This article may contain slight spoilers
DOOM's Argent Tower is a superb Single-Player level. The Argent Tower motivates players with an obvious goal, expands in scope (almost unbelievably), and masterfully controls pacing. A playground for new a ability and a giant environmental puzzle, the Argent Tower is the best level in this excellent reboot of the franchise.
Now, let's explore the reasons why this level feels so memorable!
OBJECTIVE
Players will know their goal from the outset: climbing the Argent Tower. In addition to verbal instructions, the level's construction and composition never fails to aim you upward. Warm lighting moves up vertically, so that players' eyes are always drawn upwards.
Even the item you acquire in the level's prelude is a double-jump upgrade, which the level then associates with an oft-repeated green light motif. Players will be doing a LOT of double-jumping in the Tower, so the game articulates a method to guide them.
While players may or may not consciously respond to this green-light motif, the designers clearly believe it works as a navigational aid: it is repeated with brutal consistency throughout the level.
SCOPE
When players reach the Tower's inner core, the vast power of DOOM's engine is indisputable. Great music kicks in, monsters spawn all around the player, and the game "gates" engagements without muddying players' central, long-term gameplay goal.
The symmetrical, circular design of the Tower's core proves extremely useful in several respects. Because players can only progress upwards, they get to experience fun combat engagements and jumping puzzles before they are neatly stuffed into small corridors adjoining the main core.
This contrast between the core's verticality and its cramped side passages makes for easily controlled progression through the level and amplifies the awe of returning to the core. In one side area of the Argent Tower, players experience a "monster closet" ambush, a classic DOOM design trope in which a demon emerges from a closet adjacent to a corridor. Here, the designers chose an exploding demon for extra "oomph"!
There's just something timeless about monster closets. That the game dives down to its most granular level (the monster closet) additionally provides contrast to the heights of the massive core.
PACING
DOOM carefully reminds players of their progress ascending the Tower. In one cramped side-area, players are faced with the seemingly trivial task of shooting canisters that underpin an elevator blocking their path. After destroying the canisters, the elevator falls down its shaft.
Half-Life 2 used similar imagery to convey the scale (and ongoing destruction) of The Citadel:
An additional point of this elevator diversion was to slow players down, to keep them away from the showpiece core a little while longer.
New players will take a minute to identify the canisters overhead and discern that they need to be destroyed, because this is a novel task and because FPS players notoriously fail to look upward. Later in the game, the designers repeat the canister mechanic before providing players the BFG, the defining weapon of the series. Without the subtle change in momentum the canisters provide, gaining access to the Tower's rooftop or the BFG would feel too straightforward and simplistic.
Having artificially lengthened the break players take from the core, the designers have guaranteed that environmental contrast will enhance perception of the Tower's scale AND that player intelligence and momentum has been challenged by a new problem. (...but because this is DOOM, problem solving is still ultimately about destroying shit.)
Players complete more than six different jumping tasks including riding a flying drone to climb the Argent Tower and enter a portal into Hell.
Such a variety of jumping puzzles and hazards makes the level memorable and is another technique enlarging perception of the Tower. To be clear, jumping puzzles are universally terrible in every FPS game, but their annoyance here is dulled by the focused grandiosity of the level and the ability to grapple onto ledges. The designers ultimately cared a lot more about giving players a memorable locale than sparing them falling deaths.
CONCLUSION
After reaching the top of the Argent Tower, players are greeted by a giant, climactic battle which ends with a wonderful fade to white.
Only now are players ready to enter Hell confident that they've truly gotten to experience Mars.
It's important to remember that, fundamentally, the Argent Tower is about going from point A (the foot of the tower) to point B (the top). Faced with a similar Tower-landmark, some designers might path this route with nothing more than a simple elevator cinematic or miss countless opportunities to do something special. DOOM's designers, however, missed nothing: they recognized the need to offer players dense and varied challenges, careful pacing, and spatial design rich with contrast.
Later, when players return to Mars, the destroyed husk of the Tower provides an instantly recognizable landmark re-orienting players on their adventure and a tantalizing hint that things are different now.
The Argent Tower goes to show that great levels are not about the destination, but the journey -- and all the controlled chaos along the way!
Thanks for reading!
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