A question: how many games can you think of that were once so popular, it was installed on more computers than Microsoft Windows?
Due to its success and subsequent impact, DOOM has been analysed for nearly twenty-five years and counting. Each study aims to further unravel what made the 1993 title plus its expansion packs and sequel, tick. From its technical achievements, appreciation for speedrunning and modding to its level design – there’s plenty to cover. More than any single article can encompass.
Instead of adding to this ongoing master thesis of DOOM, let’s turn it around and examine what lessons Action games can take from it, good and bad.
LEVEL DESIGN & AUTHORSHIP
DOOM’s combat is about shooting demons while moving at a lightning’s pace. The levels that house these slaughters often feature locked doors, hidden ambushes and secret chambers with extra resources, all paired with slight backtracking making them feel very open. You cannot look up or down and since it sports a considerable auto-aim, DOOM is more about positioning and speed. Each level builds on the complexity of the last, peaking with the last levels becoming a miniature maze of death to unravel.
It is those levels that are part of the first lesson. Originally, DOOM’s levels would be created by game-designer Tom Hall. However, programmer John Romero found them lacking for numerous reasons, one being that they didn’t play into the technology available. Unlike their previous games such as Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM would allow for different types of elevations, crooked hallways as well as being able to toy with different volumes of lighting, just to name a few.
These elements are what make DOOM’s levels stand out and even exceed many that are created today in more modern games. Episode 1, Mission 1: Hangar [E1M1], by John Romero, is the most famous example of this. Starting off in a U-shaped area with a staircase, leading to a hallway with a zigzag pattern surrounded by acid, all while being able to look outside to a seemingly unreachable place that teases you with an armour powerup.
While these elements aren’t as impressive now as they were in 1993, the mentality is, especially for Action games. With rare exceptions, most action titles offer big open spaces with the occasional hallway. Elevation is generally avoided or nothing more than a cliff to jump on. Other modern techniques that allow for newer, more interesting types of geometry or combat options – such as walking on the ceiling in Prey from 2006, flying in 2010’s DarkVoid or grappling from Sekiro – are contextualized, ignored or relegated to gimmicks, instead of being a key part of the game’s design. As technology moved forward the plethora of options that came with it seemed to have steered titles in a simpler direction.
Now one element that might have popped out is the specific mention of Romero as the designer of E1M1 while also being the programmer. Because DOOM’s levels were made with most of the assets already present, one person could make a level by himself. This allowed Romero a great deal of autonomy and, to a degree, authorship of levels. Authorship that seems to be missing in current game-design.
Now, one must mention that DOOM was made by around six people: programmers John Carmack, John Romero and Dave Taylor, artists Adrian Carmack (no relation) and Kevin Cloud and game-designer Sandy Petersen – who replaced the aforementioned Tom Hall ten weeks before the game’s release.
This is important for the following comparison. Action gaming’s more recent release was Devil May Cry V in 2019. This title has 18 game-designers, 19 environmental artists, 17 people relegated to the interface, 16 working on character art, more than 80 for animation, over 30 working on visual effects and lighting, 26 programmers and 45 just for the engine. Not to mention the staff working on audio, cinematics or any of the outsourced works like character riggers, totalling at more than 130 people working on just the product itself, nearly triple the amount that worked on the first Devil May Cry from 2001. And that’s not to mention management, marketing and other departments that are involved.
DOOM 1993’s entire development team 
A small portion of Devil May Cry V’s development team
Why is this? Though an overly simplified statement, making games in the current day and age takes much more manpower than before if you want to keep up visually. This is thanks to the jump to 3D requiring more complex rigging, motion capture, higher frame rates and resolutions and more complicated coding and engines to accompany them. All of this demands stronger hardware, with the end result being more error-sensitive and less flexible. Sprite based King of Fighters XIII’s team needed nearly 16 months to make a single character for example, juggling multiple at a time with long hours to see the game launch on time. Expectations of what a full price game is supposed to look like have gone up, as evident by the fan backlash of a title like Mass Effect: Andromeda.
This drive to keep up with the ever-shifting visual benchmark could be a cause to authorship taking a backseat. While the sector has its names, like Kamiya, Jaffe and Ancel, these are more directors that guide the vision of the product, not people that handcraft a whole set of levels themselves.
We once noted that director Itagaki oversaw most encounters in Ninja Gaiden II personally. While admirable, any changes wouldn’t then be made by a single individual; instead one cog would force another in motion, and another, and another.
If, during the final ten weeks of development on Devil May Cry V, director Itsuno had wanted one entire mission to be redone, it would’ve been a monumental undertaking. Conversely, despite being hired ten weeks before the game’s launch, Sandy Petersen was able to make 19 of DOOM’s 27 levels, though 8 were based on early sketches by Tom Hall.
At the same time they were also given a distinct feeling, like Petersen’s love for ambushes and themes. Themes that served as a red line throughout, such as a level based solely around exploding barrels [DOOM II: Map23: Barrels o’ Fun]. A different example is Romero’s emphasis on contrast i.e. light and dark and compact versus open. All these thematic levels flow into each other and have players revisit older areas to build a map in their head.
