
Lessons from Doom (2010) - Kristine1975
http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74
======
ivl
I'm glad the article mentioned movement. Games today make so many decisions
when it comes to movement where the goal is to make it feel 'realistic', with
sprinting, ducking and the like, but they end up feeling like they don't have
any depth. An average player will have fairly similar movement to a fairly
good one, with incremental differences on small things, and a player with
amazing movement won't hugely stand out. In Quake 3? A player with amazing
movement could do way more to control the map. Quake 3 really mastered that
depth, especially with how much there was to learn between the two physics
rule-sets (with CPM allowing for a bit more than VQ3). And the reason I say
that is because the classic arena shooters (Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament,
etc) had their movement systems as a key part of the game. It's why Defrag
became such a (relatively) big thing. And it's why Overwatch just doesn't feel
as fun as it could, to me at least. For a game to look like that, but to leave
out bunny hopping? Disappointing.

~~~
rangibaby
I felt the same way when grenades were removed from TF2. In TFC they were hard
to learn, but very rewarding to players who did. Conc-jumping was severely OP
and fun. I guess they remove advanced gameplay mechanics to make the games
more appealing to noobs and lower-skilled players.

I think one of the reasons for CS' enduring popularity is even noobs can get
lucky or trick a better player and kill them. In Q3? Nope.

~~~
kbenson
> I think one of the reasons for CS' enduring popularity is even noobs can get
> lucky or trick a better player and kill them.

It's probably better for the better player as well. No matter how good you
are, a stray bullet or two could take you out. There was no relaxing, and the
game promoted caution enough that if you felt unchallenged, there were risks
to take.

~~~
ManlyBread
>No matter how good you are, a stray bullet or two could take you out.

And this is why I never really liked this game: it takes the control out of
the hands of the player and gives it to a random number generator. If I'm good
at the game, I should be the one who is in control, not RNG.

~~~
kbenson
I think this is one of those situations where _most_ people don't really know
why they like what they like, or at least have a hard time comparing between
two things. People like winning, but people like challenge. In a game where
the more skilled or already winning player continues to win, that's enjoyable
for them short term until it gets boring, but importantly it's often not
enjoyable for the other players. In a game where some randomness is introduced
(and/or other mechanisms to reduce the advantage of an already winning player)
which prevents a single person from completely controlling the board/map, that
person may feel it's less fun than situations where that is allowed, but I
think that level of less fun (but still fun!) may last much longer, since
challenge remains. In fact, to remain consistently at the top actually
requires more skill, IMO.

Personally, I never liked Quake deathmatch (all the way back to the original).
To me it seemed to reward prior map knowledge too much, and allowed someone
with a known path that optimized item respawns to deny pickups to other users.
Anything that makes the game _easier_ for the person in the lead in a
multiplayer game is a net negative IMO, as much fun as it feels to be that
person.

~~~
qrybam
It took me a while to really _get_ the difference in mentality between
different types of gamers and this difference would go a long way to explain
what one person finds enjoyable vs another - of course everyone wants to win
but if you didn't have to put in any real effort to win then it's not going to
be as rewarding.

In a nutshell there are two types of gamers: 1) casual and 2) serious

FWIW (which may not be all that much), certain games cater more to casual
players by having a shallow learning curve and a low skill ceiling while
others are more favourable towards serious players by providing a steep
learning curve and a surprising amount of depth.

I'd compare games that have a steep curve and skill depth to real sports, like
tennis or golf. If you've never played tennis and you go up against an
enthusiast player who's played a few hundred hours of tennis, guess who's not
going to be having much fun? How long will it take you to catch up if you both
continue to practice the same amount from this point onwards? You'll probably
always feel that the other guy has a certain edge over you even once you catch
up to where he originally was.

If you're serious about wanting to get better then you'll keep practising
until you reach a point where you become competitive against players of a
given level and things get a whole lot more rewarding and fun then. This is
actually the main reason why I loved playing Quake and Starcraft so much
(there are many other games, but these are the two I was most involved with),
It's also the reason why they were (and still are) great competitive
platforms.

[edit] grammar

~~~
kbenson
I agree with what you are saying, but it's somewhat different to what I was
explaining. Beyond learning curve and skill there are the mechanics of the
game itself. These can affect not only the learning curve and the skill, but
also provide positive and negative feedback loops, which can completely ruin
the experience for many not because of a disparity of skill, but because of
poor forethought of the designers.

