Can we fix Doom 4 up a little more?

So good its bad? No, but its so good with some bad.

Okay so Doom is amazing, and I've stated that, and will continue to state that. But lets also note that its not perfect. Today in this article, I'd love to put down some notes out loud on some of the things that bother me, and... I can't be entirely sure all of it is fixable, but lets go over it anyways without trekking over the fact that I still hate the official title is not actually Doom 4 like it should be.

We need to see online get some actual effort to its interface...

So I will defend Doom's online to the death on its style of gameplay. Its arena-lite awesomeness, and while some whiners are out there saying its not "fast enough", and the weapon limitations suck, my response is... what the hell else are you playing better right now? Unless you go back to playing bots on UT04, which I'm not suggesting is a bad idea at all, you've got very little to deal with for better competitions. Even Quake Live ran over the purist crowd with a stupid loadout update. I would certainly enjoy seeing the loadouts done away with, but it doesn't ruin the online completely or anything. Doom still is ridiculously fast paced, vicious and energetic in combat, and its still got some crazy and cool weapons as well as pickups. I have to kind of scratch my head and wonder how you guys let TF2 and Overwatch get away with their set-ups if you strictly believe every crazy arena FPS needs the full UT/Quake format, and before you bring up their "classes/characters", that's kind of my point... how are you okay with that for happening in the first place if you can't even give Doom a real chance?

However here's the thing I will level at Doom's online, and it admittedly is a bit about what the game lacks in respects to capturing UT04 or even TF2 fame. But its not because of what its close to being and ruins it with modern conventions, its the fact that even any modern game sucks in this regard if they lack it. We're talking server lists, bots, and (perhaps this was patched, but in case its not:) private matches. When Doom's MP launched, it was not only disappointing to the purists that complained about the structure, but also the fact that you couldn't do anything with it other than jump into a random matchmaking session. To add salt to the injury, and I don't care what you say about this "party" plan, there's premium mappacks to ruin the community. Fuck that. But its too late because you had to rush those out on season passes and now that's locked in stone, but I will still criticize the forced matchmaking and the lack of bots. On top of that, here's the weird thing: Bots would not be a grueling new exercise, they were programmed into the game to begin with! For some brain-dead decision, they did not make it to the point of release and neither did private matches. Even if it was done primitively, like you just loaded up an empty match and shot right into completely untweakable bots exclusive to a deathmatch mode, I'd still at least appreciate them being kept.

It isn't all pretty

I'd be thankful to hear an update is probably coming to fix this, but I'm not exactly an idiot. They went out of their way to not answer about this, to strip it out, and to say that maybe it'll be done on all platforms eventually. Here we well over a month later without something that was in before the game was even officially released. I'm not thanking them for that, and nobody else should either. Private matches especially are a standard thing that should always be done if you deem yourself a complete multiplayer experience, and we didn't get that. I'm not thanking them for being sub-par about their game, and only bringing it up to balance later. I'm also not sure server lists are even talked about, and I'm not expecting that to be fixed, but it still should and would greatly improve the atmosphere, lasting value, and just fun of the online. These things should all be standard to every multiplayer game, but the sad fact is that devs think they can skimp on it or even gut it and everything will still be alright. Well if we were to take that bethesda claim that the multiplayer is a part of the whole game enough so to keep critics held back away from it, I say under that condition they released an unfinished game in a big way and that needs to be remedied. The reality is that truly the camaign by itself is a gift from the heavens and more than worth your money, but eh I'll hold game to their own standards as an extra reason to say that their multiplayer needs some more effort put into it.

Optimizing the interface, and just cutting the down-time

Optimization is usually a word we talk about involving the game's performance in motion and play. Doom has this down as perfect and masterfully as anything else it does. Its everything around it I call into question. I really don't understand how this works or why they decided to work it in this way, but just take a few minutes of your time to sort through the menus and you begin seeing its a bit of a clutter to deal with. I could probably linger on this for the snapmap alone, but its really a part of the whole package. If you wanted to load up the multiplayer just to check anything new, it'll take you about two minutes to get that done, and then maybe another minute or two to get back into a normal mode. Meanwhile something like Timesplitters 2 from over a decade old ago was equally as content packed (if not more), and only made you load up things when they were truly loading something you were going to play, or worth seeing. If our reliance on servers have bogged us down this much, I really just want a damn option to turn that stuff on or off to begin with (similar to how Phantom Pain works much better when you turn online off). This stuff is a good example of "I don't know if it can be fixed" because this really is something up to the coders, data experts, and whatnot. However I do feel like the recent update has brought out the biggest sting regarding the accessibility problems this presence.

It all started with just downloading the update. Why is it 12gbs (A chunk of the full Doom game, and the size of about three-to-five good indies) for some asset flips over towards snapmap, and two new multiplayer modes? I know I'm trivializing that, because snapmap bits get their own descriptions, special coding, but its not like they're making me a new level or expansion pack with that stuff. I question this almost as harshly as the Witcher & COD updates that were so bad, but not quite as harshly. Still this is pre-DLC stuff here, and so we haven't even touched on all the future snapmap updates, the promised multiplayer fixes, and then each of the 3 awful DLC packs we don't even want but will be forced to install anyway. Stop it devs, just stop it and optimize your damn game sizes! I love Doom, but its not the only game I play, and I don't want it to eat up 100gbs of my 430-ishGB PS4.