Today there are, simply put, too many moving parts for a game’s design process to be as flexible as DOOM’s was in 1993.
As such, it should be no surprise that most of the levels in modern Action games consist of open spaces or simple shapes when looked at from above. Their simplicity is hidden behind good art-design, stronger visuals and filled with story moments or interesting encounters. Which as a result have the games rely more on their immediate gameplay than the levels they take place in.
DOOM’s method of level-design comes with a downside though, namely the inconsistent quality. While the levels in DOOM’s first episode, Knee Deep in the Dead, were nearly wholly designed by Romero, later expansions and games would feature more of a mishmash of designers. Sometimes you’d play maps from 4 different designers in a row each of varying quality and with different design philosophies and logic, leading to an inconsistent title.
All in all though, the First Lesson that Action games can learn from DOOM is this:
Action games currently focus on the immediate gameplay, and not a lot on where said gameplay takes place. Level design should embrace current technological development more to offer new types of levels, interesting method of traversal, gameplay or combat scenarios. All while avoiding gimmicks and staying true to their current vision. The open arena is great, but use it more sparingly.
Aside from that, technologies have become too vast, too complex and too focused on high detail to let a single person make a level. Instead it falls back on the combat and art direction to do the work for them. It would be interesting to see a title in the genre focus less on the resolution of the texture or the quality of the cloth physics and instead allow for more flexibility in the game’s design process. In an effort to keep the design consistent, unlike DOOM, there’d have to be a leading designer that monitors the level’s cohesion with each other.
ENEMIES, WEAPONS & HOW IT ALL COMES TOGETHER
How exactly those levels play out though is determined by the enemies and the weapons that kill them. Foes in DOOM run at you and shoot at you in various ways and some might even be used to kill each other. But that is not what makes DOOM’s combat tick. A Pinkie is a near brain dead foe whose only purpose in life is to rush at you for a bite. An Imp will at random occasions fire orbs at you. It seems very basic.
When that single Pinkie is supported by an Imp however, the battle changes. What was once just a simple matter of keeping distance now also involves dodging a projectile. Add a pool of lava around the arena and it changes even more. Twelve steps further and we’ve laid down the foundation for an arena with multiple levels of elevation, different enemy types working together to put the player in unique situations, while the environmental hazards keep him in check.
Each demon in DOOM has a distinct theme making for interesting engagements not when alone, but when they are combined. An element taken even further when taking into account which weapons the player will have.
The first mission of each episode resets your loadout. Designing which weapon can be picked up in certain missions also influences the combat further; a battle against three Barons of Hell can be very different not only depending on the room you’re in, but also whether you have a Plasma Gun to rely on or just a regular shotgun.
Later encounters in the game tend to devolve into large fights however. A once nuanced encounter devolves into waves of enemies huddled together, especially in DOOM’s third episode and the latter half of DOOM II. This can be attributed to the designers having to compensate the player’s rising skill level and improved load-out plus the fact that DOOM tends to show its cards quite early. Most enemies will have been encountered as early as halfway through the game with the remaining levels being more about experimentation with DOOM’s offerings. Eventually each possible combination has been made and levels will start to either mirror their design or rely on gimmicks, like hordes of enemies. While sometimes this works to entertain, other times it will just annoy and pad out the game.
Encounters also change depending on the difficulty-mode. Ultra Violence might add a Cacodemon in that one key area, whose projectiles change the dynamic completely. Meanwhile Nightmare difficulty speeds up enemies and projectiles while also respawning killed foes after a set time. All difficulties also change item locations and offer unique weapon pickups. A good example is Episode 4, Mission 1: Hell Beneath [E4M1], by American McGee, which famously removed all medkits on Ultra Violence and Nightmare, turning an already hard level into arguable the series’ hardest. Or how Episode 1, Mission 3: Toxic Refinery [E1M3], by John Romero, removes certain lights making it harder to see in some encounters.
This methodology also gives level designers the freedom to construct numerous versions of each level with unique enemy encounters with specific skill levels in mind.
For example the expansion pack The Plutonia Experiment by the brothers Dario and Milo Casali. One mission in this expansion features nine Arch-viles, one of the game’s most dangerous foes. By comparison, DOOM II only features one fight with two Arch-viles near the end. Same goes for the Cyberdemon, the boss of DOOM’s second episode. He tends to be used as a chokepoint offering a tight encounter. Plutonia throws four at once at you.
Dario has gone on record saying that the expansion was made for people who had finished DOOM II on Hard and were looking for a challenge using all the elements from the game and putting them to their most extreme use. He noted that he’d always played through the level he’d made on Hard, and if it was beaten too easily, it would be made harder. Dario went on to state that he didn’t have a lot of sympathy for players who played Plutonia on Hard and complain it’s ‘too hard’.
