x100 this. Quake 1 was terrifying for me even though the pixelated graphics are poor by todays standard because my imagination would fill in the blanks making things feel way more scary.

Just take a look at these pixelated creatures. Coupled with the soundtrack from NIN and Trent Reznor and the gothic atmosphere they feel way scarier to me than what came after like Doom 3 or even Dooms of this decade. I don't now why but the recent Doom games just look a bit too cartoonish for me and not scary at all.

http://retrovania-vgjunk.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-creatures-...

I think perhaps the biggest reason why Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal don't feel "creepy" like the old games is because they are completely missing the point. The newer games are fun, beautiful, well designed games. However, instead of making a game that captures the essence of Doom its more like a Michael Bay version of Doom. Instead of desperately fighting never ending hordes of increasingly horrifying creatures from hell so you can get out in one piece and save the world, you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons for lulz. The whole way the story makes it seem like its a foregone conclusion that you've won. Its not a struggle, its just you punishing the hordes of hell that are powerless to stop you.

Aesthetically they nailed the look of the creatures although as you pointed out less can be more. The sound track is good but at some point the composer was consumed by his own pretentiousness (IMO Dusk's composer that replaced him produces far better "Doom" music). The combat is fun and if it wasn't a Doom game it would still be rightly lauded as one of the best shooters of the generation, but glory kills annihilate the flow of the game IMO and detract from any authentic feeling it may have had. Glory kills feel like shortened, dumbed-down quick time events that you're supposed to spam the entire time you play and quick time events always feel bad.

They are some of the best single player games I've played in years, but I was there with Id since the Commander Keen games and this does not feel like a Doom game to me.

I mean its literally a Doom game, but the franchise has clearly lost something and I feel like a lot of the people that preach about how authentically they captured the experience might be too young to have bothered to play it.

Doom II: Hell On Earth is IMO one of the top 5 games of all time. Quake 1 is also on the list. I hope some day we get proper remakes or spiritual successors that capture not just the aesthetic, but the feel and the point of the original games.

Dusk was a decently sized step in the right direction.

People flipped out when Doom 3 ended up being low light horror game and not a fast paced shooter.

Heck the lore of the Doom is that the protagonist is the 'Doom of demonkind'. Its the game where you are not locked in room with demons but they are locked in room with you.

> you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons

That is the 100% the core idea of Doom lore.

Tldr: The doom marine was entangled with 'hell' and at some stage was tricked that his dead son could be brought to life by a some demon deal - he came back as twisted undead. Doomguy got really angry and his anger propelled him to destroy all that is hell.

> They are some of the best single player games I've played in years, but I was there with Id since the Commander Keen games and this does not feel like a Doom game to me.

I have some mixed feelings about Doom Eternal as it sometimes feels like a puzzle and bit gamey. But Doom 2016 is quite literally a modernised version of Doom 1.

>That is the 100% the core idea of Doom lore.

That was created specifically in 2016 Doom. Prior to that, Doom didn't really have much of a story.

I grew up on N64/Gamecube/XB360, and can confirm that Doom was not scary the first time I played it (about 10 years old).

I'd like to think that there is both an objective and subjective aspect to this. On the one hand, maybe people just can't appreciate the older styles of art. On the other hand, after being exposed to modern violence, cinematography, and suspense, the old techniques truly do pale in comparison, at least in the visceral, emotional sense.

My mom found "The Exorcist" truly frightening, so much so that she refused to re-watch it in adulthood. So my friend and I rented it one night looking forward to a good scare; instead, we mostly found ourselves laughing at how ridiculous it seemed. We must have been around 12 at the time, so probably already quite desensitized to horror movies in general, but I think it is also the case that the subject matter was just less frightening to us than it was to her. We were all raised Catholic, but she was of the stern-nuns-with-rulers generation whereas our elementary school in the 90's had been of the hippie-nuns-with-guitars variety. I don't think things like demons/the devil had ever felt like real objects of fear for us like they may have been for her (in such a deep way that their representation continued to creep her out long after she stopped believing in their literal existence).

It's one of the best games I've played in a long time. Way better than Doom Eternal.

>People flipped out when Doom 3 ended up being low light horror game and not a fast paced shooter.

A game can have a creepy aesthetic and even scare people without being a slow paced survival game where you walk around awkwardly pointing at things with a flashlight. The early games had creepy vibes at many different parts of the game. If you disagree to each his own.

