Why Doom’s Multiplayer Really Isn’t an Arena Shooter
It may look like an arena shooter, but it sure doesn’t play like one, if the recent closed beta is anything to go by.
Doom's multiplayer... is a Strogg-like fusion of Call of Duty meets Quake
It sounds great on paper, but Doom’s multiplayer fails to properly respect the core tenets of an arena shooter. Instead, it comes off as a contemporary shooter with arena shooter elements, kind of like earlier instances of Halo multiplayer. For the simplest distinction, it’s a Strogg-like fusion of Call of Duty meets Quake and, unfortunately for the arena shooter categorisation, Doom multiplayer is closer to the former part of that distinction than the latter."
So, what exactly are we talking about here? While there is division on some of the supplementary pillars of an arena shooter, there’s a strong general consensus on the key mainstays. First and foremost, all players start on equal footing. In Quake III terms, this means players start with a machine gun and melee gauntlet, while weapons are collected from fixed spawn points.
These weapons are far from reskinned versions of each other, too: each weapon has a specific purpose and, therefore, requires specific skills to master. Linked to the first point is the second: players have the ability to buff both offensive and defensive capabilities from map pick-ups only. In basic offensive terms, it’s weapons, but it also includes pick-ups such as Quad Damage to temporarily boost attack damage.In defensive terms, it means replenishing or boosting health beyond 100HP and/or collecting armour in a similar fashion. The is important because it links into the third point: maps and item drops should be balanced for a 1v1 environment, with free-for-all or team-based modes treated as secondary, which leads to the last pillar. Total map control is essential to improving your chances of killing faster or living longer and achieved by moving, not camping an area.
All of this combines to create an environment that rewards highly skilled players who are constantly moving, where the final scorecard is reflective of performance built atop fast reactions and impressive accuracy. It doesn’t have to be tricky to learn, but it is harder to master. These tenets are inadequately reflected in what I’ve played of Doom’s competitive multiplayer.There’s trouble out of the gate, in terms of the arena shooter classification, with the two-weapon loadout system. This is, coincidentally, ripped right out of the Halo handbook, which has since become standard across contemporary military shooters: a primary and secondary weapon. Doom is slightly more flexible in that the player can choose from the full arsenal for filling primary and secondary weapon slots, but it immediately hamstrings a couple of pillars of the arena shooter classification.
Primarily, it means players don’t spawn on an even keel. For example, if your first encounter is at range, and you’re only packing, say, a close-quarters combo of Super Shotgun and Lightning Gun, you’re screwed. In Doom, you don’t have access to a balanced default spawn weapon that works at any range; instead, you have to run, or close the gap without getting hit. To be fair, the addition of secondary-fire modes doesn’t break the approach to weapons in terms of an arena shooter, but it is lifted from Quake’s oldest competitor, Unreal.
But then, Doom’s arsenal is confused in terms of what experience id is trying to sell. Over on the Bethesda.net blog, this article claims "you’ll need to stay in constant motion to stay alive," yet the Vortex Rifle’s secondary fire requires a player to be zoomed in for a few seconds before they can achieve a fully charged shot.
This essentially means the Vortex Rifle-wielding player needs to sacrifice visibility and movement speed to allow their shot to fully charge, attempting to move with the scope up to achieve maximum damage, but this runs at odds with the pace of an arena shooter. Alternatively, it means they need to camp which, according to that same link, is at odds with the map design across the board: "none of [the maps] are built to allow for easy sniping or hiding points."
The reality [is] that the weapons simply don’t do enough damage.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Static Cannon charges kinetically, which requires consistent forward movement. The weapon stops charging if you’re vaulting, though, which is one of the newer movement systems in Doom. It’s not that vaulting is bad, it’s that you're using what is technically a momentum system and being punished by the Static Cannon not charging. On top of this, the Vortex Rifle does higher base damage without the requirement for movement, which makes the Static Cannon pretty redundant, especially considering its secondary-fire mode is a run-of-the-mill zoom feature."
But all of this pales in comparison to the reality that the weapons simply don’t do enough damage. On top of this, confusing Borderlands-style damage numbers spew out of enemies with every hit, and they’re either indicative of netcode issues or a damage feedback system that’s not reflective of base 100 health (with armour additions on top). I say this because, multiple times, it took three to four Super Shotgun blasts at point blank to kill a newly spawned, clearly unarmoured enemy, where the damage numbers read 55 every time. Go figure.
To add low-damage injury to insult, the rocket launcher, which is basically how an arena shooter’s worth is judged (just look back at the player reaction to Quake II’s rocket launcher for proof of this), fires puny rockets. It’s just one example of bigger weapons that look and sound good but don’t offer the kind of damage feedback that warrants their booming sounds and occupied screen real estate. Furthermore, damage doesn’t throw back enemies like it should. While hitting an enemy mid-air (with any weapon) will halt their trajectory, that trajectory can’t be changed with an accurately fired rocket.
In trying to make Doom’s multiplayer more accessible, escapability has been confused as synonymous with low-lethality.
