DOOM Eternal - the sequel to the 2016 reboot - now with The Ancient Gods DLC

[Israfael]

Don't think you can compare a game with auto-aim and different sort of dynamic to a bona fide single-player competitive online arena shooter. It's simply too different, you need different skillsets here.

 

[Multidirectional]

Well, I was wondering about the overall difficulty, since folks seem to praise it a lot in that regard.

You shouldn't lack challenge playing it on Nightmare. It gets easier once you get more upgrades in but the game also does a decent job of ramping things up until the end.

 

[Ol' Willy]

game with auto-aim and different sort of dynamic

This mod is very OP, but the difficulty can be tweaked

 

[Lyric Suite]

How hard is Doom Eternal compared to some Doom megawads on UV?

Impossible to compare.

Both nuDoom games play out like Quake Arena with monsters instead of enemy players and enemy piñatas instead of health or ammo pick ups (so that level design matters even less than it does on those online shooters), like i said. Every fight in nuDoom consists in you going around like an headless chicken trying to get an opening on some of the nastier demons (which you have to prioritize) in the few milliseconds of time you have to take aim before the entire horde gets on your ass. The cacophony is amplified by the fact the enemies have a vast array of nasty attacks and a pretty smart move set. It's probably the most "impressive" aspect of the game, from a technical point of view. I remember toying around an imp in Doom 2016 and the array of things they can do is actually remarkable. They can shot you from the front with either a normal fireball or a charged up one. Or they can shoot while strafing around. If they are running away from you they can hurl a ball from behind their backs without stopping. If you are behind a corner they can jump, hurl a ball, and jump back before you can shoot back (the game is designed to punish popeamole hard), and finally they can climb or hang from shit so they can shoot you from basically every direction.

And every monster is like this, and many of them also have devastating melee attacks that makes getting close to them a very bad idea. A couple can even create environmental hazards.

So the game is "hard" in the sense you have an immense number of variables (and the AI never fucks up either, which i guess is a testament to their coding) so that you are not allowed at any point to take it easy and the only rest you get is when you are performing a take down. The "bad" part of the gameplay is that in this cacophony you can often die through no fault of your own. It isn't unusual to die because you dodged an enemy attack only to fly straight into another. Second, your running speech is much lower than what it should be, which makes you feel like you have an artificial handicap. You have some utilities that helps you with mobility, but if your running speed was the same as it was in the original Doom the game wouldn't be half as hard as it is. And finally, the game forces you to use certain tools for specific situations and you get punished if you deviate from how the designers decided you should play the game. If you see a spider, you need to take out their turrets asap with the scope rifle or a sticky bomb. Before you get your hands on the more powerful weapons, you are forced to hurl a sticky bomb down the throat of every Cacodemon you meet or they'll never go down. Pinkies will take forever as they have way too much armor if you shoot them from the front but you can bypass that with a blood punch (an attack that recharges with take downs). If you don't have that you have to freeze them and shoot them from behind, or if you are good enough get them with the remote detonate mod from the rocket launcher. You can neuter the Mancubuses if you shoot their arms off. You can knock the armor off the Cyber Mancubuses with a blood bunch making them a lot easier to kill and so on and so forth.

Basically, the game has very little relation to classic Doom. It's not a bad game in so far as modern shooters go. At least it requires skill and nu-id soft seem to have a sadistic streak to them which in the current age of decline is certainly refreshing to see. But don't expect anything like Doom and if you like level design in your shooters forget about it as there's very little here. All the exploration revolves around finding secrets and most of them consist of shit like plastic dolls and the like, which is pretty fucking retarded but i was compelled to get them all just because at least you get a change to explore the level, for whatever that's worth.

 

[Lyric Suite]

game with auto-aim and different sort of dynamic

This mod is very OP, but the difficulty can be tweaked

Still can't be compared because the mobility and variety of attacks of monsters in nuDoom is more advanced. Running in a circle while never changing weapon like the guy does in your video doesn't actually work. Your situation feels a lot more precarious in nuDoom than it does in even those insane megawads. So in a sense nuDoom is actually harder than old Doom, but the reason for that is that you can then just recharge yourself with a take down meaning the game ends up being easier as a result, paradoxically enough. Nightmare difficulty is the only exception because monsters do so much damage there that you really have to get into online shooter mode for that, up to having special keybinds for your weapons exactly like you would in Quake 3 because you need to be able to switch attacks on the fly really fast or you are dead within seconds (you can also override the recoil animation of the heavier weapons by switching between them fast, allowing you to get "free" shots to heavy demons).

