PETE HINES: In 1993 a small studio called id Software made a first person shooter called Doom, that
forever changed gaming.
This is Game Maker's Toolkit. I'm Mark Brown.
Doom is undeniably an influential game. Pretty much every first person shooter made today
can trace its lineage back to this gory game about blasting away at demons from Hell.
But the question is, do we even remember what made Doom so much fun to play?
I mean, there was probably more to it than...
MARTY STRATTON: Bad-ass demons, big F-ing guns, and moving really, really fast.
Many people will point to the game's non-linear level design that had you scouting about stages
for keys to unlock coloured doors. And some will point to the bevy of secrets, which were
stashed behind fake walls and unlocked by hidden buttons. Or maybe they'll highlight
the traps and monster closests that trolled first time players.
And all those aspects contributed to Doom's terrific design. But I think the secret is
something more fundamental. I think it's in the nitty gritty of the combat, and how every
fight becomes something of a dance, of careful positioning and quick-fire decisions.
And your dance partners, are these iconic monsters.
As Matthias Worch, a designer at 2K Games who started his career making levels for Doom,
puts it "the reason Doom works so well is because each enemy represents a distinct,
consistent, and discernible behaviour that can be learned".
So you've got the zombiemen and shotgun guys, who are weak but use hitscan weapons which
do immediate damage to you. That's in contrast to the Imps who are a bit more powerful
but their fireballs soar slowly across the map and can be dodged with the smart use of strafing.
Demons and their invisible counterparts, Spectres, don't have any weapons, so they chase you
down and do melee damage. A bit like the Lost Souls, but those charge directly at you so
you have to sidestep to avoid them.
Cacodemons and Barons of Hell also use projectile attacks, but they also have an enormous amount
of health.
This is what Deus Ex designer Harvey Smith calls "orthogonal unit differentiation", which
basically means that the different elements in the game - in this case, the enemies - have
completely unique attributes, rather than just being more or less powerful versions
of each other. Orthogonal meaning "statistically independent".
And what this means, according to Smith, is that you start "playing intentionally, and
making meaningful, tactical decisions - not just randomly reacting to what's going on".
Those are decision about prioritisation. Imps and Cacodemons may be powerful, but you can
dodge their fireballs so you learn to focus first on the zombiemen and their hitscan weapons,
and the demons who deal melee damage.
They're decisions about positioning. The hitscan enemies encourage you to take cover, fireballs
and Lost Souls encourage you to move laterally, and demons make you move backwards. At times,
Doom feels like a bullet hell shooter where you can avoid damage altogether just by racing
to the right spot.
Not to mention that enemies can hurt each other, so lining one enemy in front of the
other is a handy, high level strategy.
And they're decisions about resources. Shotguns work great closeup, but the chaingun is better
from a distance. The rocket launcher is a killer, but the projectile can soar past quick
moving enemies. You have to think critically about which gun to use, and when.
There are also decisions unique to Doom's design. Every enemy has a pain chance, where
if they get hit during an attack animation there's a possibility they won't fire - so
enemies with a high pain chance, like the Cacodemon, can be needled with bullets to
slow their fire. And as enemies from different species will attack each other, you can lure
one group of foes to fight another.
Something interesting happens when you visualise these orthogonal attributes. If we throw together
a graph of say, damage dealt and speed of attack, we can plot the weak, but immediate
hitscan enemies, the more powerful but slow projectile foes, the melee monsters, and the
baron of hell.
When shown like this, we get to see how Doom offers a wide "possibility space" - a term
Sim City inventor Will Wright uses to describe all the things you can do in a game - or,
in this case, all the things that can be done to you.
Compare that to more modern shooters where enemies are essentially the same guy with
thicker and thicker body armour - perhaps with a shotgun guy who charges at you if you're
lucky - and you can see just how much more ground Doom covers.
Some games do carry the torch of unique and orthogonal enemies, of course. In Halo you
have monsters like the grunts who scatter and panic if the more powerful aliens are
killed, elites who have regenerating health, jackals who carry big round shields, and hunters
who often attack in pairs and go berserk if their partner is killed.
Like in id software's game, the different enemies have different behaviours, different
strengths, and different weaknesses, causing you to pick your targets, to think about how
to fight, and to move about the battlefield deliberately.
What really makes this work in both Halo and Doom is that there is only a small number
of enemies - about seven in Doom, which is, perhaps coincidentally, the number of objects
an average human can hold in working memory.
Deliberate or not, this meagre cast of monsters means almost every player can remember how
to fight, and evade each foe.
It certainly helps that the monsters have very distinct visual designs, both in colour
and silhouette, from the hunchbacked pink demons, to the massive red cacodemons, to
the weird lanky imp. It's easy to quickly scan a room and figure out what you're dealing with.
They also have somewhat unique sounds, like this for the zombieman, this for the imp,
and this for the demon. A shame, then, that various other creatures share that same distinct
noise. A game that does this exceptionally well is Half Life 2, where an orchestra of
iconic sounds, like the manhack's noisy whirr and a dying combine soldier's flatlining alarm,
let you know exactly what's going on in the heat of a frantic battle.
Anyway, back to Doom's cast of monsters. "Such diversity creates a large but simple to understand
toolset that level design can combine with architecture to create a huge variety of combat
setups," says JP LeBreton, an ex-Irrational designer and self-described "Doom hipster".
Whereas in many shooters, the only way to change up the combat encounters is to add
more and more foes, Doom can offer unique fights simply by offering different combinations
of monsters, and in different shapes and sizes of arena.
In this room, you're set upon by a bunch of imps and zombiemen. The best way to deal with
this scenario is to run around the room, killing the hitscan shooters and dodging the fireballs,
and then turning your attention to the imps. Elsewhere, demons are deployed in tight, claustrophobic
mazes; and enemies with massive numbers of hit points are surrounded by cannon fodder
foes to encourage crowd control.
So this, in my mind, is what makes Doom tick.
It's that small cast of iconic enemies, which encourage different behaviours and distinct
ways of moving. In play, this means your mind is making dozens of tactical decisions a minute.
Intentional choices, driven by your knowledge of how the game works.
This is Doom's legacy. And more games could stand to learn from it.
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