It's finally happened: Bethesda has gone toe to toe with Minecraft. The publisher has been toying with in-game map editing tools for its core RPG franchises for some time – Skyrim's Hearthfire expansion allows you to build and decorate houses, on top of a robust physics system that lets you drag objects around willy-nilly – but not ‘til has it handed us more or less a level designer’s power over an area's layout and contents.

In certain parts of the new game, you'll be able to convert objects into component resources such as wood and rubber, then buy and place walls, props and interactive fixtures to form your very own town. What's more, NPCs will come to live in these towns and you'll need to keep them fed, watered, happy, and protected, placing resources such as crops and automated defences to head off raider attacks. OK, so you can't (that we know of) dig into the very terrain, but everything above ground is yours to meddle with.

There are a fair few games with map-editing features on the shop right now, of course, and certain design “trends” have emerged, from the obligatory giant penis effigy to those terrifyingly adept works of urban planning I keep bumping into on Youtube. Here are a few varieties of user-created settlement you're all but guaranteed to encounter at least once in the average Fallout 4 savegame.

Fallout 4's editing toolset includes switches (terminals) that can be hooked up to components such as power generators and signboards to control their behaviour. From the E3 videos, it appears that you can bodge together quite complex sequences of interactions, calling on more advanced gadgets such as laser tripwires and components that all map to the same terminal. My knowledge of programming is admittedly sketchy, but it sounds like you could even create your own analytical engine inside the simulation, following in the footsteps of this from Dwarf Fortress.

Quite why people keep feeling the urge to build computers inside other computers eludes me. True, it's cheaper than buying another laptop, but it's also months of work for a machine that's just about powerful enough to add and subtract. One of these days somebody will build a computer inside a computer inside a computer, and humanity will evaporate in a blaze of meta-textuality.

Or Winterhold. Or Whiterun. Or the Starship Enterprise. Or the DisneyLand castle. Or Lordran. Or the set of Carry On Cleo. Probably all of them, in fact, plus the Los Angeles convention centre (complete with NPCs queueing by flickering TV sets), six thousand casino-style billboard animations of Mario doing non-canonical things to Princess Peach, and the meth lab from Breaking Bad. Lengthy trawls of various Reddit boards have taught me that there is nothing committed level editors enjoy more than transplanting pop culture landmarks between or into games, blurring their DNA in a manner calculated to rouse Twitter's shock and admiration. And annoy the hell out of various copyright lawyers.

Fallout 4's aesthetic poses a bit of an obstacle – it's hard to believe you're living in the Smurf Village when there are 200-year-old shopping trolleys all over, and everything looks like it's made of rat droppings – but I have faith in you, fans of license splicing. On PC, of course, you can look forward to skin and texture mods to help complete the illusion. These will migrate to the Xbox One version, with mod support on PS4 still TBC at the time of writing.

For every 10 half-finished eyesores or giant penis sculptures, there should (we hope) be at least one player who sets out boldly to create something that actually works as a town should. A town in which the arrangement of farms, markets, homesteads and so forth is genuinely reminiscent of the practical and emotional needs of living creatures. A town where morale is always high, where nobody wants for potable water, a bar to lean on or a place to lay their head. A town that can hold off raiders and sustain itself without the player needing to pop back continually to fix up the barricades and ensure all the guards are pointing in the right direction.

A town, moreover, that feels like a plausible part of the game's storyline. Bethesda's tools allow for fine-grained object placement – you might spend half-an-hour moving a single lightbulb around in order to precisely illuminate an arresting tableau. It'll be intriguing to see whether the most ambitious town creators can hint at forgotten backstories as successfully as the game's own designers.

Some will see AI raids on player-owned towns as a nuisance, but look at it this way: you're almost certainly going to kill a lot of people in Fallout 4 regardless. At least in this case they have the courtesy to come to you. And think of the loot! The bottle caps! The unending shrieks of pain and terror from without the walls as you recline on your throne at the centre of a maze of tripwires, turrets, landmines and guard towers – a capricious and uncaring despot, growing fat off the suicidal imbecility of scavenger tribes.

The idea of auto-farming enemies in open world games for XP or items has a long, illustrious history – in particular, Minecraft players have learned to bump off whole armies of mobs by placing spawn points near natural hazards. With any luck, Fallout 4's crafting system will be sophisticated enough to allow creation of . Imagine opening a bridge trapdoor below a raiding party to plunge them into a river of nuclear sewage, which then sweeps dropped items beneath a walkway where they can be safely harvested. Every frontier town should have one! Who knows, perhaps you'll find the corpse of the game's final boss in there.

Bethesda-brand NPCs are characterised by two things. One, facial animations that put you in mind of The Exorcist. And two, an endearing mixture of independent thinking and rampant bloody stupidity. Yes, the average Skyrim resident might sleep in an actual bed at night, sell armour by day and hunt the game's wildlife for sport, but you can also to stop him noticing when you nick his stuff. It's not exactly Deus Ex Machina.