> you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons

> That is the 100% the core idea of Doom lore.

> But Doom 2016 is quite literally a modernised version of Doom 1.

Not really, here's the final paragraphs to the introduction to Doom 1 from the original manual:

> Things aren't looking too good. You'll never navigate off the planet on your own. Plus, all the heavy weapons have been taken by the assault team leaving you only with a pistol. If only you could get your hands around a plasma rifle or even a shotgun you could take a few down on your way out. Whatever killed your buddies deserves a couple pellets in the forehead. Securing your helmet, you exit the landing pod. Hopefully you can find more substantial firepower somewhere within the station. As you walk through the main entrance of the base, you hear animal-like growls echoing throughout the distant corridors. They know you're here. There's no turning back now.

Yes, he's a highly trained badass, but he's just a Marine. He ends up killing all of the monsters if you finish the game, but the setup and the aesthetic and lore of the entire game makes it seem like an insurmountable challenge ahead of you, just a guy, fighting through hell and later on repelling the hordes of hell from earth.

The art team did a great job replicating doom, the composer did a great job of renewing classic Doom music and merging it with modern takes on the Doom aesthetic, although it is ridiculous that the music is intended to overpower the other sounds in the game.

The gameplay is where they really screwed up IMO. Its a great game but its not authentic old school Doom gameplay. You could modernize it properly, I'm just saying that in my opinion they haven't for the reasons I explained elsewhere. They instead created a new thing that uses the Doom franchise and it just happens to be fantastic. As great as it is though I would rather have had a well executed modern take that also feels authentic.

The "New Doom" music/sound producer gave a pretty good GDC one hour talk about the music came about. Some fun stories there ( the sound easter egg story was fun). Its more than about just the sound, its about process and change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FNBMZsqrY

The Doom soundtrack to me constitutes excellent video game music. I didn't enjoy it enough to listen to the OST like many folks did. I'm a metal head but it didn't quite do it for me like Mr. Bungle/Meshuggah does. I do listen to the parts of the Dusk soundtrack once in a while though.

Mr bungle... wasn’t that a 90s faith no more offshoot that was like crazy circus music? I’ll have to check them out again.

Dave Lombardo (Slayer Drummer) and Scott Ian (Anthrax Guitarist) joined three of the original members for the re-recording. Scott Ian was a fan of it back in the day and thinks it was more musically complex than what they and most of the other big metal bands were doing at the time. And it was written by 15-17 year olds inspired by Slayer's Reign in Blood.

But yes Bungle did a later album that was crazy circus metal and eventually they did a really great album of music that was less heavy (not metal at all) and more accessible called California.

I love all of it. Search for the 2020 version of Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny for their new stuff. Easily the best album released this year IMO. RTJ4 was also pretty good though.

Bungle wasn't really an offshoot of FNM, it was the lead singer Mike Patton's first band. FNM is also criminally under-rated. Their only really famous song "Epic" isn't really representative of the rest of their work. IMO the follow-up album Angel Dust is the best album of all time. They experiment with lots of genres and its still weird stuff though so its not gonna be everyone's cup of tea.

Sample of the Re-Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U5ZKKxqUzY

Doom was structured in such a way that when you started off playing it was practically survival horror, but when you "got gud" you were practically the unkillable demigod. That's what I loved about it: it was so open-ended. It could be that way because its engine was so limited. There were only so many possible level layouts, and only a few different parameters that determined how enemies behaved. Using those, you could construct a combinatoric explosion of battle scenarios that ran the gamut from balls-out arena battle to hunting down enemies in dark narrow corridors and everything in between. Furthermore, the level data was small enough that the entire level, and all objects spawned within it, could live in memory at once. This made each level feel like a living world. Enemies from a faraway part of the level you haven't reached yet can spot you and start chasing and attacking.

In Doom 3, Doom (2016), and Doom Eternal, the engine is so unlimited that the designers had to basically pick a playstyle in order to narrow down the solution space, just to get started. Doom 3 opted for a survival horror style while the latter two games opted for a Serious Sam/Painkiller style combat game: move to area, sweep all enemies, move to next area, repeat. They feel more fun and more like Doom than Doom 3 did, but there's still something missing. Not that I blame them for adopting a few modern shooter conventions. Had they made it a total "boomer shooter" I doubt it would have sold as well.

