Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom (2010)

http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74

by Rolpa • 12 years ago

159 53 12 years ago

vectorpoem.com

hnha• 12 years ago

[2010] but always nice to revisit

RobotCaleb• 12 years ago

Not sure what you're implying.

wlesieutre• 12 years ago

It's helpful to have dates on things that aren't "news". If (for example) a doom-like game had become extremely popular in 2012, the [2010] tag would give readers more context so they know why it's not mentioned.

Mithaldu3• 12 years ago

  > Doom is about “maneuverability as defense”
  > ...
  > There’s nothing quite like it today.

There's one game i'm aware of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painkiller_(video_game)

By default it also moves fairly slowly, but the player is strongly encouraged and almost forced to use bunny-hopping to gain extreme agility and speed. Most youtube LPs showcase this quite well. "Asylum" and "Snowy Bridge" are imo the highpoint levels to watch for this.

endgame• 12 years ago

The Serious Sam games fit the DooM tradition, as well.

Rolpa2• 12 years ago

There's also numerous open source examples. (See Cube/Cube 2)

bitwize• 12 years ago

As do the Tribes games with their "skiing" mechanic.

aeflash• 12 years ago

Serious Sam can't compete on level design and art direction, though.

moshR• 12 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree. I love Painkiller as well, but it (the original, at least) never quite got "maneuverability as defense" right in my opinion. I think one reason for this is the integration with the Havok physics engine. The character would often become stalled on debris from broken crates, vases, etc. Stairs were also an issue.

If anyone else is into these kinds of shooters, and wants to try more recent titles, I also highly recommend both Hard Reset (2011) and Shadow Warrior (2013) by Flying Wild Hog. I believe some of the developers were part of the original Painkiller team.

Jehar2• 12 years ago

There is a critical gap between the sensibilities of Doom/Quake/Duke and Painkiller/Serious Sam: level flow. The latter camp is in varying degrees a series of rooms you get locked into as enemies spawn in waves. The former involves navigating a highly varied environment as you attract the attention of pre-existing enemies.

Sure, on the avatar scale, they play at a similar level. The environments are what really set the earlier generation apart, and in that respect very little approaches that sort of design.

bkcooper• 12 years ago

Painkiller does feel more like Doom than most other more modern FPSs, but I never felt like the bunny hopping really measured up evasion wise.

The game that I felt captured this dynamic really well, at least in multiplayer deathmatches, was Half-Life. You were surprisingly zippy, and the long jump module gave you a lot of ability to get out of where you were in a hurry. I enjoyed this sort of dynamic because it played well to my strengths. Having mediocre aim but being able to dodge well worked out okay in this setting. Doom and Half-Life are probably the only shooters I've ever been decent at.

antimagic• 12 years ago

You should try out the Marathon series then (the precursors to Halo from Bungie, sort of set in the same universe). They are available in open source at:

http://marathon.sourceforge.net/

lotharbot3• 12 years ago

“maneuverability as defense”

the Descent series is all about this, even in multiplayer.

Here's a video of two of the best players in the world: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8eCULTB3IQ (with audio commentary from some of the other best players, starting at around 7%.)

moultano• 12 years ago

I loved the movement in that game. I wish there was something modern like it.

arethuza• 12 years ago

That reminded me that Descent is the only game to really make me feel nauseous - great game though!

egypturnash3• 12 years ago

There's an entire genre that's about maneuverability as defense: "bullet hell" shootemups. (Also known as "danmaku" or "curtain fire".) You know, the ones about flying a little spaceship through these huge, complicated patterns of slow-moving bright pink bullets.

And my experience of playing Dark Souls was all about "dodging around like a maniac and not being where enemies were putting their weapons".

I mean, if you want to constrain it to FPSs, yeah, there's not much like it. But there are a hell of a lot of games whose primary strategy is "Be Where The Bullets Are Not".

anon42• 12 years ago

That's Dark Souls 2. Dodging in DaS1 is less I AM FUCKING INVINCIBLE and more I AM INVINCIBLE for a very short amount of time and oh please please let me be out of range by the time my limited invincibility frames run out, plus your dodge is shorter and you can wear a lot less stuff before your rolls get slow. The only way to get DaS2-like dodging in DaS1 is with the dark wood grain ring.

On the other hand, you can parry much more reliably in 1 and I've killed dark knights simply by parrying them 4 times successively. Or you can backstab, since the enemies don't turn as quickly as they do in 2.

I'll agree that a lot of strategy in DaS 1 and 2 comes from careful positioning, given that replenishing your health puts you at a considerable danger while you sit immobile drinking estus and can be interrupted at any time by an attack. However, I find that the two games have a definitely different feel to them, even though they're woven from the same cloth. Another thing is that the camera in DaS2 is much, much faster, due to being truly mouse controlled - you can turn as fast as you can swing your mouse (I still recommend using AutoHotkey to bind mouse buttons to keyboard buttons because otherwise you get lag on attack, due to the game waiting a frame or two to check if you're not double-clicking, since you can bind different actions on single and double click; it's not the end of the world, but it's annoying). In 1, not only is m+kb absolutely unworkable, the mouse has a negative acceleration applied and you can't turn any faster than with a joypad.

I like both, but if you play a long enough time these small differences start getting really obvious.

Also, I haven't seen someone mention the Serious Sam games, so there.

