Laughing my ass off at this thread. People criticising gameplay in TNO, saying it was repetitive, boring etc. Maybe that is fair. I probably look kindly on the game due to fondness for alternate history and story-driven campaigns. But don't bring in the Doom games as an example of how to do it right. Those were very much games of their time and hold up appallingly badly today. Those were very much about swarms of enemies, long slogs through maps doing nothing but killing with the odd keycard puzzle here and there. At least modern shooters try to find ways of breaking up the monotony.
wat
The amount of gameplay elements a Doom mapper has at his disposal allows for many more unique levels than TNO can. Like with puzzle games, just shuffling around things and adding just the little things can create entirely new challenges, whereas TNO relies on large crude changes in terms of setpieces and unique situations (something that in itself isn't bad) to mask the fact that the core idea of moving around in a small arena and shooting nazis isn't being as changed up as it could. Doom has a large variety of enemies which can be mixed and matched together, on top of placing them in certain positions to challenge you this and that way.
Considering most enemies in TNO are hitscan and are capable of moving around with a decent speed so they don't need to be placed around the levels by hand, one remaining approach for the level design is the F.E.A.R. approach where you and the enemies are placed in tight quarters and are engaged in some kind of game of cat and mouse, where you can hide behind cover and popamole with ironsights like a chump, or play aggressively by using grenades as a distraction and flanking them where possible with one in each hand to avoid damage entirely. The unfortunate part is that TNO only sometimes does this instead of always, as it places you in large open levels with no opportunity to outflank the enemies as damage is practically inevitable, and the only way to not die is to once again popamole.
Painkiller is more deserving of 'swarms of enemies, long slogs through maps doing nothing but killing' criticism, with its
homogenous packs of enemies and drawn out levels with long stretches of nothing but walking, whereas most Doom levels can be beaten under 10 minutes, with clear build-up instead of always throwing shit at you right from the start as the OG Doom levels were built around pistol starts and thus required a sense of pacing. If you're complaining that all you do is killing (e.g. what the very fucking game is designed around), then that's a personal problem. Keycards existed to gate progression and preventing you from running past the entire level to the finish so you had to get yourself in some nasty situations before you could find a matching key, which is what also gave Doom levels their non-linear design considering a Doom level designer has to keep in mind how to make the progression of going from colored key to colored door as smooth as possible while reducing the feeling of having to backtrack while doing nothing as much as possible.
In essence the route to finishing a level is almost always linear in Doom, but it's a route you have to find on your own nonetheless, you usually don't feel railroaded. Making the player feel like levels are greatly varied is also quite effective. The simplest method of doing so is changing the aesthetics and looks of the levels. One example is F.E.A.R., which gets criticized for having repetitive level design, largely due the fact that the environments in which you fight are mostly the same, and because the enemies you fight are mostly the same. However, that's not taking in consideration how the encounters of F.E.A.R. actually work and why they do. If you were just to change up the locale and setpieces of the encounters, the reception towards the level design would be more positive, because most people don't really play with the mindset of learning how and why the game works without resorting to sudden genre changes which strongly deviate from the base gameplay formula for the sake of 'variety'.
Modern shooter campaigns often have this shit, first its just shooting, then it's a turret section, then it's a vehicle section, then it's shooting again, then it's a forced stealth section, then it's shooting with a gimmick, then it's a boss fight against a bulletsponge, and so on. Instead of building and expanding on a certain gameplay concept, it throws away coherence for the sake of 'variety'. It no longer becomes about learning and getting better at the game, but enduring the 'experience' the developers have lined up for me. At which point it becomes a case of 'why bother' since you might as well go full WarioWare and make the whole game a collection of mini-games and QTEs if you're not going to stick to anything. If you need to break up the monotony of the core gameplay with forced genre shifts, then the problem lies with the core gameplay itself.