Doom: 2016

I've just finished playing Doom. I won by shooting a big spidery demon thing a lot of times and then, when it was looking very sad from all the shooting, I ripped it's head in half, stuck a massive gun inside it, and blew it up.

It has been a thrilling, if not exactly intellectual adventure.


Happiness is...

I've really enjoyed Doom, but for the life of me I can't tell you exactly why. All the time I've been playing, whether leaping about futuristic research labs or traversing the plains of Hell, my brain has been split into two distinct sections. One was asking, "Why is this so good? What is it that's drawing me in here?" The other half was shouting, "Ha ha ha! Whoooo! Kill! Shoot! Kaboom!"

At it's heart, this is an incredibly simple game. You wander through horrific sci-fi environments, looking for the way out. Wave after wave of increasingly hideous demons materialise around you, all hell bent on eating your face. You shoot at these demons with a variety of exciting guns. They explode in a pleasing fashion. Sometimes a demon will glow orange, which means you can run up to it and perform a 'glory kill' - an incredibly gross melee attack which usually involves ripping its face off and sticking it up its bum.

It's not the sort of thing I tend to love. Pure shooters often leave me cold. I've tried to play Call of Duty a number of times, and every time I've given up after about an hour, shouting insults at the stupid, boring, tedious nonsense that it has the nerve to call 'gameplay'.

So, what's Doom's thing? Here's are some thoughts.

Cool Economies

Part of the pleasure of games, for me, is levelling up. I love it when a game gives me perks, and I am pathetically grateful. Doom has a number of upgrade systems and they're all really satisfying.

The most basic thing is the number of guns you can get. As you progress through the levels, the game offers up a number of enjoyable weapons for you to play with. Pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, rocket launcher and so on. 

Each weapon is brilliantly designed to have a different impact on the creatures you face. There's a palpable difference in the way they handle, the projectiles they spew out and the effect they have on the evil pillocks that keep trying to get in your face. It's a joy switching between them and experimenting with their offensive capabilities.

Then there's weapon upgrades - cool secondary abilities that you can unlock like stun rays, exploding bullets and some kind of weapon lock thing that is probably great if you can get the bloody thing to work. I could not. Unless it's function was to help me shoot myself in the face, in which case yes, I could. 

Upgrades can be bought with points, gained from all the demons you blow to bits, with extra special powers only available once you complete very specific challenges, like "Shoot twenty Skum Demons in the face while reciting all the episodes of Blake's 7 in order." Or something.

And you can upgrade your suit, so it has special abilities, and your health, and your armour, and... ooh, all sorts. Lots of cool new toys to unlock and play with. It has the effect of lending real variety to the killing, and driving you to try out differing play-styles to complete the challenges.

Fiero

Happiness in a game comes through the feeling that you are having an effect on the world you are in. Players desire agency and a good game spends a lot of time making sure that's how things feel. In game design terms, that's called 'fiero'. Which is appropriate for this game, given how many things you set on fire. 

Fighting off a wave of demons is hard. There are loads of them, attacking all at once, and in different ways. Some shoot fireballs. Some leap at you, claws at the ready. Some are already on fire, and want you to be on fire too. 

Tackling these unsociable gits requires a player to perform a number of tasks at once. Keep moving, to avoid the billions of things flying at you. Jump, spring and duck, making use of every platform, tunnel and ledge. Grab all the powerups and ammunition dumps, at the right times. Trigger special abilities and manage their cooldown periods. 

And most of all, of course, shoot. Shoot these horrible, ugly creatures as many times as you can, switching between all your cool weapons to hit the right ones with the right ammunition. Trigger their weaknesses and pounce in for glory kills, ripping their stupid heads off their hideous bodies. Watch as health points and ammunition cascade from their dying torso, just in time to replenish you for the continuing battle. Now, quickly, move!

When you get it wrong, it's frustrating. But you know, even as you lay burning to death on the ground, that you're going to press X and go again. Because this time you've worked out what you should have done.

And when you get it right, the adrenalin rush is glorious. You know you deserve this victory. You did dozens of cool, exciting things and came close to death oh so many times. But you made it. Yeah!

Verbs

There's a pretty good book by Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark called 'A Game Design Vocabulary'. In it they identify a practice which makes for excellent game design - identifying the verbs of a game. 

Every game is about doing something. That's why it's a game. More or less. A good designer, say Anthropy and Clark, works out what the player is doing, and ties all the gameplay to that thing. Sounds simple, doesn't it? But since I came across this idea, I've realised how many games fail to do it.

I complained a little while ago about the irritating experience I had playing Beyond: Two Souls. There was a game which simply could not define its verbs. Every level had dozens of different things for me to do. Sometimes those things were crucial parts of the gameplay. Sometimes they were mysteriously forbidden. Rarely did they work in combination. As a result the game was a load of tedious nonsense and I spent the last few hours of gameplay calling it a fickle tosser.

No such issues with Doom. In Doom, your verb is 'shoot'. If a thing is moving, shoot it. There is complexity within the verb, oh yes. The aforementioned variety of weapons to shoot with and the interesting range of firing modes open up loads of exciting combinations of gunplay. But the verb remains the same. Shoot those things in the face!

You can also hit them, if you want. The same simplicity applies. The same key press lets you interact with anything - usually by hitting it. Doors, control panels, things you want to pick up, things you want to die - all the same verb. 

And, apart from jumping and basic movement, that's your lot. A brilliant and elegant control system which means that whenever you're playing Doom, you are performing the most basic of actions, leaving your brain free to combine those actions in fluid and beautiful ways. Thus you can focus, thus you are engaged. Thus you enter a state of flow, where you very thoughts seem to translate into action without any intermediary stage. 

In Conclusion

Doom is so good it's hard to see why it's good. Like anything done with skill, it looks simple and it looks easy. There don't appear to be any cracks to show where it was glued together. No way in. It just is. A gorgeous piece of design, both primal and sophisticated. Not easy to make, I imagine. But a joy to play.

Put simply, I liked it. I thought it was good.