> Level layouts in modern games (even bland ones like CoD) don't make much sense either, but they're better at hiding it.
Modern games usually feel waaaaaaay less realistic to me because they fall right into the uncanny valley.
You'll have some photorealistic landscape, or some crazy fantasy landscape that looks real enough to touch.
And then the realism falls away because half of the simple doors in the village can't be operated by your character (even though he's strong enough to fight a 50-foot dragon with his bare hands) and there's a 2 foot high fence you can't jump over even though your character is a literal superhuman. And all the characters look "real" but move like slightly creepy photorealistic mannequins.
That always feels a lot less "real" to me than something like Doom that's just the right level of abstract.
The levels in Doom don't feel realistic (compared to any place that exists in reality) but they feel real in the sense that they are tangible, understandable, consistent environments.