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

copebot

Learned
Joined
Dec 27, 2020
Messages
387
I heard the DLC is cheap interms of difficulty? Worth?

It's not cheap, it's just harder than regular Eternal because there's no real character progression except for some extra runes. In the base game, you start outpacing the encounters just because you keep getting more HP and fancier weapons. In the expansion, you get forced into unusual situations and small arenas all the time so you can't just run circles around an arena healing and regenerating ammo. Almost everything can be dealt with with some planning and thinking, but there are fewer situations that you can just deal with by moving around a lot.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Vote Marauder for fun zone: https://www.pcgamer.com/doom-eternals-director-says-the-marauder-is-good-actually/

Doom Eternal director says the Marauder is good, actually
"All he does is steer you into the fun zone."

The Marauder is a dangerous tipping point for a lot of Doom Eternal players. It's the first enemy in the series that demands you fight on its own terms, rather than rely on the usual run-and-gun strategy that defined the last couple decades of Doom. It's jarring, easing up on the trigger to carefully dance around the demonic warrior, waiting for the green flash just before the axe comes down to get in a perfectly timed counter shot.

And even then, you're only afforded a few seconds to deal damage before the shield comes back up and the dance begins again. Toss the Marauder in an arena with Doom Eternal's other demons, and suddenly the player has to invert tactics at a moment's notice: aggressive and efficient with the usual fodder, while restrained and reactive with the Marauder.

Vice called the Marauder "Doom Eternal's biggest indulgence and greatest failing." YouTuber SkillUp called the Marauder "... the only objectively terrible thing in the entire Doom franchise at this point." Even we PC Gamer editors are split on the guy (I'm pro axe-guy). It's no surprise some players don't like the change of pace, but Doom Eternal director Hugo Martin stands by the Marauder, telling PC Gamer, "It is actually crystallizing everything about the game".

In defense of the Marauder

The most basic principle the Marauder is meant to teach players, according to Martin, is weapon swapping. Martin says the Marauder falters for a specific amount of time to allow for at least one shot with most weapons, but just long enough for two shots if the player swaps to something else. Quicksilver number row players can get in three shots, and especially skilled players can combo weapons to take the Marauder out within a single stun phase.

Most players will never trivialize the Marauder though, and that sustained presence of danger was also by design. "The idea was that there would be one [enemy] that would command your respect, and then what that would do for the other [enemies] that when he is out on the floor," says Martin. Despite those broad shoulders and that hot red gaze, Martin says the Marauder is mostly there to help. "All he does is steer you into the fun zone."

What is the fun zone? "It's prioritizing enemy targets," says Martin. Doom Eternal is about clearing an arena as efficiently as possible and Martin says the Marauder essentially forces that process into overdrive. "Everything I was doing before he arrived, now I have to do it very quickly, because I need to fight him and clear the field of everyone else."

The Marauder's prescriptive weakness, countering its attacks to do damage during a stun, feeds into a greater common criticism of Doom Eternal. Some players feel Eternal restricts expressive play by forcing the player to closely manage resources refilled through specific means: Glory kills and blood punches for health, the chainsaw for ammo, the flame belch for armor. If there's a specific or most efficient way to solve most of Eternal's problems, then does that mean it's a less expressive or fun game? "It's not true," says Martin.

"To say that it is overly prescriptive is not accurate, because all of these things are skillshot opportunities," says Martin. "I don't always take out cacodemons with sticky bombs. Sometimes I take them out with grenades, and sometimes I just ballista-shotgun them into the ground. They die with a quickswap. The arbalest mod takes them out in one shot. You could throw a grenade in their mouth, you could obviously do the sticky bomb one. You could chaingun them, you could freeze them, you could lock-on rocket them. I mean, there's so many different ways. Actually, it's a game of pure creativity."

The Marauder, says Martin, is the keystone in this philosophy. In an arena it forces players to make cacodemon disintegration decisions faster, but it also represents the player's first major hurdle and departure from the more classic Doom strategy of constant movement and aggression. "The game asks you to think, it asks you to solve this, figure it out. And then when you solve it now you're God," Martin says of the Marauder. "You walk out of there, like, okay, who wants some of this?"

Martin has plenty of humility about what could've been done better, though. Telegraphing when the Marauder is vulnerable and for how long wasn't even clear to FPS expert and Twitch personality Shroud, who Martin watched fight the Marauder for the first time. "I remember sitting there watching Shroud do it, and he'd shoot him once."