For me the games that best illustrate this are ancient Ultima games. Ultima I-IV have tile based symbolic graphics. Ultima V also is tile-based, but makes an effort to represent every torch, chair, brazier; as much detail as they can fit. Fallen Enchantress screenshots worked for me, but the game itself was a failure.

Mr. X of the RE2 remake was very good at this (for the first playthrough at least). The original amnesia monsters were pretty good for a bit too. Both grew kind of tiresome after you were familiar with their mechanics.

- Just like the 60s-70s in music, product people had no concept of what a marketable game looked like, and were willing to fund much more riskier ideas. - Video game team sizes and budgets were smaller, allowing designers much more leeway, as well being able to personally oversee the production much better. - Although Moore's law was a thing before and after the 90s, It's the advancement during that time meant that games went from pixelated abstract bleep-bloop affairs, to being able to render and simulate complex 2D and 3D worlds. - Feeding in to my previous point, people were literally writing the book on modern game genres, like RTS, Sim games (who thought that managing a city could be fun?), FPS, etc. - John Carmack, I literally cannot overstate how impactful his contributions were to the FPS genre. With the introduction of Binary Space Partitioning in games (first in Doom in 2D, then a fully 3D version in Quake), he elegantly solved occlusion culling, collision detection, and 3D level editors in a masterstroke, while allowing 3D games to run on the meagre hardware of the times. Almost literally every FPS game used a BSP to represent its levels for more than a decade (Unreal, Quake and Source sure did).

Unfortunately, the console era which came after, has put a brake to this breakneck pace of development.Console games, especially in the PS1-X360 eras, were dumbed down for both technical limitations, and gameplay: - Studios sought to appeal to the masses, who didn't always appreciate the complex mechanics. - You just can't make as sophisticated UI for gamepads as for keyboard/mouse. This killed of multiple PC genres on console, the RTS most prominent among them. - Due to the primary storage medium being DVDs/CDS in the console space, developers had to contend with their limitations, such as slow transfer speed, and abysmal seek times (yes even compared to HDDs). This meant that levels needed to be more linear, and player freedom had to be restricted. RAM sizes were also tiny compared to PCs of the time, further increasing the problem.

I'm sure there's a ton of stuff that I missed.

I don't think it'd be exaggerating to say that the 90s were, for 3D gaming, the equivalent of 1900-1910 for aircraft. The decade started with a few barely-functional attempts and ended with relatively polished and widely available products.

This meant that 3D became available to the masses, but the only way you could render graphics was the DirectX/OpenGL way, with triangles,Z-Buffers,vertex/pixel shaders.

Unfortunately this meant that other techniques, like voxel raycasting, spline surfaces and other weird techniques couldn't be accelerated, and became much less prominent.

So yeah, the analogy stands that 3D transitioned from a period of whimsical experimentation to a "this-is-how-we-do-things" mindset in the timeframe, while a number of otherwise interesting solutions fell by the wayside.

I don't know. I'm not big into RTS games, but one of my favorite XB360 games was Supreme Commander 2, which definitely falls under RTS.

The chunky thing was why making levels for DooM was so easy. Prodeus (early access) also has easy to use level editor, but currently the game has some design problems - such as dumb and slow monsters. Those in DooM were also dumb, but their AI was functional. They could swarm and surround you well enough. I honestly think Prodeus looks better than Doom Eternal, the art direction especially. But I don't need as much ketchup.

I think games like these (Dusk, Graven, Ion Fury etc...) will sell in part because players' expectations have changed. Players have also realized that if they want action reminiscent of old FPS games, they can't look towards AAA games because no AAA game will imitate the experience. It's too much risk. You need to give smaller studios a chance, and the only way smaller studios can make it work is by limiting visual detail.

I agree that the action was slower, however, Halo's real trick was designing a set of weapons that were fun to use, but were mostly horribly inaccurate. The sniper was the clear exception.

I did a controller VS mouse/keyboard competition with Halo 1 on PC vs the best console Halo player in my Battalion when we were deployed to Kuwait. We would both use the same weapons at the same time for most of the games to make it fair and objective since we were doing it out of curiosity. We were mostly even with the majority of the weapons. With the shotgun the console player had a clear advantage although I don't know why because I would have assumed a mouse would still be faster (maybe it was just me). When we were using sniper rifles, however, with my mouse and keyboard vs a controller it was like playing against someone that had never played Halo before. The mouse was just too quick and accurate and at that point Halo hadn't developed a really egregious form of aim assist yet. The funny thing about this last observation was that I was the one that had barely ever played Halo.

