Why Doom Succeeds Both as a Modern Game and as a Doom Game

Movement and Gunplay

Doom’s core is a perfect blend of moving around the stage and maiming enemies. And though it took me a total of 2 and a half play-throughs to figure it out I am certain which was designed first.

Movement in modern first person shooters is boring. It’s incredibly boring. I need to hammer this point home: movement in modern FPS games is a worthless after-thought not worthy of inclusion. It’s so bad that I can go through my old FPS game footage, highlight the parts where I’m moving and the parts where I’m performing some other action, and there’s basically no overlap. In Spec Ops: The Line I either move forward or take cover and shoot. In CoD I’m sprinting, wall-sliding, and boost jumping but when it comes time to fire at an enemy I’m either stationary or moving at a snail’s pace.

The simple cause is that all these games are designed guns first movement second. Most FPS game developers nowadays just know that every player’s core loadout is going to contain a medium-range hitscan assault rifle.