Fight Like Hell.

April 14, 2016 9:05 PM

DOOM [Campaign Trailer] As the iconic DOOM Marine, you wake to learn that the Union Aerospace Corporation’s facility on Mars has been decimated and overrun by hordes of demons. Humanity’s survival rests in your hands – and your hands alone.

- [Fight Like Hell Cinematic Trailer]
- [Official Multiplayer Trailer]
- [Multiplayer Maps Explored]
- [Demons, Power Weapons & Power-Ups]
- [The Gruesome Level Design Of Doom]
- [Reverse Sleeve Time-lapse Art]
- [The Guts and Gore of Glory Kills]

posted by Fizz (75 comments total)

Huh. I'm sort of reminded of Duke Nukem more than anything, what with all the comedic splatter and stomping and squishing and such. Not sure that's what they were going for.
posted by Artw at 9:14 PM on April 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

The inner 12 yr. old in me loves everything about this game. Especially the music.
posted by Fizz at 9:16 PM on April 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

Why are the demons hostile to big business? Maybe they have some good arguments. Maybe they're not my real enemies.
posted by clockzero at 9:16 PM on April 14, 2016 [54 favorites]

Are the graphics better than the last one? I suppose they must be but I really can't tell anymore.
posted by Artw at 9:20 PM on April 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Why are there finishing moves? Doom is supposed to be fast.

This has Call of Dooty written all over it.
posted by Yowser at 9:23 PM on April 14, 2016 [9 favorites]

Sure is edgy!
posted by naju at 9:32 PM on April 14, 2016

And then John was a zombie.
posted by Sternmeyer at 9:33 PM on April 14, 2016 [5 favorites]

The trailer's plot arc had a weird vibe to it. Like, this is (like most FPSs) a power fantasy to the extreme (Rip this monster's eye out! Slice this one in half!) and then at the end they had to kill the player in order to get across that these things are dangerous at all. Strikes a weird tone, IMO.
posted by brecc at 9:42 PM on April 14, 2016

Reminds me of Serious Sam 3 more than anything else. Which did have something like finishing moves; you could run up to any monster not too much larger than you and instakill it with a melee attack. Since the game threw SO MANY MONSTERS at you, it didn't slow it down too much (they were fast and you rarely used them when fighting multiple monsters, which was all the time).
posted by Mitrovarr at 10:03 PM on April 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

brecc, I had the same thought when I watched the trailer. Are you an unstoppable badass or what??? I want to like this, but I'm not getting it so far.
posted by Doleful Creature at 10:07 PM on April 14, 2016

Yowser: shouldn't that be Call of Doody?
posted by drfu at 10:24 PM on April 14, 2016

I was kind of hoping it would be more like this.
posted by special agent conrad uno at 10:32 PM on April 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

"It just isn't the same without the right music."

The right music is with the GUS.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:52 PM on April 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

Okay, as the "Campaign trailer" shouldn't we see the other politicians, not just various versions of Ted Cruz?
posted by blueberry at 10:56 PM on April 14, 2016 [16 favorites]

I was kind of hoping it would be more like this.

I knew that was going to be devil daggers...
posted by Hicksu at 10:59 PM on April 14, 2016

Humanity’s survival rests in your hands – and your hands alone

Killing = surviving! Guns = life! Victim = demon! Shooter = God!
posted by the quidnunc kid at 11:26 PM on April 14, 2016 [11 favorites]

Why are there finishing moves? Doom is supposed to be fast.

I believe this is actually a playable demo.
posted by dumbland at 11:40 PM on April 14, 2016

The right music is with the GUS.

If someone else hadn't said this, I would have. (I'd already dug up the link)
posted by aubilenon at 12:19 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

So this looks like fun but is effectively Bulletstorm with a Doom wad loaded in. They went to one extreme with 90% darkness in Doom 3, and now this is just seems way too colourful.
posted by turbid dahlia at 12:24 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

A colorful AAA game would be a refreshing change of pace. Everything in the trailer looked pretty muted and RED/yellow/orange/brown to me though.
posted by clorox at 12:48 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

I was one of the people who really liked Doom 3, so I'm actually kind of disappointed that they decided to take things in this direction.
posted by teponaztli at 12:58 AM on April 15, 2016

Want to play old-style Doom, updated and greatly enhanced for the modern PC, with hordes of enemies and a frantic pace?

You want Brutal Doom (SLYT)
posted by GallonOfAlan at 1:43 AM on April 15, 2016 [6 favorites]

Humanity’s survival rests in your hands – and your hands alone.

Is all of humanity on Mars in this scenario? How can we know that this mission parameter has been accurately conveyed? Why am I here alone?

