Changes were carried across from the
Atari Jaguar and PlayStation ports of the
Doom engine, along with additional tweaks made specifically for Doom 64, and many gameplay elements were altered. Doom's core gameplay, however remained the same: the exploration of demon-infested corridors, looking for key cards, switches and ultimately the map's exit while surviving deadly traps and ambushes.
Key differences from the computer games in the series include:
- 32 exclusive new levels. Later 7 more are added in the 2020 re-released ports of the game.
- New, larger sprites for all enemies, items, weapons and projectiles, created from high-poly rendered models.
- Three-sample bilinear filtering applied to textures and sprites courtesy of the Nintendo 64's hardware.
- All-new textures, scrolling skies, limited room-over-room architecture, and more advanced line triggers.
- More advanced atmospheric colored lighting and effects, such as parallaxing skies, fog and lightning.
- A new dark ambient soundtrack composed by Aubrey Hodges.
- High-quality sound effects (the same as used in the PlayStation version).
- No status bar. Instead, only the numbers for health, armor and ammo are shown on the HUD, and even these can be turned off.
- Scripted events through macros, similar to Hexen's ACS. Uses include sequences which dramatically transform areas, tripwire booby traps such as darts and homing fireball launchers, enemies that appear out of thin air, and (to some extent) disappearing enemy corpses.
- Camera effects.
- Dramatic usage of dark light levels, ambient music, and Satanic imagery (pentagrams, inverted crosses, and gory depictions of human sacrifice) to create an atmosphere which invokes a sense of horror.
- No commandos, arch-viles, spiderdemons or revenants (cut due to the limited storage capacity of Nintendo 64 cartridges).
- A new demonic laser weapon, called by fans "the Unmaker", which can increase in power throughout the game by collecting all three Demon Keys.
- The nightmare imp and Mother Demon are introduced as new monsters.
- The super shotgun reloads much faster, with nearly the same speed as the regular shotgun. This makes it one of the most essential weapons in the game.
- Like the Playstation and Saturn ports, the Hell knight and baron of Hell can hurt each other with their projectiles, and infight as a result, unlike the PC version where there is a hard-coded exception for them.
- Certain monsters are re-balanced with new behaviors or attack properties. For example, imps (and consequently nightmare imps) now have their fireball and clawing attacks separated, arachnotrons have a weaker twin plasma gun instead of a stronger single-barrel one; lost souls are weaker with less health, but attack viciously, making them one of the most dangerous enemies; pain elementals spawn two souls at a time when attacking, and the souls will cause massive splash damage to anything in the vicinity if they are blocked from spawning.
- Recoil effects when firing stronger weapons, such as being knocked back a few inches from firing a rocket launcher or a super shotgun.
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