Here's an example of how the game plays out with online shooter level of skill:



Which, BTW, the fact the gameplay is so centered on arena fighting makes the lack of proper multiplayer really, really, REALLY infuriating. The game is already fucking half-way there in the single player itself the only reason i can think of why they didn't go all the way with a proper online mode is that they didn't want to run into the problem of people playing on consoles getting their ass raped by people playing on PC.

 

[Lyric Suite]

BTW, regarding some of the "unfairness" of the game, i would say the fact an iron mode exists and that people play them is proof that you can actually git gud enough to a point you can actually avoid ever dying. This shows that even though the gameplay is often chaotic to a point you feel you are dying to random shit beyond your control, there's really no "unfair" difficulty in this game or it wouldn't be possible to do no dying or no hit runs.

 

[Average Manatee]

The gameplay isn't that different between Doom slaughter maps and DoomE. In both cases the focus is figuring out a circular path and not getting cornered. DoomE is much, much more lenient about it though, with how many extra movement options you have and how you can constantly leech health/armor/ammo to make up for mistakes. There's also panic-button options like the freeze grenades (basically a free win against anything hard), and later the BFG (BFG is just a bonus in nuDoom where Doom wads never give you a BFG unless you are meant to use it).

 

[Ol' Willy]

This is the answers I was looking for, mates. So, it's slaughtermap level design + more enemy variety + more enemy mobility, which equals liquid assrape; but to counter this player is given some quite powerful tools. This kind of gameplay philosophy is not bad at all.

 

[Ash]

Any gameplayfag that rightly expects a challenge and is a veteran of FPS should gain some satisfaction on Ultra Violence and Nightmare -- I know I did. If you want to go one step further you can try ultra nightmare but that's for people with severe autism (iron man mode) that don't mind losing many, many hours of progress many, many times instead of playing different games once they were done with UV/Nightmare. It's a good game but not that good.

It's overall tamer than slaughterfest wads in terms of enemy count and asshole enemy placement, but AI is smarter and there are no manual saves - survive each designed gauntlet and earn your monocle.

FWIW been playing shooters (and games in general) obsessively since I first played the original Doom in the 90s, and have quite a bit of experience with slaughterwads too.

 

[Israfael]

Which, BTW, the fact the gameplay is so centered on arena fighting makes the lack of proper multiplayer really, really, REALLY infuriating

Yeah, I thought the same when I was going through DE on nightmare in the spring or when it came out, don't remember it. But then there's too many tools (and frost grenade would be outright removed due to how OP it is, although you can make something out of it with the punch or dash breaking the stun or something like that) that are too OP against an opponent with the typical health pool of a player. Also, it's a big unknown if this engine can handle spacious environments and unpredictable number of entities on screen (I think nu-Doom 2016 had some sort of hard limit encoded in it, but it might have been map generator only thing)

 

[Lyric Suite]

This is the answers I was looking for, mates. So, it's slaughtermap level design + more enemy variety + more enemy mobility, which equals liquid assrape; but to counter this player is given some quite powerful tools. This kind of gameplay philosophy is not bad at all.

Better than Call of Dooty, that's for sure.

 

[OctavianRomulus]

This isn't 2 hour 20 dollar DLC. No, the first level alone will take you two hours to beat and there are 4. This sort of feels like a sequel actually. Honestly, another developer would have charged 60 dollars for this. You give the money, you get the product. No bullshit. I wish more companies did this. Some skins in some games cost just as much.

So we already went from "60$ for 8 hours?!" to "at least it's not 2 hours!"

For a shooter of this kind, this is a lot of content.

Also, the base game is around twice as long as 8 hours.

 

[DalekFlay]

So we already went from "60$ for 8 hours?!" to "at least it's not 2 hours!"

Length is a massively overrated value decider.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/doom-eternal-the-ancient-gods-part-one-review/

DOOM ETERNAL: THE ANCIENT GODS – PART ONE REVIEW
Hell boils over.

If the Doom Slayer is a race car, as id Software has described him, then The Ancient Gods – Part One is a series of victory laps around three new courses. It picks up right at the finish line of Doom Eternal, and the experience is akin to waking up at the wheel of a Ferrari screaming down the track at 200mph. It's precisely as alarming and exhilarating as that sounds.