GlennS• 12 years ago

The Tribes series takes this much further. The most recent of those is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribes:_Ascend

MrZongle22• 12 years ago

It's a shame that T:A is an online-only free-to-play game, meaning that developer Hi-Rez tightly controls distribution and servers and thus hobbles the modding community.

twotwotwo• 12 years ago

re: how mod-friendly Doom was, Portal 2's simplified level editor (released 2012, after this was written) was pretty well-done--only exposed a tiny fraction of the things one could do, of course, but enough to build real puzzles, and with just enough default visual interest that the product didn't necessarily look awful.

http://theportalwiki.com/wiki/Puzzle_Creator

Of the user-made levels, it's surprising how many used the full level editor anyway--even though, as the post notes, building levels ain't quite as simple as it was in the Doom days. User-made level gallery:

http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse?appid=620&browseso...

gipp• 12 years ago

Not entirely surprising; there was already a gigantic Source modding community well before Portal 2.

ahoy• 12 years ago

Entirely off-topic, but that thread title sounds like the best metal album ever.

logicchains• 12 years ago

Not entirely off-topic; Doom had a pretty awesome, reasonably metal-ish soundtrack, by the standards of the day.

dirktheman• 12 years ago

On the Smashing Pumpkins track 'where the boys fear to tread' they sampled the rocket launcher sound. I recognized it the minute I heard it first.

tdicola• 12 years ago

Interesting article. I played with making Doom levels back in the day and it wasn't exactly easy. The tools (DEU, DETH, etc.) were generally clunky DOS apps that resembled very simplified CAD programs. Documentation was non-existent or spotty at best, so you really had to spend a lot of time figuring out how to do simple things. It would easily take you months to ramp up and start building levels that were more complex than two rooms with a door (and even that was pretty complex to figure out the right line defs, sectors, actions, etc. to just make a door work!). This was before the web took off so you couldn't just Google for a Stackoverflow answer when you got stuck!

Duke Nukem 3D and the Build engine were pretty interesting for level creation. The game engine included the editor so you could actually drop into a mode where you walk through the level and directly modify textures, floor/ceiling height, etc. Was a very cool experience at the time.

Rolpa2• 12 years ago

Having submitted myself through the same process but with modern tools (see DoomBuilder and XWE) and Google, I can only concur. Anything more complicated than room-corridor-room winds up being a major pain in the ass. :)

yason• 12 years ago

That was part of the point: back then things weren't supposed to be easy nor documented and investing months to really learn how the intricate details of a Doom map worked paid off in giving us years of fun creating our own levels and episodes.

cmurdock• 12 years ago

Oh come on. I think they just weren't user friendly tools. I doubt they developed them with the intention of being obtuse.

kriro• 12 years ago

The Wolfenstein Map Builder on the other hand was really easy and straightforward. I spend a lot of time building maps with that. Especially silly ones with a lot of hidden corridors (space bar on the wall). First "map" I ever built was just a big room filled with treasure :P

Granted Wolfenstein was a much simpler game. But man I spend hours with that editor.

angersock• 12 years ago

To get an idea of this madness, it can help to look at some relevant footage.

Speedrun of Dead Simple from Doom 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfijpjvS9Q8&feature=player_de...

Quake Done Quick: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpiNDxssUL0

That sort of manic movement is, I think, what really sets apart the elite FPS players of the Doom, Quake, and UT era (and the games in the same vein) from folks in the CoD/Halo games.

Also, the level design is pretty much strictly better, because it mattered a lot more. With regenerating health and lots of ammo/easy pickups, you no longer have to be quite so careful when putting together a level, because you know that if the give the player X seconds of time without suffering everything will be okay.

jrobn• 12 years ago

Watching the Quake video brought back memories of playing the Action Quake 2 mod, where the entire gameplay mechanics revolved around jumping and shooting.

gaelian• 12 years ago

That sort of manic movement is, I think, what really sets apart the elite FPS players of the Doom, Quake, and UT era

In those days, my friends and I used to get into UT quite a lot. Most of the more experienced UT players I watched would use the double-tap of the left/right arrow button to trigger the short sideways leap as a means of rounding a corner (for a better chance of surprising an enemy), or to make it harder for an enemy to keep a bead on them when they were being fired on. I was always surprised at how - to me at least - this simple mechanic made such a difference to how dynamic the combat felt.

dr1337• 12 years ago

I was disappointed to learn that the article wasn't about a living fossil fish.

omarhegazy• 12 years ago

What a great analysis. I'd like to see stuff like this on other games : what about shooters with instant-hit and slow physics where the player is still definitely NOT a tank (2-3 bullets from most guns will kill you), still capturing the same sense of gameplay-over-narrative and experience diversity -- Counter-Strike. In fact, I'd like to see an article like this on every archetypal shooter type. Goldeneye, Halo, System Shock, Counter-Strike... does anyone know of more game analysis like this?

Maakuth2• 12 years ago

I just finished reading David Kushner's Masters of Doom, which tells the story of DOOM development, as well as the id software story around it. It was well-written and thoroughly researched story, should be a good read for many in here.

Paul_S• 12 years ago

Fair warning though, if you don't want to see the dark side of your heroes maybe skip it. Because the book is very thourough and they did some morally questionable things. Repeatedly. I was horrified. I thought maybe some of it is not true but then no one sued for defamy.

ripter• 12 years ago

I don't remember anything horrifying in it. It definitely shows that they are human with flaws, just like everyone else.

joshuaheard• 12 years ago

Team Fortress Classic is similar. The levels were built for gameplay, not realism. A large modding community surrounded the game also.

NAFV_P2• 12 years ago

Has anyone come across the Neo-Doom megawad?

There is one level with a Cathedral.... you walk in through the entrance to see a few dozen imps standing at pews, and there are a couple of Knights of Hell and a Baron on the front stage giving a sermon.

The mock up was pleasingly realistic, then I noticed that the crucifix on the front wall was inverted.

Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom (2010)

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