Aside from catering to the hardcore, DOOM also uses its difficulty modes for newer players to be eased into the game on lower settings. It would offer smaller encounters with less dangerous foes and more health-pickups or give certain powerful weapons earlier. It doesn’t coddle new players with gameplay changes like auto-aim (Vanquish), regenerating health (Resident Evil 2 Remake), letting the game do the fighting for you (Bayonetta 2) or having you dodge automatically (Ninja Gaiden 3). These are changes that never teach you how to play the game, but play it for you.
It is clear that DOOM strives to make the best of what little elements it has to offer. And that is exactly Action gaming’s Second Lesson that it can learn from it:
The foundation of a great Action game is generally present in current day titles, with a fantastic cast of enemies, moves that are available to the player and how they interact. Instead of taking this for granted, modern titles could benefit from further experimenting on how all those foes and abilities come together. Introducing a foe shouldn’t be the end of it, it should be the beginning of trying engagement setups and unique level-designs built to give the foe a new twist each and every time, making it feel fresh. Combine foes that would have no reason to team up, and if immersion is risked to be broken, relegate these unique encounters to higher difficulty settings only. If your game is too challenging, offer unique lower settings to ease newcomers in.
Play with enemy combinations and weapon setups and don’t be afraid to use multiple difficulty levels to try out newer and more dangerous encounters or gimp the player with different item locations. As a bonus, allow players to make their own maps down the line. Dante’s Inferno’s Trials of Lucia had the right idea, but was badly executed. Who knows what fantastic fights await if players could design their own? One need but look to Super Mario Maker for the endless creativity.
MOVEMENT IN ACTION
If there’s one key element in all of the aforementioned fights in DOOM, it is movement. Where you are, where you enemy is and how you can you bridge the gap. Regular movement aside, Action games offer a plethora of other options in this regard. From Ninja Gaiden’s wallrunning, Shinobi’s dash to Devil May Cry 3’s teleport. One thing that’s consistent with these types of movement though is that they are static and when the character starts to attack, that move is static as well.
When Dante attacks, he cannot move, similarly to how Ryu stops being agile the second he readies his blade. While there are some attacks that have movement tied into them, like Ninja Gaiden’s Windmill Slash or Devil May Cry’s Stinger, these tend to be pre-defined. And when movement does take place, it is mostly used for a quick dodge or reposition with a specific set distance and angle, only for the offensive to start once again, with halted movement.
As a result, plenty of the tricks in these games are about staying on the offensive through canceling animations or keeping a foe pressured so you can stay right in his face. This is sharp contrast to DOOM where movement and positioning combined with attacking is key, understandable considering its genre. This is highlighted further with most of its hidden mechanics contributing to movement speed and mobility, like SR50, Strafe Running, Gliding and Wall Running.
That’s not to say some Action games haven’t already done this. Players can move while attacking in The Wonderful 101 and then there’s Raiden’s Ninja Run in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Some games also put movement as a weapon ability like Nioh’s Tonfa, which can be canceled with a press of a button. Generally speaking though, unlike their 2d brethren like Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom or Muramasa: The Demon Blade, movement in combat seems to be heavily stilted in modern Action games.
In Devil May Cry 4 players would use the momentum of previously canceled attacks to generature movement for subsequent moves, allowing players to move while attacking to an extent, often dubbed as Inertia. An example of this would be Guard Flying. When removed from Devil May Cry 5, this was justifiably met with controversy and discussion, since this meant a sizable portion of the game’s offensive mechanics was removed. This highlights a great desire for such movement in combat.
So why is this element mostly exclusive to games like DOOM 2016, Vanquish, Max Payne 3 and the upcoming Nelo, and not present in games that actively promote mobility like Shinobi or even Assassin’s Creed?
One argument as to why can be made that giving players such mobility could result in too easy a game. Metal Gear Rising had to force enemies to automatically counter attacks after blocking a certain amount of hits to prevent Ninja Running from locking enemies down completely.
Another argument can be that it can make attacks feel less powerful. While not important mechanically, a lot of the visual appeal from an attack comes from elements like anticipation in animation, timing, body movement and the enemy’s reaction. Attacking while on the move can see animations lack build-up and have them be less grounded, making the resulting move feel floaty.
For it to truly work though, enemies have to play into it, which is currently not the case. Foes are made to be fought head on with only rare exceptions. Looking to DOOM II, Arch-viles are completely built around line of sight, shotgunners need to be avoided using terrain and Pinkies are a huge danger in enclosed areas. Such a change in enemy design could open action gaming to foes that dodge around much more often or use line of sight moves more akin to the medusa-like Nure-Onna’s gaze in Nioh 2.
It’s an interesting proposition; an action game where the act of doing the attack is but one part of the whole while the constant movement, control and positioning of the character during such an attack is just as important.
As such, the third, and last, lesson that action games can learn from DOOM isn’t just as much a lesson, but also a spark for inspiration:
Too many action games focus on movement being stilted while being on the offensive. While originally 2d Action games were all about movement in combat, combat is now about moving until you’re engaged in a fight, at which point your position is frozen until defensive actions need to be taken again.
