Id's upcoming Doom uses some game mechanics usually associated with older shooters: Health doesn't regenerate, you don't need to reload, and your movement speed is incredibly high.
But in other ways, Doom feels more contemporary. It uses loadouts in multiplayer, and you can mantle to move through the environment, for example.
At QuakeCon, I spoke with Marty Stratton, the Executive Producer on Doom, about how his team is blending old and new. It turns out the answer isn't so simple.
"Ultimately, I don’t think it’s about old and new," Stratton said. "It’s about what’s fun and what’s Doom. We started early on with trying to figure out the game’s identity. Not what is 'old Doom,' but what is Doom? How does it make us feel? What do we want from a Doom experience? When we boil it down, are the things we’re doing feeding into that?"
"There’s no regenerative health," he continued. "It’s based on movement, which is one of the most important elements of our game. We want to drive players into combat, dodging projectiles, being faster than the enemy. We want them to move all the time, so how does health fit into that? Does regenerative health fit into movement? Not really, because then you’re taking cover, which can be fun from a tactical perspective, but it makes you not want to go into combat."
Mantling, he mentioned, keeps the player moving too, which plays into the philosophy that Doom needs to be fast. Loadouts, which are not typical of older, faster shooters, work toward Id's goal as well by making players effective immediately when they spawn.
"It’s all those individual decisions feeding into a whole that makes this Doom the most fun or effective version of itself -- not have those decisions dictated by or beholden to any one specific mentality."
For more on the game, read our early hands-on Doom multiplayer impressions from QuakeCon 2015.