Doom 2016 - Multiplayer Thoughts

After the Open Beta of the Doom multiplayer component, a lot of players have said that the multiplayer is mediocre and boring. Although the multiplayer is mediocre it is by no means boring. The gameplay of multiplayer is fast, action-packed and intense in a lot of situations from BUT it does also suffer from a lot of questionable design decisions and all in all it does feel quite mediocre.

Starting off with gameplay. The movement and the guns both feel perfect because they are just ported over from the singleplayer aspect. The point where the mediocrity starts to creep in is the design decisions and one of the biggest complaints most players have is the hack modules. Hack modules are basically some kind of buff added to your player to give you a slight advantage in combat. One of them shows you the cooldown on map item respawns whilst others show you the enemies health above their heads. Although these are more fair and less advantageous towards the player with them active, there are hack modules that can result in your easy victory over other players. One of them being a wall hack where the game highlights certain enemies, based on your active hack module, that allows you to see them through walls and that in itself is just broken.

The pickups in the game are fair especially the ammo and health but sometimes the armor pickups can be too overpowered on players lucky enough to get them. Giving a player more health, thus more time to kill, means that it's less of a game focused on skill but more so on luck of getting the right item at the right time. It just breaks the game to have players slightly more overpowered than other players on the field. Sadly, there is also a hack module that gives you armor at the start of the spawn. This is extremely unfair to some players as they spawn with a boon but it also helps deny the kill from players trying to kill you because of the bad spawns.

Doom suffers from some of the worst spawning I've ever seen in any game. There seems to be no consistent formula to where you and other enemies spawn. Sometimes you spawn miles away from the action whilst sometimes they spawn in right in front of 3 enemies running towards you. I can't wrap my head around the spawn system to the point where ganking is pretty much extremely difficult to pull of.

Weapons in general feel balanced although the chaingun has been overly used due to its massive damage even at range and continuous high rate of fire. Id Software's suppport of the game since release has been none to minimal. There have been complaints of certain aspects of the game the developers are not doing anything about, not even mentioning all the hackers present in the game.

Doom's multiplayer is still an extremely fun game. Just a barebones FPS game with no attachments and no perks can make the game really fun. Though this fun is torn down by the garbage addition of hack modules and the armor being slightly unbalanced.