Action games could benefit from experimenting with movement inside the combat area and how this plays into the different types of foes. Movement should become more of a mechanic in Action games outside of avoiding attacks, it should play more into the combat as well. Be it through a unique weapon or a game built around it.
CONCLUSION
There are of course other little lessons to be gained from classic DOOM. How the levels are filled with well hidden secrets that reward exploration, how little pickups for armour always made said exploration worthwhile, its open ranking screen that promoted all types of challenge runs and the detailed way of how the Big Fucking Gun’s hidden tracer-mechanic allowed for more expert play. Mistakes can also be lessons, like the overlap of certain weapons, lackluster boss fights or dull variation in level-aesthetics in DOOM II. One could even look to DOOM 2016 for inspiration, such as its showcase in how weapon upgrades could be handled properly – a title we may one day cover.
It is important to note that all these lessons, big and small, are generalized and can never fit every game or style. The older Resident Evil games should not have higher movement in combat for instance, nor do any of these lessons guarantee more sales. Instead, the general notion is this: Action games have been around for a long, long time, but since the release of the Playstation 2 they have slowly started to settle into the mold laid down by Rising Zan that was cemented by Devil May Cry. If anything, let this article serve as an inspiration that there can be more elements to look at and new avenues to explore into how combat is constructed and made interesting. Here’s hoping that future installments of our beloved genre seek to inspire once again.
斬 postscript notes 斬
- Originally I had planned to just write a review for DOOM, but I felt that was so overdone and would add nothing to the overall discussion outside of my take on it. Instead, I decided to handle it this way. I think it worked out well, allowing me to both review and praise DOOM, while also giving insight into how modern Action games can improve;
- Apparently the lead environmental artist for Devil May Cry V is named Shinji Mikami. Not to be confused with the Shinji Mikami;
- Originally the Armour Pickups were going to be a lesson of their own, but I decided against it as it wasn’t major enough. The general idea is that the way armour works in DOOM is that regular armours only bring you to 100 armour, no more. But little armour chunks can get you above 100 to a maximum of 200. There are a lot of secrets in DOOM that as a basic reward have little chunks of armour. It is a simple method of rewarding players with something useful that can always stack and tends to expire. You can sort of see this in Viewtiful Joe, where each chapter requires you to collect film canisters to upgrade your VFX-meter;
- A lot of the names used throughout the article for DOOM’s weapons and enemies are a mixture of those present in the official manual and their more popularized terms in the community. For example, while the manual calls it the Plasma Rifle, most players call it the Plasma Gun. Similarly no-one writes the shotgun with a capital ‘s’, so I avoided that. Other foes like shotgunners and Pinkies are more common terms, while their official names, Former Human Sergeant and Demon, are rarely used. I also decided to just write out Big Fucking Gun instead of BFG, as I felt more people would understand what I was talking about if I did so. That and I just wanted to have an article with the word “fucking” in it for once;
- Infighting between enemies in DOOM isn’t really mentioned. The reason is mostly that the article was getting long enough. There have been Action games that toyed with this, such as Asura’s Wrath where enemies could damage each other;
- Summoning characters like Sieg from Chaos Legion, Akira from Astral Chain and V from Devil May Cry V were considered to be mentioned in the lesson about movement. I’ve always felt it interesting that you could order monsters to attack while you move, but generally these player characters did suffer from the same limitation in the end as well once they attacked themselves, so I left them out to avoid confusion. That, and that part of the article had enough references as it is;
- Nightmare was a difficulty mode in DOOM that was originally put in to quell possible complaints that Ultra Violence difficulty was too easy. As a result most players considered it a joke difficulty, but it still has its adamant fans;
- The methodology of enemies and item locations changing on higher difficulties is only fully revisited on DOOM’s scale in Ninja Gaiden Black, where each difficulty changes enemies, item locations, scarab rewards and even introduced new bosses. This saw each difficulty mode play like its own unique game. Some modes at times even contained harder enemy encounters than in harder modes, which had to compensate for their higher damage output. The same goes with how Ninja Dog’s difficulty urged players to become better, instead of coddling them too much. This article by fellow Action hero Shane Eric Dent is a great read on the matter;
- I wrote an entire analysis on what made E1M2, by John Romero, such a fantastic level and why I consider it to be the best map in the series, but I couldn’t fit it in anywhere. As a result it is still unedited. Maybe I’ll use it one day. Same goes with my analysis for each and every foe in DOOM II. It just didn’t fit;
- After much looking around, generally speaking the game itself is stylized as DOOM, while the builder is stylized as Doom. This inconsistency hurts my eyes, but it is the way it is;
- And yes, American McGee is his real name. The story behind it is, as he puts it: “Yes, my mother named me that. She claims a woman she knew in college, who named her daughter ‘America’, inspired the name. She also tells me that she was thinking of naming me ‘Obnard’. She was and always has been a very eccentric and creative person”;
- It is sad to see that most modern action games have moved further away from combining enemies together. Ninja Gaiden II never pits players against Van Gelfs and Spider Clan ninjas at the same time, nor do Dark Souls veterans face off against a Phalanx supported with Undead Archers and Ghosts. Current titles opt to aim for themes, where intermixing of otherwise unrelated foes could result in a breach of immersion. A shame;
- For this article I decided to try my hands at Doom Builder myself. While not finished, it is interesting to witness just what a difference a single Lost Soul can make to your combat encounter. Especially how the game’s infighting can make each fight feel different. You can download the levels here, but be warned…they aren’t very good!
