that locks you into your decisions. Instead, you can reconfigure your runes at a moment’s notice to give you an advantage for the scenario at hand.
NEXT-GEN IDTECH
Thanks to the programming genius of John Carmack, id Software has always been synonymous with future-leaning game engines. Just because he’s left to join Oculus, however, doesn’t mean the tech is suddenly in peril.
For the new Doom, the programmers essentially rewrote the entire engine from a rendering perspective. The new physically based renderer ensures all the surfaces in the world react as you would expect to light and shadow, such as realistic shines off of metal or reflections in blood pools.
Game director Marty Stratton is bullish on the idTech 6 engine. “It’s our strongest tech we’ve ever had,” he says. “I’m super proud of the team. To do all that at 60 frames per second and 1080p, it’s a real feather in the cap of the team here. It’s something they take a huge amount of pride in. Their mantra is we want to be the best looking game on the market at 1080p and 60 frames per second.”
As always, id plans to deliver sliders and multi-sampling options to the fervent PC player base to push their high-end rigs beyond these benchmarks.