Sigh. Back during id Software’s glory days of Doom and Quake, getting the absolute best out of the humble PC was a top priority. Sadly, going from the open beta for the new Doom, it’s clearly been relegated to a footnote on a napkin, written in Sanskrit and encoded with a cipher of extraterrestrial origin. It’s not all doom and gloom, however, with id promising a raft of improvements.
According to a post over on Bethesda’s blog by id CTO Robert Duffy, the developer received “a lot of great information” over the beta period, including a massive chunk of opinions from PC gamers. The opinions, shall we say, were not positive and as a result, Duffy felt it necessary to emphasise id’s dedication to the desktop crowd:
PC gaming is in our DNA here at id. Just like so many of you, we also love to tinker with settings to get the exact experience we want — and every ounce of performance our systems can handle. We will be running an uncapped framerate on PC at launch, supporting ultra-wide 21:9 monitors, allowing wider FOV, and providing a wide variety of advanced settings that allows any PC connoisseur the opportunity to make intelligent tradeoffs between visual fidelity and performance.
What sort of advanced settings? Here you go:
- Manually Lock Framerate (un-locked by default)
- Lights Quality
- Chromatic Aberration Toggle
- Shading Quality
- Post Process Quality
- Particles Quality
- Game F/X Quality
- Decal Quality
- Directional Occlusion
- Reflections Quality
- Depth of Field Toggle
- Decal / Texture Filtering
- Motion Blur Quality / Toggle
- Sharpening Amount
- Lens Flare Toggle
- Lens Dirt Toggle
- Texture Atlas Size
- Show Performance Metrics
- Resolution Scaling
- UI Opacity
- Film Grain
- Rendering Mode
- FOV Slider
- Simple Reticle
- Show First-person Hands Toggle
- Use Compute Shaders
- Vsync (support or triple buffering)
The question now is whether it’ll be enough to sweeten feelings about the game for its May release. I reckon the game will still sell well — it’s Doom after all — but for the “PC connoisseurs”, the damage is done.
DOOM on PC [Bethesda]
Comments
42 responses to “Doom On PC: Bethesda Promises A Metric Crapload Of Fixes”
It just wouldn’t be a Bethesda game without a raft of bugs and missing options.
It won’t matter if the singleplayer isn’t great.
As long as the weapons are not nerfed, and they steer away from the clunky, numb Doom 3 style UI, there’s still hope…
so they’re going back to the drawing board and actually make it DOOM instead of HALO/COD/QUAKE/CS:GO?
…but wasn’t their intention to make a Doom arena shooter this time around?
If their goal was to make an arena shooter, then they are doing it at the wrong time as Unreal tournament will be free and faster paced then DOOM as well as allow own mods, personal servers, selling of items and mods if they want, its free and it is fully community driven so it will stay true to the games format.
they shouldn’t have to promise this, it should be standard, ahh being a PC gamer sucks some times
Bethesda is as dedicated to PCs as Kim Jong Il is to a free democratic society.
At this point, I think it’s better if we all lowered our expectations for Doom to be amazing and anything other than a primarily console shooter. It’ll probably be a great console shooter but yeah….
MP Arena mode where you can carry every weapon…. starting with 0 weapons and have to pick up weapons laying in the open to use them… is also something that needs to be done. None of this ‘pick a class’ rubbish. This is goddamn DOOM not COD.
That’s the thing, FOV sliders (and all the other PC centric graphical features) are great and all, but it means nothing if all the classic arena shooter elements are still missing.
Fuckin A right, brother!
I hate it when a post begins with a glaring error. Everybody know ‘crapload’ is imperial, and ‘shit tonne’ is metric. Pffft.
What about a fucktonne? A ‘megabuttload’ and a ‘whoppinfuckinmegashittonne of a load’?
Metric, Imperial, Metric.
*scoffs*
Hahahaha.
What about….. PARSEC!!!!!
Which one? The Parsec measurement of distance, or the erroneous way it’s used to measure time, usually by nerf herders? :p
The names Nerfherder…. Scruffy Nerfherder…
*SLAP*
That’s our word! OUR WORD!!
Yeah well……………..Mums Dad was one quarter Scruffy! I’m at least one sixty fourth! I can use the S word if I like!
https://www.quora.com/Measurements-How-much-is-a-buttload-precisely
Let’s just say we’d like to avoid any imperial entanglements.
Did everyone miss the fact that this was a BETA? As in the game was NOT finished at the time?
Do you miss the fact that the point of the beta is to put out an early build of the game to garner feedback on what to change/ Improve? they dont put out beta’s just for shits and giggles, They put them out to get feedback on them so they can improve.
Really? I just thought they put out betas cause they had nothing else better to do.
The beta was carried out as intented. They got their feedback, now they are making changes. The game is not finished, so I don’t know what all the fuss is about the “damage being done”. It was a beta, it wasn’t the final product.
People whinge when games come out full of bugs and essentially use paying customers as beta testers. They are running a proper beta program to make fixes before release and people still complain. I don’t get it.
This was exactly my point. Players are up in arms like this is what the finished game is going to be.
I don’t think advanced options are going to save Doom4.
