Average Manatee
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2012
- Messages
- 15,492
It's what Mick wanted them to do, deep down, though.
-
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DOOM Eternal - the sequel to the 2016 reboot - now with The Ancient Gods DLC
- Thread starter LESS T_T
- Start date
Doom Eternal has a rhythm to it. If you're willing and able to play along with it you're in for a hell of a time, but if you can't, won't or don't want to you're in for your time to be hell. It's a series of combat arenas connected by platforming sections, along which you'll do your fair share of fighting as well. Boss battles are not very good, but the regular fights are good fun. The DLC is a step up in scope and difficulty, like how Thy Flesh Consumed contrasts to the rest of Doom 1. The first part is better than the second part, and the boss fights are a step down from the base game. Alo skip the cosmetic packs, they're shit.
Game's currently not a discount, so it's best to either wait or apply different means to obtain the game.
Eternal is made for spastics. It replaces the little "design" that was left in Doom 2016 with pure chaotic movement disorder. There is also the horrible Mario platforming and the WoW graphics pushed to extremes.
It's hot garbage.
RoSoDude
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 1, 2016
- Messages
- 751
Doom Eternal is an excellent game mashed up in a blender with a terrible game. I am extremely suspicious of anyone who recognizes one half without acknowledging the other, on both sides.
It's got a lot of unwholesome aspects (4-5 layers of progression bloat, cop-out text tutorials, erratic content structuring), however the core gameplay is lightyears better than Doom 2016. My main complaint about D16 was that it didn't lean hard enough into the arena shooter style, so a lot of its new ideas (esp. glory kills) felt like band-aids to encourage active play that would be unnecessary from a classic FPS viewpoint. Eternal succeeds by doubling down. D16 introduced glory kills to replenish health and chainsaw to refill ammo, but the former was basically a free action due to the large buffer zone on enemy health that made it hard to overkill, so you were basically invincible with the rubber banding on health drops. Doom Eternal smartly makes the health window for glory killing quite a bit narrower, so you have to control your damage output to reliably heal from fodder enemies. I rarely got execution prompts on pinkies, and I even frequently lost glory kills on arachnotrons. Much ado has been made about the tighter ammo economy, but I think it's mostly a wash thanks to the chainsaw regenerating on a cooldown, which I view as a major blunder. There's plenty of ammo to be found in arenas, and I'd have found it more interesting to scavenge in real time for ammo and chainsaw fuel while retaining the choice to generate more ammo vs killing heavies as in D16. Armor is still just Health 2 The Sequel to Health as it absorbs all damage in place of health, but in Eternal it plays a more active role in that the player can generate it with the flamethrower as a temporary buffer to volatile health, like picking up a mega health in Doom/Quake.
A key difference that brings things together is that the enemies are much more aggressive in Eternal, putting much more pressure on the player to use effective weapon combos and stay on the move, making health, ammo, and armor management much more engaging. About half of D16's enemies were well-suited to arena combat (imps, pinkies, shotgun shield guys, hell knights), while the other half (cacodemons, revenants, mancubi, etc.) weren't updated to counter the player's mobility and thus filled the role of harmless damage sponge. Now, arachnotrons, revenants, and mancubi are all super threatening up close, and even imps, hell knights, and pinkies made more an effort to catch up to my dashing to threaten me -- combat overall is much more frenetic. Some enemy weaknesses are brilliant. Shooting cannons off of arachnotrons, revenants, and mancubi is rewarding and presents a tradeoff vs dealing direct damage that depends on your equipped weapon/mod, ammo count, level geometry, other threats. Other weaknesses feel ill-considered, though. Cacodemons gulp down grenades for effortless glory kills; why not require the player to time with their charging bite attack? Shield guys blow up from plasma, a dominant one-note solution; why not require the player to shoot 2 to create an arc between them?