You inherit the Slayer plus all the extras, souped up with weapon mods and ability runes picked up during Eternal's original campaign. And despite having completed it, I spent the first 20 minutes thoroughly embarrassing myself, thumping at a reload key that doesn't exist and never has. It's the shooter equivalent of flicking into sports mode and realising you've activated the windscreen wipers instead.

id Software, like the Slayer, is at the height of its powers. 2016's Doom saw the studio reinvent the wheel—quite literally, building the game around spinning arenas that set you in constant motion. Ever since, it's been coming up with inventive ways to thrust a stick in the spokes, tripping up players by disrupting the formula.

Doom Eternal's most notorious example was the Marauder, a relentless runner who pursued the Slayer like a shadow, if your shadow owned an axe and a bright-orange attack dog. He returns in The Ancient Gods, and exemplifies id's trend towards enemies who can only be defeated in highly specific fashion. Take the Turrets, new fixed placement shooters that appear like miniature Eyes of Sauron. A couple of shots through the scope of your assault rifle will burst the orb—but take too long during targeting and the ball will retreat inside its pillar, surviving until you can loop around for another try.

Then there's the Spirit, which makes a ghostbuster of the Slayer. Mostly invisible, you'll know it by the blue aura that encircles its host—as well as the super-speed, hyper-aggressive assaults on your person. Once the host is killed, the possessing Spirit bursts out, and you have a few seconds to zap it with the plasma rifle's microwave beam. That would be an easy enough task were it just the two of you—but in Doom, you're always surrounded. If you're tardy with the beam or get distracted, then the Spirit will hop into another host and you'll have to begin again.

You would think this kind of step-by-step enemy disposal would trap you into a process—as if shooting by instruction manual. But the Spirit presents more tactical choice, not less: do you focus your firepower on the host, and hope you can follow through with the plasma? Or demolish the most powerful demons on the periphery first, ensuring there are no large homes left for the ghost to haunt?

The Turret is a sign that the membrane between Doom's fight and exploration phases is weakening. While huge arena fights still provide the punctuation of each level, new threats conspire to push you through the intervening corridors. In the festering Blood Swamps, battered by acid rain, pustules rise from the sodden earth. They bulge as you pass, and blister with a roar if you hang about, causing damage. The rising fog hurts, too, pushing you to keep pace in a Prince of Persia-style platforming puzzle. And remember those annoying tentacles in Doom Eternal? Their gigantic sister lives here, and she heard what you said.

As a consequence, The Ancient Gods is Doom at its most oppressive and intimidating. If there's little respite outside combat, you certainly won't find any in the centrepiece battles, where id holds an occult candle to your arse until your pants start to singe.

There were moments, after several minutes in the mosh pit, where the appearance of a chainsaw-endowed Doom Slayer or two towering Tyrants or three Barons of Hell left me buckling emotionally, not knowing how I'd keep up the act that I was the Slayer, the only thing the demons fear. The truth is that The Ancient Gods regularly frightened me with its intensity.

Ironically, only the Marauder provides the closest thing to a break—despite its first appearance triggering an involuntary, out-loud "oh no". It now triggers the strongest muscle memory, and its patterns are so predictable they're almost comforting in a storm.

If both the imps and the Slayer are quaking, pun intended, the only truly fearless party involved in The Ancient Gods is id Software. Unbowed by the naysayers who objected to jumping sequences and lore, it's pushed forward with both. This is no side story, delivering critical blows to major characters from the past half-a-decade of Doom, while artfully consolidating new additions to keep things simple. There's even some meta-comedy, courtesy of a UAC intern who has a direct view of your HUD and its revelations.

It's hard to complain that Doom has plot when it results in environments like The Holt, where digital plant life blooms against the backdrop of a bloodsoaked forest; where, if you chip away at the bark of the trees, it reveals gold beneath. Heaven has done right by id's art department.

The biggest worry going into The Ancient Gods was that Doom's momentum might be stalled by the absence of Mick Gordon, its composer since 2016, whose hell choirs and industrial crunch have become as central to the series as the Super Shotgun. It's a fitting compliment to Gordon's work that he's been replaced by not one man, but two—and while there's nothing as striking as BFG Division soundtracking the Ancient Gods, Andrew Hulshult and David Levy do an admirable job of matching Gordon's pulsing, downtuned precedent.

