We are t-minus just a few days until the official release of id Software’s reboot(?) of DOOM, the hyper violent shooter that, let’s be honest, if you’re on this site, you clearly know and love (or loathe).
The team at id has been out front with the game, showing it off at every possible opportunity, including a few recent high-profile demos. To be completely frank, the game looks amazing. The tech is, bar none, some of the most impressive seen anywhere, so the performance aspects of the game are not in question. The game was unleashed at a staggering 200 frames-per-second on an Nvidia GTX 1080 in a video captured by PC Gamer, and it looks, well, amazing.
And no question: DOOM is a storied series. It was a mega cash crop for id in the 90s, when it brought blazing-fast gameplay to the PC and beyond. Not just that, it also revolutionized what multiplayer could be.
However, we are twenty-three years removed from the original release — sorry; I meant TWENTY-THREE YEARS! — and the design decisions that made the original game special then are not necessarily what bring people to first-person shooters today. In fact, we are twelve years removed from the last proper DOOM game — the BFG Edition came out in 2012 — and the landscape for shooters has changed. Like plenty of people, I remember it as a hyper-fast shooter with an arena-based multiplayer component. For me, it’s just was DOOM is.
Some telltale signs of a troubled launch are beginning to show through the veneer of the highly-glossed visual appearance of the newest entry in the series. For example, the reaction to the DOOM open beta was less than enthusiastic. It wasn’t overwhelmingly hated, though a glaring majority found myriad problems with the game: loadouts, generic multiplayer, rough controls. The list goes on and on. It came off like a shooter you’d find being released with a guy named Master Chief or…whatever the characters in Call of Duty are called.
Now, I must, at this point, offer a very specific caveat: This might all just be fan-based outrage, a sense of nostalgia gone overboard, but there does seem to be something slightly…off about the new game, doesn’t there? There are plenty of monsters and whatnot, but it just doesn’t feel like DOOM, for some reason. Or maybe it’s hard to know what that should look like. Should there be an RPG-like upgrade system for the player? Are the finishers laid out in last year’s E3 presentation really the way to go for a series that needs to re-establish itself? What if the emphasis is on new-fangled gimmicks, instead of what made DOOM great?
It’s also easy to look back at previous successes to find examples of how to do a sequel / reboot right. Two years ago, Wolfenstein: The New Order surprised audiences with a streamlined but kick-ass throwback to the games of yore. While a few ameliorative aspects updated the game’s mechanics, it still felt like what players wanted a Wolfenstein game to feel like.
However, the expectations for a Wolfenstein sequel were low, at best. DOOM carries with it a cultural cache reserved only for the highest of echelons. And the complaints aren’t complete unfounded, either. The most damning appears to be linking the reboot to other first-person shooters, the grandchildren of the original FPS.
Certain Affinity, known for developing the multiplayer for Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Halo 4, is working on the DOOM multiplayer. Those who played the open beta complained that it played like a generic shooter, which is probably the worst thing you could say about this game. Eurogamer’s Ian Higton had this to say:
Rather than feeling like a throwback to days of old, the sad fact is Doom feels like a generic first-person shooter wearing a Doom skin. id has tried its best to appeal to two markets by adding modern mechanics to an arena shooter, but by doing so its [sic] alienated its core audience and produced a shooter modern gamers will find mediocre at best.
Ouch.
As if that weren’t enough, DOOM review copies won’t be available until launch day, on Friday. Not that it definitely means that the game is going to review poorly, but that’s been a depressing trend for games we’ve been excited about recently. Last week, Bethesda — the game’s publisher — released a statement explaining why they wouldn’t be providing copies before day and date:
DOOM is a robust game comprised of a single-player campaign, online multiplayer, and SnapMap. We believe all three elements are important parts of the complete DOOM experience, and are meant to be experienced as part of a complete package. The game’s SnapMap and multiplayer modes both require access to a server that won’t be live prior to launch, review copies will arrive on launch day
Granted, some fully broken games have been released recently, ones whose online presences were completely broken on the day of release, so it kind of sounds feasible, but then again, it’s almost certainly written in indecipherable PR-speak, so there’s no way to know for sure. Truth be told, it doesn’t bode very well for this, one of our favorite horror-shooter series of all time.
In a weird, almost ironic twist, series co-creator John Romero recently posted news of a Kickstarter that’s on hold until a playable demo is ready. It seems like the time for DOOM may be now, but it may also be a time for us to be given a hard look at what a series long in the tooth looks like when it can’t make the leap to modern consoles / PCs.
Speculation can just be that, at this point: speculation. With some pretty high-profile games going through very public growing pains / failures, it’s easy to begin lobbing grenades at this one. Still, id and Bethesda are finding themselves follwing the ‘middling review’ blueprint to a T, and I can’t help but hope that my worst fears here are wrong. We’ll find out on Friday.
