Less than 10% of people completed chapter 3?

[Asymmetric]

What's up with that?

[Zammy]

Seems that many who bought the game are actually heretics!

[GrenadeMagnet6]

Yeah, I noticed that also from the achievements. Maybe some of the gameplay issues in Chapter 2 put them off. The lack of an auto-map, the unhelpful Servitor, and possibly the "red tint" in the purge battles, though the developer added a feature to disable the red tint in the latest patch.

[Bombast]

As someone who wont complete Chapter 2 let alone 3, I can tell you: The game just isn't that fun and is often incredibly frustrating. If I were younger I'd probably bully through it anyway, but as I've gotten older I've become less willing to struggle with game design. If its not fun, or everything looks bad, or its difficult to find or track things that should be easy, I'm just not going to deal with it.

Note: Obviously the statement "It isn't fun" is an opinion and not cosmic law. Normally one wouldn't have to specify that, but we're on Steam Discussion Boards so now I do.

[DefectiveByDesign]

Originally posted by GrenadeMagnet6:

Yeah, I noticed that also from the achievements. Maybe some of the gameplay issues in Chapter 2 put them off. The lack of an auto-map, the unhelpful Servitor, and possibly the "red tint" in the purge battles, though the developer added a feature to disable the red tint in the latest patch.

Yeah, it's not good. The early levels were trash, very Serious Sam 3 like with the progression, no damage feedback, accuracy dips with full auto, UE4 engine performance is bad, graphics are bad.

The levels improve, but people lose interest from the boring early levels. The combat is also super trash, enemies attack from behind with no feedback, cheesy pathfinding, and just wave spawn on top of you. Doom 1 had enemy physics where they would bump into each other and walls, like doom 2 tricks and traps where the pinkies funnel themselves through a passage and you can chainsaw them. Boltgun would likely let the enemies noclip through other enemies and 360 swarm you with ridiculous damage and no hit feedback. The AI is nonsense garbage. Then you have the projectile enemies that stand completely still while shooting and move really slow, and the boss enemies are cheese jank with hitscan line of sight super attacks. The main character also moves slow, doesn't have a dodge move, doesn't have any advanced melee combat, weapon power is based on nerfing main weapons to only upgrade ONE weapon with machine spirit upgrade. (Protip: Upgrade should be permanent.) Secrets are also not fun or consistent. Most are, but you always have a couple per level that's not common sense. All the old games had secrets that had giveaways or a style, boltgun is not consistent. You CAN'T BACKTRACK to find secrets either, which is absolutely terrible without a map system. It's the toxic slime icing on the garbage cake. The powerup placement then doesn't make sense, as they place powerups AFTER you need them in many areas in non obvious places. It would be more acceptable with a doom style AI, but the enemies just rush you with no realistic behavior, they know where you are through walls and nothing blocks their movement. So you don't have time to search for powerups hidden behind them. You end up clearing the room, THEN finding the powerups.

Generally speaking, the game isn't fun to play. It's just not.

Then we get to the graphics, which are NOT GOOD, especially for the performance. Level design is fine, but texture resolution could be improved. The real problem is poor performance on low end machines due to UE4, and absolutely no anti-aliasing. The game also uses bilinear mip maps on transparent point filter so certain textures are a mess, and the lack of AA makes EVERYTHING look like eye cancer. ReShade doesn't have a native linux port, so I basically HAD to manually install it to keep my eyes from bleeding. WHY? Why is AA not in the game?

This game was hype marketed, but has no replay value, so there was big hype early on, which fooled a bunch of people who didn't say anything because it was "good enough", or just fanboys of 40k. Problem is, it's not actually good, so the hype DIED and now people are wondering what happened. Marketing. That's what happened, and nobody called it out.

Could this game be better? Yeah, but that means LISTENING TO FEEDBACK and ADDING FEATURES, which will likely not happen. This game could use a co-op mode too, but we haven't had PC games do this since the 90's. I don't think developers even know how to do co-op anymore, and don't even think about modding, because developers are all about NOT supporting mods for DLC/MTX.

If you want my 2c, people need to hold "retro" games accountable to actual retro standards. It needs to fully support user configuration, co-op, mods, etc. If not, don't hype it, don't participate in astroturfing, and be critical of the actual product.

Dusk and Amid Evil still hold up because they were good. Everything else died. Too many people went with the hype, paid for junk, and the developers dropped support. It's literally a business model now to scam people with junk retro games via hype, and it's not going away until people wise up to it. If people stop supporting nonsense, then retro games will have to meet standards and be better for it. You're also likely better off to see if there's already a doom mod for X, and enjoy the full benefits of the doom engine with said mod. Why are we paying full price for fake retro UE4 games that play bad and support nothing?

