QuakeCon: Doom Live Demo Impressions

07/25/14

The first event on the first day of QuakeCon featured a "live" demo of Doom (considering I don't have access to video of the person playing the demo up-close, I remain healthily skeptical that the demo was done live and not properly scripted). There was lots of cheering and perhaps some weeping during this demo. People were happy. People were really freaking happy.

There was an implied apology about the direction id Software took Doom 3, and there was a promise of going back to Doom's roots. That's why this game is called Doom, not Doom 4. It's going to be faster, it's going to be about "running and gunning" (as opposed to the cover-based obession of today's shooters).

It seemed like everyone in the audience was excited. Some of my friends were excited. Everyone watched the demo. Everyone was excited.

Except me.

I was not excited. I was not impressed. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of cool stuff shown off, but then there was the gorn that was there just for gorn's sake. I mean, it's Doom, there should be glibs, and there should be blood, and the violence should be super mega ultra violent. But that violent should be dressing, it should complement the fast and crazy action mechanics. It should not interupt that fast and crazy action to show you a prerendered kill move that takes momentary control away from the player (complete with temporary invincibility to make up for that lack of control).

That's the main thing I saw. When any given enemy was properly weakened from the running and gunning, the player could run up to them and perform a scripted kill-move. To be fair, there seemed to be a lot of them per enemy, and between enemies they were different as well. But still, even with the variety, I saw plenty repeated, and even kill moves as short as a second really felt like they slowed down the game.

And I really don't understand why such scripted moments exist in this day and age. Some of the kills that happened purely by shooting the enemies to death were much more entertaining. Demons were shot in half and collapsed to the ground in amazing ways. And that's emergent behaivior based on their physics and model destruction engine. That sort of kill mechanic churn out many more interesting kills than the limited ones they decided to animate statically.

And those kills don't slow down the combat. It's win-win. But instead it looks like a lot of money was invested in the scripted, pseduo quick-time-events. And if that much money was put into it, I remain skeptical at how avoidable using them are (though, in the demo, nothing suggested that they were required).

I suspect all bosses will require an ending using a special kill, and if I'm correct that's a real shame. I have played games like that, and I vastly prefer a more subtle ending to boss fights, that at least don't force all players to have the same experience out of the end of each fight.

So, to give an impression that I feel no one else in the QuakeCon audience will give: the next Doom is definitely a step in the right direction, but I can already tell it has some issues.