Things aren’t looking good for me. I’m a few levels into Selaco, a new FPS out now on Steam, and I’m stuck behind a bar as a group of sci-fi soldiers unload their rifles and shotguns into my hiding spot. I’m also low on health. So yeah, a bad spot to be in. I take a deep breath and try something.
As smoothly as I can I slide out from behind the bar, toss an ice grenade toward the enemies, and then dash behind a wall. A moment later a boom happens and my foes are frozen. I spot a nearby propane tank, pick it up, and chuck it at them. A second later I shoot it and watch them blow up. On my screen, a notification lets me know I’ve killed enough of these bastards to unlock a new milestone and earned some new crafting materials to make my assault rifle even better. Sweet!
I then remember that the game I’m playing—that lets me do all this and more was built using a modified version of the ancient Doom engine and giggle. This kind of thing happens a lot in Selaco, a game that rarely feels like it’s built on old bones and dated tech, but instead feels like a polished and modern shooter with some slick retro visuals. What’s most surprising about Selaco isn’t that it’s developed in GZDoom, but that it might be one of the best shooters I’ve played in years.
In the sense that Doom more or less invented the genre (unless you count the original Wolfenstein, I guess).
Still kind of an awful headline. While GZDoom technically IS based on “Doom tech” because it’s derived from the OG Doom source code that was released to the public, it’s still vastly more powerful than the original engine, with GPU support, beefed up lighting effects, and many of the limitations of the original engine either vastly increased or removed entirely.
Wolfenstein 3-D definitely gets the credit, but Doom took it SO much further and was the first game that really brought out our gaming-kid excitement through fear and suspense even despite, in retrospect, it really just being a puzzle game with exploding demons (and when you get into the history and documentaries, it’s wild what they actually wanted to do in the engine, but the consumer level performance limits at the time cut into a much more in depth experience).
But I mean that was the whole point of opening the Doom code wasn’t it? So it would evolve and expand beyond the state of the art at the time.
Right. It’s still fundamentally the same old engine, just massively beefed up. There are still many limitations that more modern engines (like the one used in the 2014 remake) don’t have.
Which BTW is another reason the title is stupid, because the remake is also just called DOOM and it was the first thing I thought of when reading it. Yes, that engine might be 10 years old by now but it’s still fairly state-of-the-art and continues to be used in other AAA games (like Wolfenstein Youngblood).