Note: I don't look down on people that prefer gaming on a console and I have enjoyed my Switch/PS4 immensely. For some genres an analog controller is objectively superior without purposefully implementing a software advantage to balance things out like many games choose to do with aim assist. I do tend to agree with Shroud's opinion that when it comes to competitive play at a certain level of MM rank they should just have separate queues for each controller type. Ultimately its a tradeoff though because if queues for a game like COD:Warzone were forcibly separated the game's community on PC would have died completely after a month or two like previous games did.

Maybe that's the exception that proves the rule?

The pistol actually seemed popular among players with better accuracy than myself, specifically because it was one of the few weapons accurate enough to reliably land headshots.

I tried some of the later Halo games, and it felt very non-Halo, and I think this pins it down. In the original Halo, it was relatively difficult to die instantly. Grenades, sniper rifles, the bazooka, and the hand sword were the only weapons that could do it, and each of them had substantial tradeoffs (grenades were limited, the bazooka traveled rather slowly and only killed on direct hits or very close hits, etc). Now there are tons of weapons that can kill in one hit. I think the starting rifle can't one shot, but two bursts to the head is death. And they've turned up the aim assist to the point where players are fairly good at getting headshots.

It misses all those "if I hide behind this rock and let my shields regen, I might survive" moments. There's no tension to the game as you struggle to survive; in a flash you're either the conqueror or the conquered. There's no cat and mouse as you chase someone through their base, hoping they don't hide behind a corner and stick you with a plasma grenade.

Maybe the tension is what I miss more than the slower speed of play. After all, fast playing games can still be fun (like Sonic) because they keep that tension that you could die at any second. That kind of tension that keeps you on the edge of your seat, so when you finally make it through you get the level you lean back and pat yourself on the shoulder. Modern AAA games seem to want to get directly to the dopamine hit, so they crushed the combat sequence into a very small number of actions so that you can do it over and over again faster. It just doesn't do as much for me.

Goldeneye and Turok would like to have a word, if you have a moment.

Overall it's fairly similar to Halo, without the extra buttons for crouch, jump, grenade, or melee. Halo's golden triangle would be functionally dead without them. But... the pro controllers exist for a reason -- you can't use a fleet of thumb buttons on the controller face if your left and right thumbs are dedicated to moving and looking.

Edit: timesplitters, that was David doak and his goldeneye mates when they left rare and set up free radical. I think that franchise lost its way on the third one when they ditched the Goldeneye style controls.

And of course, LAN play really helps vs split screen matches, but thats mostly a function of the era rather than game design philosophy.

It was subtle, but it was there. I remember getting frustrated with the fact that it dragged the target reticule towards center of mass, which made headshots trickier.

This is from memory of fifteen years ago, so I might be mistaken. I did play the original on Xbox obsessively, FWIW.

A lot of this is probably lighting. Lighting is hugely important for things to look good. Not just photorealism high-res whatever. Dynamic raytraced super expensive lighting looks good. Old school, fake lighting where everything is automatically lit is also good. Poorly configured lighting is very bad.

Minecraft has good enough lighting by default. Unreal does not. I don't care much about high quality graphics, but I don't think I agree with your hypotheses about lower quality being better for imagination though. It's just another sort of uncanny valley.

If you want the 1 minute laydown on good enough unreal light: * Put a directional light in the scene * Set it's property that says its a sun * Set it to mobile (so it doesn't try to bake things) * Add a sky atmosphere and set all of its light scattering colors to black (so it gets its colors realistically from the sun)

As a non artist, the lighting and atmosphere functionality of unreal is probably my favorite feature: https://youtu.be/SeNM9zBPLCA?t=932

Hmh, not sure. I agree on lighting being very important, but RTX-Quake looked just weird too. But imagination probably plays a role in games like doom where enemies are barely more than a couple pixels. It's like horror movies are scary because of the stuff that is only implied through storytelling and sound, as these things then happen directly in your brain and not on the screen.

Certainly ray traced lighting isn't going to be good if the logic of what makes, blocks, and transparently passes light doesn't look good.

But I think that there is another aspect - polishing gameplay & pace. Contemporary shooters often have too many cutscenes, too many things to add to the story (and equipment, and everything) that distract from instead of complement the experience. The minimalism of games like Doom, with a fast, uninterrupted pace, is still a masterpiece. Fine-tuning mechanics is hard.

