fraggle

Here's a video showing peoples' reactions to the Doom ***4*** reveal at Quakecon that was posted today:

I thought it was interesting and I have some thoughts about it.

First of all, what's the current state of development of the new Doom game? It's hard to tell of course, but all signs so far have pointed to it being stuck in development hell: in the past few months we've seen Carmack's departure from the company along with several negative comments about the company on Glassdoor.com that went viral. Here's another article from last year with some more info.

Recently we've seen what on the face of it looks like more positive news: the teaser trailer, the news that Wolfenstein preorders would get beta access to the new Doom, and now this reveal at Quakecon. But is it just a clever PR strategy to build up hype? "the DOOM beta won’t begin until a later, yet-to-be announced date" says the Wolfenstein: New Order website, and the teaser video only showed what amounted to a few model close-ups and no actual gameplay.

This reveal is the first time that id have shown actual gameplay to outsiders. But a few things make me skeptical.

First of all, the lack of any public showing reeks of a PR attempt to build social media hype by making people talk about it. If the game is almost ready, why not just show it publicly or better still, let people at Quakecon actually try it out? Why all these silly games with closed theaters and the strict no-photography rules?

Secondly, I can't help noticing how they kept the fans who did see it waiting for several hours before they were allowed to see it. In the video above you can see one of them say how he waited for two and a half hours to see the reveal. If you think about it, this again seems like a clever marketing tactic to get lots of positive "reviews": the only people who have seen the reveal are the biggest Doom fans, the ones eagerly anticipating this game who were dedicated enough to hang around long enough to see it. And they got exactly what they wanted: a crowd of people all too eager to tell the waiting journalists how awesome the new Doom game looks.

The PR story that Id seem desperate to play up is that Doom is almost done, and its release is only just around the corner. But I don't think those beta testers will be seeing this for at least another year, probably at least a year and a half - and maybe even longer. We're even seeing admissions to this effect - that the whole thing was a PR stunt to try to restore some "confidence" in the game's development.

On the positive side we do at least have some details about what the game might be like when it's done. One thing that seems abundantly clear is that the gameplay is very similar to Brutal Doom: we've heard talk of spines being ripped out, hand-to-hand combat and intentionally excessive gore. One tweet I saw described it as "Brutal Doom in HD".

Brutal Doom is controversial among classic Doom fans; personally I'm on the fence about it. Classic Doom to me was always a spooky and atmospheric experience rather than a horror/gorefest, though certainly there are aspects of both in the game. Games like Serious Sam and Painkiller have been called spiritual successors to classic games like Doom, but personally I just found them tedious.

That said, it wouldn't be very interesting if they were just doing Doom 3 again, with slightly improved graphics, so maybe this is a good thing. Things that aren't changing are usually dead, and perhaps what FPSes need more than anything is something different, more light hearted and fun rather than just another straight-laced military combat simulator. God knows we have enough of those on the market already. I just hope all those "finishing moves" don't become repetitive and tired after five minutes of gameplay.

EDIT: Corrected a couple of errors and added a couple of details I found in this thread.