DOOM Free Patch 3 fails to bring life to multiplayer

DOOM‘s latest free patch was aimed to bring life into multiplayer, while fixing a number of issues and adding optimisations for the Campaign and Snapmap. The big feature was the addition of Deathmatch, but it seems it was a feature that was added far too late from its May 2016 release.

Failing to impress

The multiplayer of DOOM has been a disaster since it’s Beta several months before the game’s release. During that time, it was receiving a lot of negative feedback from the community on Steam. Overall the rating was mixed to negative by the end of the beta.

Upon release, the community praised the game for its Campaign but the response to the multiplayer was as negative as ever. The issues DOOM had at launch, led to multiplayer being unplayable for a lot of players. Issues included, the inability to connect to the server and unplayable amounts of lag.

Despite these issues being fixed, problems only persisted. Hacking and cheating have been rife in the multiplayer for a long time, with no sign of it being resolved. Due to the low user count on Multiplayer, most of the modes — except Team Deathmatch — can take up to, and at times over, five minutes to get a match started. With all the negativity and issues DOOM’s multiplayer has had, it has failed to impress from the very beginning.

Too little too late

Many will say that Deathmatch is a mode that should have been included in the game from the very start. After all, Deathmatch was the first and original FPS multiplayer mode long before team based modes ever existed. With the patch releasing just last month, four months after the game’s release, it seems it was too late.

If it had been added perhaps a few weeks to a month after the game’s release, it may have had a greater impact. Sadly, the multiplayer user count has failed to bring both veterans and new players back to DOOM’s multiplayer. Over the past month at peak times, the games user count has varied between 2000 and 5000 users daily.

During off-peak hours, the user count is only an average of between 500 and 1000. Upon checking the user count prior to the release of the patch, the daily figures were roughly the same. It would seem that the addition of deathmatch, was too little too late.