had a surprising realization recently, playing the remake of resident evil 4...
which is that doom 2016 doesn't play like the OG doom games. i've always thought this but i didn't really have a way to describe what it plays like instead, and it's resident evil 4, but in first person. the remake even more so, but that's only because the remake is building upon what's already there:
big, restricted non-linear combat arenas where you're encouraged to be constantly moving, kiting opponents, and prioritizing targets. that's not classic doom, that's resident evil 4, which was taking the "survival" part of being survival horror and reinterpreting it as faster-paced, more aggressive action horror. the village fight in both versions of RE4 could translate to doom 2016's gameplay loop almost entirely unchanged!
and i think that's fascinating when it doesn't feel like that was intentional at all. but resident evil 4's gameplay loop defined two entire decades of video game design and continues to define it today (see: uncharted and last of us). RE4 itself was taking MGS2's innovations on MGS's gameplay, particularly the over the shoulder shooting from cover, and developers responded to those innovations by creating the third-person cover shooter that was every AAA video game for at least two entire console generations.
so what you have in doom 2016 is an attempt to go back to the roots of first person shooters, but not by going back to how doom 1993 played in reality. instead it's taking the "cover" and "third" out of "third person cover shooter" by making it a first person shooter about constant movement... which is going back to how resident evil 4 played, before gears of war looked at RE4 and established the third-person shooter as we know it.
what a wild back and forth in the history of this medium. it's SO interesting to think about.
that kind of brings me to another thing which is that i think what people associate with doom isn't the reality of what doom was actually like, and the imagery we associate with classic doom is based on years of pop culture osmosis, the genuinely brilliant peak camp of the doom comic, and most of all, mods.
i'd strongly argue the original doom iwads, even today but especially in 1994, were very rarely blisteringly fast giant non-linear combat arenas packed to the hilt with monsters, where you're zipping around at 300MPH dodging projectiles and prioritizing targets.
there's a few levels i'd describe like that but they tended to come later as doom formed more of its identity. ultimate doom (released a year after doom 2) has e4m2, e4m3, and e4m6 which definitely seem to fit that bill... but even doom 2's maps like downtown which seem like they fit this description are just non-linear, they're too barren to really be called combat arenas. the most explicitly combat arena map in doom 2 might be map07 which is the size of a matchbox and has you fighting enemies in waves of at most 12 at a time.
the actual levels of doom, at least up until plutonia (and especially MAP32 of plutonia) completely redefined doom map design, were relatively linear, narrow, and boxy, with only a few enemies at a time, and those enemies were placed in a simplistic way that didn't highly focus on target prioritization. only the boss levels, which were big combat arenas, really come close.
and besides the levels, it's important to consider how the average person actually played doom at the time. using the mouse to aim was available (and encouraged, believe it or not), but the majority of people played with the arrow keys and the idea of using a mouse to aim was a pretty novel concept. because you turned with the arrow keys too, by default the game had you strafe by pressing "alt" in addition to the arrow keys, which was pretty awkward... and removed your ability to turn. there was no caps lock run or toggle run, so to sprint, you held shift. this made for a pretty complex control scheme in 1993, especially for players inexperienced with FPSes.
when i was a child, i watched my father play doom more than i played it myself (and when he set up the program for me, he turned the monsters off.) the way he'd play was completely nothing like people play doom today: he would sit in a corner behind cover, patiently wait for enemies to trundle close enough, and then pop out of cover to let loose until they were dead. there was no skillfully dodging projectiles, no madcap sprinting around the map, just patience. and this was in final doom, in a plutonia map! (specifically map04: caged, if you're curious.)
this was how many people played doom at the time. the association people have with doom, the "boomer shooter," wasn't a whole lot like the actual reality. if anything, doom 3 was much closer to what doom felt like in 1993 than people gave it credit for even in 2004.
but when doom 2016 came around, there was an expectation of what doom was supposed to look like, to play like, and to feel like. doom was a brutally violent, absurdly fast, skill-based game about a guy who runs faster than a cheetah and punches cyberdemons to death. it's a myth that doom 2016 was based on brutal doom, but at the peak of brutal doom's popularity, there was one description i read of it - that brutal doom was "more doom than doom." i think that really speaks to how much people's perception of doom has changed over the decades, and that perception massively influenced the aesthetics, the gameplay style, and the level of brutality of doom 2016.
map design had completely changed too by this point. by, well, 2016, modern doom maps already played much closer to 2016 than the original maps, and the variety in doom map design was unfathomable. you had everything from zdoom tech showcases to cartoonish slaughtermaps filled with thousands of cyberdemons to highly acclaimed mappacks that were based around zipping around huge non-linear combat arenas, kiting enemies, and prioritizing targets.
so, intentionally or not, resident evil 4, a game that itself took the slower and more horror-based gameplay of the PS1 resident evils and transformed it into a faster-paced, closer to arcade style action horror game, was a perfect fit.