[BIӨMΣCHΛПӨID69]

Originally posted by DefectiveByDesign:

Originally posted by GrenadeMagnet6:

Yeah, I noticed that also from the achievements. Maybe some of the gameplay issues in Chapter 2 put them off. The lack of an auto-map, the unhelpful Servitor, and possibly the "red tint" in the purge battles, though the developer added a feature to disable the red tint in the latest patch.

Yeah, it's not good. The early levels were trash, very Serious Sam 3 like with the progression, no damage feedback, accuracy dips with full auto, UE4 engine performance is bad, graphics are bad.

The levels improve, but people lose interest from the boring early levels. The combat is also super trash, enemies attack from behind with no feedback, cheesy pathfinding, and just wave spawn on top of you. Doom 1 had enemy physics where they would bump into each other and walls, like doom 2 tricks and traps where the pinkies funnel themselves through a passage and you can chainsaw them. Boltgun would likely let the enemies noclip through other enemies and 360 swarm you with ridiculous damage and no hit feedback. The AI is nonsense garbage. Then you have the projectile enemies that stand completely still while shooting and move really slow, and the boss enemies are cheese jank with hitscan line of sight super attacks. The main character also moves slow, doesn't have a dodge move, doesn't have any advanced melee combat, weapon power is based on nerfing main weapons to only upgrade ONE weapon with machine spirit upgrade. (Protip: Upgrade should be permanent.) Secrets are also not fun or consistent. Most are, but you always have a couple per level that's not common sense. All the old games had secrets that had giveaways or a style, boltgun is not consistent. You CAN'T BACKTRACK to find secrets either, which is absolutely terrible without a map system. It's the toxic slime icing on the garbage cake. The powerup placement then doesn't make sense, as they place powerups AFTER you need them in many areas in non obvious places. It would be more acceptable with a doom style AI, but the enemies just rush you with no realistic behavior, they know where you are through walls and nothing blocks their movement. So you don't have time to search for powerups hidden behind them. You end up clearing the room, THEN finding the powerups.

Generally speaking, the game isn't fun to play. It's just not.

Then we get to the graphics, which are NOT GOOD, especially for the performance. Level design is fine, but texture resolution could be improved. The real problem is poor performance on low end machines due to UE4, and absolutely no anti-aliasing. The game also uses bilinear mip maps on transparent point filter so certain textures are a mess, and the lack of AA makes EVERYTHING look like eye cancer. ReShade doesn't have a native linux port, so I basically HAD to manually install it to keep my eyes from bleeding. WHY? Why is AA not in the game?

This game was hype marketed, but has no replay value, so there was big hype early on, which fooled a bunch of people who didn't say anything because it was "good enough", or just fanboys of 40k. Problem is, it's not actually good, so the hype DIED and now people are wondering what happened. Marketing. That's what happened, and nobody called it out.

Could this game be better? Yeah, but that means LISTENING TO FEEDBACK and ADDING FEATURES, which will likely not happen. This game could use a co-op mode too, but we haven't had PC games do this since the 90's. I don't think developers even know how to do co-op anymore, and don't even think about modding, because developers are all about NOT supporting mods for DLC/MTX.

If you want my 2c, people need to hold "retro" games accountable to actual retro standards. It needs to fully support user configuration, co-op, mods, etc. If not, don't hype it, don't participate in astroturfing, and be critical of the actual product.

Dusk and Amid Evil still hold up because they were good. Everything else died. Too many people went with the hype, paid for junk, and the developers dropped support. It's literally a business model now to scam people with junk retro games via hype, and it's not going away until people wise up to it. If people stop supporting nonsense, then retro games will have to meet standards and be better for it. You're also likely better off to see if there's already a doom mod for X, and enjoy the full benefits of the doom engine with said mod. Why are we paying full price for fake retro UE4 games that play bad and support nothing?

Agree with a lot of this, except that I think the level design is also pretty bad compared to many other boomer shooters. It's obvious that the level designer learned nothing from John Romero.

[Asymmetric]

Originally posted by DefectiveByDesign:

Originally posted by GrenadeMagnet6:

Yeah, I noticed that also from the achievements. Maybe some of the gameplay issues in Chapter 2 put them off. The lack of an auto-map, the unhelpful Servitor, and possibly the "red tint" in the purge battles, though the developer added a feature to disable the red tint in the latest patch.

Yeah, it's not good. The early levels were trash, very Serious Sam 3 like with the progression, no damage feedback, accuracy dips with full auto, UE4 engine performance is bad, graphics are bad.