The Ancient Gods – Part One is a virtuostic display from id Software, then, and asks the same from you. The only question is how far it makes sense to turn up the temperature. After finishing these three campaign missions on Ultra-Violence difficulty, I was so exhausted I couldn't quite tell whether I'd enjoyed myself—synapses fried by sheer mental and physical challenge.

THE VERDICT
89

DOOM ETERNAL
A frankly terrifying exercise in pushing Doom as far as it can go.

 

[Lyric Suite]

So satisfying to see gayming journos squirm.

 

[sullynathan]

I'm 69% sure death match etc was cut out because it wasn't received well in D44M 2016

 

[Lyric Suite]

It wasn't received well because it was shit. But maybe the problem is that it was shit because they put so much of their resources on the single player and didn't have much left for the multi, so they figured why bother.

 

[Caim]

The multiplayer for 2016 was outsourced to Certain Affinity, who did multiplayer modes for several of the Halo and Call of Duty games. Think of them as an off-brand Raven Software.

 

[Durandal]

The new DLC is good and shows some glimpses of Doom Eternal's true potential whereas the main campaign was tame in comparison, the same way that Plutonia started going all out with the (new) enemies in Doom 2. Here you start fully upgraded, so there are no RPG systems and trawling through pause menus to fuck with the pacing. You don't get the Crucible either (you left it in the Icon of Simp's head at the end of the base campaign), so now you have to actually engage with Archviles and Tyrant in earnest instead of using your delete button (although the BFG still exists and the Ice Bomb and Lock-on Burst deletes them about as easily, but oh well).

The first level in the DLC, the UAC Oil Rig, is the most straightforward of the bunch, and mostly exists to serve as a warm-up for those who haven't played DE for some months. The encounters here start to ask much more out of you: Cyber-Mancubi start appearing as often as regular Mancubi, Barons start appearing on the regular, Carcasses and Shieldguys feel like they are in every encounter. Superheavies just start appearing even in the small corridors inbetween the arenas. But more importantly, the arenas get a lot more cramped. You don't get as much room to run/dash circles around enemies, environmental hazards such as electrified floors appear more frequently, and heavy demons are able to more effectively pressure you now that you have less space to work with. Hell, the second Marauder fight in this level takes place in a janitor closet. A trend that will be more apparent in the later levels is that the outer rims of the arena now tend to provide less sightlines on the center of the arena (where most of the enemies and fodder are). So whereas in the base campaign you could often peck away at enemies from the outer rims of the arena, now you have to move towards the center if you want to farm resources off fodder and don't want to encounter a Hell Knight around the corner.

There is only one new enemy type introduced in this level (not counting the shark) in the form of the Turret. It's an Ambient Enemy that serves to be a nuisance, but not necessarily in a good way. Much like the Tentacles you can only damage it when it pops up, and it pops down when you hit it/when you're too close to it/when you look at it too long. It takes at least two high-power shots to kill (like a Precision Bolt or a Ballista shot), so you'll inevitably be forced to wait for it to pop back up. The underlying idea behind this design is that because the Turret itself isn't a major threat and because you usually have ten other more threatening demons to worry about, you're better off focusing your attention on them instead of waiting for this lowly Turret to pop back up. But usually you can find a safe moment where you can focus on the Turret, and eventually can do nothing but wait to kill it, which isn't very engaging. It would be nice if there was a way to immediately bait them into popping up, or if they could be instantly destroyed with a Blood Punch regardless of their state.

One rather annoying thing about this level is the underwater swimming sections, which are just a waste of time and involve even less player interaction than the platforming sections. Doomguy's oxygen is suddenly limited now (lol) and you have to get a wetsuit to breathe underwater, which is just a repurposed radsuit. At least the radsuit offered interesting possibilities by creating a limit to how long you could stay on acid floors without taking damage (even though the base campaign never really tried to play more with this idea in big encounters), but the wetsuit has no such flexibility unless underwater combat ever becomes a thing.