The next issue came with loading times, and trying to use those lovely new updates, because the new updates were pretty awesome in what they added. I loved the hell modules, the weapons lists, the- oh, it crashed. Well damn I didn't save that because I was only 12 minutes in and finding some basic foundation! *15 minutes, and four loading screens later* Okay, I'm back in and ready to link this thing, with that thing, and now I'm testing this other thing, an- oh, damnit, not again!? Not only does it crash a lot in (mostly bluepoint mode actually), but in order to load it up again you go through those painful menus I mentioned earlier. Every crash means you're dealing with a start, a mode switch, "connecting to the servers" wait, scrolling through the crazy UI, and getting the map-maker itself to load. Oh, and if you lose while playing someone's map, its just a "fuck you" and you get to load back into a rating screen where you rate the level you never beat. Then you have to manually start it again from the hosting screen (which is stupid for the many solo maps that have no such actual hosting). No more of that fast-paced mastery, or any trial or error in learning some insane random player creation like you'd expect from a game like this; You're punished by essentially being kicked out of a server. That's just absurd, and I feel like at least that much can be fixed. I'm not asking for mandatory checkpoints to hold me through, but at least give us a traditional "Game Over: Try again?" kind of screen to just instantly reload the map.

Oh, and while I'm at it, I'll also point out the ridiculous nature of replaying levels where minor details are fixed to work in alien ways. The way runes can't be played anymore on the spot, or how checkpoints just don't work, yet for some reason the secret meter goes off on discovered stuff, it all makes no sense. I think someone put together the save system in a really clumsy and tangled way, and some poor guy tried to salvage things and save us from an Ubisoft-style "haha, can only play it once" style of idiocy.

Nitpicking snapmap even more...

Uh, no this command didn't work right at all for me

...and trying to wrap this up quickly now, but efficiently, lets talk of the issues I've had within snapmap. No longer about the menus, formatting, etc, but rather how it actually works... and sometimes that's broken. In addition to the game launching where demon entry types conflicted with each other without warning, and running off of the multiplayer's tweaks, there's other issues. Because of that demon issue, where pre-placed demon assets wont work alongside spawns without their own special coding, you need to mostly depend on spawner codes. Spawner codes, which randomly break. I've had waves come in way too late, enemies that spawn only once you've already passed the room, and oh I've even had enemies that loop their own respawn upon an "on-kill" command going to someone else for... reasons? On top of that, it also doesn't help that spawners just don't have enough options. Why is it that 80% of the preset groups consist of a baron, as if that's the one guy they want players to fight all the time rather than as a sparingly used super baddie like he really is? Why is it that the boss mode bit is one of the only spawners that lacks health buff settings, so you can't actually make him a real boss (meaning you should use the baron for that spare occasion, and not the dozen pre-sets with him in it)? Also is wave customization too much to ask, so that I can omit something like the 6 lost souls that keep popping up and cheaply blowing my health down to zero? Is it also possible to polish the filters, because I'm not a huge fan of how you can see room A's filter in room B without B actually having it, and then walking through it just snaps back into shape. Yeah this mode still has some issues and like I mentioned in my review, its awful that this replaced modding.

The mode has issues preventing full freedom and control, and it doesn't even know what its going to do itself sometimes. The mode is still incredible, and sucks hours of my time into making one map right, but its still got issues that usually force me into a work-around on every kind of map. I'd love to end every map with a boss fight, but I can't with the miniboss system since that doesn't allow me to create a real boss. I'd have to instead make a super-buff spawn of a bigger enemy and pretend he's the boss, since I don't have the official event in place. I have to finely test each wave event multiple times to make sure I don't get a bad roll of the dice and die to a cheap spawn rate, since I can't control who spawns and if I have the right equipment. Oh, and a little issue I found only recently that perfectly sums up how bullshit the errors in this can be: I wanted to make a checkpoint system. I found a way to move up the spawn point by setting a code to enable a new player start, and it worked. If I died at a certain point, it brought me to my 2nd spawn every time. Did this with the final room, and it... failed. It would not work at all, and kept sending me to the 2nd spawn. So I set a disable trigger to both other spawns to see if there were too many activated, and it... just sent me back to the very beginning ignoring both my new spawn, and ignoring my disable command. Each time I tested this I looked closely at the code to make sure it was set in place right, and it was. Every logic command just right, done exactly how I set the 2nd spawn. I had to give up and invent a teleporter activation that kicked in underneath of the 2nd spawn, so I'd have a sloppy delayed jump to the area I was supposed to. Meanwhile real checkpoints beyond one are possible as is evident by another map I played, but as I tore through the game's options, I found nothing like it in my tools. So this is not only telling me that codes just don't work on their own terms, but also there's clearly some stuff here not intuitive enough to figure out something as simple as "Checkpoint" or "enables player respawn here".

Doom has some mess beyond the gore splattering on the walls

Doom is an amazing game, but it isn't perfect. In all of its amazing glory, and in all the smiles it brings, it has inspired me to play it enough to see some ugly stuff underneath its pristine surface. Some of this stuff really, really, really can bug a person like me that loves and craves more out of this game. Its everything from the little bugs, and wishful thinking, to the fact that I can't design a damn reasonable boss fight with the boss tool, or enjoy any custom MP maps since there's no bots to do it and nobody else is actually going to wait around in their crappy matchmaking system. It'd be amazing if Doom actually fixed all of these problems. Its still one of the best shooters I've ever played, but it sure would be great to see it do even better and fix the weak cracks in the wall. If nothing else though, I really want that size to go down rather than up with some optimization. I cannot repeat it enough that there's a difference from me actually being able to play the game or not if the game winds up at some ridiculous 100GB size. I love Doom, but not enough to throw away 4-6 other games for it.