I remember the last time I was posted to this picket duty, like twenty years ago. There was barely an internet and it took us half a day just to download the debriefing. You would think they'd add some sentries for godsake.
posted by mwhybark at 2:09 AM on April 15, 2016 [4 favorites]

Actually, I think that Brutal Doom video sort of highlights why I'm not super excited about the new Doom stuff. The ultra gore and violence feels really weirdly out of place for me.

I remember one of the big complaints about Doom 3 being that it was too different from the old games. Maybe it's just because they just couldn't pull it off with 1994 technology, but the crazy violence of this trailer has always seemed really different from the old games, too. That's fine - I mean, I wouldn't expect every game in the series to be the same. It's just that I can't really relate to this particular approach.
posted by teponaztli at 2:16 AM on April 15, 2016 [2 favorites]

Just minutes ago played a bit of the deathmatch open beta that's running for two days on Steam.

It's utterly, completely disappointing, in every single possible way that I was able to notice. Doom was the game that made me into the first-person experiential gamer that I am. My greatest formative non-TF2 multiplayer combative funtimes, for decades now, have been in successive iterations of Doom and Quake. I pre-ordered the new Doom for the campaign, because even though id software isn't even a thing any more, I'm nothing if not loyal, to concepts and memories and nostalgia for the bad old days if nothing else.

But holy shit, the multiplayer could not have been more bland and unDoomy if you'd just done a goddamned re-skin of whatever future-military manshoot wankfest EA had crapped out of it's cash-cloaca this year.

Call of Dude-y, bro! Fuckin awesome! High five! [fuck you]

That said, it's Friday night, and I've had a day spackled with a rainbow of fuckery, and am a few beers into Relaxation Time, so perhaps I am being over-emphatic. We shall see.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 2:26 AM on April 15, 2016 [10 favorites]

It only seems difference because of the relative crudeness of the visuals to current graphics tech. When Doom first came out, it was incredibly gory for what could be done at the time, and even now it's still fast as hell for an FPS, way quicker to get around in than the browny-beige military shooters. The turn for the ultra-violence and hyper-kinetic gameplay is perfectly in line with original Doom.
posted by Punkey at 2:27 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I mean, and I remember all the hype about the violence too, it's just that it doesn't feel right for me. Or it just doesn't feel satisfying? I don't know. I'm perfectly willing to accept that this is due to my own changing tastes as much as anything else (although I started playing Doom 2 again recently and had fun with it).
posted by teponaztli at 2:29 AM on April 15, 2016

Here's the link for the open beta if you have Steam. 36 hours left or so, if you have Steam and 14Gb to spare, and are not put off by my Emphatic Disappointment.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 2:30 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

So this looks like fun but is effectively Bulletstorm with a Doom wad loaded in. They went to one extreme with 90% darkness in Doom 3, and now this is just seems way too colourful.

Doom was full of bright reds, blues, greens, and other colors. Quake was the real brown and grey offender.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:50 AM on April 15, 2016 [4 favorites]

in which trailer does the doom marine take off her helmet
posted by robocop is bleeding at 2:50 AM on April 15, 2016 [13 favorites]

Killing = surviving! Guns = life! Victim = demon! Shooter = God!

Yes. Yes. As usual, vote #1 quidnunc kid.
posted by clockzero at 4:59 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

in which trailer does the doom marine take off her helmet

"Justin Bailey"
posted by mr. digits at 5:12 AM on April 15, 2016 [2 favorites]

Doomt
posted by litleozy at 5:14 AM on April 15, 2016 [8 favorites]

Doom's entire schtick was that you had to stay alive by being FAST, not be being an unstoppable killing machine. (Well... you had to be fast WHILE you were an unstoppable killing machine, if we're being pedantic) All the game's most powerful weapons, and most of the attacks used by the nastier enemies, were projectiles that traveled across the map, rather than ray-traced effects like bullets. Critically, the player himself was as least as fast as any of those projectiles. If you loosed a rocket across a wide open space while you were running full speed, you could keep pace with it until it hit a wall and fragged you. A dozen angry cacodemons spewing fireballs from across a pit wasn't such a big deal, even though three or four hits would kill you from full health, because you could dodge those suckers like Rip Torn dodges a wrench. Fights where you were massively outnumbered were tough but winnable, because you could play with this central game mechanic to use cover and maneuverability to give yourself the edge.

