Do the enemies take gradual damage?

[Koko Ricky]

Remember how in Quake 2, the enemies all had a secondary skin that would activate when they took damage? It was pretty forward thinking for 1997. Here we are, close to two decades later, and we don't see the rev's armor fall apart (something you could have seen in Gore, circa early 2000s), and as far as I can tell we don't see enemies gradually taking damage. I just feel that, both aesthetically and gameplay-wise, that would be a really nice feature. Is this kind of thing not common in modern FPSs? Or is it just too hard to implement with high-detail models? I mean, I would hate to think id took a look at what they were doing and it didn't cross anyone's mind to add this.

[HorrorMovieRei]

That's a shame. I would love to see enemies lose limbs and still go at you, like in Chasm: The Rift. It even adds a layer of strategy, as you can, say, shoot off the arm of a commando to disarm him, or the legs off an imp, to stop him from jumping around

[Technician]

We have multiple unique animations for quick time disembowelment so I don't know why we couldn't have models with different stages of dismemberment, such as arms and heads if hit correctly. I was wishing the plasma riffle would actually leave a steaming burnt texture when the enemy was dead much like Postal 2 did. That would have been so rad. I always wanted to see the damage from burning hot plasma on an enemy. And I certainly hope rockets will gib enemies the same way Quake did. I hated seeing enemies just rag doll like they did in Doom 3 when hit point blank with a rocket.

Really, they just have to have the drive to achieve this.

[Deleted_Account]

There was a part in the demo where the player has the super shotgun and blasts an Imps legs both off, I thought the Imp was going to drag itself towards him and bite the players ankles. That would have been neat, but I'm indifferent to gradual damage. If it's implemented, that's great, if not oh well.

[Xaero_Four]

We see limbs and chunks being blasted off some of them in the footage. Everything I'm seeing leads me to believe that we're getting just what you asked. It's a little hard to tell since things are moving kinda fast but it does look like enemies take gradual damage.

Also I can't quite tell for sure but it does look like the plasma rifle does leave burn marks. We don't really get to see it in action that much unfortunately. Would be cool if you could char bodies like in BD.

[Clonehunter]

That Imp did look like it started to crawl, but the player kept moving and din't bother to look at it. As an actual gameplay feature, that'd be amazing. However, I can't really think of anything outside of Chasm that implemented this well (Though you could only shoot the legs off of the flying zombie without killing it).

[printz]

I don't like the idea of monsters getting weaker (and eventually crippled) as you shoot them. I prefer them to be as dangerous at 10 health as at 500 health.

[Buckshot]

looks like it... though the weapons are so powerful, the smaller guys appear to explode instantly at times.

Makes me wonder about the chainsaw... it looks like a insta-kill weapon

[LANEGRACABRA]

In the demo I saw the player shoot former human and it fell to its knees after which the player blasted its head off. That was Pretty cool. L4D2 had satisfying damage system and I was hoping Doom would have taken it even further. It still looks nice though.

[SirKicksalot]

printz said:

I don't like the idea of monsters getting weaker (and eventually crippled) as you shoot them. I prefer them to be as dangerous at 10 health as at 500 health.

I liked how they did it in Dead Island. Especially the big zombies still struggling to attack after their arms were cut off of broken. Broken limbs were especially fucked-up as they went into ragdoll mode, flailing around the body.

Removing chunks of meat wasn't bad either. IIRC the game was revealed with 5 tissue layers in 2007 but they reduced it to three because the vsual difference wasn't worth the performance hit.

[Antroid]

Admittedly I haven't played that many shooters in my life, but I have yet to see one with casual dismemberment more satisfying than in Turok 2. It doesn't affect gameplay or anything, but many enemies (especially the earlier ones) could suffer a great many deaths depending on where the killing blow was dealt and whether it was dealt by something powerful. Heads blown off, limbs (sometimes partially), holes in the chest, everything but the feet (amusingly the feet often looped through a running animation after that), and some particularly brutal ones where you could see, like, an enemy's lower jaw hanging off it's spine or whatever, with a bunch of meat blown off it's collar bones and such. It was accompanied by very satisfying sounds and blood. It was also made that much better because enemies didn't just fucking fall apart all the time. I feel that the constant gibbing kinda cheapens this (serious sam 2, while still hugely enjoyable IMO, had this problem: pretty much everyone would always fall apart and it got old).

[illYay1337]

Isn't that what we were seeing in the demo though? There was dismemberment, and all this other stuff.

Killing Floor has this as well. Flood were affected by this in Halo.

I saw an imp with its legs blown off crawling on the ground in the demo earlier. That may have counted the monster as "dead" and it was just shown crawling for show. Or it might have been capable of attacking and we didn't see.

If a monster's arm is blown off, I'm sure it can still remain somewhat functional and keep doing other things if the work was put into that kind of thing.

[RaikohZX]

Honestly you don't even really need dynamic dismemberment while still counting an enemy as alive. Look at Doom 3, the enemies flinch a little with a shotgun blast or a pistol shot to the head but you can't knock them out of their attacks usually except for maybe Cacodemons. But when you hit them, the blood wound decals appear on their body, at least giving some indicator that you just filled a zombie with buckshot even if it wasn't fatal. So far, Doom 4 seems to completely lack that, although that might just be because the game has a year on development to go; the Mancubus got no burns or wounds, the enemies being blasted with a shotgun repeatedly only made sparks and minor blood sprays, and other annoying details missing.