For many, these AI foibles are all part of the fun – hey, what's not to love about tavern-goers who ? - but now imagine a Fallout 4 NPC attempting to navigate a town laid out not by a trained designer but some half-arsed teenager. A smashed labyrinth of doorless rooms and free-standing walls through which crusty residents trundle forever, searching in despair for the crops they're supposed to water, stalls they're supposed to run. Truly pitiful.

Let's say you've just gotten hold of a Fat Man, the returning heavy launcher from Fallout 3. You're itching to try it out on something, but the Fat Man is not a weapon you can fire off just anywhere. Put it this way - it's not the kind of weapon that wounds. Were you playing as an utter villain, kicking the legs out from under civilisation as it struggles to its feet, this wouldn't be a problem. But you've resolved to play as a goddamn do-gooder. You're also a stealth specialist. How on Earth are you going to dig yourself a nice cathartic crater without losing karma and making a mockery of your ninja pretensions?

Ah but wait. There is that rubbish, mostly deserted village you set up the other week, isn't there? The one you filled with custom shop window mannequins, who you gave individual names and backstories, so as to create a cathartic mini-realm of guilt-free violent oppression. So that you could do all kinds of evil stuff to people, without losing your hero rating. Because you’re possibly a bit mad. Perhaps you should pay a visit. The kind of visit that ends about, oh, let's say a hundred metres outside the city limits. It's just a shame Fallout 4 doesn't appear to support the same level of realistic building destruction you'd get in, say, Red Faction: Guerrilla. Still, those mannequin minions will fly.

You can build towns on several sites in Fallout 4. Assuming an only-human level of dedication, at least one of the towns you build is probably going to consist of the bare necessities – a shack with a workbench, a roof turret, a strongbox, and a lonely-looking trader peering at the horizon.

It raises an important question: exactly how punishing are the raiding and town morale aspects? Will players be obliged to think big, fleshing out their settlements to satisfy NPC requirements and head off attacks, or will we be able to throw together the odd homestead purely for the sake of a fast-travel point? If the town-building is too much of a chore, its appeal may be limited - much like maintaining a social life in Grand Theft Auto 4.

So after all the excitable yelping coming out of last year's Quakecon, after that damnably exciting, damnably brief teaser trailer, we've now seen Doom 4 (or just plain Doom, as it's currently calling itself), by way of a couple of hefty E3 demos. And you know what? The Quakecon converts were right. The new Doom is incendiary.

Faster, harder, gorier, funnier, and altogether more brutal, Doom stands out from the swathe of its bullet-happy contemporaries with a fresh, unique, damnably satisfying-looking combat flow that nevertheless feels 100% authentically Doom. It also looks incredible, has a gloriously horrible sense of humour, and is bringing some seriously unexpected but very, very cool additions in its community-focused customisation tools. Click on, and we'll tell you all.

Shotguns. Super shotguns. Machine guns. Plasma rifles. Chainsaws. Chainsaws that carve up demons at a variety of interesting angles, often changing direction mid-hack in order maximise artistic expression. Rocket launchers. The goddamn BFG. Whatever weapon pops instinctively into your mind’s eye when you hear the word ‘Doom’, it’s in the new Doom. And when it fires, it fires like the end of days.

But there are a few new ones too. We’ve seen – in snatches – a new lightning rifle, and a couple of longer-ranged scoped weapons too. But don’t worry. Mid to close-range, rapid fire slaughter, with Doomguy sprinting through swathes of arterial spray, looks to be the order of the day, 100%. That’s because…

It’s fast, it’s ferocious, and it never, ever stops moving. From the industrial environs of Mars, to the wide, open-air killing fields of Hell, Doom’s combat is a whirling, ever-shifting carnival of weapon-changing, demon-mulching violence. On top of his expected speed (which sees him walking faster than some games let you sprint), Doomguy also has a neat new mantle move, which, alongside his double-jump, opens up a raft of verticality and on-the-fly strategic options.

You’ll never be hiding weakly behind cover, but you can duck behind a crate, climb swiftly over it, and then leap off to retaliate with a surprise shotgun burst as you hurtle through the air toward your previous attacker.

That’s how it looks right now. The combat is too fast and kinectic, and flows with too much momentum, to make static recovery any kind of an option. And the levels and multiplayer arenas we’ve seen are positively littered with health and armour pick-ups. Certain enemies will spew them out too, once you’ve burst said enemies satisfactorily all over the wall.

But that’s not to say Doom is too generous. In terms of game balance it looks more like a case of ‘keep moving, keep killing, keep healing, or die quickly’.

Taking the occasional hint from Doom 3’s more ‘realistic’ monsters, but swinging far closer to the early games’ more colourful, expressive take on biotech body-horror, the new Doom’s demons are a totally faithful, modern recreation of the same, line-up of enemies that have underpinned the series – and in fact FPS archytypes in general – for over 20 years.