The second level, the Blood Swamps, is where shit gets real. First you get these plants everywhere that detonate after a second or two if you get near them, and leave behind some acid on the floor that damages and slows you down; making you stay airborne and move around more. The second is that there's now cloaked Whiplashes and GIANT Tentacles. Whiplashes aren't as threatening as they were at first if you know how to quickswap a little, so cloaking them so they can sneak into your face does help make them more threatening. Giant Tentacles are just scaled-up Tentacles, but it does fill an extra role in the bestiary by being able to prevent you from safely approaching a much larger area. The third is gimmicks, And That's A Good Thing! I've always argued that nuDoom and Eternal should have employed way more gimmicks for their arenas, because it allows arenas to be more distinct. The new Doom games cannot create variety through different monster placement and level layout to the same extent that the old Doom games could, because the enemy AI in the new Dooms is simply too chaotic and unpredictable to create handcrafted levels around without the enemies doing something you never intended. In old Doom the levels had to compensate for the simple AI, and in the new Dooms it's sort of the other way around. Obviously the arenas in the new Doom games aren't literally copypasted. Elements like heavy demon placement, how much fodder demons there are to farm resources off, and the layout of the arena do affect how you play, but not necessarily in a noticeable way. If you can get by in an arena fight using roughly the same strategy of the last arena, it can't help but feel repetitive.

But here you've got gimmicks that affect how you have to strategize on a macro-level. So you get fog that doesn't let you see more than five feet ahead of you, making long-range weapons unreliable and having you try and get the high ground (by Meathookjumping) so you can see clearly above the fog, all while the high ground is littered with the aforementioned plants. So you get a section that passively damages you unless you stay in the protective bubble of a wolf familiar, all while enemies come from every direction to invade your tiny safe space, especially demons like Shieldguys, Pinkies and Barons that are especially a massive pain to deal with in close quarters. There is also a section with a Buff Totem that is locked until you kill a buffed Marauder. I honestly wish arenas would more regularly use Buff Totems in this fashion where you are forced to fight buffed enemies, instead of how they're normally used, where on your first try you ignore all the enemies and are looking around the arena to find the damn thing, and on subsequent attempts you just beeline towards wherever the Buff Totem is.

The biggest gamechanger so far is the Spirit. It's the Summoner from nuDoom, except now it possesses enemies, which: quadruples their health, makes them immune to any kind of faltering or Ice Bombs, buffs their movement and attack speed, and removes their weak points. What's great about Spirits is how they allow the entire enemy roster to be recontextualized into essentially new enemies. Possessed Arachnotrons force you to deal with their turret and make you rely more on the arena layout to break line of sight and avoid having to play Touhou with it. Possessed Hell Knights and Barons of Hell will simply deal unavoidable damage if you do not keep your distance at all times. Possessed Tyrants and Pain Elementals are the closest thing DE has to a Chaingunner. Fighting these makes you realize just how easy you had it up until now by being able to control enemies with falters and destroying their weak points, so enemies that can ignore all of your bullshit really pushes you to improve your fundamentals, and allows other nuisance enemies like Carcasses and Shieldguys to be even more relevant threats.

The only way to kill a Spirit is to kill its host and then lock it down with the Microwave Beam. If you don't kill it in time, it will possess another nearby enemy and make you go through the same dance all over again. Having an enemy only be killable with one weapon is particular is certainly controversial, especially if it's the weapon that most considered to be the worst in the game, but I think in this case it is a net positive and not just a matter of color-coding to force variety. While you use the Microwave Beam you are slowed down, which makes you extra vulnerable to enemies around you--especially melee-focused enemies. This forces you to ask whether finishing off the possessed demon in this time and position is a good idea, and whether you shouldn't first create a situation where you can take care of the Spirit without getting interrupted. The other aspect is that it makes you be more mindful of your cell ammo in particular, because by the time the Spirit pops up you want to have enough juice in the can to take care of it in one cycle before it possesses something else. So now you have to be more careful about using the Ballista in your quickswap combos. These dynamics wouldn't be as present if you could just shoot down the Spirit with any weapon while being able to move freely and not having to worry as much about ammo. Paradoxically, limiting you to one weapon in this case results in more interesting gameplay than if you could use anything.

However, I do have one issue with this implementation of Spirits, which is that it puts a ceiling on how many possessed enemies you could reasonably deal with at once. Enemies being able to spawn pre-possessed allows for way more variation in level design, but because you have to make yourself vulnerable with the Microwave Beam to kill the Spirits, you can only have so many possessed enemies at once before things become bullshit overwhelming, whereas without the need to microwave Spirits the level designers could be a lot more flexible in this regard. And because you can only have so many Spirits at once, you probably don't want to waste them on fodder demons, even though there is some potential in having to fight larger groups of possessed fodder demons.