Even without truly dynamic gore details, the mere fact that they have not even wounded skins like Quake 2 as GoatLord mentioned nor injury decals makes me wonder if all the gore budget, if we can call it that, went into the executions and the gibbing from explosions/Super Shotgun.

[Koko Ricky]

I won't fret if such details don't make it into the final product, but I can't help but ask, "If you've got all this amazing detail going on, why not just add the injury decals?

[doom_is_great]

I think I noticed some injury decals on the hell knights in the hell level. Specifically when one of them was getting shot by the chaingun.

[ChickenOrBeef]

doom_is_great said:

I think I noticed some injury decals on the hell knights in the hell level. Specifically when one of them was getting shot by the chaingun.

I was about to mention the same thing. The hell knight gets all bloodied up where he's shot. So that gives me hope that the devs are still working on implementing that for all enemies and weapons.

[id.dav]

In Rage there's skin change when damaging enemies....esspecially those who don't wear armor..like ghost bandits...wasted, scorchers...so it was in Rage! Maybe it will be in Doom after all.

[Koko Ricky]

Is it me or does the blood not spray on the ground or walls?

[LANEGRACABRA]

It's not just you.

[scifista42]

If it's an engine related restriction, it's pretty sad.

[LANEGRACABRA]

Right at the beginning of the first demo level, one of the first batch of imps gibs into few bits from a shotgun blast. That looked really shitty. I hated it in Blood 2 and I hate it now. They have ALOT of polishing to do for the final release.

[CyberDemonEmpress]

Yes, the shotguns namely appears to take "chunks" off of enemies, other weapons seem to inflict viable damage as well, suck as bullet holes.. Honestly, to me it looks kinda neat... In a gross way.

[Deleted_Account]

Didn't Soldier of Fortune let you dismember baddies? Could a similar system be implemented?

[Maes]

I guess it could, but it's one thing doing it on the models of a 2000 game, and one thing to do it for the models of a 2015-16 AAA game, with a much more demanding and pretty much unsatisfiable crowd to nitpick every aspect of it.

Also, it's pretty different doing an elaborate dismemberment/gibbing/whatever animation for a fatality, and another to implement a system where "crippled" monsters can still move and attack in a convincing manner, while gameplay remains balanced.

Rather than having one dismemberment animation, it's probably better to have none at all. Just look at how the chainsaw fatalities were received: after seeing the same one for three times, the "crowd" just yawned. So why bother? That's exactly the kind of work you let modders do pro bono, not on company time/money.

[Deleted_Account]

I wonder if they could do something similar to Dead Space's dismemberment system. Could that work?

[Koko Ricky]

Maes said:

Rather than having one dismemberment animation, it's probably better to have none at all. Just look at how the chainsaw fatalities were received: after seeing the same one for three times, the "crowd" just yawned. So why bother? That's exactly the kind of work you let modders do pro bono, not on company time/money.

I'm worried about this very thing. I'm hoping once we get to play it, the gimmick won't end up just getting in the way.

[Livo]

I wish that Doom 4 would have a more free flowing approach with the chainsaw, instead of being locked into a canned animation for a few seconds. In Shadow Warrior 2013, there's dynamic dismemberment of the enemies (with enemy reactions and animations varying depending on where they were hit) with the katana that's much smoother, with no QTEs at all.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76db-QSJu-k

https://youtu.be/EeCxMxS25gs

Obviously a chainsaw wouldn't be as precise and would be much more unwieldy, but you can see in the above videos how you could adapt an dismemberment melee approach like the SW 2013 katana to Doom 4 to keep things interesting and fast paced.

[illYay1337]

GoatLord said:

I won't fret if such details don't make it into the final product, but I can't help but ask, "If you've got all this amazing detail going on, why not just add the injury decals?

It's somewhat difficult. Doom 3 wasn't even that high poly so they could I guess easily afford to do it, although they could barely afford to do anything at the time. It was even easier in Halflife 2 when you hit a zombie with a paint bucket because they did this thing where they marked the vertices on the model as colored instead of trying to project a deformed texture on them.

Not sure how familiar people are with computer graphics here but putting decals on animated models is a lot more work than putting them on static geometry. It has to animate and deform properly and all that...

Adding an explosion to a static wall with modern graphics is very much the same technique as shining a flashlight at the wall by projecting a texture onto it.
But adding blood to an animated demon is more complicated because the blood has to move around with the creature. If you just use the shining a flashlight technique, the blood will not move around with the animated body parts. It'll instead look like you're shining a flashlight onto the creature with a bloodstain pattern. It may not be noticeable with tiny bullet holes though...

It's almost like creating a second copy of the model and animating it just for that one blood mark.


Ugh, and then even with static unanimated geometry, what if you hit a barrel. You have to add an explosion to the barrel and the ground. And then you have to add extra data into the gbuffer to track which object is affected by the explosion so when the barrel moves the explosion isn't projected onto things that aren't the barrel around it.

It's a huge headache...