Limitations of the time. Even B-Cell there frequently cites the map design from Doom.Hawki said:Saying Doom has exploration is like saying there's lettace in a hamburger - technically true, but irrelevant to the product, and not what you play/eat it for.Samtemdo8 said:Doom is just as much of a First Person Adventure as is Metroid Prime. I mean there is PLENTY of exploration to be had.
But even then, much as I dislike Metroid Prime, that at least had a sense of exploration - you're on an alien world where you get to uncover its secrets and history. Doom has the premise of "demons have invaded, kill them" and doesn't go beyond that. There's no sense of wonder or discovery to be had in the original Doom game (which is true for most Doom games - certainly prior to Doom 3 at least).
Your actual first person adventure games at the time with exploration and such were literal slideshows, maybe with some mega-low res FMV if you had one of them fancy CD drives. Myst (also in 1993) has maybe a dozen dialogue lines and a similar number of notes throughout the whole game, and it was a woefully bad performance technically at the time.
The only real potential examples for hybrid games around then were coming out of Origin. And Origin literally bankrutped their company with overbudget projects trying to make ever bigger things (some of which essentially were unplayable by actual consumers for a year or more, or had weird nonsense like custom boot disks to load their own memory OS).