If one of the best FPS players ever doesn't know or isn't encouraged to get more shots in, then something was clearly amiss. It's a big reason Martin updated the Marauder's dazed animation to more clearly signal vulnerability to the player. "It was too subtle to have people just notice that in his animation that he's wobbling. It's just like, dude, people are running for their lives, you know?"

The dissenting voices and imperfect telegraphs aren't holding players back though. According to Martin, despite the notorious difficulty, Doom Eternal's completion rate percentages are "much higher" than they were for Doom 2016. Whatever id Software's doing, and whatever you think about it, it's apparently working.

It's also why no one should expect Doom to play it safe ever again. Even though Doom Eternal and the Slayer Saga that started with Doom 2016 is wrapping with The Ancient Gods, Part 2, Martin expects we'll see similarly bold enemy designs in Doom's future, whatever that looks like. "I'm excited to see where we could go with the character in the future, or a character like that character."
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
Patron
Joined
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Messages
27,093
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
I'm not sure whether Doom Eternal is trying to be Halo or Warhammer 40k - but right now it seems to be failing at both. :/
 

Wunderbar

Arcane
Joined
Nov 15, 2015
Messages
8,809

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Todd the absolute madman managed to snuck Skyrim into doom dlc.
 

Ash

Arcane
Joined
Oct 16, 2015
Messages
6,235
That is like 10% less generic and bland fantasy theming over Skyrim, ergo probably not Todd's doing. Behold, there's actually colour!
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,173
Doom 2016 had a better aesthetic, i'm sorry to say, even if you could say grim dark is generic. This pastel looking shit just doesn't jibe with me.

Martin's doubling down on the Marauder shows exactly what i said about him. The guy is a stubborn bastard and that can work in the game's favor. The Marauder is all about exploiting a new variable, which goes in line with the general design philosophy of the whole game, which is about leaving no stone unturned when it comes to exploiting possibilities in terms of gameplay opportunities. Even the "vertical" design of the arenas is supposed to serve this overall quest to leave no redundant or vacant gameplay possibilities.

Which is not to say that all of his ideas are good. The jumping puzzles are a down grade from the the level exploration of Doom 2016 when it coms to filling downtime with shit to do. Martin doesn't obviously understand the role atmosphere had in the original, where moments of contemplatively and study followed intense action. He wants you to spaz out even between fights by jumping around like a retard and for this reason Eternal was more fatiguing than Doom 2016.

But i think overall the positives of his pigheadedness outweigh the negatives. In the pantheon of shit nu-shooters, nu-Doom stands as something unique. Martin is a mainstream auteur, if that makes sense. Seems like a contradiction but that's what he is.

What should be next for this series? Boss fights that are actually hard. That, i think, is the current lacuna in the series. Eternal improved that a bit compared to 2016 but it wasn't enough. He needs to go full Dark Souls with that shit or remove boss fights altogether. You can't have a game that is total rape when fighting normal enemies but turns into popamole early 2000 simplicity when fighting bosses. You have to go all the fucking way with this formula or else it won't work.

The Khan Makyr came closest to what i'm talking about. Icon of Sin was pretty bad, easier (considering all the ammo you get, with the Khan Makyr you had to actually fight for ammo) and the idea of the Icon being this giant monster was retarded.
 
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Kainan

Learned
Joined
Jul 24, 2020
Messages
191
Remember when Doom was about fighting monsters on moons?
That was in the old days, Unreal, when we didnt know much.

However, recently Professor Martin has discovered new things like: weapon switching and enemy prioritizing (actually the Fun Zone). We used to think this meant just that you have different gun and enemy types in a game (lol). Also some mindblowing stuff like using different guns on enemies ( you dont have to shoot them with the same gun always - creativity).

So no matter what we may think we have to admit, nothing will be the same for shooters after the Marauder Paradigm.
 

OctavianRomulus

Learned
Joined
Aug 21, 2019
Messages
480
Doom 2016 had a better aesthetic, i'm sorry to say, even if you could say grim dark is generic. This pastel looking shit just doesn't jibe with me.
.

I personally like it more too even though I also like Eternal. It had just the right amount of cheese. Eternal doubles down on it and then dials it up to 11.

I hope that after they put this current "incarnation" to rest they will reinvent the style yet again. I would love to see a Doom game with truly abstract, bizarre and quirky level design like SIGIL, Doom 2 and Doom 64. I used to dislike Doom 2's level art for how ugly it is but I've come to like it a lot. It's very strange and abstract and has a very particular atmosphere. It's very hard to put in words how it makes you feel and I like that.
 