源 sources 源
- https://pastebin.com/1ds4rUsh
- https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3t1obw/sandy_petersen_designer_of_cthulhu_wars_DOOM_call/
- https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131767/secrets_of_the_sages_level_design.php?print=1
- https://www.helldoradoteam.com/2018/12/19/john-romeros-level-design-tips/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUU7_BthBWM
- Masters of DOOM – David Kushner (ISBN13: 9780812972153)
- https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/198783/monsters_from_the_id_the_making_.php
- https://www.pcgamesn.com/making-doom-ids-shooter-masterpiece
- https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Builder
- https://web.archive.org/web/20061030081729/
- http://www.americanmcgee.com/forum/index.php?board=3.0
- https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/87199-the-doom-movement-bible/
This is a fantastic article! Love doom, originals and new. Please do one on 2016.
Appreciate it man, glad you liked it so much! Which DOOM would you say is your favourite if you had to choose?
One of your best articles yet, good job! Man, I can’t stand the First Person Shooter genre, but love Doom. And if the DMC Reddit is anything to go by, it seems like a lot of Stylish Action/Hack and Slash fans like Doom, The original Doom is my favourite shooter ever.
I think a lot of Stylish Action games are about putting enemies in to states where they can’t fight back so that you can combo them to death. For example, launching an enemy in DMC disables that enemy, and takes them out of the fight. This works well in DMC because it is all about your combos but my point is that I think this is a big reason why movement isn’t that important in these games. It maximises the player’s ability to play expressively with the mechanics, with the enemy acting as your canvas. But at the same time, it silently sucks the dynamism out of the fights/situations. That’s the trade off. I have different games for different moods. I specifically play Doom, Souls + Sekiro when I want dynamic situations, and DMC and Bayonetta when I want to combo. Ninja Gaiden exists smack bang in the middle between the two extremes, I’d say.
But, I like your suggestions a lot. I really would love to play a DMC-style game where the level design is actually an integral part of the combat. I don’t even know if it’s possible to do that since, as I said, a lot of moves in DMC disable the enemies, effectively cutting off their access to the level geometry and so, not to sound redundant, but I have always viewed that as being the trade off. I mean just imagine fighting the Anor Londo arches as Dante. Trickster Teleport just skips the whole encounter. I guess that’s the thing. Games where the level design is important to the combat reinforce the importance of the level design by limiting what the player can do, with the level design enforcing those limitations. Whereas DMC-like games are all about not limiting you in any way. You have too much power for it to work! Thus, it inevitably turns the game’s focus to arena battles, where the only level-related factor that the player needs to consider is how wide the arena is.
The great thing about Doom and Souls is that the enemies just exist in the world, whereas Action games spawn them in and lock you in the arena until you’ve killed them all, to stress the focus on combos. So you have the chance to spot the Anor Londo archers before they even start firing at you, which enables you to formulate a plan. Then once you’ve taken down the archers, you own that territory now, and can use it to your advantage much like the archers did(!!). So you can draw enemies away from groups and to your territory to face them one on one, for example. Doom also does this. There’s many situations where the enemies won’t aggro until you start shooting, or rooms which allow you to observe the lay of the land before they flood it with enemies. You formulate a plan, kill the enemies, take the territory, and then move forward from there, always being mindful of the spaces you own, and the spaces your enemies own.
Anyway, this is an enormously complex, and very interesting topic, and I could talk about it all day. Thanks for the article, I really enjoyed it.
Really appreciate the love Swinny! I’m really, really pleased with this one as well I have to say, took a while to really nail it and I was still a bit anxious about the ‘third lesson’, but it seems to be going over well!
I think DOOM really is more of an action game if you look at how it plays, with most FPS’s having gone in a totally different direction. You could easily replace the action-game examples with Call of Duty and the article would work the exact same way.
Regarding the combat. There was recently a pretty good combo-video by Millz which also showcased combos implementing the enviroment, and I thought that was really interesting. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHjDlaNvBxk
If you mix in let’s say enviromentals like in God of War 3, which has spiked walls, that you can pin enemies into, stuff like that – would open up a lot. Just a minor example.
That aside, it would be interesting to see the level-design that’s there to be more than fancy dressing, making for memorable levels. An arena is good, but a well thought out arena is better (see a bit like in DMC3).
As you note, it’s a really complicated topic. But very interesting! Had a lot of fun decoding this one haha!
