This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Doom [official site].
Doom, the new one, has one heck of a sense of forward momentum. It s a game of aggression and constant movement. You re the Doom Marine: you move like the wind and your shots are unbroken by the need to reload.
At the heart of how Doom creates this response in players is a single feature which, paradoxically, is all about pausing your interaction with the game, pressing you so close to the enemy that they often fill the screen. It s a feature, after all, that was intended to capture something special about the original Doom that had little to do with movement, but it turned out to trigger all kinds of secondary effects. The feature was:
THE MECHANIC: Glory kills