[rob74]

Well, if you paid attention, Doom 1 and 2 were "horror" too (the amount of "creatures from hell", mutilated bodies hanging around as decoration, enemies exploding into giblets of bloody meat etc. are pretty sure giveaways), but the technical limitations of the time prevented them from being as scary as Doom 3.

[IMTDb]

"Horror" is more than just the setting, it's mainly about the gameplay. Doom 1, 2 and eternal are more action than horror. You have lots of relatively "weak" ennemies to kill. The blood and gore just intensify that "happy trigger" feeling. Rooms are bigs, allowing you to move freely to avoid projectiles.

Doom 3 on the other hand is different; you very rarely have more than one enemy to beat at a time. That single enemy can absolutely shred you if you are not very careful, you have to consider each engagement carefully. The darkness and blood are tuned to intensify that "fear" feeling. Rooms are very small, limiting your ability to dodge, almost to the point of inducing claustrophobia.

Painkiller was released almost as the same time as Doom and was way more action oriented, even tho it contains its fair share of gore.

[darkwater]

> "Horror" is more than just the setting, it's mainly about the gameplay. Doom 1, 2 and eternal are more action than horror. You have lots of relatively "weak" ennemies to kill. The blood and gore just intensify that "happy trigger" feeling. Rooms are bigs, allowing you to move freely to avoid projectiles.

It might be just me being overly frightening but I clearly remember 14y old me playing Doom at night with my headphones on and begin scared as fuckin hell when something appeared out of nowhere making guttural noises.

[jerf]

If memory serves, Doom is sorta bimodal.

If you know how to strafe, and get to the point that you are habitually doing it almost every second of play, Doom is an action game where you are grossly overpowered compared to your opponents, more or less. To even slow Doom guy down you need tight corridors to cut his maneuverability down and enough enemies to clog him up even so. In open space the only real threat is being plinked away by the undodgeable hit scan weapons; high level play with speedruns involves a lot of managing that and hoping for decent luck. The non-hitscan weapons for them are, to quote a popular Youtuber, super easy, barely an inconvenience, which ironically makes the "weakest" enemies actually the most dangerous in the game in most places.

If you don't know how to strafe, which was very common at the time since we were all new to 3D spaces and even the ones we had used before may not have had a "strafe" option, Doom becomes much more a horror game. As others are saying about how Doom 3 gives you the choice of "seeing" or "shooting", but not both, Doom without strafing gives you the choice of either dodging or shooting, but not both. Shooting becomes a contest of nerves because you're committed for a second or two... to dodge an incoming missile involves turning, then moving. And that move is either "forward", vectoring into the oncoming missile, or backwards, vectoring away but heading away from your field of vision.

I remember both modes now, both playing it back when Doom I was the only release and I played the shareware, and I saw the "strafe" option and had no idea what it was or why I would use it, and playing in later years when strafing was simply part of my 3D "vocabulary" and I did it instinctively. It's almost two different games.

I suspect even at the time, the developers of Doom weren't used to strafing either, and in a weird way it has contributed to its classic status. If they were it would have been balanced much differently.

The same things that make it a gaming classic that people are still playing to this day are also gross violations of the current state of the art of game design and balance... the reader is invited to conclude from that statement whatever they like.

[int_19h]

Part of it was that keybindings were still in flux at the time. Strafe actually appeared in Wolfenstein 3D already, but the way you did it was by holding Alt while pressing left/right arrow; you used the arrows without Alt to turn around (and using the mouse to turn was very uncommon back then). The original Doom inherited that.

It wasn't really a good setup even in Wolf3D, but it took some time for the gamers to figure that out, and for those findings to percolate as the defaults in newer games. Even Quake (1) didn't have mouse look + WASD enabled by default. I think part of the inertia was that arrow keys were so ingrained as navigation by design (they're arrows!) that abandoning them just didn't make sense.

[laumars]

> I suspect even at the time, the developers of Doom weren't used to strafing either,

I don’t know if that’s fair. Doom had a timer in it and was built to have speed running in mind (even if that term hasn’t yet been coined).

[bombcar]

IIRC certain secrets are basically only available via strafing so the general concept was known.

There are other moves that developed much later.

[jerf]

Certainly the developers knew about it in general, or they wouldn't have put the controls in. My contention is that even they hadn't yet fully internalized just how useful it is. By the time of Quake it's clear that it had gotten to the hardcore, and by now of course it's just part of playing 3D games. But it took time for everyone to realize it. 3D was a pretty big jump. I'd say that the "bug" that strafe + forward was faster than either alone, which was pretty common for a long time in 3D games, reflects that. There's no reason to have that bug or leave it in if you have deeply internalized strafing as a viable option. It happened precisely because it was viewed as an exceptional case rather than the way that almost everyone would be running around all the time.

I'd also observe that biologically, "strafing" is fairly hard, and the idea that you can strafe at the exact same speed you can run forward, safely, for long periods of time, is absurd. What we have instead is faster turning than keyboard controls offer, and more flexibility in general, but not literally the ability to "strafe" at 90 degree angles. It's an adaptation to limited 3D environments. (Strafe + forward gives a more realistic 45 degree angle of shoot to movement. I think in reality that would still be a fairly extreme thing to maintain all the time, but it's closer to realistic. 90 degrees is just absurd.) As it is implausible, it is perhaps not surprising it took a while to become popular.

[laumars]

Strafing was in Wolf3D too. In fact I think it was intended as the core mechanic for defeating the Episode 1 boss.

[rob74]

Yeah, especially the first time when one of those near-invisible bitey things sneaked up and started gnawing on you, you were in for a pretty good scare...

[laumars]

That was intentional but it’s still a point about atmosphere and not game play.

Doom 3 plays very different to Doom 1&2.

[0x457]

Yes, but it's not that simple. Doom 3 is pretty "horror" compared to any other Doom game. I would put in the same basket as Dead Space games.

Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal gameplay is much closer to Doom 1 and 2. Both are very "push-forward" shooters.

[int_19h]

The later Dooms overdid the platform jumping part. Not that the originals didn't have that, but the trickier jumps were generally only necessary to reach fancier pickups, secrets, and secret levels.

[nailer]

That’s true, it’s more the gameplay shift (jump scares, less enemies on screen at once, no power fantasy) than the aesthetic shift.