Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm just on

Pro hint! Keep away from him and be patient.

In the next bit, get up close and make happy with the super shotty.

Pro hint! Don't die.

I managed to get more time on this last night than expected as Hearthly Jnr decided to do upstairs activities with her mum at about 7pm, which immediately made it DOOM-O-CLOCK for me.

So yes, it's fricking awesome, obviously. I can't remember the last time I played a game that so completely dispensed with any sort of faffing about and got straight down to the nitty gritty. (The original Serious Sam, maybe?)

I didn't find the pistol all that bad really, the charged shot is OK and generally speaking you're only worried about wounding things enough to get the glory kill off anyway. (In fact, before long I was finding it rather disappointing if the baddies died from gunshot wounds as opposed to me ripping them to pieces.) And you get the shotgun soon enough anyway, so no problems there.

The first proper level, the UAC, didn't cause me too many problems, but at the end of the level I noted I was missing a secret and a weapon upgrade token (and this was despite the fact I'd been fairly thorough on my sweep through the level), at which point my completionist instincts kicked in and I then spent quite a while discovering those final two items.

I love the automap, that's a really nice touch and makes it far less annoying to work out which areas of the map you've missed and where still needs investigating.

It did make it a bit of a level of two halves though, as I'd killed every single baddie on it, and then just spent about half an hour running around trying to find the last secrets. At one point it made a half-hearted attempt to respawn a few things but it only seemed to be a single 'wave' and that was the only time it did it, so I'm not even sure it was supposed to happen.

When I called it a night I was most of the way through RESOURCE OPERATIONS, but again, I'm really taking my time over it and making sure I find every last secret, and the way the yellow security access works is a little bit tricksy in what it allows access to (beyond the obvious) which took a while to unpick.



Combat wise there's not much to say that hasn't already been covered in this thread. It's incredibly fast and exhilarating, and the glory kills are pretty much mandatory for the health top-ups and also to save on ammo, why waste an extra shotgun shell when a swift bit of demon dismemberment will do the job? Once you get into a rhythm with it, it's quite unlike any other game I've ever played, but I'd perhaps draw parallels with Borderlands 2 and how you sort of 'zone in' during a big fight and almost feel your way around the combat, running on pure instincts because there isn't any time to actually think things through.

I'm not entirely sold on the various upgrade paths for your suit and weapons yet, as it looks like I'm being asked to make permanent choices with no real clue as to which might be good or bad, and I get the feeling that the game isn't exactly going to be chucking the various tokens around like confetti. Hopefully they're more 'style' choices insofar as you choose things based on how you want to play the game, rather than there being outright bad decisions that could hobble you further down the line.

So yes, it's a glorious, fantastic VIDEOGAME, as in, it knows exactly what it wants to be and it does it perfectly. Frantic, visceral and exciting with one genius little touch after another, doesn't take itself seriously and is quite happy to chuck in amusing and retro touches at every turn (who couldn't love the little Doomguys?). Oh yes, love the music too, fits the game superbly well.

I'm on leave this week so no doubt I'll pile through the game in fairly short order, I'm on HURT ME PLENTY which feels about right at the moment, but I wouldn't rule out another playthrough on a harder skill level.

PC TECHNO BABBLE, I'll keep this brief

Loading times are worth mentioning though as that seems to be the biggest complaint in this thread and also in a lot of the reviews. On my PC the time from selecting 'LOAD FROM CHECKPOINT' after a death, to being back in the game and moving again ready to kick more ass, was timed at just under 9 seconds. (The initial game load from the menu screen is about 16-17 seconds.) I'm running the game from a decent Samsung EVO SSD, albeit on an otherwise pretty clonky old PC with SATA-2 (which will bottleneck the SSD), but clearly it makes a difference. (I also have 12GB of system RAM and 4GB of VRAM, as opposed to a unified 8GB pool, so maybe that's a factor too.)

Graphics wise I just went for the ULTRA preset and ADAPTIVE v-sync at my native res of 2560x1440, it maintains a pretty solid 60FPS at all times, which is quite a remarkable achievement in an age where games such as The Division, Witcher 3 and the NFS game have all proved too much for my PC to cope with at that resolution and equivalent settings, so hats off to ID there. The adaptive v-sync in particular is a genius touch.

Finally, I doff my cap to anyone who can play this with a pad, the gymnastics required in a hectic firefight would be totally beyond me with a gamepad, so I'm very pleased to have K+M available.