For example, in games where there are relatively few spawn points, spawn
points are enemy accessible, and you can respawn multiple times per round, you
might have a negative feedback loop on death through the camping of enemy
spawn points. If this isn't mitigated in some way, such as through removing
one of the prerequisites or making it fairly dangerous to attempt, it can turn
into a situation where once this tactic is successfully employed, skill
becomes much less important, and you may not be able to escape.

In the original Quake/Quakeworld, there were routes around some maps where you
could run the route, and things would spawn almost immediately prior to your
arrival. For a person who knew this and traveled that route, not only would it
allow them to effectively travel a large portion of the map to look for
opponents while keeping themselves in good health with good ammo, and denying
their opponents resources. This is a positive feedback loop on a successful
player, and also reduces the effectiveness of skill.

In the end, games that have easily implemented tactics (that is, they don't
require a lot of skill) that nullify the impact of opponent skill and don't
have tactical answers to those situations are not good vehicles for
competition. A good competitive game is one where skill (speed, accuracy,
knowledge, prediction, etc) is often the deciding factor, and tactics employed
can be countered by a skilled opponent that is prepared for them.

~~~
jessewmc
I think I agree with your point in general, but it doesn't sound like you
played much Quakeworld or Quake 3. Spawn times on all items are on a fixed
timer, and a large part of the game dynamic is, when you're behind, knowing
when the opponent picked them up and knowing when to contest them. And
obviously being skilled enough to do so. Variants of Quake 3 (and Quakeworld
for that matter) are still played competitively, and the skill ceiling is
extremely high.

Your suggestion is that these games would allow a weaker player to win because
of lucky spawn or item pickups early in the game, but this never happens.

In all games (Tennis, chess, whatever) one player very often has to play from
behind -- whether you agree this is a good thing or not I'm not sure, but it
is one way to design a game, and the way many many competitive games well
before video games work. If you play better you gain an advantage, otherwise
what is the point of playing better until the last moments?

~~~
kbenson
> it doesn't sound like you played much Quakeworld or Quake 3

You're right. There were multiple factors that made it less fun than the
alternatives I had at the time.

> Spawn times on all items are on a fixed timer, and a large part of the game
> dynamic is, when you're behind, knowing when the opponent picked them up and
> knowing when to contest them.

> Your suggestion is that these games would allow a weaker player to win
> because of lucky spawn or item pickups early in the game

That's not sufficient for the scenario I described. It's not just that you get
specific items early, it's that _some maps_ supported specific routes you
could traverse that allowed _monopolization_ of those item drops. Now, my
point isn't that this is necessarily bad, but that without effective tactics
to combat this (which may exist, I was by no means a pro), then it's possible
it may boost the ability of a player over someone who might be considered
somewhat more skilled at that game. Based on how good my recollection of the
situation (from almost a decade and a half ago) was and how well I was able to
ascertain methods to counter it (possibly very poor), it may not be a good
example.

> In all games (Tennis, chess, whatever) one player very often has to play
> from behind -- whether you agree this is a good thing or not I'm not sure
> ...

I think it _is_ a good thing (thus my original point, a few comments up-
thread). I also think a game that's meant to be competitive and skill based
that it should be possible for a more skilled player to outplay a less skilled
player, given enough time. Any situation which allows the lead player to
maintain a lead regardless of skill (or even just ignoring everything but
great skill differences) is a poor game of skill, and not really fit for
competitive play.

------
overcast
Can I just say how unbelievably good the new Doom is. That game has single-
handedly restored my faith in the first person shooter genre.

~~~
skoczymroczny
What is so good about it? I haven't played it, but from what I've seen it
looked like a fairly generic monster shooter, except without a cover system.

~~~
cableshaft
I got it based on glowing reviews, started it up....and wasn't too impressed
initially.

But I kept playing, and started getting used to the movement and the shooting
and started dancing through the enemies and dodging fireball after fireball
while charging headfirst into a room, picking off enemies easily even though
I'm using a controller (I know it has some auto-aim assistance but it's one of
the best I've seen) and it felt different from every other fps I've played
lately. Last game in a long time to make me feel that way was Splatoon.

