DOOM! A real game that actually exists! I couldn’t be more excited if you told me Blizzard were going to make an Overwatch-inspired Advance Wars clone. Finally we’re starting to get some more hard details, as the digital edition of GameInformer’s latest mag, which features id’s hell-blaster on the cover and the majority of the inside, has gone out and been summarised by those brave denizens of the internet. There’s a little bit of a Doom 3-style plot revealed, information on how the BFG and Chainsaw operate as ‘panic buttons’ and exactly how limited SnapMap is going to be versus the modding tools of old, among other tidbits.
Will Doom manage to join its elder bretheren in the pantheon of best FPS games?
The deets were posted on NeoGAF ahead of the slow-rolling month-long reveal on GameInformer’s site. Here’s the highlights from what seems to be a playthrough of some of the game’s early levels:
- BFG and Chainsaw have their own keybinds. The chainsaw is effectively a one-hit melee weapon, while the BFG is a room-clearing panic button. This certainly matches up with how I used it in the original games. The chainsaw won’t one-shot larger enemies, and using it is limited by powercells.
- Weapons are moddable, the example used is remote detonation of in-air rockets for targetable splash damage.
- Along with this are character upgrades that let you do things more quickly, carry more ammo and be harder to kill. There are also Elder Scrolls/Fallout-style perks that give more major new abilities, like a stacking speed boost on every melee kill.
- A character named Dr. Olivia Pierce showed up to say she was the one who unleashed the demons, because she’s a religious zealot. Different decade, same excuse – scientists of the fictional worlds, get your acts together.
- Some enemies will have armoured areas and fleshy ones, making flanking or approaching them from behind more deadly. Hopefully there isn’t too much of this, Doom’s masses of enemies only really work because precision isn’t something you need to worry about.
- Keycards and secrets both show up in similar ways to their first iteration.
Posterkinaesthete also mentions that SnapMap gets a section, once again clarifying that it’s the only planned kind of mod tools for the game. It’s all shared on a hub that will have profiles you can follow, ratings given out and so on, letting you find good fan content easily. That’s great, but with all the SnapMap files being small instruction sets to the game rather than fully build levels, chances are it will be impossible to make truly custom areas with them – you’ll only be able to plug bits of what id gives you together. That will still lead to some great stuff, no doubt, but the openness of Doom’s creative tools is what has lead to a 20+ year community that still creates experiences to rival the best games of today.
Much more in the GAF thread, and GameInformer will likely be releasing their own versions of all this info with video accompaniment in the near future. Various screenshots have also popped up showing that the game is a little more colourful than before.