Doom is very fond of springing traps on you when you grab important items such as keys, and the sound design is absolutely critical to the player being given a fighting chance to survive these situations. While many of its stock sound effects are approaching Wilhelm Scream levels of ubiquity these days, they still remain hugely effective in context, because they’re not only atmospheric, but they also give you important information about what is going on. As such, you need to have situational awareness not only from what you can see, but also what you can hear - as well as the things you learn from experience.ĭoom’s sound design is exemplary. The difference is that in a beat ’em up you can generally see what is going on all around you at all times, whereas in Doom you can only see directly in front of you. In a beat ’em up, getting surrounded is generally a death sentence, and the same is very much true for Doom. It’s not a sure-fire thing, so you’ll still need to be ready to dodge projectile attacks from enemies such as Imps, Cacodemons and Barons of Hell, but if you can keep the pressure on your foes, you’ll take at least a little pressure off yourself, and that can make all the difference.Īlso coming to Doom from the beat ’em up genre is the importance of situational awareness and controlling space. Hit an enemy with a weapon and they’ll often be thrown off for a brief moment, even to the extent of cancelling an attack if you time things properly. It’s perhaps not as drastic as in beat ’em ups and fighting games, but it’s definitely present. It’d be a real pain if, while you were shooting these enemies multiple times, they were simply able to continue hurting you as if nothing was going on, particularly in the case of enemies who use hitscan attacks with no visible projectiles. Yes, Former Humans and Imps can be taken down with a single shotgun blast - and even Pinky demons too if you’re lucky - but for the most part, you need to unload at least a few shots into an enemy to take them down, especially once you start running into foes like Cacodemons. Most enemies in Doom don’t go down in one hit, particularly if you’re using one of the weaker weapons. But most importantly for our purposes today, it’s also seen in Doom. It’s also seen in the character action genre, which is essentially a spinoff of the beat ’em up genre. This was first seen in classic Technos Japan beat ’em up Renegade, but is a critical part of both the beat ’em up and fighting game genre even today.
#DOOM ORIGINAL SERIES#
The initial idea of hitstun was extended into the concept of combos, allowing you to stun an enemy with an initial hit, then follow up with a series of attacks that usually culminate with you knocking them to the floor. This is a mechanic from real-time games whereby if you hit an enemy, they are momentarily stunned, preventing them from immediately hitting you back while you’re standing in melee range. Let’s take the concept of hitstun as an example. The mechanical tropes it makes use of became popular for a reason, after all, and it turns out that they transplant well from a 2D or 2.5D perspective to a first-person quasi-3D perspective. One thing that particularly struck me while I was playing is something that I had neither the experience or the awareness to appreciate back in the day, which is how many mechanical cues Doom takes from other games, many of which are in completely different genres. Instead, the beauty of Doom comes in how well the whole experience is designed, how well it incorporates lessons learned from other games, and how satisfying it still is to play, thirty years after its original release. It’s a legitimate work of art from a design and mechanical perspective, and a strong argument for how when we talk about “games as art” we shouldn’t just focus on the narrative or aesthetic side of things.ĭoom’s story is stupid, after all, but it also doesn’t matter one jot to the experience as a whole. What I found - or perhaps reminded myself - is that the original Doom is an absolute masterpiece of game design. As such, I was curious to play through that - but also to revisit the earlier episodes. I did eventually get my hands on a copy of the registered version and play through both The Shores of Hell and Inferno, but never picked up The Ultimate Doom, meaning that fourth episode Thy Flesh Consumed, added in The Ultimate Doom, was something I never spent any time with back in the day.
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