Today we wanted to discuss something a little different. We briefly talked about Doom 2016 in an earlier article, but wanted to talk more about why we didn’t get blown away from it.

The modern Dooms started with 2016, and people were loving the game. They said how it made shooters great again, and was game of the year. We were in the multiplayer beta and played the demo for it before it cane out. The game wasn’t bad but not mind blowing at the same time. The beta was actually panned with people calling it generic and CoD like, but wanting to be an arena shooter.

After playing it, we felt it was a 7.5. It started out decent but got repetitive. After taking place in rooms of the space station, later levels became just arenas. The biggest issue was the enemies were just bullet sponges. When your guns were upgraded it still took a while to kill them.

One of the games coolest features is not talked about. SnapMap was a map editor where you could link different rooms together, adjust enemy placement, adjust game logic and share for people to download. After 2016, no other game in the series had this mode.

When I played Doom, I felt Wolfenstein The New Order did everything better. People would say things about Doom and I’d wonder did they play Wolfenstein. A lot of people said how Doom’s guns felt good and powerful. The New Orders were better, their alt fire modes were cooler and you could dual wield almost any gun. So when I played Doom they didn’t feel nearly as good to me.

People say Doom 2016 revolutionized or breathed new life into a stale FPS genre. If you’re referring to Call of Duty, you can say that, but thats the only one. The New Order and Titanfall 2 did better jobs in level design and story.

I think a lot of Doom’s hype and praise came from Call of Duty players, who wanted Modern Warfare 4 and not another futuristic CoD. After the letdown of Ghosts, CoDs had tried to be like Titanfall and were a mixed bag. Advanced Warfare was generic and forgettable, outside Kevin Spacey. Black Ops 3’s gameplay was good but single player and multiplayer maps were ok. When Infinite Warfare was announced it set a record for most disliked video on Youtube. Then it was announced Modern Warfare 1 was getting a remaster.  This caused a lot of public anger because you had to buy Infinite Warfare’s collectors edition to play it. Doom came out not too long after this,  got very popular and praised by FPS lovers.

People talk about how Doom saved the franchise, but Wolfenstein did it too. Doom took a good franchise with no bad entries and brought it to modern gaming. Wolfenstein wasn’t regarded nearly as highly. After the generic 2009 game, it was thought of as a dead franchise. With the New Order announcement, many thought it would be another meh entry too.

The new Doom trilogy has been better than the new Wolfenstein one. Doom: Eternal at least was a way better sequel than Wolfenstein The New Colossus and Youngblood, despite its problems. With New Colossus you wondered where did the writers and level designers from the first game go. Then it tried being over the top while embracing political agendas. Youngblood tried to do something similar, but with coop, level gating and health bars. The DLC was unused levels from the base game. 

After two disappointing sequels, Wolfenstein has been put on ice. I hope they can get back to what made the first game good.  But Bethesda and Machine Games’ quality has been going down since The New Order. When you also add in the lesser quality with Microsoft buying them, it doesn’t seem likely.