The levels improve, but people lose interest from the boring early levels. The combat is also super trash, enemies attack from behind with no feedback, cheesy pathfinding, and just wave spawn on top of you. Doom 1 had enemy physics where they would bump into each other and walls, like doom 2 tricks and traps where the pinkies funnel themselves through a passage and you can chainsaw them. Boltgun would likely let the enemies noclip through other enemies and 360 swarm you with ridiculous damage and no hit feedback. The AI is nonsense garbage. Then you have the projectile enemies that stand completely still while shooting and move really slow, and the boss enemies are cheese jank with hitscan line of sight super attacks. The main character also moves slow, doesn't have a dodge move, doesn't have any advanced melee combat, weapon power is based on nerfing main weapons to only upgrade ONE weapon with machine spirit upgrade. (Protip: Upgrade should be permanent.) Secrets are also not fun or consistent. Most are, but you always have a couple per level that's not common sense. All the old games had secrets that had giveaways or a style, boltgun is not consistent. You CAN'T BACKTRACK to find secrets either, which is absolutely terrible without a map system. It's the toxic slime icing on the garbage cake. The powerup placement then doesn't make sense, as they place powerups AFTER you need them in many areas in non obvious places. It would be more acceptable with a doom style AI, but the enemies just rush you with no realistic behavior, they know where you are through walls and nothing blocks their movement. So you don't have time to search for powerups hidden behind them. You end up clearing the room, THEN finding the powerups.

Generally speaking, the game isn't fun to play. It's just not.

Then we get to the graphics, which are NOT GOOD, especially for the performance. Level design is fine, but texture resolution could be improved. The real problem is poor performance on low end machines due to UE4, and absolutely no anti-aliasing. The game also uses bilinear mip maps on transparent point filter so certain textures are a mess, and the lack of AA makes EVERYTHING look like eye cancer. ReShade doesn't have a native linux port, so I basically HAD to manually install it to keep my eyes from bleeding. WHY? Why is AA not in the game?

This game was hype marketed, but has no replay value, so there was big hype early on, which fooled a bunch of people who didn't say anything because it was "good enough", or just fanboys of 40k. Problem is, it's not actually good, so the hype DIED and now people are wondering what happened. Marketing. That's what happened, and nobody called it out.

Could this game be better? Yeah, but that means LISTENING TO FEEDBACK and ADDING FEATURES, which will likely not happen. This game could use a co-op mode too, but we haven't had PC games do this since the 90's. I don't think developers even know how to do co-op anymore, and don't even think about modding, because developers are all about NOT supporting mods for DLC/MTX.

If you want my 2c, people need to hold "retro" games accountable to actual retro standards. It needs to fully support user configuration, co-op, mods, etc. If not, don't hype it, don't participate in astroturfing, and be critical of the actual product.

Dusk and Amid Evil still hold up because they were good. Everything else died. Too many people went with the hype, paid for junk, and the developers dropped support. It's literally a business model now to scam people with junk retro games via hype, and it's not going away until people wise up to it. If people stop supporting nonsense, then retro games will have to meet standards and be better for it. You're also likely better off to see if there's already a doom mod for X, and enjoy the full benefits of the doom engine with said mod. Why are we paying full price for fake retro UE4 games that play bad and support nothing?

I mean I enjoyed it for what it was worth. It wasn't trying to do anything new to the genre, just kinda went with the basics of the genre. And I think they did it pretty swell. My only real gripe about the game, is the AI and at sometimes the difficulty. But I come to expect that with boomer shooters, difficulty part. Other than that, I'm a huge fan of pixel art and somewhat of a pixel artist myself, so the graphics and art style where amazing for me.

[DefectiveByDesign]

The latest patch apparently does address some of the more annoying problems. It doesn't fix the AI being jank, or make the game better, just fixes some annoyances.

I would recommend the machine spirit upgrade to be permanent so you can maximize your enjoyment of the weapons. This is like a Doom weapon mod upgrade, except right now every level resets your upgrade and you only get one, which sucks. I don't like how the stock weapon just underperforms until it gets the powerup, so they're not fun to use. The powerups are already hidden, and easy to overlook. Just make them permanent to justify the search, and keep the game fun to play.

Bare minimum there needs to be an in-level secret x/x counter. Even better, there needs to be a map. It doesn't make sense to copy doom and leave out the good features.

The AI needs work to make it less cheap. It's ruining the game. It's fine in some spots, bad in others, like where you have a large arena and it's not fun due to the cheapness.

