yes!!!
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all of this is true but i also keep dying on the regular difficulty so i’m having fun perfecting the extremely stupid “combat loop” that they literally call a “combat loop” when you try to turn off the tutorials. i wish i’d taken a screenshot of that, it’s wild.
but yeah it’s definitely dumb as shit
I need a classic ActionButton dot net takedown of the tutorial popup that tells you how to defeat a monster before it shows up on screen
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Also super disappointed in the fact that the only characters are demons. it was fun to watch humans in the first game succumb to demonic bullshit, y’know? now it’s just like “ah slayer, you are here to murder me, but i shall murder you first!! get 'im, brothers!!!”
i am one of the 17 people who was really looking forward to the continuation of the characters from the first nudoom and so this sucks
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god i know i turned them off but too late, i had already been told how to kill most of them. like, what the fuck
Part of me likes DOOM Eternal as being a very Act and React style of flow but I also miss the wiggle room of 2016 DOOM where you can feasably clear most encounters by just sticking to two or three guns. Juggling guns was a skill that could be organically learned as the game went on and the reward was spreading resources and maybe a faster clear time. There was more room for expression with your weapon upgrades. I was watching Woolie’s Playthrough of 2016 and it was interesting watching him try to find as many solutions as he could to stick to the Gaus Cannon. Eternal has a much more narrow space for this because almost every enemy has a hard counter and you are heavily goaded into using them and harshly punished if you don’t.
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This hard counter/memorization/flow state approach is why I have watched like three entire 100% Nightmare speedruns of Eternal but have no desire to play it. It is not only the ideal way to experience the game, but really the only entertaining one imo
Put another way, Eternal took Noom, added tons of combat and mobility tools and then stripped out 135% of the fat, leaving the game overstuffed but also skeletal and malnourished - and at the same time added more goofy collectibles and currencies and “lore” and explanations and secret-hunting. They exploded all the cruft that doesn’t matter and stripped out the only thing that did, which was the ability for kinesthetic expression.
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This is true but frustratingly they added a ton of great mobility – the gymnastic bars, the shotgun grapple, the double-dash are great mobility (the wall-climb is stupid and they don’t use it in combat) but the screws are tightened such that you can’t use them expressively!
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I think the airdashes and hookshot shotgun were good for this but I’m also an anime fighting game player so airdashes will always be welcome.
The airdashes leave me cold and the monkey bars are limiting and just dumb as hell imo. The only really great mobility addition is the grapple, which is very satisfying and tactical in use (since it HAS to be anchored on an enemy), but attaching it to the SSG was a huge error. In Noom the SSG is almost a specialty weapon, devastating up close - but you have to get up close, which is an adventure all in itself. In Eternal you have ideal-SSG-range-on-command (balanced by a cooldown of all the godforsaken things) which makes it one of your three forever weapons in your ideal weapon rotation. bleh
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I don’t like using the dashes when I’m on ground because they’re so limited but I like using them as air nudges. The monkey bars lead into a beautiful vertiginous slingshot and I love it for that even if it’s not that useful in a fight.
I agree that the grapple should be always available but, god, this game is already taking ‘hero shooters’ as a license to be cooldown hell
I think this is the core problem: every enemy has to chase you ~constantly~ to exert any sort of pressure given the number of movement tools you have and the feeling the designers want to convey, so whatever potential for interesting combat behaviors exists is immediately flattened to “run run run”.
Or, to put it another way: If they have interesting behaviors, but I never have to engage with them, are they really there?
Every single enemy dashes into melee range as soon as possible, or slings fireballs (or equivalent projectiles, like rockets) from a distance. The only enemies that differ from this pattern are bosses and the Marauder, who are not coincidentally the only enemies that are remotely interesting to fight.
It ends up making every fight feel like picking off the outer edge of an amorphous blob of demons, which is the ~exact~ problem I have with slaughtermaps in Classic Doom. They also wait until the VERY END to start layering some interesting environmental interactions like crushers (I beat a Marauder by luring him into a crusher, one of the few times I felt good while playing!), which is like, introduce this earlier! Make it a core part of the combat encounters! What the fuck!
After you get the SSG/Gauss the game turns to piss, hotswap-delete everything or use one of three different instakills based on the grade of monster. I don’t think I had a real fight with a Tyrant (Eternal’s new cyberdemon stand-in) the entire game. I just hit them with a freeze bomb and either hotswapped or sworded them.
There’s no room to breathe, and that is the fundamental problem with NuDoom’s combat design. You NEED that middle ground between intensity and fight over where you’re reassessing the situation and altering your strategies or decisions to better fit it. It is the core of good combat sandbox.
Classic Doom manages this by making enemies slow and dumb but powerful, so you have to use the level to your advantage to retain resources for the next encounter. Since every enemy in NuDoom is a monomaniacal chaser AI and resources are so constrained you have to vamp them from fodder in the middle of a fight, there’s none of that consideration. I’m never actually thinking about what’s going on, and when I fail I never reconsider my approach, because I know my approach is the correct as it has been THE ENTIRE GAME.
It’s very emblematic of all the problems of AAA game design where you sand off every edge and overdesign your game so that there’s precisely one way to approach it. It appeals to normal people as a “spectacle shooter” but as someone immersed in the genre I’m not really impressed by spectacle anymore. I want something tactically engaging. And Eternal is not, at all.
Eternal is rote, paint-by-numbers. That is its sin. It has a million different systems and mechanics and weapons and none of it matters because you will do the literal exact same thing for hours.
