Most people (including Rae) who played the single player campaign of DOOM said “wow this is good” but then found the multiplayer to be lackluster, generic, and boring. Some of the complaints were legitimate and the internet was full of players trying to get their money’s worth out of a crappy game with little online content, while also having to contend with cheaters and a lack of standard features like custom games. Speaking to Eurogamer, executive producer Marty Stratton revealed how id is tackling complaints.
“There’s certainly no lack of commitment to Doom as a multiplayer game on our side. We are already working on private matches with custom game settings and expect to include that in a free update this summer.”
So there you go. If you were one of those people who bought DOOM for nostalgia, because you love ID or just because you thought it looked cool you might be getting a massive content update soon. Though private matches are mentioned here, dont expect those to occur on private servers, rather what Marty is probably saying is that they will allow for games with custom options. This doesnt fix one of the most rampant issues, the cheating, but it also means that people wont be able to set up say a surfing server or a server will all of one type of gun, or a server running a hacked lobby. It leaves more control in the hands of the developers, which I can’t see as being too bad. ID is looking into implementing a traditional match browser too. Bots are also planned, but according to Marty they are still some ways off.
“Our bot system was actually written by one of our long-time senior programmers, John Dean, known online as ‘Maleficus’, who also wrote the Return to Castle Wolfenstein Fritz bot and the bots in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, so he does great work with bots. But John also just happens to be our internal lead programmer on SnapMap, so he’s very busy.”
In my most humble opinion, shipping a game with something as powerful as snapmap and not giving people the private server to play those maps on, and the bots to practice against, was a poor move by ID. Bethesda will be talking more about their newest shooter at their E3 showcase on Sunday 12, 7pm PT. We will be covering it live, so be sure to tune in!