The third level, The Holt, is less overtly gimmicky, but it still has enough in terms of unorthodox surprises and set-ups to keep things fresh, such as an arena interspersed with pylons that damage you if you touch them, an arena where the floor is lava and you're surrounded by flying enemies, and a fight against a possessed Tyrant which is a MAJOR pain since you only get 1 (one) respawning fodder enemy to work with. That's a common theme with The Holt, where a large part of the difficulty stems that there's way less fodder spawns for you to farm resources off, as opposed to the UAC Oil Rig where fodder would often clump together for you to easily ignite and detonate into a flaming ball of +100 armor. It means you can't rely on your generic fallback strategies as much and have to be more mindful of doing unnecessarily risky shit. The lack of fodder to Chainsaw for ammo is compensated for with the presence of Makyr Drones. Speaking of them, on launch shooting their head wouldn't drop any health, but only ammo. But id later "fixed" this to drop both. I find this unfortunate, because it does away with the dynamics of 'do I headshot them for ammo or do I set up a Glory Kill for health' and keeping them alive as floating ammo packs for when you really need it, whereas in a level with a draught of fodder and health items, going for a Makyr Drone's head is not even a question.

This level also introduces the Blood Makyr, which is basically a Turret that can fly around, except it fires damaging AoE zones that also slow you down, so it's more of a relevant threat. It's invulnerable to everything until it attacks, so damaging it again involves more waiting. At least it dies in one shot to the head instead of two. Like I said before, I could tolerate them more if there was a way to sidestep their immunity by playing proactively, such as being able to bait them into dropping their guard (f.e. by deploying a mod that slows you down like Mobile Turret or Auto-Fire and then quickswapping to a weapon that can oneshot them) or by hitting them with a fully charged Destroyer Blade or something. That said, I do like having a supporting enemy that you simply cannot swat away in the middle of a fight while there's more threatening enemies around. I just wish dealing with it wasn't largely outside the player's control.

The boss fight against Samur is the best in the game, the best in the franchise, and honestly one of the best of the genre (an admittedly low bar), for it is one of the few FPS bosses I can describe with full confidence as being truly... average. What makes it so average is that it actually tests you on your mastery over the core gameplay instead of forcing a different and more limited playstyle on you at the eleventh hour. So the boss fight heavily relies on spawning in regular demons to pressure you from multiple directions and lock you in, and the boss actually challenges your aim by constantly zipping around every which way. The constant teleporting also has the added benefit on making the Lock-on Burst unreliable, so you can't rely on that crutch for this fight. This is in stark contrast to the Khan Makyr fight where you could just spam Lock-on Burst or your other favourite weapon at a static target, the waiting game that is the Gladiator fight, or the clusterfuck that is the Icon of Sin. That said, the first three phases of the fight are a total doozy.

The first phase doesn't have many heavy adds (or many adds at all) to keep you on your toes, and Samur isn't that big of a threat himself with his easily avoidable projectile spread, so you can get away with just focusing down Samur for most of the fight. Samur does span Eyes that move in a fixed path and deal damage if you're nearby, which are neat and make focusing down Samur a bit more complicated, but unfortunately he only spawns these when you get him down to about 50% health, so you won't notice their presence that much for this phase. The second phase has Samur become invincible and make you fight a Possessed Mancubus and Hell Knight at once, but this phase is hamstrung by the fact that there's a pillar in the middle of the arena which you can use to break line of sight between you and the Possessed Mancubus while you go deal with the Possessed Hell Knight first, so you're not even really fighting both at once. The third phase certainly has the setup to be good, the problem is that the Cacodemons don't spawn in at a fast enough rate/high enough amount to really put pressure on the limited amount of space you now have.

The fourth phase is when things actually start getting good. It's a repeat of the first phase, except now you have lasers slowly combing over the arena to give you a macro-level threat to keep in mind, there's a constantly respawning Blood Makyr to complicate things further, and the new layout of the arena is more vertical in a way that no longer gives you a clear oversight over the whole arena, which makes getting a line of sight on a speedy Samur way more difficult. Because of the raised platforms you also have less space to deal with Samur's attacks without falling to the bottom where the Blood Makyr and the rest of the adds are. The fifth phase now has you deal with a Possessed Pain Elemental and Possessed Dread Knight on top of a Blood Makyr, which is something that cost me a good half hour to beat. You really have to try this without crutches like superweapons or the Lock-on Burst to appreciate how intense this phase can be. A Possessed Pain Elemental is ridiculously accurate while the Dread Knight is being ridiculously aggressive, and all the while you're trying to find an opportunity where you can take care of the Spirit without the other Possessed enemy interfering. It really shows the potential of having to deal with multiple Possessed enemies, but I suppose we'll see more of that in TAG2.