In trying to make Doom’s multiplayer more accessible, escapability has been confused as synonymous with low-lethality. Yes, being able to weather some shots does lend itself to escape potentiality, but it needn’t be this way if Doom simply built upon the advanced movement of Quake. In reducing weapon damage, the time to kill has spiked, which makes fights last longer than they should. Instead of rewarding expert map knowledge and the collection of health/armour buffs, the over-protected player simply makes fights last even longer, unless they encounter the ridiculously overpowered Gauss Cannon."
This closed-beta weapon is what’s left of the old-school arena shooter idea of having to collect your weapons. Except instead of it being supplementary to an arena littered with long-, mid- and short-range weapons, it becomes a non-replenishable WMD that acts like a Quake railgun under the influence of Quad Damage. Granted, it’s the quickest way to kill the demon, but it wouldn’t be nearly as frustrating if it was just these types of overpowered guns and not the demon pick-ups. In its current form, the Gauss Cannon is so OP that I was fragging enemies outside of my aiming reticule.While vaulting is a great addition and complemented by the introduction of double jump, it seems to be there to distract from the lack of Quake-forged advanced movement principles. Forget about all of the advanced jumping prefixes of Quake III – circle, ramp, strafe, hell, even rocket – because they’re non-existent or, in the instance of rocket jumping, not worth the self-inflicted damage hit. Part of an arena shooter’s verticality, particularly an id Software-forged arena shooter, should involve players strategising in three-dimensional space.
This means that a lot of kills should be achieved mid-air, while the only reason you want to be on the ground is to jump back into the air, or to collect a pick-up. In Doom, you can merrily double-jump around the map ad infinitum, but it provides zero speed boost, and is really only useful for mantling up to hard-to-reach places or for limited escapability purposes. These inclusions wouldn’t need to exist if Doom’s multiplayer included the advanced jumping movement of Quake III.More pointedly, in terms of the movement, Doom’s multiplayer isn’t even that fast. The Bethesda.net blog claims it’s "fast-paced" on more than one occasion, but that seems to be relative to Doom 3. Faster than Doom 3 does not mean your game is fast enough to be an arena shooter. Next to Quake or the first two Doom games, the latter of which id is eager to mirror (at least in terms of single-player), this Doom game is slow. It’s not Halo or Battlefield slow, mind you, but the lack of pace and the absence of the advanced movement principles listed above resulted in matches that felt more Call of Duty than arena shooter.
This was most evident in the closed beta as the slower speeds and lack of advanced movement options resulted in players predominantly combatting along the horizontal plane, which is standard fare for modern shooters. More disturbing, though, was the inclusion of the incredibly overpowered demon pick-up. Towards the end of the closed beta, the winning formula was simple: the team that controlled the demon power-up for the longest won.Considering the Revenant demon has 300HP and dual fast-firing rocket launchers that basically one-shot enemies, as well as a jetpack and enemy-highlighting vision, it’s the kind of power-up that has no place in an arena shooter. The traditional Quake-style power-ups that are present in Doom still work because they’re temporary and, more importantly, single purpose. Where the competent Revenant player can make use of boosted offensive, defensive, movement and vision capacities, the player wielding Quad Damage, Invisibility, Haste, or Regeneration can only rely on one of those capacities at a time.
What this meant is that teams bolted for the randomised demon drop, whose limited time between announcement and drop meant that you had to be lucky to be near enough to secure it, let alone fight over the area where it will spawn. If the timer was increased, it would be fairer, but the way it stands now, it rewards luck over skill, which is, again, at odds with how arena shooters operate. As far as my experience, I was both on and fighting against teams that dominated demon control, working as a hunting party with the demon in the lead to create such an early score deficit that the other team had no hope of bouncing back.Because of this, most of my matches were skewed towards one team or the other, with only a handful that felt close. To further alienate itself from arena shooters, Doom embraces the contemporary-shooter staple of passive perks. Called "Hack Modules", they range from practical (timers on various level pick-ups), to murky (a vengeance cam that highlights your last killer), to downright controversial (spawning with an armour buff).
SnapMap facilitates the in-game creation and cross-platform sharing of user-generated content, which means that players like me who want a true arena shooter experience from Doom’s multiplayer can build and share it with others.
While this armour buff is limited, it can still mean the difference between being fragged in a fair fight, and having that slight defensive edge that means you survive. This is obviously at odds with the arena shooter’s holiest of holies: thou shalt spawn on even footing. I think the scarier proposition is that there are other unrevealed Hack Modules that could inevitably influence base offensive and defensive capabilities. What could have worked well as a learning tool for newcomers, instead, will become another balancing consideration that distracts from overall skill and rewards RPG-like kit management in terms of Hack Modules and loadout."
Regardless of my breakdown of why Doom’s multiplayer doesn’t feel like an arena shooter, id Software has built in the ultimate contingency plan: SnapMap. SnapMap facilitates the in-game creation and cross-platform sharing of user-generated content, which means that players like me who want a true arena shooter experience from Doom’s multiplayer can build and share it with others.
If those user-generated multiplayer modes are popular enough, I’ll be able to get my fix. But in terms of how Doom’s multiplayer is shaping up for launch, this will almost certainly be a contemporary shooter experience that’s more inspired by arena shooters than it is one itself. Nathan Lawrence is a freelance writer based in Sydney and shooter specialist. Track him down on Twitter.
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