The content besides the arena combat is hit or miss. I like the platforming puzzles somewhat, moreso than in D16, but agree with everyone who despises the purple goo and tentacles. There's a decent integration of combat and exploration with various traps and enemy spawns, but the game is still mostly arena-corridor-arena. Worse than any of that, though, is how the game makes almost no attempt to organically teach the player. I mean, it kinda does; the first map is a barebones slog with only a few weapons/enemies to ease you in. But the whole game is filled to the brim with text pop-ups, like they spent their entire dev time creating enemies and player mechanics and then gave up on introducing them through gameplay. The worst of it is when a text pop-up appears for an enemy you've never seen, completely ruining all the surprise while also spelling out exactly how to beat them... in a way that discards all the tactical depth and nuance that's actually available to you during combat. Sometimes the tutorials are even misleading -- everyone who thought you had to stay in a Goldilocks zone to combat the Marauder probably got screwed by the game implying as much. But if you don't have the text pop-ups, some of the inferences you have to make are pretty unreasonable; how is anyone supposed to figure out that the Cyber-Mancubi shields are resistant to everything but a blood punch, or that the Doom Hunter's shield can only be disrupted by the plasma gun?
The audio design is abysmal as it was in D16 -- the mix is so dominated by low frequencies (except the aggravating monster screeching), from gun sounds that sound like they're underwater to the endless djent guitar chugging, and there's no directional audio to tell anything apart. The sound cues that play when you're low on health or have a blood punch available were made ear-splittingly annoying to cut through all of the noise. The game is also stuffed with an unreasonable number of progression systems, all of which are utter garbage save for the weapon alt-fire mods. Several of the rune perks feel like things that should have been enabled by default (e.g. air control and faster glory kills), so you're left with at most 1 of 3 slots to determine a "playstyle". The wheel of suit upgrade is just embarrassing, with 3 of the 5 sections offering no-brainer upgrades like faster cooldowns and better grenades, while the other 2 sections offer useless crap like larger automap radius and respawning explosive barrels. You also get upgrades to your health/armor/ammo/capacity, which is for some reason tied to yet another layer of shitty perks that are impossible to remember or care about. The weapon mods are cool but you still have to waste a bunch of time upgrading them by performing tedious kill challenges, which you can graciously skip by using another progression item. You'll spend a bunch of time exploring for these upgrades but half the time you'll just find dumb cosmetics, collectibles and lore dumps. Story is utmost cringe but can be largely ignored and the UI is pretty unpleasant, but at least there's a red-green colorblind mode.
At the end of the day you have a pretty deep and arguably innovative combat system which is dragged down by pretty much everything else about the game, from lazy player communication and progression busywork to terrible sound design and DLC bloat. I think the combat makes it still worth playing, but whoever the higher-ups in management were who greenlit the other shit should be excised from making games.
EDIT: I forgot to mention how 2/3 of the way through, the game gives you a sword that can oneshot every enemy in the game, as if it needed another oneshot tool on top of the chainsaw and BFG 9000, with ammo for each thrown at you ever more regularly. So even as the fights get more complex, it shoots itself in the foot by allowing you to just delete elements of the challenge.
It's got a lot of unwholesome aspects (4-5 layers of progression bloat, cop-out text tutorials, erratic content structuring), however the core gameplay is lightyears better than Doom 2016. My main complaint about D16 was that it didn't lean hard enough into the arena shooter style, so a lot of its new ideas (esp. glory kills) felt like band-aids to encourage active play that would be unnecessary from a classic FPS viewpoint. Eternal succeeds by doubling down. D16 introduced glory kills to replenish health and chainsaw to refill ammo, but the former was basically a free action due to the large buffer zone on enemy health that made it hard to overkill, so you were basically invincible with the rubber banding on health drops. Doom Eternal smartly makes the health window for glory killing quite a bit narrower, so you have to control your damage output to reliably heal from fodder enemies. I rarely got execution prompts on pinkies, and I even frequently lost glory kills on arachnotrons. Much ado has been made about the tighter ammo economy, but I think it's mostly a wash thanks to the chainsaw regenerating on a cooldown, which I view as a major blunder. There's plenty of ammo to be found in arenas, and I'd have found it more interesting to scavenge in real time for ammo and chainsaw fuel while retaining the choice to generate more ammo vs killing heavies as in D16. Armor is still just Health 2 The Sequel to Health as it absorbs all damage in place of health, but in Eternal it plays a more active role in that the player can generate it with the flamethrower as a temporary buffer to volatile health, like picking up a mega health in Doom/Quake.