A pattern I see each time there are discussions about games, is to compare games in the past, actually played, with contemporary games, as observed in reviews or youtube videos (which, additionally, biases towards AAA-games, since they have more coverage).

To answer the parent:

> Just the other day I was wondering whether these old games were just so much fun because I was much younger and it was simply something new and exciting to me, or whether there's something else to it.

This is the nostalgia lens, and there are a couple of reasons.

The first is that today the gaming landscape is considerably wider than it was, because the barrier to entry is considerably lower, but one instinctually considers just the AAA games, and additionally, the noisier ones. There has been "one" Doom and Quake for some time, and with reasons - there was one Carmack only. Today there are plenty.

Second, one forgets very easily how games could have poor mechanics. From the article:

> But not everything from the past is being included in Dusk. “I want to avoid unintuitive navigation and overly obscure puzzles,” Szymanski said. Not everything transfers so well into the present day.

> A pattern I see each time there are discussions about games, is to compare games in the past, actually played, with contemporary games, as observed in reviews or youtube videos (which, additionally, biases towards AAA-games, since they have more coverage).

+1 to that. A lot of AAA games are designed with every moment being a handcrafted experience. That is, some sort of scripted thing is happening that couldn't happen organically by normal mechanics. Older AAA titles tended to just produce a solid set of mechanics and just let them speak for themselves.

But there's plenty of good stuff that still leans into that approach.

And what do you have against serious sam series that you disqualify it from being "old school"? Did they have too many cutscenes for your liking?

Halflife was still a step up, having been released years prior. The gameplay of HL had stagnated at that point so I was looking for anything else.

Whenever I see a game with super detailed forests and houses and human models, it's almost impossible to get interested in it. It's too real and bland. Maybe it's a mental association from seeing a bunch of cheap Russian and Chinese games on Steam that use premade assets.

I think RPGs especially have paid a big price as fidelity has gone up. The move to voice acting lost us rich, broad textual interactions with every NPC, the waypoints-and-cutscenes that give us almost film-like narratives mean that role play is now largely limited to a small number of paths (good/evil or strong/stealthy). The complexity of these games has really gone down overall, and while they’re often wonderful storytelling experiences you’re right it’s far less _your_ story in many modern games.

Even AAA action-adventure games are now like watching interactive tv.

No micro-transactions, no limitations by console platforms, no huge worldwide marketing campaigns and TV adverts.

Just developers trying to make the games as fun as possible so more people would buy a copy when magazines gave it a good review or people showed their friends when they were over.

I personally am looking forward to a return of the wobbly skin model skinning from Kingpin!

He's done a bunch of great animations (eg The External World, The Horse Raised by Spheres - youtube) and games (Mountain, EVERYTHING - steam/consoles) that epitomize it imo - very worth a watch/play

But, then Id started to make a comeback; games like the Wolfenstein reboot which were more about over the top violence again, and Doom which made FPS games fast again (if it wasn't for the constant scramble for ammo it really would've captured the 'old' feel even better I think). That one's criticized for having too much platforming in it though, but other than that it's still a fun / fast paced FPS games.

Alongside there's been the Serious Sam franchise which never stopped feeling outdated, lol. It's a weird one because the gameplay of that one seems to be focused on kiting.

Kiting works artistically with rocket launchers!

From the older days, it's one of the big reasons teenage me preferred Unreal Tournament over Quake III Arena. In the former, the rockets had a nice exhaust plume and were slow enough that if you were strafing while shooting, you got to see a nice view of a missile in flight[0]. In Q3A, the rockets were just glowing blobs with a small trail behind, rarely giving you nice visuals. I always favored railguns because of a nicer trail.

Serious Sam, back in those days, also had a very nice missile trail visual, and coupled with the outdoor gameplay (giving rockets many seconds of flight), I just loved kiting and unloading rockets at the coalescing piles of enemies.

--

[0] - Let's ignore for a moment that real-life rockets would be much faster.

Scott McCloud made the same point while discussing Abstraction in comics in his book 'Understanding Comics'. The more abstract the representation of a character is, the more easily a reader can project themselves onto that character and identify with it.

This is highlighted in this video: "I Hate Immersive Sims" a.k.a. "Why is Half-Life 1 so compelling". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HByDGHl7PNc