SO YOU WANT TO PLAY SOME FUCKING DOOM FULL
Part of the reason Doom 2016 was just so damn great to me was because it took everything I liked about the old games and put it in a new, shiny, AAA package, and that includes finding secret areas full of useful bonuses and stuff. Secret-hunting and exploration and stuff has been a part of Doom since the beginning. Rise of the Tomb Raider had a ton of collectibles, but all of them were of the variety you've mentioned - periphery stuff that isn't really useful and usually feels pointless and I wound up being very disappointed in that game. I want stuff that's fun and relevant to the game I'm playing. The lore and stuff's nice, but I don't want that, either.
SO YOU WANT TO PLAY SOME FUCKING DOOM UPGRADE
I want to find weapons earlier than I'm supposed to and Argent energy cells that upgrade my armor/ammo/health. I just watched a super bunny hop video that is largely about this topic and sums up my feelings pretty wellīut I don't want cool 3D models and lore and stuff as rewards for my exploration and interest in the environment. I personally didn't really read any of the data logs you can collect because I just didn't care, but I'm sure a lot of the people that went out of their way to explore probably did spend time reading that stuff. Stuff that the kinda people interested in having a break from the action would probably be interested in. For people that want to mix up the pace and have these slower paced sections reward them with more lore and the cool 3D models and stuff like that.
I should be rewarded for good play with upgrades, like how the weaponry mastery system works and the combat rating system where you can earn up to five weapon upgrades depending on how well you play. If they are there in large part to help the pacing of the game (and to possibly pad out the length, I think it would be a much shorter game without them) I think it's a pretty lazy solution to that problem that other games have found much better solutions to.Īnd I just don't think the collectibles should have helped upgrade your weapons and systems at all. But they're also optional enough to make it easy to dismiss the complaint. All the secrets and collectibles and secrets are totally optional and don't have that major of an impact on the gameplay but they shove the fact that they exist and that you are rewarded for them just enough to set off the completionist in me and they impact gameplay just enough to make it feel like I'm missing out by not getting them. It's a hard thing to critique and complain about because it does come down to a very personal preference and way of playing games.
This makes it so looking for collectibles is your way to "refresh" between game sections, while in Doom the game sections becomes the thing that prepares you for another session of collectible hunting. If you look at more traditional collectible heavy games (like AC or Arkham) the balance is completely shifted towards the other side, where the game sections can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or more, but looking for a collectible rarely takes more than a couple of minutes. The heart-throb pacing of the game just ends up working against itself.
I enjoy looking for collectibles, I had fun looking for them in Doom, but when it feels like the core game sections of combat are about 2-5 minutes at most and you spend 15+ minutes looking around for stuff the game starts to feel like just a hunt for collectibles, and that's not fun. While a lot of people will say you can just ignore them, that's not really the problem. The game is probably one of the best shooters I've played in years, but I just never managed to play it for long (and have yet to finish it) because of how the collectibles killed the pacing for me. Said it here before, but I'm totally with you.