Doom 3 killed that mechanic completely, and went way more grimdark than the series had ever been. I hated it, though I'm apparently in the minority. This latest reboot feels like they're trying to recapture the aesthetic of the first two, but without returning the central gameplay mechanic, it's just another shooter with a weird color palette.
posted by Mayor West at 5:25 AM on April 15, 2016 [8 favorites]

I dunno. For me, the more hyper-real the imagery becomes, the less fun it is. I really don't find this an improvement over the original.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:27 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wow it's visually so boring.

The monsters look all dirty and grayscale and hard to see. I guess the bright shield effect they get is a signal that you can get close and not-so-insta kill them, which probably you'll want to do all the time because it saves ammo, so they'll probably get old pretty quick.

I wish the environments were a little odder. The old Doom had some weird Nosferatu action going on with the level design. Rooms were kind of unsettling and half abstract, but often had puzzle or trap elements to them that made it feel like there was something to figure out. You'd get to a new place and be like, "Okay what the hell is this room's deal." It was often dark but it was often bright, with stark changes in lighting that were visually pretty interesting. The limitations of their engine resulted in lots of interesting design.

Versus like, the ten millionth dimly lit Facility. That place looks like it's filled with generators that need to be manually restarted.
posted by nom de poop at 5:54 AM on April 15, 2016 [7 favorites]

The essence of Doom is of course the way the ground-based enemies are paced so that there is *just* enough time to reload the double-barreled shotgun to blow the next one away - but mistime one and you're getting mauled.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 6:03 AM on April 15, 2016 [3 favorites]

Yeah, this is the game Duke Nukem plays when he's just chillin with his bros.
posted by gwint at 6:29 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

I wish the environments were a little odder. The old Doom had some weird Nosferatu action going on with the level design.

Marathon!
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:37 AM on April 15, 2016 [4 favorites]

Doom 3 also had the single shittiest shotgun in the history of first person shooters- you might as well not even pull the trigger if the barrel's not right against the demon in question.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:46 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

Do I have to upgrade my ATI VGA Magic card to play this?
posted by lagomorphius at 6:50 AM on April 15, 2016 [13 favorites]

Fun fact: a lot of the levels of Doom, Doom II and Quake were designed by Sandy Petersen of Call of Cthulhu fame.
posted by Artw at 6:51 AM on April 15, 2016 [6 favorites]

It still doesn't look good. I'll be giving this a pass regardless, since I no longer have a gaming PC, and can't fathom playing a FPS on a controller (well, aside from Fallout, where that doesn't matter too much). But, yeah, the constant cut to animations really destroys the central idea of what made DOOM 1 and 2 fun.
posted by codacorolla at 6:51 AM on April 15, 2016

Fun fact: a lot of the levels of Doom, Doom II and Quake were designed by Sandy Petersen of Call of Cthulhu fame.

There's a bit in I think Masters of Doom recounting the time somebody asked Petersen, a Mormon, if all the demons and devils of Doom didn't bother him. He replied that it's all very cartoonish and impossible to take seriously, and besides, the whole point is that you're fighting them!
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:55 AM on April 15, 2016 [3 favorites]

That thing where you're trying so hard to be edgy that you're painfully predictable and cartoonishly trite. We need a word for that.

Eliza Gauger said a few years (and I'm misquoting) that: "the question is not "are video games art". Of course they are. The real question we should be asking of games is: why are games so bad, when they could be so good?"

I think about that a lot.
posted by mhoye at 7:11 AM on April 15, 2016 [6 favorites]

I think maybe we need an FPS that's all digitized graphics of real models except with 2016-level computing power.
posted by griphus at 7:14 AM on April 15, 2016

I think maybe we need an FPS that's all digitized graphics of real models except with 2016-level computing power.

Oh my god, especially if they move like Ray Harryhausen made the game. That could be amazing.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:19 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

Ahah! Here's Gauger's article:

[...] i loved Bioshock. I loved it way past the point where i was willing to listen to critiques of the game based on “it’s just another boring FPS” grounds because honestly I didn’t care and still don’t, really. I’m hung up on aesthetics and will forgive a game a lot of sins if it shows me a beautiful pictureshow with a rousing soundtrack, and voice acting which isn’t actively terrible, which Bioshock did. Of course it’s art. All games are “art”; but so are post-it doodles, seashell collages sold in tourist traps, and Damien Hirst. that question—“are games art”—is predicated on a weird assumption, that whether something is “art” or not means anything.

[...] What we should be asking is why games have such consistently poor artistic methods and messages; why is the voice acting and writing and character design so consistently fucking offensive, and i mean offensive aesthetically as well as morally. Why, when so many immensely talented, versatile, original people are either jobless or already working in the industry, are we consistently subjected to bullshit that is not only racist, and sexist, and trans* and queer-hating, but also just boring?

