False memory
Doom (2016) Review

At E3 2015 Marty Stratton introduced 2016’s Doom reboot by enumerating the qualities of a good game in the series as having ‘badass demons, big effing guns, and moving really really fast’. I already knew then that me and that yet-to-be-released game were on a collision course. Never mind the cultural flattening of Quake and Doom. Never mind the corporate memory holing of Doom 3. I was more concerned about the qualities that weren’t there.

Despite constant promises of how ‘old school’ this game was going to be and how Doom was going back to its roots, the marketing was clearly aimed at people that were new to the series. Communication aimed at those that were familiar with the cultural titan on a surface level through osmosis. The constant vapid appeals to nostalgia made this obvious. All this while, of course, ignoring the less culturally impactful Doom 3. This is not me doing a kids-these-days routine—I myself was barely an adult in 2016. Most people simply hadn’t played the originals, because gaming as a hobby had massively grown since the mid nineties. No, what irked me was the heavily warped image of the original Doom games that was used to promote the reboot.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was very active in online communities surrounding Doom and the RPG Makers. More demanding stuff simply wouldn’t run on the computer I got from my dad. The thing was struggling with Windows XP all on its own already. While the amount of older games this PC could run was massive, outside of these specialised communities, I was mostly shut out from contemporary game creation. And on top of that, everything in these communities was free, which was great as a kid with only some pocket money. So, while I did not play the original games when they came out, I played a lot of them with and without mods. With that experience, Marty Stratton’s words did not instil me with confidence. Even less so when later press coverage hinted at trendy stuff like skill trees. All the while what I felt was crucial remained absent. And, I’m sad to say, my scepticism was validated.

What’s missing

Right, so what’s the stuff that is missing in 2016’s Doom? Let’s start with level design. In the original games navigating the labyrinths that masqueraded as levels was half the fun. Learning to quickly navigate these digital spaces was super satisfying; finding a shortcut and recognising where it brought you, picking up a keycard and knowing where to go without first consulting the map, finding secret armour on low health, and so on. This makes revisiting levels doubly fun, especially on higher difficulty. Surprisingly, being good at this genre-defining shooter was less about good aim and more about knowing your way around.

One of the reboot’s early levels, Foundry, makes it clear that its creators also understand this. Purely in terms of level design, the place is great. Every point of interest has at least two accesses, there are three security levels you gradually unlock, and there is a lot of verticality here (something the original Dooms lacked). Foundry is the best level in the game by far—there is a reason why it was the showpiece at E3. But it also makes it obvious what the remaining roughly twelve hours lack. In the following levels, 2016’s Doom quickly degrades into a bunch of battle arenas linearly connected through corridors. This isn’t simply a jab at how boring the architecture is, large chunks of the game are spent locked into such combat arenas, killing demons for many extended minutes. In the OG games combat was something that spiced up the exploration, but here it comes in a focused overdose.

While I’m already on combat, are ‘big demons’ integral? Honestly, I’m not really partial to that. Having a diverse set of enemies that can be easily distinguished is important, of course. But I was never all that into the aesthetics―it’s more of a means to an end for me. Doom 2016 clears my admittedly low standards in this regard. When it comes to big guns, however, I’m much more picky.

‘big effing guns’

Guns that convey a certain level of power are important for a good shooter experience. The reboot is so-so on this. Most weapons feel nice to shoot, with the pistol and Plasma Rifle being unfortunate exceptions―they just feel super weak. But much more important is that the overall arsenal is well-composed. Every weapon should be uniquely useful and, with sufficient experience, a good player should be able to use their trifecta knowledge in level, enemy, and weapon to their advantage. This is where Doom completely falls apart.

The Plasma Rifle may feel weak, but it is relatively useful. The pistol is just weak and made redundant by every other weapon. Even worse is the Super Shotgun, which, when fully upgraded, knocks the competition completely out of the park. Even the strongest enemies yield after roughly 6–8 shotgun shells. Is this beast of a weapon hard to get? Not really. Is the weapon’s power constrained by the game only giving little ammunition, like with the BFG? Also no.

Ammo consumption is one of the cleverest ways of approaching weapon balancing. The distribution of ammo in OG Doom levels really determined how you played them. Doom 2016 does not assume any such competency from its players.
Right, you go on a rampage with the overpowered Super Shotgun and now you are empty. What do you do? You find a small demon, take out your chainsaw, cut the guy in half, and all the ammo you could ever need pops right out. That’s the reboot’s idea of ammo management.

‘moving really, really fast’

What about fast combat then? Sounds more like Quake to me with all the rocket jumping you can do. But sure, fast combat is fun. However, moving fast is not just literally about moving fast. Everything else has to feel fast and snappy, too; instant feedback. This is where this game clearly being made for consoles becomes an issue. Many of the design decisions made to accommodate consoles do not translate well to playing with mouse and keyboard, my preferred way of playing FPS games.

Glory Kills make finishing off enemies easy: simply press the button in the proximity of the weakened enemy and the game takes control of the camera and Doom Guy does the ripping and tearing. What could be a nice, if repetitive, spectacle becomes one of my biggest problems with this game. With a mouse, movement translates one-to-one to the first-person camera. Taking away this control briefly feels awful, like someone clawed the mouse out of my hand.

Additionally, the lack of visual feedback on selecting weapons annoys me. This game has too many weapons to remember exactly how to get to each one. Not to mention that to reach some of them you have to press a key twice. Half-Life has a similar setup, but if I pressed the wrong key, I know immediately how to correct course, because the overlay that pops up shows where the mapped weapon keys are relative to each other. The game’s weapon wheel sounds like what I need, but time stops on opening it, which is neither fast nor fun. Between Half-Life and Doom it is clear which one was developed for PC first.