This is well sourced and thorough, but also extremely meandering and you don’t state your thesis clearly in any section, and most of your words aren’t dedicated to supporting your thesis, so your thesis just suddenly emerges at the end of the section without any supporting details or examination. The actual sections are long historical or technical explanations of how other games were built that don’t particularly establish an argument for whatever your actual point is, they’re more set dressing related to it.
1. Action games don’t have a lot of variety in where/how you fight enemies, relying on open arenas.
2. Higher difficulties should mix and match enemies more, lower ones should use less enemies instead of automatic assistance features.
3. You can’t attack and move at the same time in most cases.
1. This is because action games let you move in 3 dimensions, very quickly, with the ability to dodge incoming attacks, and enemies don’t have contact damage. Enemies realistically don’t have a way to block you from moving past them, there isn’t a big risk in running past them. Doom is very similar to the NES paradigm of level design, in that levels and enemy placement play off of each other a lot, and it’s equally dangerous to fight an enemy as it is to run past it. In action games, it’s absurdly easy to run past an enemy, or to keep dodging enemy attacks. Dark Souls has more of an emphasis on level design and enemy placement, because Dark Souls (and Sekiro) have more limited movement (and even in those games, it’s still too easy to run past many enemies). The action game solution is to lock the doors when you enter a room.
The other trouble is that introducing more varied terrain is frequently a distraction or interference with the combat. Compare to Smash Bros or Tekken. The legal stages in those game are very simple open arenas. If you look at the illegal stages, they’re ones with hazards, walls, slopes, and other things that get in the way. The only action game I’ve seen really succeed at varied level design was God Hand, but of course, it also had very limited movement, no jumping. There were a number of varied rooms in DMC3, like the tight hallways with the sawblades, and those were very annoying to fight in, because your movement and dodge abilities moved you so far that you’d run into the saw blades, and get knocked back really far into more saw blades.
While there is probably more room to innovate with action game level design, it’s going to need to take an approach more tailored to the genre specifically.
Everything you said about how hard it is to build levels is a massive amount of fluff unrelated to your core point. Modern level designers graybox their level’s collision geometry so they can test them out quickly.
2. Most action games do this already. DMC5 didn’t do the best job of it. Better luck next time. I think there’s a strong point to be made that there should be better features for teaching the player how to play as they play (like enabling the dynamic combo list from Bayonetta into the core game instead of relegating it to the training room), but that’s a topic for another time.
3. This is because action games have a different core paradigm from shooter games. Action games are about commitment. Shooter games are about aiming and dodging, like shoot em ups. In action games, both the player and the enemies need to go through animations before they attack. In shooter games, enemies can belch out attacks at any time without warning, or they might even deal contact damage when you’re too close to them. You’re expected to be far away enough from enemies that you can dodge by moving out of the way using normal movement. In action games, enemies have attacks with anticipatory animations, a startup, an active time, and a recovery. This lets you time a dodge move.
It also means that attacks can distinguish themselves by having different startup times, and by moving you over the course of the attack. If you can move freely during attacks, it matters less how long it takes to start up, because you can just start it while you’re far away and safe, then move in when it’s about to hit. The other thing is that standard movement is slow, and abilities such as dodging or stinger are faster, so you largely stand your ground, and move when the time is right.
Fighting games have you stop when you attack, except during jumps or airdashes. There isn’t really a reason action games should be any different. Being forced to stop in order to attack is just less of a deficit in action games than it is in shooters, and the principle of commitment (when I attack, I open myself up to attack) is more important than it is in shooters. More forms of movement would be cool, more types of cancels and so on, but this isn’t a core issue with the genre.
Conclusion: There are certainly a lot of things action games could experiment in (more unique areas of effect on enemy attacks for example, more experimentation with defense besides dodge/parry, better learning tools for beginners). I don’t think this article really addressed anything particular significant, or even made many points that could really be related between Doom and Action games. You spent a massive amount of time quibbling about things that weren’t your core points, instead of stating your thesis up front.
Learn to trim your writing. State your thesis up front. Use points that support your thesis instead of a history of Doom level design and description of how the level editors work. I’m sure you think that’s interesting, but it had nothing to do with your final point.
Thank you for replying! I am surprised though that you posted your reply both here and on Reddit, one of the two would have been enough. Half surprised you didn’t also send it to my Linkedin account haha!
> level design
One of the points I hear, not just from you, is that what was done before is boring and not fitting with the game’s structure or vision (or they were just plain bad like the sawblade rooms). Fair, but also not something that pushes the games forward. As you and I both have noted, games like Devil May Cry 3, or my favourite example Ninja Gaiden, have featured level design in combat that went beyond ‘big shiny arena‘.
An example I always like to use is the strip club in DMC3, which is just a fantastic little room. It’s got multiple floors, some slight elevations, a pole to use for a unique move etc. Aside from having an aesthetic that works in the game’s punk-rock style, it also serves to create an arena that you can play into. You can use the second floor for an escape, or juggle foes towards it. You can divide and conquer foes with the railings etc; lots of minor decisions to be made that are completely absent in a huge arena. You could even make it play into the combat more by adding wall-bounces as a combat mechanics like in Yakuza.
