Doom is far more than a just resource management FPS, though. In a lot of ways it's more like a first person STG than a conventional FPS. There's the strong emphasis on dodging, of course. You're not supposed to tank hits in Doom like you'll inevitably need to do in Halo or Half Life or what have you. What few hitscan enemies exist tend to have very low health, a high pain chance (ie they are easy to stun), and are overall not much of a threat. In most FPS games, the enemies are imitations of player characters. They tend to use similar weapons to what you get. They'll employ similar tactics to what you might use, such as taking cover from attacks or lying in ambush. Snipers will keep their distance while shotgun dudes might try to rush you down. Doom's enemies, by contrast, are much simpler and more arcade-like. They march straight towards you. They don't cooperate with each other at all. They have one or two attacks each and they shoot right at you whenever they can with no regard for collateral damage. Individually they can't stand up to Doomguy at all. Even the cyberdemon is a joke if you've got a bit of room to work with.ZellSF wrote:We know this... based on no one trying?
I don't see why a resource management FPS wouldn't work today.
These simple, arcadey enemies are, I think, the single most important thing that differentiates Doom from other first person shooters. Doom enemies aren't rival characters you need to outsmart or anything like that. They're puzzle pieces that the level designer puts together to create encounters. A single imp is a nonentity. A wall of a thousand imps can be dealt with fairly easily by moving perpendicular to them - in shmup terms, it's a stream attack. But just like in a shmup, you combine the stream attack with some random shots from mancubi and you've got something potentially nasty. Trade the mancubi for revenants and it's a different fight altogether. Take a bunch of easy enemies from an open space and put them in a tight hallway and suddenly they're dangerous. Take an encounter in an open room and throw up a bunch of pillars in the way and it's a totally different fight. There's a near infinite number of ways enemy groups can be assembled and each one leads to a different encounter. Really, Doom isn't revered because of how good the vanilla game is (it's fine, nothing amazing) but because it's the world's greatest build-your-own-FPS kit.
Doom's weapons aren't too far off conceptually from most first person shooters, but I don't think they've ever been surpassed. The pistol sucks and it's supposed to suck. Its job is to make the later parts of the level more cathartic once you've got real weapons and are ready for some payback. The shotgun is overshadowed by the super shotgun, but I think it's still one of the best shotguns in the genre. It oneshots quite a few enemies. Its spread is a lot tighter than most video game shotguns and it's plenty useful at long range. The super shotgun is quite simply the best shotgun in a video game. The chaingun is just the pistol with a higher rate of fire, but it interacts really well with the pain system. Good way to lock down moderately pain-sensitive enemies like revenants and cacodemons. It also has absolutely zero spread and can snipe distant targets just fine. The rocket launcher is a huge risk reward weapon, far more so than rocket launchers are in most games. Part of the reason is because Doom tends to pit you against tons of enemies, which makes splash damage really good, and also makes the danger of a monster kamikaze dashing into point blank range that much worse. Another part is because of how aiming in Doom works. In most FPS games, the safe and reliable way to use the rocket launcher is to aim at the other guy's feet. If he's too close to you you can aim at the ground a bit behind him so he's in the splash radius and you're not. That doesn't work in Doom because you can't manually aim vertically. If you want to hit a monster you need to aim right at him, or at an obstacle nearby. Its rate of fire is very high and sustained fire will melt anything in no time. The plasma is a better chaingun that uses a more exotic type of ammo. It's very good at destroying a single target quickly and it's a solid emergency weapon. It's hard to justify burning your cells on the plasma gun if you have the BFG, though. The BFG is basically a shmup bomb that'll annihilate anything on a good chunk of the map, but only after brief, vulnerable startup period. It looks like it's a better rocket launcher, it's actually a very strange and complex weapon when you get into the fine details. Functionally it's more like a bizarre, delayed, superpowered shotgun than anything else.
The fist is fun, its delay makes it challenging to use. It's genuinely very strong once you've found a berserk pack. It looks like the berserk boost only lasts while the screen is red, but it actually persists until the end of the level. Chainsaw is kinda bad, though, especially since it's glitchy. Oh well.
Custom maps are the real Doom. Of course they count. Custom maps are why people still care about the game at all.Blinge wrote:I don't think you've shown how OG doom was about resource management.
Custom maps don't count.
Anyway I'd say resource management is still relatively important in the base game, but only if you're playing under pistol start conduct or if you die and are thus forced into a pistol start. It's pretty easy for an early resource lead to snowball into an insurmountable advantage. The weapon balance is so good that running out of ammo and losing access to any out of your super shotgun, chaingun, or rocket launcher could pose a serious problem later on. The plasma gun and BFG are such powerful get-out-of-jail-free cards that you can mostly treat energy cells similar to STG bombs.
Remembering where you left items so you can go back for them after expending ammo is lame though.