Initial game load:



Checkpoint load after death:

If you find that hunting all the dull stuff down is getting in the way of punching everything into pieces, you can go back and do a level again later on if you like (and you take all your stuff with you, so it's a good place to get weapon and rune tasks done).

On the other hand, I don't know how anyone can play this game on keyboard, being stuck to eight directions. Let's face it, aiming isn't exactly top priority, there's only a couple of weapons that are precision based, everything else is either spread, spray and pray, splash damage or proximity based.

I played the original Doom just on keyboard. Mouse aiming never even occurred to me.

Original doom was Dos - why would you waste the 13k or so to load a mouse driver when you didn't need it !

To aim quicker. I think I still struggled on trying to do the same thing when Quake came out too, though.

And having to set up a specific .bat file to set the IRQ and DMA up to get sound.

Ahhh right, I totally didn't know this, I would have definitely moved on from the UAC sooner last night if I'd have known I could go back later at my leisure to find the secrets I'd missed.



Same again in RESOURCE OPERATIONS, I was determined to work out the interactions between all the yellow security card thingies, but part of me was wanting to press on and start punching demons in the face again.

Good to know that anything you miss isn't left behind for good.

Well you use W and S for backwards and forwards (A and D are strafe left and right), the direction of your movement is controlled with the mouse, so pretty much an infinite choice of directions, as opposed to, y'know, eight.

The Cheevo for competing in Multiplayer is called "IPXSETUP.EXE"

I am almost at 100% for every level I've done; I'm missing two challenges I screwed up, and I think one secret.

I have occasionally spammed the weapon masteries e.g. yesterday I found a room with a number of Possessed in it (which is quite rare in the later levels) so I kept hammering Restart Checkpoint until I'd done the masteries for the Gauss gun siege mode (kill 3 demons with one shot) and the chain gun turret mode (kill 4 demons with one turret deploy.) All those counters never reset on any given playthrough, so you can go back to checkpoints or earlier levels to grind them.

There's an animation for the beserk kill on (I think) an imp where you shove your hands in its mouth and tear its head in two. It's awesome.

There are exactly enough Praetor armour points and weapon mods to unlock everything in one playthrough, and apparently there are about 20 weapon upgrade points to spare; so you're not making permanent choices.

One thing I found slightly annoying is that weapon upgrades aren't throttled by upgrade points as much as they are by upgrade drones. Especially when you find the weapons early it's a bit frustrating to be sitting on upgrade points because you've not unlocked the upgrades yet.

I'm sure there are lots of worthy things one could do with a day off, jobs around the house, that sort of shit.

Fuck it, I choose DOOM and beer.

Think the next time I fire it up I'll revisit the early levels to mop up some goodies.

Ahhhh that's handy to know, cheers. I really was agonising over what to spend my points on last night......

I'm not very good at finding the secrets in this and still haven't seen an original Doom level. I think I should try and fix that tonight.

You can usually spot the classic map on the automap as somewhere you haven't been.

The means to open it up is fairly close.

Although you feel so damn slow in the classic maps.

This game is amazingly good.

I hate it when the thundering metal rock music finishes, as that means there are no more demons to kill in the current area.

Sticking to my guns on 100% finding everything on first playthrough, cleared Level 3 with the entire map uncovered and absolutely everything done and found - I can't bring myself to move on with greyed out icons still on the MISSION screen.

Currently running with a maxed out explosive shotgun and the tactical scope on the heavy assault rifle.

If I'm honest the tactical scope isn't really working out very well, knew I should have gone for micro missiles..... (The maxed out shotgun makes up for it though, and the plasma rifle comes in useful in a pinch, can't remember the last time I even fired the pistol. A periodic chainsaw is useful for replenishing ammo as well.)

Is it just me who was sad enough to hang around in the classic DOOM level on Level 3 (Foundry), just to listen to the old MIDI style music loop through?

Awesome stuff, I can see this game ending up with Borderlands 2 and Dishonored in exalted 'best games I've ever played' territory.

Unfortunately, the levels start introducing plenty of one way sections (some entirely arbitrarily - you go back and find a locked door has appeared... no idea why they'd do that from a design perspetive) making getting everything rather less easy, unless you restart the mission to retry getting everything.

Hmmm, that sounds rather irritating.

So far there's been complete freedom to roam back over the entire level, or a very clearly telegraphed YOU ARE MOVING ONTO THE NEXT BIT OF THE GAME door that you obviously just need to avoid going through for a bit if you want to keep poking around in the current environment.

I shall see how it pans out, currently about to embark on Level 4 - ARGENT FACILITY.