I watched 3 first impression videos yesterday – from TotalBiscuit to two others in the sidebar, and they all said pretty much the same thing: it’s just not that good. A few notable complaints are that the game doesn’t feel like Doom, that it seems like it’s having an identity crisis. It tries to take elements from CoD and Halo, and as a result it makes a bland product that people who prefer CoD or Halo would just go and play CoD or Halo instead.
It seems pretty unanimous that the Demon Rune (the thing that turns you into a jetpacking rocket launching Revenant) isn’t fun for anyone else – the enemy team gets effectively igibbed and the allied teammates just get to stand around while the Demon player gets all the points. There wasn’t too much love for the loadout system either, which kind of goes against what Arena shooters are.
But I haven’t played it. Maybe you have! Tell me how you feel about the multiplayer.
i think the only thing saving Doom at the moment is that the Mp wasnt made by ID. But really i just cant believe how badly Bethesda has fucked up with Doom. FIrst there was the Box Art which was nothing anywhere near Doom like, now with the MP not even being a proper Arena Shooter (loadouts, Unlocks,no weapon pickups, uninspired alt mode which TB pointed out 4 olf the 6 weapons alt mode was just zoom)
Worst still is the fact that there is no Co-Op mode unless you go through and remake each level from the SP in snap map
The original Doom, back in the day, wasn’t really that fast in MP because nobody was using a mouse. It’s only in more modern times with source ports like ZDOOM or Skulltag et al that the mega fast Doom has been around. Just the same as people forget Doom wasn’t Wal to wall demons and was actually quite well paced. Constant fighting with silly numbers of demons is a relatively new thing – the original only used that in specific areas (ironically, battle arena style areas).
I think people have largely forgotten what Doom really was, and instead think that source ports are what Doom was. They aren’t.
I didn’t actually mention the speed, but since you’ve brought it up:
Speed was one of my big concerns early on, but having seen the game in motion, it does look pretty speedy. Not the fastest thing ever (as you said, source ports of Doom can be crazy fast) but compared to most modern FPS, it’s pretty quick.
Yeah sorry I was more making a general comment, didn’t mean to single you out specifically with that! I agree with you. I also sort of think that the arena shooter had its day and isn’t popular anymore. They pale in comparison to games like CS or Halo and have for some time now.
I do beg to differ on that one. While it wasn’t a twitch shooter as such, Doom was a fast multiplayer game in comparison to some other already existing shooters (there weren’t that many at the time, but they did exist). It only really started to show up as ‘slow’ when Duke Nukem 3d hit, and then later Quake, and blitzed it in terms of twitch reaction shooter mp.
Most people did use the KB combo in single player, but personally, the group I was with and most people I knew switched to mouse in multiplayer for that extra bit of aiming goodness. It was back then, and still now, the only game where I’ve seen people do that. I guess it’s because single player was slower and more contemplative.
I’m amazed how many people can’t see past an MP component that wasn’t released by id software? There is a huge single player game that nobody has seen but everybody is insta-blinded but a somewhat underwhelming MP component. There is more to a game than a tacked on MP part.
I think everyone is expecting the second coming of Jebus reborn in a Q3A style MP, which doom really isn’t, but the are so blinding by rose tinted nostalgia glasses that they really can’t see past it and enjoy the game for what it is. I feel sorry for any big IP dev these days as fans are endlessly hyping games way beyond what they are.
I completely agree with this! These last 5,6 years gamers have been complaining now more than ever about everything under the sun and moon. It feels like people who grew up in the early 2000’s and late 90s are now all in their 20s and have this jaded view that games should still be made like they are from that era still. You either ride the wave of change or get crushed under it.
Doom mp beta was fun i enjoyed it and i had a complaint for th loadout system too. But some of the straight out lies the gaming community spew out is utter nonsense. For example there is no weapon unlocking it was stated before only unlocks are purely visual not weapon based.
There seems to be no mention of date. Are we to presume this stuff will be good to go on release or is it a post release promise / gotcha?
I was invited into the Alpha and the beta, but after the Alpha I didn’t bother with the beta. It was so full and lifeless. The announcer was the icing on the cake. When he says ‘quad damage ‘ he even sounds bored as Fuck. At least in quake 3 when he announced quad damage it got you amped and your opponents scared. In all honesty, I would rather play quake 3 than this half parsed modern shooter. It is as if they are trying to get the CoD and halo boys on board, instead of realising that Doom was what those games were inspired from. Play to that fan base, not try to capture the others. Hopefully they learnt from the excellent Wolfenstien re-boot when it comes to the single player. That game gave me wolfenstien, but modernised it in all the right places.
the last time the pc was a priority for bethesda was with morrowind, these days they are a console first developer
I don’t get how you think these are fixes. Like, have a passing familiarity with the game (or PC gaming) and you’ll know this is just a list of the advanced options. Which, as it was a greyed out menu option in the beta, one would assume are there but locked off for development reasons.
But apparently the oh so old school veteran PC crowd are actually pretty fucking stupid \ 😀 /
I’m struggling to remember if this is the exact same line of bullshit they gave us when people complained about the abysmal clusterfuck that was Rage… but my googlefu is weak.
If this is another shitty “Client Side Hit Detection” multiplayer balls-up then i’ll pass.