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Israfael

Arcane
Joined
Sep 21, 2012
Messages
3,580
Installed TAG2 and played a bit. It seems to be easier (not sure, I've been trying UN yesterday, passed about half UACA without dying, pre-knowledge helps, I guess)), but lots of new dickery. People complained about the fog, the dog and the purple shit - they got all of it together with something to get some more on top of it. Gotta give Hugo and the team props for that, I laughed through whole that fight. There was also "radiation floor + speed buffed HKs" in a 2 square meter room fight before that, also fun.

The Khan Makyr came closest to what i'm talking about.
Khan Maykr is the easiest boss on nightmare, what are you talking about? And you probably never played the DLC, the last boss is pure AIDS in terms of difficulty.
 

Morenatsu.

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Joined
May 6, 2016
Messages
2,582
Location
The Centre of the World
Remember when Doom was about fighting monsters on moons?
That was in the old days, Unreal, when we didnt know much.

However, recently Professor Martin has discovered new things like: weapon switching and enemy prioritizing (actually the Fun Zone). We used to think this meant just that you have different gun and enemy types in a game (lol). Also some mindblowing stuff like using different guns on enemies ( you dont have to shoot them with the same gun always - creativity).

So no matter what we may think we have to admit, nothing will be the same for shooters after the Marauder Paradigm.
Okay, but what does that have do with the game being set in Skyrim?
 

Israfael

Arcane
Joined
Sep 21, 2012
Messages
3,580
Also, people complained about the colours and "Mario jumps", they now added a powerup (can't really call it a weapon) that makes you jump and slam the hammer, stunning the demons around you. They even get the cartoonish stars around their heads, lol :lol::salute: How was it said: your resistance makes my dick even harder? +M
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,173
Installed TAG2 and played a bit. It seems to be easier (not sure, I've been trying UN yesterday, passed about half UACA without dying, pre-knowledge helps, I guess)), but lots of new dickery. People complained about the fog, the dog and the purple shit - they got all of it together with something to get some more on top of it. Gotta give Hugo and the team props for that, I laughed through whole that fight. There was also "radiation floor + speed buffed HKs" in a 2 square meter room fight before that, also fun.

The Khan Makyr came closest to what i'm talking about.
Khan Maykr is the easiest boss on nightmare, what are you talking about? And you probably never played the DLC, the last boss is pure AIDS in terms of difficulty.

You are right i don't have the DLC yet. I keep forgetting that thing exists when talking about this game.

Khan Maykr was the hardest boss for me, but the others were piss easy so i don't know how much that's worth. It's the only boss that had me scramble like in the regular arenas. Icon of Sin throws arenas at you but like i said you get so much ammo it's not really that hard. I died a few times but that's about it.

I'm glad they followed through with the DLC by making the bosses actually hard. Like i said they either go all the way with this or not bother.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,173
Remember when Doom was about fighting monsters on moons?
That was in the old days, Unreal, when we didnt know much.

However, recently Professor Martin has discovered new things like: weapon switching and enemy prioritizing (actually the Fun Zone). We used to think this meant just that you have different gun and enemy types in a game (lol). Also some mindblowing stuff like using different guns on enemies ( you dont have to shoot them with the same gun always - creativity).

So no matter what we may think we have to admit, nothing will be the same for shooters after the Marauder Paradigm.

The game's aim is to force you into constant action with no "rest" zones of any kind.

It's like with death match. I remember when i replayed Quake 3 again, back when they released Quake Live, i had a lot of trouble getting in that kind of "zone" again because i hadn't played an online shooter for years (at the beginning i was actually struggling with the bots in the training levels lmao).

This game had me go through a similar ordeal. For a single player game, i think that's notable, especially in this day and age, but i can see why some people find that too tiring to deal with. Dark Souls isn't actually like this a closer point of comparison would be Sekiro, or Devil May Cry (which if i understand is where they ripped the Marauder out of in the first place).

Ultimately, the game feels overwhelming and straining until finger memory starts to play into it. Just like with an online shooter ultimately.
 

Vlajdermen

Arcane
Joined
Nov 19, 2017
Messages
2,039
Location
Catholic Serbia
Icon of Sin was pretty bad, easier (considering all the ammo you get, with the Khan Makyr you had to actually fight for ammo) and the idea of the Icon being this giant monster was retarded.
What bothers me about Icon of Sin is that it had all the ingredients for a good giant monster fight. Instead of fighting him from the top of a building, why not fight him from the top of multiple buildings, adding more traversal to the fight than running in and out of cover? This God of War shit has no place in Doom.
 

Kainan

Learned
Joined
Jul 24, 2020
Messages
191
Remember when Doom was about fighting monsters on moons?
That was in the old days, Unreal, when we didnt know much.

