Lessons From Doom
polycounter lvl 7
I found an interesting article about FPS game design, and how different Doom is compared to modern games of today.
You can read more at:
http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74
A high-minded goal like expand the boundaries of the medium doesnt always mean forging ahead in crazy new unknown directions. Sometimes it means examining lost evolutionary lines in game design picking up ideas that were abandoned long ago and seeing if theres any new life in them. The game I keep coming back to in this regard is Doom. Not the 2004 reboot, but Classic Doom: Doom 1 and 2, Final Doom, the Master Levels and its vast universe of user-made content. What can it teach us today?
You can read more at:
http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74
Replies
Also,
Yeah Xoliul, playing Minecraft kinda got me interested in playing Doom again. It's a nice quick way of enjoying some good gameplay, and no mouse requirement helps on the go.
And yeah, I played doom1 and 2 not too long ago, there's modifications that lets you use the mouse in X and Y axis, which makes it really awesome to play.
Yes, but the point still stands that we've abandoned or devalued a number of fundamental gameplay and game design mechanics. The end result is that people are still playing and building shit for Doom, nearly 20 years later, while on the flip side there were nine copies of Call of Duty in the used section of my local Gamestop less than a day after it came out. It was so heavily linear, scripted, and rail-based that you saw and did everything there was to do in the game in just one play-through. It was a very polished experience, but it was a single experience and that's pretty much all it had to offer because it was so tunnel-visioned.
I think a large part of it is the complexity of content creation he brings up, either for users OR for the original developers. A good example is the first Dungeon Siege compared to the second one.
The first Dungeon Siege had a very high-detailed, relatively linear single-player map which could be played alone, coop, or drop-in multiplayer. And then it had an entire second sprawling multiplayer map (the Utrean Peninsula) that was MASSIVE and allowed you to basically walk around wherever you wanted to freely, in deserts, forests, fields, caves, mountains, wherever. Besides logical landscape barriers (mountains, rivers, chasms, tunnels, etc), there weren't a lot of arbitrary constraints within an area about where you could move. You could go diving off the side of a forest path into the bushes and go trekking through the trees until you hit a mountain range, or straight through the swaps and out the other side into the fields and then into a village fifteen minutes away, all without having to stay on certain paths.
In comparison, the second game had a wide variety of locations but by and large they were much more rail-based. There were only certain paths through the jungles, certain paths through the forests, certain paths through the swamps. You couldn't go tromping off through the forest or diving into the bushes after a bad guy. The game looked fantastic, but it was relatively obvious that in order to create gameplay-proof visuals of more complex environments, GPG had ended up having to restrict player movement to very narrow corridors and paths. The fantastic and awe-inspiring sense of Morrowind or Oblivion-like free roaming was gone.
The biggest reason I can think that happened was from watching a making-of video of DS2. The original game had relatively simple environment art that was incredibly modular. Environments were stitched together from mini-zones and a huge library of smaller objects was strewn around within them. The increased complexity the team faced when building art assets for the second game meant that they couldn't generate the same quantity or variety, and the increased visual fidelity introduced visual logic issues - in order to make places look more real, they were starting to add visual elements (fallen trees, pits, tangled bushes) that players would have expected more detailed or realistic interaction with. The only way to avoid development bloat was to put those visual details behind fences and keep them strictly visual.
For reference, the first Fable suffered the same problem with gorgeous environments requiring the game designers to build small paths through areas instead of allowing open exploration. Oblivion managed to preserve Morrowind's open world, while Neverwinter Nights (which was roughly a contemporary of the first Dungeon Siege) looked like a rules, design and visual super-compromise with semi-open maps with semi-open movement.
I would give my left nut for a new Dungeon Siege sequel that brought back the feeling of wonder and magic in a sprawling, explorable land like the first game, but having seen the new screenshots of DS3 and hearing that GPG isn't heavily involved... I'm not holding my breath. :poly118:
I completely agree that DooM's gameplay remains quite unique today. The abstract level design, along with a unique per-level music & scenario, made each level a game on its own.
Do you want a finely crafted linear experience that will hold your hand through it all or the freedom to go where you want but the loss of that created experience.
Each has there pros and cons.
Personally I prefer a hand held well crafted linear experience like that of Half Life 2 over say a much more open, choose how to get to the end game like Crysis. That isnt to say I dont like a more open game every now and then but I prefer a more hand crafted experience generally.
The image posted by [HP] is a uniformed (at best), and overly-simplified view of modern level design by a game player that hasn't played many games or has an incorrect perception of reality.
