Update 26 April, 2016: The archived livestream is now available and you can watch it in full below:
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Original Story 25 April, 2016: During a livestream tonight Bethesda showed off Doom’s SnapMap creation tool, highlighting some examples of what people can make and showcasing its features.
Will new Doom join the original in our list of the best FPS games on PC?
Doom’s SnapMap mode looks like a cool little tool, with myriad ways to use its built-in logic and toolset to create something truly original. During the livestream we were shown a bunch of clever ideas, like BasketBoom – a versus mode on a basketball court where players have to melee each other to snatch the ball and fire to throw it into a hoop on their opponent’s side.
Then there was a memory game where you had to remember the contents of a room and go through a door to choose from one of the multiple choice answers. There was also a working keyboard and drum machine, a horde mode, boss fights, fleshed out single-player levels and more.
You can modify health and damage, spawn in demons randomly based on an algorithm, have monsters fight each other, make players spawn as monsters and probably do lots of other things that id Software never even considered.
Each map will have a leaderboard, and players can grab and tinker with any map in the database – a database that’s populated by maps made across every platform, so you will be able to play maps created by console players as well as PC creators. Each of them also comes with its own leaderboards, and they can be tagged and voted on, hopefully causing the best to rise to the top.
It looks like a cool addition, but it’s not likely going to fill the void left behind by the lack of modding support, especially as SnapMap only supports four-players. I mean, four players is fine for co-op, but that’s a pretty huge restriction in the user-generated content competitive multiplayer modes. Judging by the memory restrictions on the created levels present in the livestream, it seems like a concession to support these maps working across all platforms, and that’s a damn shame.