![]() (Rocket jumping, incidentally, was a happy accident based on the game’s physics.) Strafe jumping, bunny hopping and rocket jumping all became essential parts of a player’s toolkit. For the time, there was also an emphasis on advanced movement compared to Quake’s peers. Players instantly respawned after death, but lost all weapons and items collected: a familiar-sounding mechanic that became standard for the genre, and still persists today. Quake’s competitive multiplayer, though, was a huge influence on the evolving FPS genre. ![]() Incidentally, those speed runs started with the original Doom and were popularised with Quake. Outside of music composed by Trent Reznor and a Lovecraftian visual influence, there isn’t a whole lot that’s memorable about Quake’s solo experience, outside of watching freakishly fast speed runs. But Quake’s legacy isn’t with its single-player, which was in many respects derivative of Doom. Quake returned to the episodic logic of the original Doom, with levels set in maze-like environments all rendered in real-time 3D. This double-barrel, break-action, sawn-off beast spewed pellets both barrels at a time, which resulted in a helluva lot more damage, making it an instant fan favourite. ![]() The best achievement of Doom II, though, was the inclusion of the only new weapon: the Super Shotgun. The hellish hordes were doubled, while enemy types who were bosses in the original game were now relegated to regular-enemy status. Instead of taking place over episodes, wherein your inventory reset at the conclusion of each one, Doom II was self-contained in terms of its progression, which meant you kept your guns, level to level. What did change was the approach to level design, with more intricate non-linear spaces that rewarded exploration with pick-ups. There were no major technological developments, the graphics look the same and the gameplay was damn near a Doom clone itself. Outside of the story, there wasn’t a whole lot dramatically different about Doom II when stacked next to the original game. The game ends with “Doomguy” laying waste to Hell, sealing the portal back to Earth and is left to live out whatever happily ever after can be eked from a post-supernatural apocalypse. A base melee attack, pistol, shotgun, mini-gun and rocket launcher became standard, while chainsaw, plasma rifle and the BFG 9000 were considered Doom staples, at least until Quake rocked onto the scene.īefore games became obsessed with sagas, yearly iterations or even the power of threes seen in trilogies, Doom II: Hell on Earth was treated as the end of Doom’s threadbare storyline. Doom stands as the arsenal prototype for what came to be expected from shooters for years to come. Hell, Willits started out making Doom mods, which helped secure him a job at id Software. ![]() Doom was a pioneering first-person shooter with three-dimensional spatiality, the capacity for networked multiplayer (cooperative and competitive), and what would become the first large mod community. A pool cue named DoomThe reason daddy Doom receives more retrospective love than granddaddy Wolfenstein 3D is because of the legacy the hellish shooter created. “Either way, Willits presents an interesting implicit question: which has had the greater impact, Doom or Quake? Never one to shy away from the exploration of a controversial topic, what follows is a look at the influence and legacy of both franchises in chronological order, to see if Willits is on point, or whether Doom truly is the unholiest of unholies.
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