There's a Remedy Out There for People Suffering From DOOM's Disappointing Multiplayer

I Have a soft spot in my heart for the classic arena shooters. They got me through my middle and high school computer technology classes. I would bring a case of bootleg CD’s (and later USB flash drives) with quake 3, unreal 2004, and as many mods as I could find for them for test days and substitute teachers. Broadband wasn’t yet the norm, and many of my friends’ and classmates’ only experience with competitive online PC gaming came from these sessions. It got to the point where I and five or six others would work ahead in the curriculum so we could perform this ritual regularly. While I have a measure of respect for DOOM, and the reboot has the best story in an FPS I’ve seen in nearly a decade, I was expecting more from the multiplayer.

This isn’t a review of DOOM, and I understand DOOM traditionally focuses on the single player experience. However, There hasn’t been a triple-A entry into the arena shooter genre that “checks all the boxes” for me regarding gameplay in entirely too long. DOOM’s single player campaign has all the right parts: fast platforming-heavy stage navigation, a ridiculous variety of weapons that feel unique (and you can carry more than 2!), static health and armor; you name it, it’s there. I don’t know if the multiplayer was an afterthought or outsourced, but Bethesda dropped the ball there. They had all the ingredients in singleplayer to cook up something dynamic and fun, but somewhere along the line it went wrong, and we got something that feels like a Halo clone.

What’s more, they locked down the modding community with their "snap map" package instead of delivering a full featured creation kit, as Bethesda has done in the past. Whether this was an effort to help console portability (something else Bethesda has failed miserably at) for custom maps or an attempt to reign in the community, it rings false to those of us who came up playing id’s and epic’s shooters.  Mods are what made those games, and their communities, stay so active for so long. DOOM’s core demographic is the people that kept those communities alive, and they missed the mark on the multiplayer,  badly. So much so that I can’t in good conscience recommend the game to anyone who isn’t looking for a quality single player experience.

Coming out of DOOM’s multiplayer left a bad taste in my mouth, and I started the search for something that could satisfy that dormant hunger awakened by my expectations for the reboot’s multiplayer. Sure, I could just go back to one of the many active communities kicking around on those older titles, but I wanted a modern game that could make me optimistic about the future of the FPS. Something designed with modding in mind. Something without microtransactions around every corner. Something that takes the classics and modernizes them without introducing “simulationist” gameplay to try and edge in on your Call of Duties and Battlefields. This came to me, unsurprisingly, in the form of Unreal Tournament 4’s pre-alpha.

This Game delivers better as a pre-alpha project than DOOM’s multiplayer likely ever will. Their dev model is community focused, and would have been a godsend in the heyday of the arena shooter. What’s more, the game is free. Not free to play, not “free until it’s finished enough to charge for it,” Free. Sufficiently free to install and run on Linux without Windows compatibility layers or other such trickery, provided you have enough time on your hands to compile it from source.  They plan on making money on it through the support of their community’s lifeblood: modders and high-level players.

Gameplay will be familiar to anyone who has spent any amount of time playing arena shooters. Platform to get around the complex maps, collect weapons, health, and armor, frag until satisfied. There are modernizations like RPG-lite progression, but it thankfully only affects cosmetics and bragging rights. Thankfully absent are camping, load-outs, grinding for the next badly balanced weapon, and everything else wrong with the modern FPS. The PC-first focus will hopefully remedy the screaming 12-year-olds FPS fans will have likely suffered somewhat as well. This doesn’t mean they aren’t doing anything new, though. The visuals are solid, even on the placeholder maps, and Unreal Engine 4 is certainly being put to good use. They are looking for community contribution as they develop the game, and early adopters will be part of that through bugfixes, feature submissions, etc. I can’t comment on the level of optimization already done on the game in its alpha state, but it already runs well on my mid-end, previous generation Linux box well enough that it’s replaced tf2 and CS: GO as my most played FPS. I’m sure it’ll be even better on Windows.

Whether you want to believe the FPS genre can be great again, you’ve wanted a well put together modern arena shooter, or you were just disappointed by DOOM’s multiplayer, ut4 is worth a look, even in pre-alpha. The more eyes on it and contributors they have at this stage, the sooner it’ll see mainstream release, and the better the starting content will be. All you need is an epic games account and a willingness to participate in a community outside of shredding your friends with a Flak Cannon.