Bethesda launch Bethesda.net, provide new Doom screenshots

[tal onzy]

By Ben Barrett PCGamesN

With all the news bunny-hopping out of Quakecon, this one seems to have slipped under our radar so far. Along with a definitive announcement for when the Doom beta will be taking place and letting folks at the show play it, Bethesda have launched their own website for not only Doom, but all their games and services.

Bethesda.net, as it's both called and located, will be the hub for all officially produced content about Bethesda's various titles - most notably Fallout 4 and Doom - for the for seeable future. At the moment it's lacking in totally new content, most of it being recycled from E3, but having it all in one place is useful.

This post sums up what the service will be used for. Essentially it's a combination of the previously more distributed blogs for various games, a fan forum and in-game support network. It's what servers will be hosted on and is already being used for The Elder Scrolls Online. It's particularly central to the sharing features of Doom's SnapMap level editor and scenario creator add-on.

They've also shipped us a batch of new Doom screenshots showing off various gribbly monsters and blood-spattered hallways. Some of it's a bit dark-'n'-Doom 3 for my liking, but see what you think here.

 

[tal onzy]

Doom's campaign won't have co-op support Chris Livingston PC Gamer

Despite drop-in drop-out co-op becoming more common, such as in recent games like Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed Unity, the upcoming Doom won't allow friends to join for a cooperative experience in the campaign mode. The lack of campaign co-op was confirmed when I spoke with Marty Stratton, Doom's Executive Producer, at QuakeCon on Saturday. But that's not quite the end of the story.

For co-op experiences, players will have to stick to maps created in SnapMap, Doom's modding utility.

Speaking of both SnapMap and campaigns, I also asked Stratton if SnapMap could be used to create custom single-player campaigns. "Yes," he said. Then added: "In a sense. You create a level experience, and then to create a campaign-type thing you would link those [levels] together in, like, a playlist."

"You wouldn't necessarily carry weapons from one level to the next," said Stratton. "The author could set it up knowing you have this set of weapons as you go into this next component. It's little bit more like a playlist."

While that doesn't really sound like a true campaign experience as much as it does a group of individual maps played in a certain order, Stratton indicated that it may change in the time before the game's release. "This is probably something we'll think about for future iterations."

 

[tal onzy]

Doom feels like "Bruce Lee with a shotgun on a skateboard," says id
Iram Brimbaum PC Gamer

At Quakecon's Doom panel on Saturday, the leaders of the development team at id Software took the stage to talk about their experience with creating the new Doom over the last several years. The focus for the entire team has been movement—the better the movement was working, they said, the better the game was shaping up. The action should be so smooth and so fast, art director Hugo Martin said, that players should "feel like Bruce Lee with a shotgun on a skateboard."

"We wanted to focus on these traditional id roots," multiplayer producer Brad Bramlett said. When the game is fast and fluid, "it's exactly what we wanted it to be, so there's no better feeling than that."

Robert Duffy, chief technology officer at id, mentioned that Doom's development began when they took the player movement framework from RAGE and doubled it. This dedication to speed also drove the adoption of the glory kills, the brutal hand-to-hand finishing moves that drew a lot of attention during Quakecon last year. The core loop of gameplay is known by id as "push-forward combat," so anything that makes players slow down and pause is immediately removed. This ethos also led to abandoning regenerative health. "Not having regnerative health isn't a random choice, it stems from movement," executive producer Marty Stratton said. "Movement is king and you don't want players stopping to regenerate health, you want them moving forward to see the resources of the game. That also leads to needing a lot of skill for players to get through the game."

Glory kills also give the player health and ammo pickups in greater volumes than players would see for simply shooting an enemy. "Speed is also the key of the glory kill. It was part of that seamless movement, you never want to have the action interrupted. We figured out a while ago that 600-700 miliseconds is the right amount of time to start and finish it." The game's speed is so dialed up that major parts of it are taking place in fractions of a second. For fans of old-school shooters, this focus on speed and mayhem will be a defining aspect of the return of Doom.

Doom will be available for alpha and beta testing over the next nine months as it heads toward a final release in spring 2016. For more details, check out all of our news from Quakecon.