So, it’s likely that there is a certain amount of nostalgia mixed into it but there seems to be some tiredness about games in the Call of Duty or Halo genre. There seems to be a yearning for Doom-like games to the point that it’s a sales pitch, even when it’s quite debatable.
I played Doom recently and it did feel quite different than playing Call of Duty, Halo or Rage. I am taking the games Doom and Call of Duty as the best examples of two FPS genres. I do not mean to limit the conversation to those two games.
So, how are they different? Why are they different?
I will provide some of my answers but I’d like to keep the first post from influencing the direction of the conversation.
Not a “real” gamer so forgive me if I’m off base, but to me Doom is almost like a puzzle game. On the really hard parts you keep going through a level, dying and restarting, till you figure out the best path to take and the correct timing since the AI pretty much acts the same way every time.
Halo is more like combat because, as far as I can tell, the AI seems to have a lot more options and will vary it’s reaction.
Are you referring to single player or multi? CoD, for example, is really a multiplayer game with a skimpy single player campaign tacked on. Doom is primarily a single player campaign with the option to have multiplayer death matches.
Well, you can actually shoot above a fixed plane in CoD as opposed to Doom, but I assume your talking about differences that aren’t due to improved technology since Doom came out.
There was a picture floating around the internet comparing a Doom level to a CoD single player level, and the former was a sprawling network of rooms while the CoD level was basically just a long hallway. But I think that’s more due to what Jophiel mentioned, the people who make CoD are making a primarily multiplayer game, so they don’t want to put a lot of work into making single player levels where there are many different possible routes.
Well, games like Quake (Doom, I think, is a bad example, as it is TOO technologically limited) just move/play differently. There’s lots of jumping, for example, and respawning items radically change the flow of play.
I don’t really know what you mean by a “yearning for Doom-like games” though. CoD is absurdly popular.
Check out reviews for Wolfenstein: The New Order. It was marketed just as much as the successor to Doom’s legacy as it was as a Wolfenstein sequel. And people loved it.
So… this “yearning” is basically just a shameless nostalgia play? Or was there actually something “Doom like” about this game? (Aside from being not entirely stupidly grimdark)
What shameless nostalgia? The new Wolfenstein is great and it is a very different style of play versus games like Call of Duty or Halo. More “run-and-gun” and less, I don’t know, Call of Duty. It really is a different style and gamers really are responding to developers who fill that niche.
I can’t say that I see much difference; they’re all first-person shooters.
If there is any marked difference, it’s in the fact that Doom plays much more like an older style video game with levels than the subsequent FPS games that have combinations of scripted cut-scenes and objective-focused gameplay. By that, I mean that a game like Doom was just basically one where you shot stuff and progressed through levels without doing anything different, and what you did didn’t really matter story-wise (as far as there was a Doom story at all).
Games like CoD, Battlefield, Titanfall or even Half-Life require you to actually move a story along with your actions, while remaining primarily first-person shooters. Games like Fallout 3 and Fallout:New Vegas take it even further, and are primarily role-playing games presented from a first-person perspective.
Doom is one of the few games that retains high lethality for the player’s weapons throughout the game, and never falls into the “bullet sponge” design trap for enemies. This keeps it playing like a fast-paced arcade game throughout its content, rarely as a sneaker, sniper, or boss-puzzler. Its core fun comes from the progression through more and more enemies with trickier abilities to defeat (invisibility, splash damage, etc) than caring about story or objectives.
CoD and Battlefield both have very similar single-player campaigns. Like other players have mentioned, their campaigns are completely ancillary to their multiplayer experiences, which are the primary focus of the franchises. Beyond that, though, their design is still very different from games like Doom. The lack of exploration isn’t only because the campaigns are tacked on. They’re more rail-like because the levels are all enormous set pieces. CoD and Battlefield campaigns play like Michael Bay movies, with firefights serving as bookends to some pretty epic scripted events. They’re actually pretty enjoyable.
But that was the point. By that point in the game you were packing the chaingun and the plasma rifle and the BIG FUCKING GUN*. Proving that you were good enough to take down hordes of powerful enemies with your powerful guns is a high-level challenge.
Note to non-Doom players, that is its actual name.
On the level with the island and many, many monsters, I would hide in the room, occasionally opening the door and sniping, while most of them killed each other.
I always thought of Halo as more like Doom than CoD, in that there’s a lot more wild shooting at each other. In CoD, the chances of still being alive after being shot at for even one second are quite small. Of course, it’s not much like Doom technologically, but it’s at least comparable to Quake and Unreal Tournament. Admittedly, I haven’t played Halo since #3.
I’d like to know what MichaelEmouse means by “Doom-type” or “CoD-type”, though, since it obviously differs from my view.
Well, the primary difference is that Call of Duty is designed to be a player-vs-player experience and letting people play “soldier”. So it has a much wider variety of guns, designed to let players take cover, set ambushes, sniper positions and stuff like that. It also has regenerating health which lets players stay in the game longer since they’re not reliant on a limited number of health packs on the map. Most importantly, they’re playing against other (supposedly) thinking opponents. But even in the campaigns, these games usually have at least rudimentary “seek cover” aspects to the AI.
Doom is designed to pretty much be a monster-mower. The monster AI is limited to “move towards player and attack” with creatures mindlessly approaching and you cutting them down. There’s a limited array of weapons because when you’re chaingunning dozens of imps at point blank range, who cares about the differences between an AK-47 and an AK-74? Health is managed by a limited number of packs on the map, forcing you to strategicly decide when to take them and preventing you from just taking hits with impunity. But most “realism” aspects are set aside for the fun of filling bad guys with holes.
A third type (and we could no doubt list others) is the survival FPS. Games like Stalker or Far Cry 2 which feature numerous (mainly) realistic guns but with weapon degradation so you’re forced to switch out weapons, reasonably intelligent opponent AI, slowly regenerating life supplemented with medical packs, multiple ammunition types to juggle even for the same class of weapons and stuff like that. Also an open world experience compared to Doom’s corridors and Call of Duty’s size-limited maps.
I’d say each type is fairly distinctive although there’s room for overlap from game to game. And you have other sub-types as well – a horror FPS like the original Bioshock or Fear handles differently any of the above in some ways for example.
