Doom PC Tips: Disable Mouse Smoothing, Skip Intro Videos, and More

Doom on PC makes you wait long enough to get to the main menu without adding unskippable intro videos before a load screen. Luckily, this and some of the other problems with the PC game can be dealt with.

Doom's multiplayer beta was cause for concern to some PC gamers due to the absence of certain settings. Id Software offered reassurances that many of these would make into the final game, and while the PC version is solid, it isn't perfect. The aforementioned intro videos don't allow you to bypass them once they're on-screen--you have to sit through sequences for Bethesda, id, and two others before hitting a loading screen, and only then can you access the main menu. This happens every time you open the game.

Also problematic is the presence of mouse smoothing, an option that stunningly can't be disabled from the settings menu. This is something that was originally designed for older mice and was intended to smooth out the movement of the mouse cursor, but it's largely been rendered useless with high-DPI mice.

Fans have found ways to circumvent these issues by using the game's launch options feature on Steam. To access this, right-click Doom in your library, go to Properties, and select Set Launch Options. From there, you can type in various commands. These include:

• Skip intro videos: +com_skipIntroVideo 1
• Disable mouse smoothing: +set m_smooth 0
• Shorten load screens: +com_skipKeyPressOnLoadScreens 1
• Unlock Nightmare difficulty: +menu_advanced_AllowAllSettings 1

You can use as many or as few of these as you would like. In order to use more than one, all you need to do is enter a space in between the commands. For instance, "+set m_smooth 0 +com_skipIntroVideo 1" will skip the intro videos and get rid of that dreaded mouse smoothing; just paste that into your launch options without the quotation marks.

These are annoyances that will hopefully be resolved with in-game options. For now, at least there is a way to deal with them.