Lastly, getting back to the level design: the layout contributes massively to feeling fast while navigating. But, like I said, the levels largely consist of battle arenas that get locked during combat. I’m not exactly feeling quick when all I’m doing is running in circles―not even with the Haste power-up.

The skybox is the limit

But there is one thing Stratton leaves entirely unmentioned, the great community of modders, that have kept the games fresh and alive over the decades. The original game provided great freedom for creatives to build whatever they wanted. While the community outpaced id Software on releasing a map creator, they published the game’s source code a few years after the initial release. It was a move almost unthinkable today with a commercially successful game. But for id, at the time, this openness was a deliberate strategy. The first level was shareware, something that no doubt contributed to the massive success that would define the FPS genre. Today, porting OG Doom to evermore obscure hardware has become a sport among hobbyists.

Things have changed since the nineties. Id Software is now owned by ZeniMax Media, which in turn has since this game’s release become a parent company of Microsoft. The freedom that people had with the original games is clearly not considered sound commercial policy. Once you relinquish control, you relinquish your ability to continue to extract value from the product. People aren’t supposed to marvel at fan creations, they can download for free, they are supposed to buy the next game once it comes out. The first level of reboot Doom is downloadable as a free demo on Steam, but of the remaining creative possibilities the OG games provided remains very little. The puddle left for creatives to swim in is called SnapMap.

With SnapMap you can make your own Doom maps. You can freely sculpt level geometry, place enemies wherever, and there is even reasonably sophisticated scripting support. SnapMap has a few things that you don’t see in the regular single player mode. Most visibly this includes weapons like the Vortex Rifle, that presumably didn’t make the cut for the regular game. But that’s it. Making an actual game is not supported, and using custom assets is out of the question.

While it is cool that this official support for player-created content brings this automatically to consoles as well, when this was usually the sole domain of PC gaming, there is also a good reason for this. Console makers want to be in control, and genuine freedom for people to publish what they want on these platforms would render them overwhelmed or obsolete as gatekeepers. Thus, player-created content can only happen in a very restricted form. Custom maps come to consoles by bringing everyone down to consoles. It’s so locked down, I’m surprised about every instance of a self-respecting creator using it.

I’m certain no one who directly worked on this game is to blame for this. These were simply their constraints. And within those boundaries those people clearly attempted to make something that honours the series’ origins. For one of three game modes, there is a genuinely surprising amount of effort in this. A lot of thought has been put into how to allow the most for map creators within the locked down context of the game. You may not be able to make and use your own voice lines, but the announcer voice has some text-to-speech support, so you can communicate to the player without constantly flashing text on the screen. And the already mentioned scripting support is very powerful, through which most assets can be repurposed into whatever you have the patience to program using the game’s visual programming environment. It effectively is Mario Maker for 2016’s Doom.

At the same time though, SnapMap is noticeably neglected. When I wanted to check it out, the game was stuck on a loading screen for minutes. The loading bar wouldn’t advance for most of the time―I thought the game had crashed. The single player has a similar loading screen, but that one is over within less than a minute.

The bottom line is that custom content and modding are a massive part of Doom’s legacy. It’s the core reason why these games are still as actively played as they are. But the future is not so bright for SnapMap. First of all, after a few maps you will have mostly seen what is possible with the given limited set of assets. Will people still be playing SnapMap ten years from now, like people are almost certainly going to with the OG Dooms? After 8 years it already made a pretty abandoned impression on me. Which leads to an even bigger problem: all of this is reliant on id Software and their corporate masters’ goodwill, as they are hosting everything. This is where the Mario Maker comparison is not a nice one, since Nintendo shut off its servers last year. Again, are people still going to play SnapMap ten years from now? I doubt it’s going to be possible at all.

A little appreciation

Alright, enough complaining, what does the game do well? Firstly, the game clearly took some notes from Metroid Prime, a good place to get inspiration from. Doom’s 3D map is legible and navigates well. And no prizes for guessing where the idea for the double jump upgrade came from. It’s just a shame they did not take more. A universally useful base weapon, enemies particularly vulnerable to specific weapons, labyrinthy level designs―all of his would have greatly benefited Doom.

Returning to Glory Kills. While I hate them for being utterly flow-breaking, I can at least theoretically appreciate how they fit into the bigger game-design picture. They encourage you to stay close to enemies, to not pass up the opportunity to get rid of them, gain invulnerability for the duration of the animation, and potentially some small health or ammo drop.

Lastly, the soundtrack simply owns. It would have been an easy crowd-pleaser to just stay with the generic metal of many Doom mods, but the industrial touch really gives the game a unique identity, not just within the Doom series, but games as a whole. Also, the audio transitions out of Glory Kills and combat work really well.

Conclusion

I hope that throughout this review, I could dispel the idea, that I don’t like the Doom remake, because it isn’t like the Doom of old. I’m usually very welcoming of change. Some of the inspiration the devs took is perfectly fine. In fact, I wished they had taken more. And sure, the music is great and unique, but when that’s mostly the soundtrack to the game’s subpar combat sections, that’s simply not enough. Those parts are marked by weapon balancing issues and fatigue from monotony. Want some potatoes to that meat―like navigational work? I guess there is one level in 2016’s Doom that might work for you.

The conditions that produced SnapMap are greatly unfortunate. It’s not like a big-budget title today would get a source code release on top of great modding tools. However, the game’s title does invoke that legacy, and just because something is the norm does not make that thing right.

However, there is a silver lining to this game. It proved that a shooter that requires aggressive play and has a health bar could be massively popular today. I may not like this Doom, but it paved the way for many games that I do like. With that, I say goodbye and go off to play one of those better shooters.