DOOM

I wonder what gameplay features were first in Doom? Thanks. :)

It was the first time I can recall superimposing a game map on top of the display, also the first time I recall in-game debugging codes (and modes like no clipping, since I guess 1st-person displays were still quite new; I remember in Wolf 3D looking up fanmade maps rather than just blitzing through walls.) Most of its other innovations were likely already present in earlier iD games or in Ultima Underworld.

Probably one of the first times missed shots from enemies would set off other enemies to attack them.

Was Ultima Underworld still grid-based? I remember reading a claim that Doom was the first to have walls that weren't restricted to 90-degree angles.

Also the first to add height to the level geometry? Rise of the Triad did have platforms, but they were floating sprites.

Further data points -- Ultima Underworld 2 apparently also pre-dates Doom, which predates Rise of the Triad.

"Also the first to add height to the level geometry?"

I'm not sure I follow, but you could jump and fall down from places in Ultima Underworld. That's like height?

Yeah, that's what I mean. Not having the action stay all on one floor or plane.

I specified "level geometry" because I can't remember if Rise of the Triad simply had large rooms with floating platforms, or actually had a second "floor" you could walk around on.

In-game cheats were around for a very long time. Some versions of Wolfenstein 3D (Spear of Destiny)? had the code for walking through walls.

As for the "superimposed map", I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean that a grid of lines forming the map is put on top of the 3D view so as to provide a map along with the view, then that wasn't in Doom. It was as early as Duke Nukem 3D, though.

I'm assuming he's talking about the ability to keep moving while the map is up. You don't see the character view running under the map, but it's presumably still there.

That is what I meant, but memory must have served incorrect. Strangely, I never spent much time with Duke3D, so that can't be where the memory comes from...

Splash damage. Any instances pre-Doom?

I want to say that it had to have been in an arcade shooter that had grenades, but I can't recall any earlier games that had diminishing damage the further from an explosion a target was.

Was Doom the first game that supported mouselook?

Did Doom support mouselook?

Wolfenstein added a random damage value based on distance. Maybe accuracy too, but you could definitely drop an enemy in fewer shots if you were closer.

You were able to turn with the mouse, but that's not mouselook in a general "full 3D" sense. And honestly, I can't remember if mouse support was always in the original Doom, or if it was added in Ultimate or Doom 95.

Nope, that was Quake's big feature.

Thanks a lot, everyone. Thanks to this thread percolating through my brain, while shoveling dirt for two hours today I envisioned the FPS we always needed but never got, the Eros to DooM's Thanatos, a game drawing inspiration from the other great extraterrestrial presence on Mars' moon Phobos, that being the Leather Goddesses of the Infocom game (or at least, the first one.) Instead of a violent gore-fest, instead one would love one's opponents into submission, through the application of various melee massage techniques and long-distance orgone accumulation devices. Campy inspiration would follow Barbarella, Flash (and Flesh) Gordon, and Earth Girls Are Easy. Being the opposite in tone to DooM, it would be named appropriately: MooD.

What gameplay would be like in a soft-core erotic B-movie cheesecake FPS remains largely unclear.

Rocky Horror Picture Show, another solid influence.

Replace FPS with top-down and that's Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars.

Earlier - Dark Forces.

Doom is one of the most famous and notable games in existence, and yet, as evidenced by this entire discussion, we barely remember just what it was like :/

I think we remember what Doom is like, we just don't remember what all those other games were like to assign appropriate innovation credit :P

I think the fundamental tech features that Doom introduced were the fact that it did everything mentioned here (different height planes, angular features, etc.) at fullscreen and with the speed of an arcade game (Ultima Underworld did everything before yes, but it moved at a snail's pace and took place in a tiny window that couldn't be more than 100x100.

More important than that was the deatmatch lan feature. 4 player carnage over a lan of 386 machines was pretty much a breakthrough.

I would also add as a gameplay revolution that before Doom the few fps out there still played like arcade games, that is they would keep a score and you would have lives and so on... From Doom on it was a more "realistic" approach with less of those traditionally gamey elements.

Additional Credits to : ID Software for making the FIRST truly realtime fast-action full-screen VGA 3-D First-person (and Multiple-player with a modem or network!) game: DOOM! some 5 years before the computer industry thought it would be possible

From the desert.wad textfile (1995).

Ain't that sweet? ;P

Sounds like MIDI Maze with texture mapping.

Yeah. Exactly like that

/rolleyes

As an interesting history lesson, here's a review of Doom from 1994.

Kind of funny that the review actually complains about the lack of anything to do besides killing monsters. I wonder what Edge's review of Strife was like, since it sounds like the game they wanted from Doom.

So much awesome in that review. From the now-infamous line

lf only you could talk to the monsters...

through pseudo-technical babble (or maybe it has some esoteric and obscure meaning?)

(...) clipping sprites in three axes (...)

and making up stuff not present in the game (maybe their monitor's colors were badly calibrated?)

shooting at a near endless supply of green lizards (...) little green guys.

Eh, I read "green lizards" as dismissive shorthand for "repetitive bad guys".