I think it's level 7 where the first area with the inability to backtrack happens (May have been earlier, but if so, I didn't notice), and it is fairly obvious. But it does get increasingly reluctant to allow you to return.

Yes, it does. I've started being careful about looking for secrets as I go along. You do normally get some warning e.g. you can see you're about to drop down something you can't climb back up.

I found the Cyberdemon!

Cyberdemon dead. Killed me three times in total.

Such a weakling.

The fucking Rich Get Richer rune trial can get to fucking fuck.

That's Level 4 done. This 'gating' thing sounds like it'll really irritate me when it kicks in though, as some of these fuckers are pretty hard work to find, and not obvious even if you're making an effort to look out for secrety type shenanigans.

Still, I shall get annoyed about that in due course, no point in getting cross about something that hasn't even happened yet And in the meantime, ZOMG AWESOME GAME.

(I haven't even logged into Hearthstone today to find out what my daily quest is, that's some serious dereliction of duty right there, but then again these demons won't kill themselves. Although actually they do if you can get them stood in the right positions.....)

Pwned it.

That was excellent.

What the shit is all that shit at the top right of that screenshot

Come on Doc, there's no way I'm not going to have that shit turned on at all times.

I could just turn it off course. But obviously I won't.

The numbers make me feel safe when the demons get too scary.

you

you

you have that on all the time

what the actual fuck

To be fair, he hasn't gone for nightmare levels of pointless readouts.

(Yes, there's more)

I felt the bosses didn't quite work... like they were an attempt to do Soulsborne bosses in a FPS, and it doesn't feel right.

I'm not going to spoiler this, because I feel it is important information, and more important than the shock value: The first two bosses have multiple health bars. Do not waste all your BFG ammo in the first part of the fight.

Multiple Heath Bars; get to fucking fuck.

So if it's important it's not a spoiler? Right-o.

Cleared up the secrets I'd missed on the first level before making progress again in the campaign.

Bagged me enough weapon upgrade points to unlock my Super Shotgun's Mastery challenge.

Well worth persuing that one. It's awesome. I got about 2/3rds of the way normally but the cannon fodder enemies were a bit thin on the ground as I got further into the game. I went back and did some earlier levels where you get lots of Possessed running around; found a spot with a few of them just after a checkpoint and did Reload Checkpoint until I'd finished it.

In other weapon mastery news, the assault rifle's micro missiles are insane when fully upgraded. So is the chain gun turret and both gauss gun mods.

Upgrades I don't care about and would advise new players to consider not spending lots of points on: both shotgun mods once you get better weapons (they are both moderately handy very early, however), the chain gun rotator thing, the assault rifle's scope, the rocket launcher's remote detonation.

I have a couple of levels left, I think, and I have every mod I care about maxed out now. I missed a challenge on the last map and I don't even care.

Captain spray and pray is incorrect about this one.

I've got the heavy assault rifle's tactical scope mod fully upgraded now, it's an effective weapon but it does feel somewhat at odds with the overall style and feel of the game, as it's a sort of rapid-fire sniper rifle type affair in that guise, and you need to have it scoped to get the mod's benefits - so by definition you're picking demons off at range and not getting into the thick of it for glory kills.

I'm not even sure why I went for it TBH, as the micro missiles sounded far cooler. I am now working on maxing out the micro missiles instead.....

Overall with the weapons though, the limitation appears to be collecting the mods themselves from the drones, the weapon upgrade tokens are dispensed reasonably generously I'm finding, so it doesn't seem to be a disaster if you pick a turkey of an upgrade tree to go down.

(I'm not saying the scope is a turkey as such, the rifle's damage is brutal when it's maxed out and you've got the mastery unlocked, it just doesn't feel very DOOM-ey.)

I agree with Gaywood. (indeed, I believe he's come to pretty much exactly the same conclusions as I did.)

If you're far enough away from the enemies that you need a scope, you're doing Doom wrong.

Out of all the people here who might Do Doom Wrong, I am astonished it was Grim....

How do you go prone?

Scoped rifle is a brilliant boss weapon.

You can crouch, actually. You press circle. I've probably done it twice, both times to fit into some narrow air duct and get to a secret. I have no idea why else you'd use it when you could be circle-strafe-jumping in gaming's biggest ever endorsement of the Beex Kangaroo Defense.

Really? Does the mastery for it bring a really, really big boost to DPS then? It doesn't seem powerful enough to me, compared to the gauss gun's scoped powershot thing.

Especially considering that the game spawns enemies right next to you. Most of the time the only enemies that seem to be present on the map at any kind of range are possessed.