The monster AI is better than in most games too. They chase you, leap onto
ledges, climb up ledges and hang from walls, run around to get behind you
(sometimes), constantly moving to dodge you and get a better shot at you, not
hiding behind cover and then appearing briefly for you to shoot where you've
been training your gun for 30 seconds like most games. Not the best I've seen,
but better than most fps games.

Then there's the secrets. It's hilarious how Doom will _show you the secret_ ,
either through a window or behind a vent, or a hidden level section will show
up on the map, and then it pretty much dares you to figure out how to get
there. You go where it looks like you can get there and there's nothing there.
It can take a long time to figure out how to get to some of these secrets.
That's pretty fun also.

The need to shoot people enough that they can be glory killed, and then
needing to rush in to get that melee kill because it drops the health you
desperately need, or hit them with a chainsaw to drop ammo you need is great
too.

It's super smooth, and the levels are giant, and puzzly, it's pretty, and just
a lot of fun. What Doom should be.

~~~
unique_parrot2
You made me buy it.

------
ifdefdebug
"This creates a feeling that’s quite rare in modern FPS: that you are powerful
because you are agile, not because you’re a tank."

Thanks. I lost interest in FPS and after reading that chapter now I know why.

~~~
ManlyBread
Apparently Reflex is trying to bring the classic multiplayer FPS back, but I
have yet to try it.

------
sp332
The article mentions that the level design was "empowered", but it doesn't
mention specific level design decisions. Here's a recent article about that:
[http://kotaku.com/surprise-doom-is-still-an-incredible-
game-...](http://kotaku.com/surprise-doom-is-still-an-incredible-
game-1694053532) The author has lots more discussion of level design and game
mechanics at
[https://www.patreon.com/DocGames](https://www.patreon.com/DocGames)

------
eumoria
This coming out in 2010 the new Doom 2016 runs like an itemized list of his
explanations of what made the original great.

Being agile instead of being a tank. Doging over cover. Low barrier of entry
to modding (which the new one didn't totally do but the snapmap system is at
least an attempt at that.) Fighting priority of large bosses while kiting
around smaller enemies.

Great read!

~~~
Asooka
For a less praise-heavy look at the new Doom see:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DT7xa-G9bA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DT7xa-G9bA)

He doesn't dislike it, but highlights the game elements that didn't quite make
it in the new one. Plus, he showcases parts of Doom that really couldn't have
happened at any time other than the early-90s.

------
Tossrock
I disagree on the point of no other games having the same level of user
generated content. Specifically, Starcraft and then Warcraft III modding
birthed multiple centi-million dollar industries (Tower Defense, MOBAs).
Minecraft didn't exist at the time this article was written but obviously it
has similar depth of user modding.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
I know what you meant, but "centi-million" is "ten thousand."

~~~
Tossrock
If you're using SI prefixes, yes. If you're using the latin sense of "centi"
meaning "hundred", as in centipede, then it means "hundred million". Dollars
are not (yet) an SI unit.

~~~
kremlin
Why not just say hundred million?

------
speeder
I read other comments here, and would like to point something.

Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and other early FPS, got the name "FPS", because people
saw them as a first person version of shooters, and shooters were those games
where you control some vehicle from the top view and would dodge a hail of
bullets and shoot back.

Currently, most poeple think the important thing about "first person shooter"
and "third person shooter" is the camera, and completely forget why "first
person shooter" had that name, the "first person" thing was just an adjective
added to the base genre, "shooter".

Most modern games aren't shooters... I am not sure how I would name them, but
the focus is not on shooting or avoiding get shot, the focus is something
else.

The descriptions I am seeing of Doom 4 single-player and why people are loving
it (I am waiting for Vulkan version to try it) are the descriptions of a game
that nailed the "shooter" genre correctly, Doom 4 can proudly call itself a
FPS, because it is a true FPS.

So some people might wonder, what I am calling here an FPS, why people feel it
is so fun and whatnot?

1\. Base mechanic, is shooting.

2\. Movement is very important, both to aim, and dodge.

3\. Stealth should be discouraged.

4\. Cover should only be part of the game if you dodge in and out of it, it
would be acceptable in a FPS with parkour mechanics for example.

5\. No Halo-style health regen, this requires you hide, stop and wait, and
when you do that you are not shooting.

6\. Weapon variety is important, even one of the shooters known to be
"minimalist", Ikaruga, has 4 weapons for 4 different uses (dark bullet, light
bullet, dark laser, light laser), the point of shooting games is the shooting,
even if the only variety comes from using powerups (1942 for example) it makes
shooting in different ways possible and interesting.

7\. If game has few weapons, it should nail it REALLY well, and the few
weapons should solve any situation, games with "realistic" limit of weapons
that result in you picking up a shotgun and a pistol and then having to shoot
something 3km away is not a shooter. (maybe it is some other genre, war
simulator or something, but it is not a shooter).

8\. For the thinking part, the important is tactics, not strategy, the player
should only be thinking of immediate decisions while shooting, and not
stopping to think what path (in the map, narrative or upgrade) he will have to
take several hours on from now (unless he is replaying the game for
completionism, then it is fine, but usually he will preplan before starting
the playthrough anyway).