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My notes, and I haven’t been experimenting as much as I should have because I don’t like it, are that the behaviors are:
- Imp: attempt to maintain middle-distance, 15m or so, take vertical jump opportunities as often as possible
- Zombie marine: move to middle-close distance, 7-15m, shoot while approaching. Use few height changes, more static in position than imps
- Hell Knight: stomp stomp stomp stomp
- Pinky: charge charge charge charge
- Revenant: maintain far distance (20-25m), alternate between ground and flying. If lose cannons, run to melee.
- Cacodemon: maintain height (3-5m above ground), approach middle distance (7m). These things barely get to shoot and they should back up a heck of a lot more than they do!
- Arachnotron: alternate between far and middle distance (15-25m), using turret. Change height frequently looking to get ‘artillery angle’ on player
- Mancubus: maintain mid-far distance (7-15m), using rockets. If guns shot off, approach player and use flame attacks.
I think if the player slows down, you’ll see a lot more of these behaviors, but because they’re spawning all over the arenas, and the player is moving so fast, the game loses all sense of safe/unsafe zones or area control. The player is mostly dragging a blob of enemies around because every character is outside of even their farthest range.
There’s a lot of work if we want to fix this without slowing down the player, but I think I’d start by getting a lot of the bigger enemies to stay put in more distinct area and having them bombard with slightly slower projectiles, like classic Doom.
100% agree, it’s too fast, too constant.
I don’t believe this is a AAA-inherent issue, but a game design problem. It’s really hard to create a complex game that doesn’t fall apart to a few specific strategies! And most of the games that have stood the time are both much simpler (fewer attacks, enemy types, less complex terrain) than modern games, and lucky.
Tightening a loop is something designers can do more reliably than building a web of balanced, interesting possibilities.
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The breathless, endlessly circling pace that @Tegiminis describes really came to a head with the final boss for me. It all just collapses in on itself as the game becomes purely rote cooldown and resource management with no wiggle room for error or deviation from the awesome godhero the game demands you invest in. That boss made me realise I didn’t like the game but alas it was too late.
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These notes all track with the behaviors I noticed, yeah. There’s some stuff that I think you missed (Revs will seek to gap-close even without losing their shoulders, Cacodemons focus mostly on charge-biting like aerial pinkies) but you got the gist of it.
Funnily, look at that list of behaviors. They almost all amount to “charge to middle-close distance.” There’s no variety in the way these enemies attack.
God I can’t believe Eternal makes me miss HITSCANNERS of all things.
Yeah, this is exacerbated by arenas infinitely spawning aggressive fodder enemies like soldiers too. I died a bunch in late-game arenas because the game spawned a zombie directly behind me while I was in a fight with another enemy. For all the complaints of hitscanners in Classic, at least I always know where they are going to be lol.
This is actually one of the few good things about Mancubi in NuDoom: since they are so slow, they mostly stay in place or slowly approach you, so they exude presence and area control in a way other enemies don’t.
Of course you immediately chump them with hotswap combo after like level 4 but that’s Eternal for you.
The reason why I call it out as a AAA-specific problem I think is related to your ending statement:
AAA as a space is determined to recoup investment. To recoup investment, you engage players so they 1) play your game and 2) encourage other people to play your game. The easiest path to this is to build a game of shallow loops and artistic spectacle, because the average person isn’t looking for a hard and deep sandbox, they just want to break a zombie’s neck like a badass.
I dunno if this is solvable, really. A few developers are trying, but only a few. Most of the engaging games I play are indie these days.
Putting this as an aside since it’s sorta tangential:
I think my problem with Eternal isn’t so much that it falls apart to a single strategy. I’m okay with that. Classic Doom is almost entirely beatable by just corner-peeking, if you want to play it that way. My problem with it is that it allows no wiggle room for other strategies either. You either adhere to the designer-intended path or perish.
This is kinda where my statement about player expression comes in. Eternal doesn’t allow for player expression at all.
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Funnily enough, Icon of Sin is the only enemy in the game worth using the minigun on precisely bc you have to keep your range and pump damage over time lmao. But yeah it sucks.
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If the player were static or slow-moving enough, you should see concentric ‘orbits’ of enemies (though I don’t know much about their lateral movement – a lot of games try to get enemies in front of the player before they attack but that’s an even more extreme movement ask in Doom Eternal). Slow the player down and I think there’s enough texture strictly in the enemy movement to make target prioritization more interesting.
I disagree that this is caused by the goals. Something like God of War shows that there is no conflict between a strong, nuanced combat game and shallow spectacle. Western AAA design absolutely prioritizes approachability over depth but it’s not a tension other than over resources.
A good example is multiplayer. We’re finally in a world where depth is rewarded in multiplayer but many games (and Blizzard is paramount) aren’t sure how to maintain it and sacrifice depth in favor of strongly-identified character roles. But that occurred over multiple post-launch iterations and as the stronger initial design team filtered out. Valorant seems informed by Riot’s work on League of Legends in how it emphasizes subtler skill use geared towards high-end nuance.
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i do need to try this game again. i really don’t think i like it, but i was also trying to play it while (probably) infected with COVID and i feel like that must have made me hate it at least 10-20% more than i normally may have.
basically, not being able to inflict damage with melee, while small, kind of ruined the whole vibe for me.
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Yeah this sucks
I’m playing this game a bit out of spite now, and I’m not even to the"bad" part yet. I’m not totally soured on it but I swear to God this game has less of a sense of Place than the original Doom, and even nudoom which was already slightly abysmal. While I appreciate the bold colors, the stage layouts are all basically straight lines punctuated by combat circles. It’s a bummer.
Also I think they accidentally invented Very Complicated Crimsonland with the combat and I’m not sure I care for it anymore
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