The enviroment can be played into heavily, as seen in games like God of War, God Hand, Ninja Gaiden etc. with off-the-wall attacks or the lack of walls being a mechanic i.e. ring-outs. There’s definitely ground to win here and gameplay to improve. That and it would make the giant arenas stand out more and be more interesting, since they aren’t all there is.
Ninja Gaiden II is an especially good example imo, with the most dull fights being the open areas, since they don’t play into the game’s mechanics at all. Cover and walls being an essential part of it, as well as minute repositionings. That lone tree in the Survival Mode isn’t going to cut it, and heavily nerfs certain weapons like the Talons as a result. I definetly feel that there’s room for improvement in this regard, genre-wide.
That said, you bring Smash into the discussion, and I do feel that community has been far to harsh with banning stages of late. I’m more of the Tekken mindset in that case, just keep everything legal and enjoy the cuhrayzee it brings.
> difficulty remixing
I’ve searched high and low and played most action-games, and can’t think of a single one that comes close to what DOOM does. If you can add to this, I’d love to play them! The only one I can think of that sort of comes close is Ninja Gaiden Black which remixes item locations, bosses (sort of) and enemies while also slightly changing the economy per difficulty (thus, 4 totally different runs). And it needed two DLC packs to get to that level as the original version’s difficulties were just higher damage values. The later games only offered a single enemy remix at times.
Bayonetta only has slight enemy remixing and the Witch Time change. DMC only has a single enemy remix throughout all its modes and the (underdeveloped) DT mechanic. Classic God of War doesn’t have remixing at all. Shinobi doesn’t. Viewtiful Joe has a single enemy-remix. God Hand does fuck all aside from a very rare spawn being exclusive to Level 3 or higher. Vanquish remixes two fights and changes the game’s values a tad. Onimusha only has a single remix of enemies. MGR:R only a single enemy remix as well as a gimmick difficulty at the end. Souls has a single remix in its entire series (Dark Souls II).
Meanwhile DOOM remixes enemy locations, completely remixes item layouts, sometimes even key-card locations, introduces certain weapons earlier and later, has unique rooms exclusive to some difficulties and even changes some minute elements like lighting to make specific rooms more difficult. All while also still having a ‘gimmick’ difficulty that plays more into the game’s mechanics. Not to mention the point about how it handles easy-modes.
So yeah, I don’t agree with your notion here. It goes beyond that DMCV was bad in this regard, which indeed it was, but the genre in general has gotten really bad at this. You could make the argument that it isn’t worth the development time, which doesn’t make it immune to critique imo.
Regarding the on-the-fly combo list, this has been done and I think it would be a good addition for sure. Ninja Gaiden 3, of all games, allowed this and it was dynamic as well and could be kept open at all times during combat. I think this was a carry-over from Dead or Alive 5 which also featured this in its single-player.
> movement
More a thought experiment than anything else. Action games in their origins have always been about movement in combat, see also the arcade and NES examples offered, or the more modern beat’m ups. Just look to something like the classic Strider or original NES Gaiden.
You mention a lot of rules that aren’t rules i.e. that ‘you have to go through animations to attack’, ‘there isn’t contact damage’ etc. They are just consistent elements, but they can easily be added. This isn’t a notion of “every action game needs this”, which is made very clear in the initial post. Just a thought experiment. Let a game try it out I’d say, see how it feels. The Wonderful 101 almost completely has it since you can move during most attacks, but that game is already quite different (and great). As stated: “As such, the third, and last, lesson that action games can learn from DOOM isn’t just as much a lesson, but also a spark for inspiration” – not a lesson, just a fun idea that could be tried.
> trim the writing
It’s what you enjoy I’d say. I write articles for fun in a way I would enjoy reading them, and I love high-detailed and historical pieces. You can also see this in my articles about Ninja Gaiden. I could throw it out the window and immediately throw conclusions and analysis to the reader like most do, but that’s just not what I enjoy reading or writing. I want to offer information, offer my take while leaving room for discussion or readers to reach their own points. I can appreciate it’s not for everyone, and it can get bloated and “just get to the point already” for sure. Thankfully I’ve more than found my audience of readers that seems to like the same thing I do, which I’m very happy with, hence why I keep this style.
I look forward to your reply on my Instagram!
” The general idea is that the way armour works in DOOM is that regular armours only bring you to 100 armour, no more.”
–This is incorrect. The green armor brings you to 100. The blue armor can take you to 200.