~~~
boomlinde
_> the "first person" thing was just an adjective added to the base genre,
"shooter"._

To be fair, calling them first person shooters wasn't really a thing until a
couple of years after the release of Doom. By the time it became the dominant
term I think this type of game had already diverged far enough from your
concept of a first-person SHMUP that I don't think that your theory on the
origin of the term is accurate. Genre taxonomy can't easily be reduced to a
simple analysis of the particular words used.

~~~
dspillett
_> To be fair, calling them first person shooters wasn't really a thing until
a couple of years after the release of Doom._

In fact up until that point they were generally referred to as "doom style"
games or similar (because while Doom certainly wasn't the first, not even the
first out of iD, it was the first that really made it big and caught the
general public's consciousness).

~~~
int_19h
It was "Doom clones":

[http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/File:Doom_clone_vs_first_person_s...](http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/File:Doom_clone_vs_first_person_shooter.png)

And real-time strategies were "C&C clones".

------
i_c_b
Glad to see this article making the rounds again.

Here's a little background to the article that might be interesting to some of
you, concerning the evolution of shooters.

I'm the Nathan McKenzie the blog author thanks at the end of the article. I
worked at Raven Software, off and on, from the spring of 1997 through the
summer of 2004. I think JP, who wrote the blog, worked at Human Head in
Madison, WI for a time. So we were both kind of in the id / fps diaspora, to
some degree. I think this conversation took place on JP's old anti-factory
blog, way back in the day.

Anyway, enough real-life background. The more interesting, possibly,
background, is that I carried a lot of the responsibility for the single-
player game balance and feel of Raven's and Activision's 2000 FPS, Soldier of
Fortune. I basically was responsible for tuning player weapon damage, player
input responses, enemy response times, enemy damage, high level enemy logic,
enemy style differentiation, overall game progression curves, user settable
difficulty levels, etc. I worked with other super talented people, of course,
but at the end of the day, I was the main person in Raven's office at 2 am
tweaking variables and subtle enemy aiming algorithms and properties to try to
make the game match what appealed to me aesthetically. I really didn't work on
SoF2 at all, so in so far as the games feel quite different, I would say that
at least partially comes down to SoF being much closer to my own tastes.

I actually don't remember the conversation in great detail that JP and I had
that led to this blog post, but I do know that a lot of what I was saying at
the time about Doom was related to my experience of trying to do my part to
balance Soldier of Fortune and make it fun and fair, and the challenges I
faced in doing that.

SoF is a fine game, but I think it occupies an interesting point,
historically, for shooters. I LOVED Doom. I just loved it. I played so much of
it. It was hugely influential on me. If it had been up to me, I would have
just been making more Doom-esque games.

