Doom Closed Beta Impressions

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I was lucky enough to be a part of the Doom Alpha, and now I got to try some of the game via the Closed Beta. I’ve been completely excited for the game since it’s been announced. As I see more of it I want it more. That being said, the beta left me satisfied and dissatisfied as well. Fair warning, my impressions are solely based on the experience on the Xbox One.

The first thing I did when I booted up the game was go to the customization screen. I always love customizing my character. While there were practically no armor options (I later started unlocking more through gameplay), I did like the types of customization. It’s similar to Halo, where you can choose a primary and secondary color for your armor, but you can also determine how worn it looks, which is a nice touch. To top it off, rather than giving specialized skins, you are given patterns to play with for the weapons, which you can apply and customize as you see fit. There isn’t a lot of flexibility, but the amount of flexibility that’s there is certainly welcome.

After that, I jumped into the game, selecting random between the game types (Deathmatch and Warpath). I jumped right into the map called ‘Infernal’. This map wasn’t in the Alpha, so I looked forward to trying it. The design reminded me of Doom 3’s rendition of Hell, which pleased me greatly. There is a lot of detail in the map, down to the way the models are designed and the effects (such as glowing pentagrams or flowing lava). This all made the map feel like it was pulled straight out of the campaign, which is pretty cool. The actual mechanics of the maps are very familiar. There are teleporters, jump pads, pits of doom, narrow passageways, wide open areas and some environmental hazards. Strewn all over the place are ammo pickups, armor pickups, and the occasional power-up or power weapon.

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One of my biggest issues with the gameplay was the lack of weapon pickups. Have weapons placed around the map is a staple of the arena-style games this borrows from, yet it’s not present. Doom, instead, adopts the loadout system that most modern shooters use now. This means that you are given two weapons and an accessory to start with every spawn. Besides the rare power weapon (or demon transformation), there is no way to acquire weapons as you are playing unless you are killed. I felt like this took away from the fast-paced frantic style that makes these types of game the most fun. If they had done a loadout system with some basic weapons, but still had other weapons around the map it’d be more interesting. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Coupled with that is a ‘hack’ system where you get hacks that you can use to give you certain edges during the match (essentially the same thing as Titanfall’s Burn Cards). This feature I actually liked a lot. I never felt like any of the hacks that were presented gave me enough of an advantage to make it unfair. It’s just little things, like seeing the location of the person who killed you, or seeing where a power-up will spawn.

While we’re on the topic of weapons and hacks, I’ll mention that the weapons (mostly) feel like underpowered baby toys. In the end, the only weapons I found myself (and others) using were the rocket launcher and the sniper rifle. Some of the weapons have interesting secondary functions. The rocket launcher, for example, allows you to detonate a shot rocket at any point before impact. This allows for much more tactical use of the weapon, and also helps to devalue the other weapons even more.

The shooting in the game feels very much like the arena shooters we’re used to (Unreal and Quake). Everything is fast-paced, responsive and high-intensity. To shake things up a bit, there is a demon mechanic (similar to the Big Daddy mechanic in Bioshock 2). A rune will appear and whoever picks it up will transform into a demon of their choice (only the Revenant was available in the Beta). This player gets extra powers. In the case of the Revenant, we have the ability to powerful rockets from our shoulders, use a jetpack to hover and fly a little and also use a powerful slash attack. Whenever a demon is summoned things get pretty interesting, and I really enjoy the type of dynamic this brings to the firefights.

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Being an arena shooter, mobility is extremely important. The aforementioned jump pads and teleporters are great, but we are given more vertical mobility via a double jump as well. Overall I really liked the mobility and pacing of the matches. I also really enjoyed the new mode called ‘Warpath’. This is basically King of the Hill, but the ‘Hill’ is a constantly moving zone which you have to hold. This makes things extremely dynamic and forces players to be on their toes, rather than learning how to hole up in certain locations like a turtle.

Putting gameplay aside for a moment, the game certainly didn’t look perfect. There was constant texture loading, low resolution effects and some rubber-banding. I rarely saw anybody with a solid connection, so I’m going to assume this was a server-side issue. Also, having damage indicators appear on screen whenever you shoot an enemy is extremely distracting and adds too much clutter to what’s an already hectic shooter. The actual design of the weapons, maps and models is great, but it doesn’t look to be that high quality. I don’t know if this is due to the limitations of the Xbox One (compared to the PC, which I’m used to playing my games on) or if it is merely a way of toning down the beta for easier testing purposes.

Overall, I’m still interested in Doom, but the beta left me wondering about why they made certain design choices for the multiplayer. I’ll likely still get the game, because I’ve enjoyed every Doom campaign that has released thus far, but this multiplayer looks a bit too confused to give me the kind of fix that I got from games like Quake and Unreal Tournament. Still, this was only a tiny sample of the full multiplayer (and only a fraction of the full game). I hope they’ll use this opportunity to improve based on feedback from this beta experience.

​Doom is slated for release on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and on Microsoft Windows on May 13, 2016.

- Teepu

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