#doom multiplayer beta

So, with the third and final day of the DOOM beta half over, I think I have a fully formed impression of the multiplayer and it’s quality.

I’ve seen a lot of really whiny posts going around about this beta, and how it “isn’t Doom”, or “is just Halo”. These posts cite things like the two weapon limit and the movement speed, and decry glory kills as pointless gimmickry that break gameplay flow. The armor looks terrible, the customization is stupid, and loadouts are Halo bullshit. Clearly this Halo developer Certain Affinity shouldn’t have been trusted with Doom, and in the words of one blogger “should never be allowed to work on multiplayer for any game ever again”.

A lot of these points are narrow-minded, hyperbolic, and totally emblematic of predictable fanboyish reactions to a new game in an old franchise. They aren’t productive or useful, and are just coming from the perspective of “If this game isn’t [my expectations], then it is bad”.

They’re not all wrong, however.

DOOM reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever. Not in that it is a horror show of rampant misogyny and abhorrent humor, but in that it feels like a game caught between two worlds. It is the kind of game that would be produced if you put Halo Reach, Quake 3, and Doom into three teleporters and sent them to the same place. It is a schizophrenic brundlefly of a game, with disparate elements that come together to create a frequently fun, if not wholly satisfying experience.

First things first, what is the basic gameplay handling like? Well, it isn’t slow. If anyone tells you that it is, their standard for shooter movement speed is Doom 1 and Serious Sam and they are hopelessly stuck in the 90′s. It has a great sense of speed and momentum, even though it isn’t as fast as twitch shooters like Unreal Tournament 4 or Quake Live. Players have a double jump and can mantle, and the maps take pretty good advantage of these abilities. However, the double jump slows your momentum, and the player has no air control whatsoever (unlike say Titanfall or CoD: AW). This led to lots of double jumps that ended slowly and ploddingly in mid air over deadly pits of lava.

The combat is easily the best component of the whole affair. The guns are loud, and their sounds are incredibly satisfying and chunky in a way that feels very Doom to me. Players almost always gib in some way when killed, with supershotgun blasts tearing people in half or rippling limbs off with ease. Damage is modeled on players while they’re alive as well, which serves as a nice visual signifier that they’re wounded and can be finished off. And these signifiers are important, because players are very durable. 

Some people have interpreted this as the weapons being weak, but I see it differently. I think this is one of the ways this beta is actually the most like older Halo games (as the newer ones developed by Certain Affinity have lost much of their identity and are paced more like CoD now). It takes a lot of hits or multiple successive forms of attack to kill players, and this gives most of the combat a sort of dueling quality. These duals are fast and frenetic, but in fact last longer than your average engagement in a CoD or Battlefield. This is because due to increased player durability the player has an opportunity for fight or flight, and a chance to retaliate when ambushed. This leads to play that feels skillful and challenging, in which almost always I knew why I had died and what I could have done better. The Halo comparison, for me, is wholly positive. I miss old Halo games, and this deathmatch captures a similar feeling to both Halo 3 and to twitch shooters when it’s at it’s best.

Another thing the gameplay has in common with specifically Halo: Reach is the glory kill system. Glory kills are easily comparable to the lavish assassination animations introduced in Reach, and have similar issues. While I found them extremely satisfying and feel they don’t break the flow of combat, they leave the player vulnerable in a way that meant a lot of glory kills ended in me being gloriously blown up right after completing them. They feel fast and visceral enough, but they don’t feel necessary. Here we start to get into what is really ugly about this combination of ideas, and where it starts to fail. Assassination animations were optional in Reach, however in DOOM they happen whenever a player happens to have low enough health and is melee attacked. This can lead to situations where a frantic random swing of the butt of your gun can leave you trapped in an animation, and set up for certain death.

Glory kills are stylish but ultimately pointless gimmickry in the multiplayer, and a similar offender is the Demon Rune system. Demon Runes are so supremely boring and un-fun I can’t believe they have been so thoroughly integrated into the design. I have no idea how the other demons like the Prowler or Baron of Hell will play in multiplayer, but the Revenant is truly awful to play as or against. It makes play so one sided that the demon’s gameplay is made trivial and the humans’ gameplay is made hellish. Unless an entire team is coordinating an assault on the demon, the demon simply has too much health for a single player to hope to encounter it and survive. I eventually resorted to just fleeing to other areas of the map when the demon spawned, which may be the least Doom sentence ever typed. Worst of all, the Demon’s kills don’t count towards the team scores, they just count towards an individual player’s score on the scoreboard. Demon runes break up the normal gameplay and temporarily make the match one sided for basically no other reason than for the marketing department’s ability to say “Hey look, Demons! Demons are from Doom! Look! DOOoOOM!”.

Another way this gameplay fails is in some of the weapon designs. The vortex rifle and heavy machinegun are both weak unless the player gets headshots, and this A. is the antithesis of Doom’s design and B. caused most players to never use either. Headshots have never been a part of the true twitch shooter formula, and with good reason. The movement speed is too fast, and the types of bouncy vertical engagements it encourages make headshots much harder to get. The design philosophy of the vortex sniper in particular, with the player being rewarded with one hit kills on fully charged headshots, is totally antithetical to the rest of the gameplay design. These weapons are outliers, however, as most of the other weapons are well balanced and satisfying. 

The framework is absolutely bog-standard for first person shooters these days, with unlocks and leveling that are totally superficial, pointless, and harmless. They have a strange sort of burn card system, because that’s another thing shooters have to have now for some reason, but it can also be safely ignored as superfluous. 

So what does of all of this add up to? A design that, as I said, feels torn between two ideas. On one half is the Certain Affinity side, where it has sniper rifles, grenades, and loadouts. On the other is the Id Software side, where it has fast movement and fun guns and quad damage. It wants to be modern very badly, but to not lose it’s classic identity in the process. Overall, I think it has accomplished that goal, but at some cost. In becoming a modern shooter it has fallen prey to a lot of the frivolous trappings and poor balancing that comes with modern shooters, but it hasn’t forgone it’s core satisfying gameplay. It’s like an old friend from high school who has showed up to your house with an open flannel shirt, a vape, and a man-bun. You remember why you liked him and he’s still recognizable as the person he used to be, but gosh he’s picked up some annoying modern habits.