I hope it’s accidentally a true sequel to Quake 1. But we know that’s never gonna happen.
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Eternal was a mechanical downgrade from 2016 but the even bigger betrayal was probably the invention of Doom lore, yeah. How degrading.
At least it’ll be fun to watch ZeroMaster’s ultrameganightmare runs
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I can understand people’s dislike for Eternal but I cannot grasp what people find to be so good about Doom 2016. I thought it became dull pretty quickly as I played it and never once liked the arena style combat, even putting aside as much of my knee-jerk “this ain’t doom” reaction to them I just thought it was predictable and brought too much of the spectacle of the gory combat to my focus. and beyond the spectacle there just wasn’t much else that i could care about, least of all in the environments or alien/otherworldly feel that Doom 1 has.
I kind of suspect the reaction to 2016 can be understood similarly to people’s reaction to Deus Ex Human Revolution, in that people were truly shocked to see a sequel/reboot of a classic 90s game come out that was just decent and backwardly reverent about its source (e.g. the devs of these games thought dx = crawl through vents and doom = metal music)
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imo, Doom 2016 found a pretty good balance of mixing older conventions with new style feel. For me I enjoyed the weapon tuning in it much more than Eternal. Weapon choice was much more softer. Any weapon could be your favorite and you could find strategies to stick to it with a few back ups. The high level play was to know how to cycle your weapons for each encounter to maximize ammo efficiency but there was enough room to play around it if you didn’t match up to that skill threshold. Eternal much more directly asks you to develop that skill with little deviation. The monsters have so many hard counters and the ammo pools are so thin you are on a constant razors edge to dance the way the game wants you to leaving less room for player expression.
I also personally enjoyed the writing in 2016 more than Eternal. The former had just the right amount of flippancy for video game plots but still having to settle with being in one. Eternal just went in the opposite direction and went full ham but also played to much reverence to the stupidity asking you to believe it wasn’t as stupid as it was.
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That mobile game was pretty fun
i can understand not liking 2016 as much as classic Doom for the arena-style combat, but yeah, the game opens with an attempt at lore, which results in Doom Guy ripping the intercom off and breaking the signal, which i think was pretty perfect insofar as letting the player know how invested we should be and how invested our main character was. knowing Doom Guy is just some kind of anarchic agent of pure ultraviolence is a lot more fun than whatever was going on in Eternal
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RIP & TEAR & WATCH THIS INFO DUMP CUTSCENE
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I liked the warhammer space marine influence on the combat in 2016
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2016’s plot being a meatheaded parody of System Shocklikes (especially Bioshock) and their love of ‘can you believe the guy you are working for is evil???’ twists is still one of my favorite things about it.
Yeah of course he’s evil, of course doom guy doesn’t trust him. There is no attempt to twist that, he’s just some asshole expositing at you.
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i loved Doom 2016, i loved how brisk everything felt, how solid all the weapons felt, an almost Nintendo-ian gameplay loop of getting health back from melee attacks and the fact that they had all the assets and environments for a game that took itself too seriously, and it didn’t, especially compared to new Wolfensteins it was sandwiched in between when released, which were a lot more slower, deliberate, and story heavy. i grew up not with a nostalgia for OG Doom, but rather a fondness for twitch heavy quick FPSes that emphasized movement and flow above all else. i mean 2016 Doom had that Arcade Mode, just to let you know how well all the levels were designed around that kind of style.
I never finished Doom Eternal, i think i got like a couple hours through it
I could maybe get into this new one if it felt less like a slog
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Yeah everyone covered it, I’d say my one real criticism of Noom is how in the back third it kind of forgets about Doomguy hating story and evil scientist man’s excuses and starts to buy into the dumb story on its own terms. Like an evil miasma of Plot is constantly assaulting the game’s bubble of cool rage action and it eventually leaks in and poisons the place.
Before Eternal released, I had a distant hope that they would cure this problem, but of course it instead was presaging things to come.
I still think it’s the best designed arena fps… ever? I mean I could see preferring Serious Sam 1+2 for its purity, or like Devil Daggers and its crazy spiritual sequel I can never remember the name of for pure arcadiness, but Noom has just got the total package. If you don’t like it you’ll probably never like any game built like it, I’d say.
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Hugo Martin was on IGN yesterday and he said Dark Ages is basically the game described in the the doom slayer testament, the lore dumps from Doom 2016. Previously in another interview he described watching the reaction to Doom 2016 and recounted seeing a streamer playing the game and each time he found a lore dump he’d open it up and narrate it all dramatically for his audience and he saw people eating it up so that’s the reason they leaned into that stuff more in Doom Eternal.
In the IGN thing from yesterday someone asked him about the story in Dark Ages and he said it’s more in the forefront this time and not just relegated to lore dumps.
So blame game streamers and their audiences I guess.
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Well they definitely say all the right things in this interview. Gameplay-wise they’re starting over again and going back making it more like the original game. Slow moving projectiles that hit hard for you bob and weave through and big huge levels that wrap back around on themselves. New guns and items right from the start that you’ve never used before. I’m certainly interested.
There will probably be a lore dump implying the Quake 1 ranger is doomguy’s dad lol.
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I feel like this is the reason behind everything I don’t like about modern games
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Way to design your game for the people who aren’t buying it.
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Maybe I’m glad they haven’t gotten around to Quake yet
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Maybe a replay of Doom 2016 is in order, post-Eternal, post-playing through all of Quake 2 and Doom 1 and 2 last year. Might feel different about it.
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Eternal is awful for many reasons, the foremost being that it simply can’t have level design anymore thanks to the strict ammo limits and tightly-wound combat loop, so every battle takes place in a redressed Longest Yard and your downtime is spent doing boring Mario platforming. It’s a badly-designed game that is style-over-substance, which means the writing and mood has to carry the game. Aw shit.
2016 still has some awkward corners to bang your knees on, real levels (with ammo pickups even!), a less restrictive combat structure, and two really good non-singleplayer modes: Snapmap (seriously why isn’t Doom Maker a game yet???) and the Multiplayer (probably the single best modernization of the Quake multiplayer formula). It does succumb to plot-rot near the end but at least it has some interesting things going on.
Dark Ages I was prepared to hate alongside my friend Joe (we are the Eternal Haters) but after reading interviews with Hugo Martin, it seems tentatively interesting? Apparently the pace is gonna be slowed down a bit with a bigger emphasis on kiting and managing big groups of enemies instead of the whack-a-mole key-and-lock combat of Eternal. I have converted from “I will hate this game” to “I am neutral about this game”. Maybe it will be good…
Instead of constructing a multi-tiered arena (which is badass) to keep you moving, because that’s what movement means in a “modern” doom game, and we ground it, slow it way down, and create patterns in the attacks, then that’s the jungle gym of attacks you’ll play with, sort of like a 3D shmup
Here’s my ultimate feeling about Doom Eternal.
Hyper Demon, a truly god tier level game
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The thing is, id Software has landed in this medieval war against Hell not out of convenience but out of a need to change the fundamentals of play. To return to where Doom became legend two decades ago. “At the start of every development cycle, I play the original Doom again, and have the team play it too. I realized that we still didn’t hit the mark” says creative director Hugo Martin. And that is where Doom: The Dark Ages was born.
The cause of this epiphany? The projectiles. The nightmarish gauntlet of floating, homing hazards. “I noticed right away how slow those projectiles move – it just dawned on me that that is the maze. The movement is more horizontal as you weave your way between the projectiles, and every projectile mattered in the original Doom.”
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I delight in the ways this man looks at Doom and can see bowser castle obstacle courses in everything
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