But once you're making a realistic, bullet weapon based game with human
enemies in relatively recognizable environments, much of what Doom got right
kind of HAS to go out the window in the name of realism. Player movement
speed. Enemies very strongly differentiated by attacks, properties, and novel
behaviors. Enemies very cleanly parsable with strongly different silhouettes
to signify that they are of different kinds. Enemies with radically different
amounts of health or interesting weaknesses or weak points. Weird,
interesting, abstract traps and interactive gadgets that can be combined with
enemies to create novel situations. Game pacing controlled by the rate of
introduction and variation of these things. Fairly abstracted environments
that interconnect in weird ways, custom built to make for interesting combat
experiences. Ratios of player size to monster size to projectile size to
environment size that maximize player ability to move gracefully. Player
interaction styles that maximize the aesthetic appeal of moving through a
hostile environment that looks nothing like how real people interact with
being shot at (specifically, using cover). There's an entire grammar that Doom
and similar shooters from that era rely on that kind of has to be tossed (or
at the least VERY dampened down) once you want some realistic verisimilitude.

And it just gets worse when you're trying to tell a linear story in the middle
of the game and so require hyper linear level flow to make sure all the plot
points are hit, and so you have to largely toss exploration as an aesthetic
pleasure. And it gets worse still when you have dumb AI buddies that have to
stay alive and get in the player's way in the middle of combat, and end up
causing players to lose because the AI decided to do dumb things and die.

We were in the middle of all these broader genre transitions while working on
SoF, and I don't think we entirely understood the consequences of how the
individual changes were adding up, nor did the broader industry. It was like
we had a recipe for a perfectly good dish, and then said, "Yeah, we're going
to totally make that exact recipe again! Except we're not going to use salt,
chicken or flour, and we will be adding some grapes and some rhubarb. And no
use of an oven!" You might be able to hill climb your way back to a new recipe
that works, but there's no guarantee, and once you do, it will be something
totally different.

The biggest thing that plagued me while trying to balance SoF, and what caused
me to look so much more closely at Doom later, was the issue of fairness and
legitimacy of challenge. In Doom, because of a variety of very carefully
considered factors (many of which JP talks about), when players take damage,
it's nearly always because they did something dumb that was avoidable. When
you get hit in Doom, it is punishment. Because of this, it's very difficult to
get yourself into an unrecoverable state in Doom. No matter how low on health
you get, you can almost always finish a level as long as you are sufficiently
savvy. And because of this style of design, Doom levels can really ratchet the
difficult up while still presenting a fair challenge. And, in turn, the
distance between casual play and really skillful play can be pretty immense.

I really love and admire that quality in a game. But it really does take a lot
of very precisely balanced, often game-y choices to make that possible.

I think JP's mention of the player-as-damage-mop versus player-as-one-who-
dodges gets right at the heart of this. Obviously most shooters with
regenerating health in the last decade or so are fair in some important sense
of the word. If you play reasonably, you will probably win. But they're often
just... sloppy. The connection between player input and resulting world states
is often looser, more chaotic, more often collapsing into a kind of spectacle.
Obviously you can ship a game someone can play through with those design
choices. But I do think games have lost something in the transition. Given the
success of the Dark Souls series, I think there's some contingent of gamers
out there how agree.

In the end, I think SoF was pretty fun. I was certainly proud of my work on
it. It's hard not to look back on it as a kind of intermediatary step, digging
its heels in as a traditional run-and-gun shooter as the future of modern
military shooters came barreling down. I know there are plenty of people who
like the direction that more modern shooters have gone, but for my part, I
always lament that I never got to work on a shooter more closely aligned with
the original Doom's design philosophy.

------
scott_s
There's a series on YouTube called "Game Maker's Toolkit" which does an
excellent analysis of why Doom worked so well: "What We Can Learn From Doom",
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q)

He hits on many of the same points, but it goes into more depth.

------
dang
Previous discussions:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Lessons%20from%20Doom%20vector...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Lessons%20from%20Doom%20vectorpoem&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0).

------
nickstefan12
Bloodborne seems to meet all of these pretty well. Especially "speed over
tanking", levels not needing to make sense if they're functional, weapon and
enemy variety.

Cool to read it all laid out why we like certain games so much more than
others.

------
speps
From a previous HN link on Doom, I remember discovering this :
[https://github.com/jmtd/wadc](https://github.com/jmtd/wadc)

------
robodale
I Love that the author mentioned M.U.L.E.

If you have never heard of it, get a C64 ROM emulator and grab a version of
the game. It's wonderfully addicting.