Re: being able to move while attacking, I think a big part of this is shooter vs. melee fighter. There are a lot of things that need to be considered here — aesthetic consistency (it’s going to kind of look stupid if I can run while swinging my sword), overall balance (in a game that’s based around melee combat, you simply can’t have an enemy like the Arch-Vile or even the Chaingunner, which means that if you can freely move while attacking, the game is likely to be extremely easy), and even things like genre precedence and heritage (many 3D brawlers are taking a lot of their core concepts from 2D belt scrollers where the main idea was positioning yourself so you could attack safely, since enemy attacks were generally unreactable; if you can attack while moving, the idea of positioning yourself before the attack gets kind of muddled). That’s not to say this can’t be done (see: Bayonetta, whose dodge-offset should really have been mentioned here), but even in the case of Bayonetta, it only works because that game has a larger emphasis on ranged combat than almost any other brawler I can think of, at times playing as much like P.N. 03 as DMC or Ninja Gaiden.
Re: needing combinations of enemies to create interesting encounters, that really isn’t always true. Take the (in)famous “Hone Gumi”, map 03 from the Combat Shock 2 pwad as an example. It’s literally just a big room that fills with an absurd amount of revenants entering from one side of the arena. However, through careful geometric design (the way the revenants fill the room from one side first prevents circle-strafing), the encounter ends up being extremely memorable and interesting to anyone who has ever played it.
One of the most important lessons from Doom that I feel has been missed here is the concept of the “pistol start” and how it affects play. Many of the best and most intense Doom levels spring encounters on you that you are *not* expected to immediately beat; you have to run throughout the whole level, find resources, and fight back with what you can scrounge up. This kind of improvisation is perhaps the biggest thing from Doom that has been lost in recent years, with every combat encounter being self-contained and resource resets happening frequently. Even in games such as DMC 1 or Ninja Gaiden Black which give you more freedom to explore levels, if you run from an encounter, the enemies won’t chase you into the next area (so there’s no chance of two encounters being combined into one), and you’re not going to find resources there that help you take on the encounter you’re running from; this is one of the most interesting aspects of Doom, and we haven’t seen it happen in any major action game release I can think of since Quake 1 in 1996, unless you count From’s recent work as action games (I don’t, except for Sekiro they’re RPGs first and foremost IMO).
Finally, if you’re going to post your pwads, I’ll post one I’ve made: https://www.doomworld.com/files/file/17876-impure-offering/ ! It’s designed for prboom-plus on -complevel 9, plays in the map 20 slot, and requires cc4-tex.wad (which can be found here: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/megawads/cchest4) to be included on the command line — the easiest way to run it is with by making a batch file with the command prboom-plus -iwad Doom2.wad -file ImpOffer.wad cc4-tex.wad -complevel 9
Cheers for the comment! Regarding the armour, a bit semantics. Blue Armor is ‘special’ armor in my eyes, I mostly refer to regular armor i.e. armor pieces / green armor with that comment; hence the comment ‘regular armour’. I choose my words very carefully :p
About the freemove, there have been games that’ve done it that I found after the fact, like Kingdom Hearts 2’s Lion-King world, where your entire moveset is swapped to one where you can attack while moving. It’s super unique and a bit what I mean.
Lastly, it’s mostly lessons for action-games. Sure there’s bad maps that play in different ways or maps that do something cool with a single enemy type (see also: Ninja Gaiden II’s infamous staircase to hell) but it’s more about what lessons can action-games take from it. One of them being mixing up enemies. Even in action-greats like NGII enemies are rarely mixed up beyond what is ‘lorewise’ possible or what is expected. You won’t see a Van Gelf fight alongside an IS ninja and Gaja for example – which is a shame. Only Ninja Gaiden Black, DMC1 and Bayonetta really pushed the envelope in terms of enemy remixing and even then still pale in comparison to what Doom does at its peak.
The part about Pistol Start is an interesting one though. I always liked the concept of it, i.e. that levels are built to both be interesting for continious play (going in it with max weapon loadouts) or just starting fresh. There are some games that already do this, i.e. ZoE2 which allows both ‘NG+’ and a fresh run, but not per stage but per playthrough. Something like this could work for something like a level-based action-game, perhaps something like Viewtiful Joe. But I wouldn’t put it as a big lesson action-games could take. It’s more “this is something that’s super cool about Doom” which isn’t what the article is about.
The point about pistol starts wasn’t so much about letting the player start with multiple power levels, but moreso to illustrate a difference in philosophy to the “unit of content”, for lack of a better phrase. In most action games, the “unit of content” is the individual encounter — sure, you can run from fights in DMC 1 or NG1, but enemies aren’t going to follow you into the next room if you do. In Doom, you can move about the whole level as you see fit, and enemies will follow you throughout — the “unit of content” has been expanded to the whole level. If it helps, you can think of it as though the entire level is almost a single big fight that has to be considered as one unit by the player. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an action game outside of early FPSs take this approach, which is unfortunate, since it really *is* a neat approach and I think could be applicable to a lot of games.
Totally agree, having resources (and more broadly, *context*) bleed into each other from previous fights seems so underexplored in the genre, and it’s something I’ve found fascinating about Doom as I’ve been getting into it.
(commenting again because I forgot to click the “notify me of new comments/new posts” button. Sorry for the extra spam.)