"went with the basics of the genre. And I think they did it pretty swell" Yeah, that's the problem. The game reached "good enough" status, except good enough wasn't actually "GOOD". So people got hyped over the new shiny, nobody called it out for being generic, and now we're wondering why nobody cares after the hype died, and the underlying issues are way more noticeable after the hype died.

"fan of pixel art" This isn't pixel art. It's modern art that's been pixelated. You can't enjoy pixel art when there's an absolute eye bleeding mess of RENDER ARTIFACTS because the engine is using bilinear mip maps and no anti-aliasing. There's a lot of wire grates that exhibit moire artifacting in motion, and all the wall textures look like garbage when the texture hits below your monitor resolution at an angle. So you're looking down a hallway, and halfway down everything looks distorted because it's not anti-aliased.

The old games made their textures to match the render color depth and resolution. They didn't look bad at low resolution and color depth because they were created to perfectly render with the limitations. New games do not do this, and you notice every issue. Not only do new games not optimize, they don't IMPROVE on the limitations. Why can't we get 60 FPS pixel art? Be cheap even and use AI motion smoothing? It's probably downscaled from a 3d model anyway, just add more detail and FPS.

Let me give you an example of trash modern retro graphics: Project Warlock, which isn't the worst, just an example. The minecraft voxel stuff looks worse. VS: Ion Fury which is made on the actual BUILD ENGINE.

Ion Fury should be the BARE MINIMUM of retro fidelity.

Here's another game you all should check out: Selaco. Built on the DOOM ENGINE. Look at what Selaco does, and ask yourself WHY are we settling for LESS? I can download free doom mods that look, run, and play better than paid UE4 retro games. Where's our standards? Is "good enough" actually good enough? Should it be? You're paying MONEY for this stuff, it needs to be better.

If people are REALLY fans of 40k, and like retro content, why hasn't anyone made a doom mod? The engine is free, you can use open source art programs, AI tools, etc. So overall, if people give boltgun a pass saying there's just nothing better, while recognizing the flaws, maybe the fans should have just done it themselves. They spend all this money and time on plastic models, but NOT making their own game. WHAT? COME ON. I wanna see these guys scan their models into the doom engine and make their own game. It would be a piece of cake to make a better game. They don't even need to do the whole thing, just piece it out to the community. Some guys do art, some guys do levels, etc.

[TubbsFontaine]

I will say this. A lot of the time when I buy games its to play them later... Ill try a few levels make sure I dig it... then I will wait until a rainy day. Not so much the case for me with this one. I actually cannot stop playing it. I play at least 2 levels everytime I boot it up.

[coldgarden]

Honestly I think that people get lost in this game and wonder around forever trying to find a key.

[GrenadeMagnet6]

Another problem I see with many players not getting thru Chapter 1, is tied to the "Defeating a Lord of Change" achievement, which only 36% have completed, and the fact less than 1% of the players have found all secrets in Chapter 1.

It could be players are not spending time looking for secrets, which makes the levels more difficult without benefits from the secret power-ups.

For example, it's possible the players that reached Chapter 1, Level 7, and didn't look for the Vortex Grenade secret, not knowing that would provide a great advantage in the boss fight against the Lord of Change (LoC) in that mission. So they got frustrated with the first LoC boss battle, due to how difficult it is to kill the LoC at this early point in the game, and just gave up. To me the LoC appears more difficult to kill than the Cyberdemon from Doom 1, as the LoC has that line-of-sight attack than can be more difficult to avoid than the Cyberdemon's rocket attacks.

[Sir Fondlebottom]

It's the most boring retro shooter I've played I think. The level design is straight trash so I stopped playing after I beat the Lord of Change boss and never started the game again.

[BIӨMΣCHΛПӨID69]

Originally posted by Sir Fondlebottom:

It's the most boring retro shooter I've played I think. The level design is straight trash so I stopped playing after I beat the Lord of Change boss and never started the game again.

I don't blame you at all. After that I had very similar feelings. I'm constantly just bored in this game.

[Ravo]

I finished Chapter 1 but I don't know if I'll finish Chapter 2. Like others have said, the game isn't that fun.

[Megapal]

very poor framerate in chapter 3 levels, I got halfway through 3 and didn't feel like dealing with it anymore, playing these types of games at 30fps isn't fun, I'm waiting for a patch that addresses the performance problems but I'm not hopeful. I've played plenty of higher fidelity games at much higher fps, so I don't see why this game has to run so poorly when levels and objects are all just low poly or 2d sprites

[BIӨMΣCHΛПӨID69]

Originally posted by Megapal:

I've played plenty of higher fidelity games at much higher fps, so I don't see why this game has to run so poorly when levels and objects are all just low poly or 2d sprites

I think the developers don't know what they are doing unfortunately.