Nor Bro

Until the game is ready to go, I'm just going to keep posting random stuff about Doom. Just for you guys, in this community. Please be patient, because creating a game is not a one-day process. That said, the team is working as fast as I've ever seen anyone else work, including John Carmack on a roll. ANYWAY, the exploding barrel is one of the more influential objects in game lore. It's a prop and decoration, but it also works for the player if he is smart enough to shoot it. It's a trap if he stands too near it. It's a puzzle if I've lined up several of them. And it's comedy gold when a zombie shoots one and kills his friends. A single object, but 1001 uses. It's so easy to place. Every shooter after Doom probably has something like it, and most haven't needed to improve on it. Pretty good for a rusty can of toxic waste.

At the Game Developer's Conference, a guy once explained to me how Doom's difficulty settings worked. He was completely utterly wrong. He thought the settings increased the monster's health and weapon damage. In his defence, I was working for Ensemble Studios by then, and I don't think he knew I'd actually built the majority of Doom & Doom 2's levels. Still, it was an impressive display of ignorance. So you know - every item and every monster on a given level had a flag indicating which of the four difficulty levels it appeared on. When you load up Doom and choose Hurt Me Plenty (difficulty 3) then only the objects flagged for Level 3 show up. This includes weapons, ammo, even decorations. Sometimes we'd just add more enemies. Sometimes we'd outright replace them - there might be a chaingunner where a normal zombie used to be. Sometimes there was less health or less ammo. Sometimes we'd add MORE ammo for a harder difficulty. (For those wondering, yes we could flag a given object to exist across multiple difficulty levels.) Since we started with 4 difficulties, this means when I built a level, I built it four times. I had to playtest it four times as much. I had to balance the ammo and health and bonus items four times. But there is more to this story. When we finished and released Doom, then within a couple weeks we saw a guy boasting online how he'd beaten it on Ultra-Violence (our toughest level then). In our innocence, we thought it would take way longer. I mean, we KNEW the levels like the backs of our hands, and Ultra-Violence was a challenge for US. Now, I don't know how long the guy spent playing the game - I'm guessing hours each day. But it got John Carmack mad. Now our problem was that we couldn't go back in and add a new difficulty. I mean, we could, but it was an awkward waste of our time to go in to EVERY ONE of Doom's 27 levels and edit each one yet again to rebalance all the items and monsters. Again. That would take weeks. We needed a quick fix. So John Carmack did it programmatically. He had the monsters move and shoot at double-speed. He almost completely removed their idle animations, so they'd throw a new fireball the second they hurled the first. He also increased the speed of their fireballs. Imp and Cacodemon fireballs move 50% faster, while Baron of Hell move 1/3 faster. This made for a relentless barrage. One bad effect of this means of re-balancing is that since we didn't actually re-playtest the levels they vary WILDLY in how impossible they are. For instance, suddenly the toughest of all Doom levels became E1M2. It's packed with zombies and shotgun zombies who have instant reaction speeds and since you can't dodge bullets, they suck your HP down to 0 before you can find a decent weapons. At least in Doom 2, the hardest level on Nightmare was the final boss (I did this one). The cacodemons knock you off the ledges with their endless fireballs and you can't really get your act together. I don't even know if it's possible without a cheat code (I never tried). Let me know in the comments. Anyhow, that's where Nightmare difficulty came from. But hey, at least I didn't have to re-balance every level again on a fifth difficulty.

DO NOT MISS OUT ON THE BETA. But remember- it’s a beta. Not a preview. If you find a problem let us know. If you see things you love, also let us know. Both positive & negative feedback are useful. We want you for the Doom army!