Article nullified by the level design of Bioshock (1), FEAR (1) and NOLF2. Both feature level design with the complexity of exploration combined with the option of plowing through at the user's determined speed PLUS the benefits of modern game design. I wrote a VERY long response on another forum, but limit it to these titles as I'm confident no one will prove game play beyond what they preent versus doom.
Disagree? You can't prove it. Think you can? Your head is so deep up your ass you can't see the forest before the trees.
Bioshock featured open levels where the goal could be reached by running through same as Doom levels. They also included heavy amounts of exploring as well as backtrack through levels previously visited (opening up secrets of previous levels down the road).
NOLF2, the gameplay equal and preview to FEAR (1). Each level a clear and obvious straight line through. However, included multiple paths, and hidden upgrades. Both an additional to gameplay featured in Doom. Remember the old early FEAR development articles? They demanded anyone challenge their level design to no objection.
Additional considerations of Crysis (1). Wow, what an open ended game beyond previous mentioned titles. The things I did to AI in that game...
There are obviously exceptions, not all games are linear shooters like CoD. You mentioned some, NOLF 1 and 2, DeusEx(1), FEAR(1), Bioshock(1), Crysis, Fallout3, are a few that come to mind but as you can see not a lot of games come to mind when it comes to freedom.
They did the same thing in FarCry and its why I could never finish the game. Crysis felt way more on rails through the whole game than FarCry, even in the open jungle parts. Crysis just had...wider..rails. I felt like FarCry really let you wander around a bit more through its levels.
Dooms mechanics would work but only in some abstract kind of game where realism is suspended. Player speed is cranked up, the need for cover is inconsequential because most attacks can be dodged. As a result the levels needed to be open and allow the core survival mechanic to work. Now shooter are duck and cover dependent.
I love maps that are open to exploration and have more than one way to get to the end at whatever pace you want. I also love a good on the rails shooter as long as they are done well.
They only see the rails, when we've fucked up the pacing.
Holy hell do players bitch when they aren't lead around every corner with giant candy coated bread crumbs. I say fuck em... They can go back to sliding around on walls looking for secret doors in dark corners getting ambushed from behind and fall down into a pit of spikes without warning. Lets stop treating them with kid gloves and fuck em up and piss them off.
What happened to "you need to die at least twice to figure out what killed you" then die 5 more times to figure out how to get around it only to have it change in some unexpected way the first time you think you have it.
Lets take the handcuffs off the AI and give the player zero chance to get to the end. The achievement glory they'll receive is who left a corpse the closest to the goal while no one ever gets there.
If players think they can build a better mouse trap, I'd like to see them try, honestly I would. I would like them to step up and do something besides bitch and buy used games all damn day. The industry isn't getting any younger and we need new people willing to step up and try to fix what they see as wrong. The majority will probably fail miserably but a few will succeed and those few will make lots and lots of cash and carry the ball forward. That's how the industry has operated and if passionate people don't move from camp whine to camp action then they're going to have a shit load more stuff to whine about.
http://video.adultswim.com/aqua-teen-hunger-force/the-mooninites-fire-on-carl.html
More importantly than the level design from the Doom era...what happened to that era's style of easter eggs?!?!
If dev teams will spend more time on that, they won't need to invest so much in tech and stuff that take a lot of money and time to develop.
And yea, I totally agree about the easter eggs / secrets thing being essential and missing from today's games.
Graph paper and pencils are too expensive?
So how come people focus on making pretty games?
Because liek omg her head is so small sooooo creepy I can't play this!!!!
The more free roaming the bigger the box that the players can move around in and the more chances they have to get stuck, loose their way or just create culling nightmares. How do you pack the same visual punch of a on the rails shooter with a lot more ground to cover, literally.
The article made a good point, I used to crank out CS maps in a day or two.. compare that with making a fleshed out UT3 level or the like. Too often the essences of a genre are diluted to broaden the potential customer base, mostly to recoup the growing costs for art assets and production -- and I don't blame them, it's a business. I just wish there were more indie developers interested in more pure genre titles like Age of Decadence.
There is a large untapped market that usually settles for the newest titles but really only choose to because there is nothing else. Sometimes we are surprised (Alpha Protocol) but more often than not we're disappointed. There is still a place for RPG's and FPS's in the old-school style and they're a very hardcore, loyal fanbase. The graphic eyecandy isn't as important as quality art direction and design.
http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/32217 the image seems very true lolz
This vid makes me sad.
One of the reasons that make Doom so fun is that it has an arcade approach to everything. Levels are short, meaning you can always stop and return to the game and you will never feel lost (Nintendo also does that). Doom would work perfectly in a coin-op arcade machine.
That's something not many mainstream games do these days. Mirror's Edge did that to some extent and it works pretty well imo.