[...] i mean cutting to the chase, if you scrolled this far, the real question we should be asking of games is: why are games so bad, when they could be so good?

The whole thing is worth reading, IMO, as are her observations about the DoomGuy Metric, and generally anything she has to say about video games, art and aesthetics.
posted by mhoye at 7:20 AM on April 15, 2016 [6 favorites]

Watching the videos of the original Doom games made me realize, the old Doom games were actually slower by today's standards. You can easily count out the shots the chaingun fires. Every non-bullet projectile can be dodged by the player (as mentioned above) or needs to be leading the enemy to make sure you hit them. You kept moving, kept circle-strafing and learned where all the secret doors were. I didn't see anyone in the trailers dodging anything. On the plus side, at least it wasn't hiding between knee high walls while waiting for the enemy to reload.

You know what I didn't see during that video? A single health pack or vial or whatever. The most important item in the old FPSes. When you don't have regenerating health and you carry over all your damage from level to level, you better have health packs.

I want a remake of Quake. Not Quake 2 or 4 or 3, but the one with an incoherent plot and plenty of lovecraftian monsters to kill. With health packs, pentagrams of protection and all that jazz.
posted by Hactar at 7:28 AM on April 15, 2016 [4 favorites]

Which Quake level was your favorite? The blue castle, the green castle, or the brown castle? ;)
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:29 AM on April 15, 2016 [8 favorites]

I wish the environments were a little odder.

Yeah, the the original was a lot weirder than the cinematic trailer remake.
posted by effbot at 7:36 AM on April 15, 2016

Blue, definitely blue. Although brown had the best multiplayer maps.
posted by Hactar at 8:32 AM on April 15, 2016 [3 favorites]

Want to play old-style Doom, updated and greatly enhanced for the modern PC, with hordes of enemies and a frantic pace? You want Brutal Doom

Usually I play Doom with the classic rules (classic Doom has entirely held up), but when I want Brutal Doom's style of goofy excess I play Project Brutality instead. It's a modified Brutal Doom with a ton more stuff: new enemy variants and behaviors, new weapons, new gameplay features. You can summon AI allies and set up sentry guns. You can steal the Revenant's rocket launcher. You can dual-wield plasma rifles.
posted by skymt at 8:44 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

Isn't this just a Gears of War rip-off?


*ducks behind cover*


*gets stuck*
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:49 AM on April 15, 2016 [4 favorites]

Boring.

Whatever. I can still play the original Doom and Doom II. They're not going anywhere.
posted by SansPoint at 9:09 AM on April 15, 2016

I want a remake of Quake. Not Quake 2 or 4 or 3, but the one with an incoherent plot and plenty of lovecraftian monsters to kill. With health packs, pentagrams of protection and all that jazz.

There are mods for Quake that bring the graphics up to modern standards. It can get downright beautiful. Yes, really.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:24 AM on April 15, 2016

You know what I didn't see during that video? A single health pack or vial or whatever. The most important item in the old FPSes. When you don't have regenerating health and you carry over all your damage from level to level, you better have health packs.

In the E3 videos, it looks like there are some pickups on the ground, but most ammo and health drops from monsters. Like, an imp might drop shotgun shells. It seems pretty random. If that's how they're doing it, they could make it so that health/ammo drops more when you're low and less when you're replete. That way you get that gritty survival feeling, without having to do any boring loser resource management crap that isn't fisting monster faces.
posted by nom de poop at 9:46 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

Random plug for game Teleglitch (Mefi post by Cortex)

Not a FPS, but this was the last game I played that actually gave me that same feeling of playing the old DOOM games.
posted by rosswald at 9:55 AM on April 15, 2016 [4 favorites]

Oh my god, especially if they move like Ray Harryhausen made the game. That could be amazing.

The Neverhood II, but less Klayman and more rubber skellingtons!
posted by mwhybark at 9:58 AM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

robocop is bleeding: "in which trailer does the doom marine take off her helmet"

you have to beat the game in under five hours.

mr. digits: "Justin Bailey"

or you could cheat, I guess
posted by ArgentCorvid at 10:40 AM on April 15, 2016 [2 favorites]

Hactar: "I want a remake of Quake. Not Quake 2 or 4 or 3, but the one with an incoherent plot and plenty of lovecraftian monsters to kill. With health packs, pentagrams of protection and all that jazz."

And the grenade launcher.

TOOM

tink tink

BOOM
posted by Splunge at 12:03 PM on April 15, 2016 [6 favorites]

Eliza Gauger said a few years (and I'm misquoting) that: "the question is not "are video games art". Of course they are. The real question we should be asking of games is: why are games so bad, when they could be so good?"