I suppose having to predominantly fight minions in a boss fight instead of the boss itself may not be thematically satisfying, but for a game that's all about fighting multiple enemies at once it is only logical to incorporate this into your boss design. That said, I would have preferred there to be one last phase where you fight against Samur himself instead of more minions.

Overall, the DLC was great and highlights that there's still plenty of potential to be had in Doom Eternal's formula. I'm looking forward to TAG 2.

 

[OctavianRomulus]

Anyone else loved the fact that they doubled down on everything they did in Eternal? Game is too hard? We're making it harder. Don't like Marauders? Here's two of them. I'm sure they're making the game even harder in the next one and I kinda dread to think about it.

Only thing that pisses me off is that once again there are useless secrets. Cosmetic stuff is cool but you should ALWAYS get something useful from finding secrets. 2016 did it right with its collectibles because they gave you weapon points.

There was also this cool red keycard secret in the first area where you had to backtrack but it's full of ammo, which you can get fully restocked from just killing a zombie...at least put a life or some BFG ammo in there. Great way to ruin a good secret. If something you pick up doesn't contribute to the gameplay it doesn't really "exist" if you get what I am saying.

Finally, this might be just my severe autism speaking but anyone else just can't stand permanently unopenable doors in games, especially games that have some sort of exploration? I mean the ones that are just scenery. It fucking pisses me off when I see them in games. As a level designer, to me doors are ways to make the level space more interesting. If I see a door I wanna see what's behind it!! They think they are making the level feel larger but they're not fooling anyone.

 

[UserNamer]

Anyone else loved the fact that they doubled down on everything they did in Eternal? Game is too hard? We're making it harder. Don't like Marauders? Here's two of them. I'm sure they're making the game even harder in the next one and I kinda dread to think about it.

Only thing that pisses me off is that once again there are useless secrets. Cosmetic stuff is cool but you should ALWAYS get something useful from finding secrets. 2016 did it right with its collectibles because they gave you weapon points.

There was also this cool red keycard secret in the first area where you had to backtrack but it's full of ammo, which you can get fully restocked from just killing a zombie...at least put a life or some BFG ammo in there. Great way to ruin a good secret. If something you pick up doesn't contribute to the gameplay it doesn't really "exist" if you get what I am saying.

Finally, this might be just my severe autism speaking but anyone else just can't stand permanently unopenable doors in games, especially games that have some sort of exploration? I mean the ones that are just scenery. It fucking pisses me off when I see them in games. As a level designer, to me doors are ways to make the level space more interesting. If I see a door I wanna see what's behind it!! They think they are making the level feel larger but they're not fooling anyone.

I just don't like how places are designed in eternal including all the invisible barriers, there is no exploration per se and no sense of place at all. And it annoys me how they place these bulky crates everywhere just to fill out the environment

Also I still don't understand why failing a jumping puzzle chips away at your life, just reload the checkpoint or just respawn me at the beginning of it. And there should be a way to disable the red screen when you are low on health that was especially annoying when playing famine mode

Overall I still like the game and the combat

Another note I have I thought all boss fights in the main campaign were lame. Still have to finish the dlc though

 

[Lyric Suite]

Consoles. Reloading is anathema for them, too much of an hassle to hit the back button and navigate to the menu.

Lack of level design is a feature with those games and expecting them to improve on that any time soon is a waste of time. It's a lost cause. Take the game for what it is or don't play it because they'll likely never change course.

 

[Jezal_k23]

Level design quality is the area where Eternal suffered the biggest losses in comparison to 2016. While 2016 level design was not interesting overall, it featured a few highlights like the Foundry or Argent Facility. Meanwhile Eternal is just linear and boring. They did make the arenas fun, but the level design is just so stupid.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Writing was better in Doom 2016 as well. Not that it matters in a game like this but it's still annoying.

 

[Ash]

DLC is real good. This is pretty fucking hard even on Ultra Violence. For reference, I didn't have too much trouble beating the base game on nightmare, though it was a good challenge. I can imagine Ancient Gods being above the majority of people's skill level, on anything beyond normal at least. Good. Didn't expect such incline with Eternal, and the DLC continues that trend. Maybe there is hope for AAA games afterall.

Fuck 2016. It's merely good for what it is. Eternal is better in almost every way. An actual worthy modern FPS.