However, recently Professor Martin has discovered new things like: weapon switching and enemy prioritizing (actually the Fun Zone). We used to think this meant just that you have different gun and enemy types in a game (lol). Also some mindblowing stuff like using different guns on enemies ( you dont have to shoot them with the same gun always - creativity).

So no matter what we may think we have to admit, nothing will be the same for shooters after the Marauder Paradigm.
Okay, but what does that have do with the game being set in Skyrim?
Somehow i didnt register the last word in your post (moons). I thought you meant when things were simpler.

Remember when Doom was about fighting monsters on moons?
That was in the old days, Unreal, when we didnt know much.

However, recently Professor Martin has discovered new things like: weapon switching and enemy prioritizing (actually the Fun Zone). We used to think this meant just that you have different gun and enemy types in a game (lol). Also some mindblowing stuff like using different guns on enemies ( you dont have to shoot them with the same gun always - creativity).

So no matter what we may think we have to admit, nothing will be the same for shooters after the Marauder Paradigm.

The game's aim is to force you into constant action with no "rest" zones of any kind.

It's like with death match. I remember when i replayed Quake 3 again, back when they released Quake Live, i had a lot of trouble getting in that kind of "zone" again because i hadn't played an online shooter for years (at the beginning i was actually struggling with the bots in the training levels lmao).

This game had me go through a similar ordeal. For a single player game, i think that's notable, especially in this day and age, but i can see why some people find that too tiring to deal with. Dark Souls isn't actually like this a closer point of comparison would be Sekiro, or Devil May Cry (which if i understand is where they ripped the Marauder out of in the first place).

Ultimately, the game feels overwhelming and straining until finger memory starts to play into it. Just like with an online shooter ultimately.
I understand. But i dont see how thats commendable. Especially for Doom. And now probably there will never be a return to form considering how now things will have to be always more extreme ( retarded) .
 

KVVRR

Learned
Joined
Apr 28, 2020
Messages
594
Doom 2016 had a better aesthetic, i'm sorry to say, even if you could say grim dark is generic. This pastel looking shit just doesn't jibe with me.

Martin's doubling down on the Marauder shows exactly what i said about him. The guy is a stubborn bastard and that can work in the game's favor. The Marauder is all about exploiting a new variable, which goes in line with the general design philosophy of the whole game, which is about leaving no stone unturned when it comes to exploiting possibilities in terms of gameplay opportunities. Even the "vertical" design of the arenas is supposed to serve this overall quest to leave no redundant or vacant gameplay possibilities.

Which is not to say that all of his ideas are good. The jumping puzzles are a down grade from the the level exploration of Doom 2016 when it coms to filling downtime with shit to do. Martin doesn't obviously understand the role atmosphere had in the original, where moments of contemplatively and study followed intense action. He wants you to spaz out even between fights by jumping around like a retard and for this reason Eternal was more fatiguing than Doom 2016.

But i think overall the positives of his pigheadedness outweigh the negatives. In the pantheon of shit nu-shooters, nu-Doom stands as something unique. Martin is a mainstream auteur, if that makes sense. Seems like a contradiction but that's what he is.

What should be next for this series? Boss fights that are actually hard. That, i think, is the current lacuna in the series. Eternal improved that a bit compared to 2016 but it wasn't enough. He needs to go full Dark Souls with that shit or remove boss fights altogether. You can't have a game that is total rape when fighting normal enemies but turns into popamole early 2000 simplicity when fighting bosses. You have to go all the fucking way with this formula or else it won't work.

The Khan Makyr came closest to what i'm talking about. Icon of Sin was pretty bad, easier (considering all the ammo you get, with the Khan Makyr you had to actually fight for ammo) and the idea of the Icon being this giant monster was retarded.

I'd love if they actually did something interesting with the giant monsters of the games. Even if it's just having one of them be a giant moving arena you've to climb up while shooting demons or something, c'mon.

People shit on 2016's demon designs but I actually really liked them. Sure, they weren't "innovative" but small stuff like the simple color pallete of (mostly) red with glowing green eyes and none of the demons having pupils really make them seem like hollow husks meant only for killing.
 

Israfael

Arcane
Joined
Sep 21, 2012
Messages
3,580
First optional encounter you get 2x pain elemental, 4x cacos, half a dozen hell knights, 4x cybercubus, 4x normal mancubus, two archviles in a row (or they spawn shortly after one another), 2x doom hunters, 2x cyberdaemons. Fun times indeed. :lol:
 

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