Zombieman is in. Imps are in. Pinkie Demons are in (and returning as the chunky, bipedal melee-bastards we all know and love, rather than the wheel-assisted rhino-dog of Doom 3). Barons of Hell are back, as are Mancubi, Revenants, and Cacodemons, all fulfilling the same roles and behaviours they’re supposed to in Doom’s complex, quietly cerebral ecosystem. Oh, and there’s this really big demon guy too. He’s got a massive gun instead of an arm, so he’s cybernetic, as well as a demon. He’s… I don’t know, some kind of a Robodemon, I suppose you’d call him…

We’ve seen around 15 minutes of solid Doom gameplay so far. And you know what? Not a break in the action. Not a line of dialogue. Not a single pleading NPC or objective-dumping audio diary. Just Doomguy, a lot of monsters, and a lot of guns. All momentum, all the time, without a moment to look back at the trail of gore heaping up behind.

The one concession to ‘narrative’ we’ve seen comes when Doomguy fires up a data file and runs it through his mobile hologram drone, which projects a recording of previous events in the room he’s in, in a manner akin to Dark Souls’ phantoms of the fallen dead. The real-time, 3D playback shows a previous Marine dragged away by a Baron of Hell. Follow the unfortunate grunt’s final path, and you’ll find his body, and the soon-to-be-severed hand required to fire up a fingerprint lock. That’s it. No slowing of pace, no loss of control, and all information delivered in economical and gleefully brutal fashion. If Doom is going to have a story, that’s the way to deliver it.

File this one under ‘Don’t-you-dare-screw-with Doom’s-core-gameplay-Oh-actually-hang-on-yeah-let’s-have-that-new-bit-actually-because-oh-my-God-it’s-incredible’. While the new Doom looks entirely, spiritually authentic to the fast, furious, freewheeling open combat that Doom Just Is, the new melee execution mechanic is an incredibly exciting addition. It’s new, it’s fresh, it transforms things just enough to make Doom feel unique again, but crucially, it’s so well implemented that it feels like it was always there.

Do enough damage to an enemy without completely killing them, and they’ll start to glow. Get in close before they recover, and you can fire off a hilariously, triumphantly violent hand-to-hand takedown, the kind of thing that makes the earlier games’ Berserk power-up look like half a can of Redbull, watered down with camomile. Heads are twisted off. Jaws are wrenched away from heads. Entire limbs are snapped off and used to stove in any heads that may miraculously remain intact. And being delivered by Doomguy, these ‘little’ takedowns, however intricate, happen fast and furiously enough to never, ever slow down the pace of the combat. Seeing a theme here now?

This is no straightforward corridor shooter. Even the enclosed sections set in the, er, corridors of the Martian UAC base are wide, rangey, multi-levelled affairs, filled with a multitude of only semi-linear options and lines of attack at any given time. Yes, you’ll move loosely from A to B, as you always have in Doom, but when the fights break out in between, it’s going to be sandbox slaughter all the way. As it always is when Doom has been at its very best.

Beyond that, we’ve already seen some suitably twisty, turny, multi-layered level designs set in Hell, with a couple of Doom’s traditionally obtuse, explicitly teased, ‘hidden’ power-ups clearly on show.

Doom is going to have multiplayer. And it looks nuts. While the core mechanics of the campaign alone would have delivered the online game of ‘skill, fast, vertical movement, and awesome guns’ that Bethesda has promised, there’s much more than that going on here.

Domination and Clan Arena modes are joined by ‘90s classics like Freeze-Tag (a brilliant, off-kilter favourite from our Quake 3 days), and the claim of ‘very unique power-ups’ definitely seems to ring true. Grabbing a pentogram to transform into a flying, rocket-hurling Revenant, anyone? Yeah, thought so. Oh, and teleports are back, so we should probably take that to mean that telefrags are as well. Delicious.

Okay, it already looks brilliant, but this is the thing that pushes Doom over from ‘exciting’ to ‘potentially essential’. Doom has an immense history with the modding scene. Hell, the original game, and its easy-to-tweak file system, is pretty much responsible for modding being a thing in the first place. Only problem is that more recent id games, such as Doom 3 and Rage, lost the scope for all those customisable fun-times when they moved over to console. We know that Fallout 4 will have mod support on the Xbox One, by way of a natty deal between Bethesda and Microsoft, but Doom possibly has an even better solution, right across the board.

SnapMap is Doom’s in-built suite of level editing tools, and presents a dizzying number of things to build, modify, tweak, and model, all with a couple of clicks. Environmental layouts, hazards, enemy placements, game logic, event triggers… there are even a bunch of single and multi-player game mode presets, all of which can be adapted and reworked into any shape you see fit. See it as LittleBigPlanet, only in 3D, and pissing gore from every hole.

So far we only have a release window of Q1/Q2 2016, but that doesn’t mean things are going to go quiet any time soon. Quakecon at the end of July should throw up even more footage and details, and Bethesda always goes big for Gamescom in August. Expect more news throughout the summer, and probably something big around Hallowe’en. Because Hallowe’en. And Doom.