Doom Beta Death Match Impressions Part 1

I have recently spent the weekend, playing the Doom (2016) beta, I also played the alpha in late 2015. Over the course of threes days I spent roughly 7 hrs, gunning down, blowing up and glory killing enemies online.Additionally I managed to obtain a solid 1.7 k/d! While the game was fun and enjoyable, I am not sure if this title has the potential to be a long term staple shooter or E-Sport. Doom 2016 deathmatch has throw backs to old-school arena shooters such as Quake and Unreal Tournament. However,there are some design issues that in my opinion the game would be better without.

Doom like many older shooter, Quake, Unreal and Pre-Reach Halo, has no sprint mechanic. The lack of sprinting is offset by a relatively fast base movement speed. The marine you control moves faster than non sprinting solider in Black Ops 3 or Spartan in Halo 5. However a Spartan in Halo 5 is much more agile than your Doom Marine, by being able to slide and having a high sprint speed. Surprisingly the jump height in Doom (2016) mp is not very high, however, you can double jump which boasts jumping height.The peak of Doom Marines jump height is less than that of a Spartan in Halo 5 or a Solider Black Ops 3, using double jump.

The low jump height of Doom (2016) is unusual as high jump heights were a staple of older arena shooters. Like older shooters and Black Ops 3, you can jump while in the air (even without jumping beforehand) which is visualized by thrusters on soldier boots. Doom also implements the modern clambering mechanic very well, as it allow players to climb onto high areas when combined with double jumping. Simply put Doom as a shooter moves well and feels old school by not having sprinting or sliding. In my opinion, neither sprinting or sliding is needed in this game, but jump height and character movement speed could both be increased . While Doom feels old-school in movement there are several things keeping the game from being a true arena shooter.

Doom (2016) unlike older arena shooter like Quake, Timesplitters and Unreal Tournament has loadouts. This is my biggest issues with the game. The lack of loadouts detracts from a key aspect of competitive arena shooters and that is having weapons on map. A player in the Doom beta is given the option of using either customized or preset loadouts. loadouts in Doom (2016) detract from map control and allow players to easily exploit weapon imbalances.

The Doom 2016 beta had a variety of weapons , these are as follows:the iconic super shotgun, plasma rifle, rocket launcher, vortex rifle, lightning rifle, static rifle, heavy assault rifle and gauss canon. All these weapons can be used as loadout weapon, with the exception of the gauss rifle which is power weapon that can be found on map. Oddly the 'battle rifle like' repeater from the alpha was not present in the beta build of the game.Additional the final build of Doom will have more weapons not present in the beta, these include the BFG, chainsaw, mini-gun and shotgun, plus others. The weapons present in the beta are arguably imbalanced.

In terms of weapon balance Doom 2016 weapons would likely be fair in an arena setting, However certain weapons are simply too strong to be starting weapons. Throughout the beta I used every single weapon in the game, to get a feel for the different weapons. In my opinion, the vortex rifle, static rifle , super shotgun and plasma rifle are much more effective at killing enemies than the game other loadout weapons .