But one of those parts, freshness, was critical to its success.ĭuring the 1990s, I played very little outside of platformers and fighting games on consoles, and first-person shooters on PC. All of its moving parts gel together into a cohesive whole.
And to be clear, I never meant to imply that Doom was (and is) great because, hey, it didn't end up being a garbage fire. Doom showed there's more than one way to make a first-person shooter, and that finding a unique hook is a stronger play than trying to out-polish Call of Duty.ĭavid Craddock: You're absolutely right, Steve. It also ingeniously tied the flow of combat to the risk-reward Glory Kill system, which made for a constantly shifting, unpredictable gameplay loop. Still, the language of the FPS had become familiar, and when every example of a genre is running an almost identical control scheme, it's a pretty sure sign of stagnation.ĭoom broke the mold by getting in touch with its fast-paced roots and ripping out anything that didn't belong. Call of Duty made a template for shooters that was enjoyable enough, and there have certainly been some great shooters made in that mold.
Doom was really the first salvo in a larger trend this year of reimagining a genre that, let's face it, had started to grow a little stale. I'm sure we all remember the slow dawning realization while playing that it was in fact not bad and was in fact, oh wait a minute, actually really good.īut merely being a pleasant surprise isn't what drove it toward the top of so many of our lists. Steve Watts: Yeah, from the press end, we had every reason to believe Doom was going to turn out pretty bad. Sure, it isn't the best multiplayer around, but it isn't the worst either. It is by far one of the best FPS games I've ever played in my life.Īs I said before, I hated the multiplayer, but since the game's release I've dabbled in it a little bit with friends, and have actually grown quite fond of it. The music, the enemies, the giddy feeling when I performed a glory kill.
Being one of the younger members of the team, I was only four when the original Quake released, so Doom was nowhere on my radar of games that I was 'allowed' to play at the time. To be fair, though, I don't have the background with the Doom series that many of you do. Although the original Doom pioneered deathmatch, I didn't play multiplayer I stuck to the three (later four) single-player episodes and the game's surfeit of mods. Some fans pinned their hopes and dreams on the poorly received multiplayer beta that preceded the game's launch. well, not low expectations, but zero expectations. Last week, before our break, the staff all sat down together to talk about why Shacknews loves Doom, and what the game means to us as a site.ĭavid Craddock: I don't know about the rest of you, but I went into Doom circa 2016 with. Developed by id Software, and published by Bethesda Games, Doom breathed new life into the stagnation of the first-person shooter genre and helped revive the industry’s love for fast-paced, hard-hitting action and gore. In 2016, though, one game has stood taller than the rest. Blizzard also released their own take on the hero shooter, and Overwatch has been an absolute joy to play. We saw a sequel to Arcane’s spectacular revenge story, Dishonored, and even got to return to the world of Final Fantasy in an entirely new way. This year was a great year for video games.