I can answer that. Because players and studios settle. Studios take enormous financial risk to release games, and so they make things that look similar to other things that come out, because they reduce (in their minds) the risk that a game will flop and they won't make their money back, so even if they might like to do something original that might be very popular, they settle for something that's more likely to be sorta popular. Players settle for this, because they don't know that there's a whole infinite world of game concepts and design out there above what they've seen, because this is 90% of what they've seen, and they're taken that for "normal," and things which don't look like that (like many Nintendo products) they've even developed insular cultural biases against.

It's become a horrible circular self-perpetuating cycle of crap, but the thing is, the cycle's actually been around for decades. Do you know how many Pac-Man bootlegs there were back in the day? How many ridiculous fighting game clones there have been? Spaceship games, fighting games, FPSes, Myst exploration games, 3D driving games, dance pad games. The history of mainstream video games has been little more than a series of huge hits, each followed by the horrible groaning noise of hundreds of companies realigning themselves to chase it. Fad after fad after fad.
posted by JHarris at 12:37 PM on April 15, 2016 [4 favorites]

I want a remake of Quake.

Quake VR is exactly this, for me. Insanely immersive and cool. If a bit stomach-turning, due to swiveling around constantly.
posted by naju at 1:16 PM on April 15, 2016

why are games so bad, when they could be so good?

I can answer that. Because players and studios settle. ... Players settle for this, because they don't know that there's a whole infinite world of game concepts and design out there above what they've seen

I disagree with this very very much. It's absolutely true that the studios are limited by budgets and risk and market realities, but the players? A lot of people actually like the video games that are out there now. It's not that they can't imagine a game that's isn't artistically bereft. It's that, at least some of the time, they want to avoid subtext, nuance, complexity, and ambiguity. Shooting zombies, putting jellybeans next to other jelly beans, and running a pretend farm are all pretty good for that.
posted by aubilenon at 3:45 PM on April 15, 2016

I just tried the beta after a long absence from the genre. The pace and controls are right and tight, and I feel very much at home with my jump jumping and rocket aiming. However, the beta does not have a regular deathmatch (free-for-all) mode!

This saddens me greatly.

At the same time, the beta has whetted my appetite. I assume the final version will have a normal deathmatch mode, but for now (and in case DOOM turns out to not be that great/popular), what are the reigning heirs of the genre of Quake 1-2 / UT99 anyway?
posted by Aiwen at 5:45 PM on April 15, 2016

... or do all new games have a glacial pace and stupid XP systems?
posted by Aiwen at 5:48 PM on April 15, 2016

I don't think anybody would say that Devil Daggers has a glacial pace.
posted by coolname at 7:19 PM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

Sorry Doom, my trigger finger runs hot for Ratchet this weekend.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 7:46 PM on April 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

...why would a Doom game have XP?
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:55 PM on April 15, 2016

When future historians try to explain how our culture glorified mindless violence, they will show a video like this and then explain to their stunned students that games like this were what we gave to young people to play for fun.

DO NOT WANT.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 3:19 AM on April 16, 2016

DOOM 2 is old enough to buy a beer at this point, so I don't think Historians are going to want for examples that they'd have to use a generic FPS with the same name as an exemplar of violence in game. The violence in DOOM 3 is also cartoon and against demons. Your historian might be better served with a CoD title where you're using realistic guns against humans.
posted by codacorolla at 7:09 AM on April 16, 2016 [3 favorites]

Is anyone else freaked out by the fact that the first trailer uses a Refused song (New Noise) as soundtrack? I don't really want to be that holier-than-thou punk complaining about the way a band I like decides to sell their work -- but randomly running into a YouTube ad that started playing one of my favorite songs, only to realize that I was looking at a commercial for packaged violence fantasies, was definitely jarring.
posted by marijn at 8:22 AM on April 16, 2016

"Is anyone else freaked out by the fact that the first trailer uses a Refused song (New Noise) as soundtrack?"

Not really. I've come to expect this sort of thing.

The Shape of Punk to Come is one of my favorite albums, and this track especially, but my main response to this when I watched the video was that it just demonstrated that the developers (and audience) are a bunch of old people (like me).
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:24 AM on April 16, 2016

Let us not forget the Quake soundtrack.
posted by Splunge at 11:01 AM on April 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

I played deathmatch in the beta quite a bit yesterday (and probably will again shortly) and, to me, it feels very 90s-era FPS. I suck, so maybe I'm missing the fine points about how this Doom DM is terrible, but it seems fine to me and the very fast-paced fragfest I wanted.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:47 PM on April 17, 2016 [1 favorite]