It shouldn't be this easy...

I got the new DOOM version on the last day of Steam summer sale. Half-price, good deal.

It only took me about four hours to find a bug in the game.

Really, people? This is neither a new problem or needing a new solution.

Does it take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure this out? Surely not...

and yet, here we are again.

The situation:  this is the outside area before you move on to the Foundry, so it's early in the game. I've run into a group of opponents. Most are "possessed", shamblers like zombies. One of them is one of those guys with the blue full-height energy shield; they are tricky, your weapons at that point are completely inadequate for this, unless you manage some other advantage. So I run backwards, out through the airlock, and wait. Actually, this isn't a good idea, it's going to allow them all to catch up to me.

The airlock door is going to be very strong--it's an airlock. But it's also mostly transparent, so I can see them and they can see me. And I can see them wiggling around as though the path-finding math is trying alternate movement plans to get at me.

The thing with the shield has an organic "machine-gun" thing as its right arm. The thing has a center of gravity, that CoG is stuck on the other side of the door, it can't come through. But apparently the weapon has its own independent CoG, and that isn't being given position test that keeps it clipped behind the door.

So the gun is actually on MY side of the airlock door, while the thing's body is on the OTHER side of the door. And I don't realize that this is a bug until it kills me.

And then you bump into the other major-league suck about DOOM and that is what's casually known as "checkpointed saves". Which means I have to run this whole level over. More than once, it turned out, while trying to figure out how to attack properly, although I only got clipping-bug-killed once. (So the guy with the shield is a little slow, you can run around behind the shield and blast it in the back.)

and I have no idea how to report this bug. I don't know how to take a screen-snap, so I don't even have proper evidence that it happened. Others do know, so you can go look for something like this: google for "doom arrow knee", and yes, you'll see a long-dead humanoid body with a Skyrim helmet and an arrow in its knee.

Back to the original point: it should NOT take an Advanced Degree (tm) to understand that the gun has to exist on the same side of a door as the body, and therefore CANNOT mathemagically kill me.

Sheesh.

And of course having to take on two Hell Knights at the same time is a disaster. You should avoid that. I backed down to difficulty=1 for that.


Later: couple of updates. I crashed out to desktop around 10 hours. Just the one time, not sure why. This game is a massive resource hog--my PC is a quad-core, and all four are running over 90%. Plus, RAM is maxed out over 90% too. I can imagine those resources being the cause of a seg-fault.

Glory kill of one of the demons is amusing: you rip its heart out, and then stuff that heart down its throat, and it then explodes. There's a different one where you rip its arm off and bludgeon it with the arm.

Major flaw #2: WAY too much jumping. I hate that. I use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. That REALLY doesn't work with this jumping crap.

And now, I've just "returned from Hell" and I'm stuck. There seems to be no proceed point. You run around a small amount, on what looks like a self-contained area of the map, from which you cannot proceed to the rest of it. It's showing no named task assignment, no description of what I'm doing next. And I can't see how to get off the map area I'm on. Dude--where's my jetpack? (Later: watched someone else's video-capture walkthrough, saw that there was another jump point upwards that leads on.)

Flaw #3: this game basically forces you to play it their way. Not what I want to do. There is a map-load message that says something to the effect of "standing still gets you killed". I want to do a slow play-through where I get to sneak/crouch/crawl around and eliminate things one at a time without getting into a run-n-gun with 4 or 5 Hell Knights and a couple of those flying shoulder-rocket things and other stuff. So I'm playing on god mode. Feels like Ultra-V--no way this is difficulty 1.

It's gorgeous, but I can't recommend this game. I may play through to the end, but I won't do it again.

Last: well, I won't even be playing through to the end. Remember Flaw #1? Checkpointed saves? Yeah, that doesn't work. Not completely. Started up again, having watched a video walkthrough, knowing what to do next, and the game says my one-and-only (because checkpoints, right?) save is corrupted and cannot load. How to proceed? Well, start over.

Goodbye. It's pretty but it sucks.

Later later: forgot this. Flaw #4: Another bug. There was a demon that had somehow spawned inside a wall (well, not that exactly, but on the opposite side of space where I can see it and shoot it, somehow inside. It was the one that throws fireballs. So being where it is, the walls behave differently in the math, it can see me, and throw fireballs at me THRU THE WALLS).

I guess it DOES take an Advanced Degree (tm) to do this right.

One last thought. It was entertaining seeing the demons occasionally attack each other. That didn't happen often enough. There were a few places in Quake 1 where that could happen, but it was rare.