A key difference that brings things together is that the enemies are much more aggressive in Eternal, putting much more pressure on the player to use effective weapon combos and stay on the move, making health, ammo, and armor management much more engaging. About half of D16's enemies were well-suited to arena combat (imps, pinkies, shotgun shield guys, hell knights), while the other half (cacodemons, revenants, mancubi, etc.) weren't updated to counter the player's mobility and thus filled the role of harmless damage sponge. Now, arachnotrons, revenants, and mancubi are all super threatening up close, and even imps, hell knights, and pinkies made more an effort to catch up to my dashing to threaten me -- combat overall is much more frenetic. Some enemy weaknesses are brilliant. Shooting cannons off of arachnotrons, revenants, and mancubi is rewarding and presents a tradeoff vs dealing direct damage that depends on your equipped weapon/mod, ammo count, level geometry, other threats. Other weaknesses feel ill-considered, though. Cacodemons gulp down grenades for effortless glory kills; why not require the player to time with their charging bite attack? Shield guys blow up from plasma, a dominant one-note solution; why not require the player to shoot 2 to create an arc between them?
The content besides the arena combat is hit or miss. I like the platforming puzzles somewhat, moreso than in D16, but agree with everyone who despises the purple goo and tentacles. There's a decent integration of combat and exploration with various traps and enemy spawns, but the game is still mostly arena-corridor-arena. Worse than any of that, though, is how the game makes almost no attempt to organically teach the player. I mean, it kinda does; the first map is a barebones slog with only a few weapons/enemies to ease you in. But the whole game is filled to the brim with text pop-ups, like they spent their entire dev time creating enemies and player mechanics and then gave up on introducing them through gameplay. The worst of it is when a text pop-up appears for an enemy you've never seen, completely ruining all the surprise while also spelling out exactly how to beat them... in a way that discards all the tactical depth and nuance that's actually available to you during combat. Sometimes the tutorials are even misleading -- everyone who thought you had to stay in a Goldilocks zone to combat the Marauder probably got screwed by the game implying as much. But if you don't have the text pop-ups, some of the inferences you have to make are pretty unreasonable; how is anyone supposed to figure out that the Cyber-Mancubi shields are resistant to everything but a blood punch, or that the Doom Hunter's shield can only be disrupted by the plasma gun?
The audio design is abysmal as it was in D16 -- the mix is so dominated by low frequencies (except the aggravating monster screeching), from gun sounds that sound like they're underwater to the endless djent guitar chugging, and there's no directional audio to tell anything apart. The sound cues that play when you're low on health or have a blood punch available were made ear-splittingly annoying to cut through all of the noise. The game is also stuffed with an unreasonable number of progression systems, all of which are utter garbage save for the weapon alt-fire mods. Several of the rune perks feel like things that should have been enabled by default (e.g. air control and faster glory kills), so you're left with at most 1 of 3 slots to determine a "playstyle". The wheel of suit upgrade is just embarrassing, with 3 of the 5 sections offering no-brainer upgrades like faster cooldowns and better grenades, while the other 2 sections offer useless crap like larger automap radius and respawning explosive barrels. You also get upgrades to your health/armor/ammo/capacity, which is for some reason tied to yet another layer of shitty perks that are impossible to remember or care about. The weapon mods are cool but you still have to waste a bunch of time upgrading them by performing tedious kill challenges, which you can graciously skip by using another progression item. You'll spend a bunch of time exploring for these upgrades but half the time you'll just find dumb cosmetics, collectibles and lore dumps. Story is utmost cringe but can be largely ignored and the UI is pretty unpleasant, but at least there's a red-green colorblind mode.
At the end of the day you have a pretty deep and arguably innovative combat system which is dragged down by pretty much everything else about the game, from lazy player communication and progression busywork to terrible sound design and DLC bloat. I think the combat makes it still worth playing, but whoever the higher-ups in management were who greenlit the other shit should be excised from making games.
EDIT: I forgot to mention how 2/3 of the way through, the game gives you a sword that can oneshot every enemy in the game, as if it needed another oneshot tool on top of the chainsaw and BFG 9000, with ammo for each thrown at you ever more regularly. So even as the fights get more complex, it shoots itself in the foot by allowing you to just delete elements of the challenge.
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Ivan
Arcane
Yes
its shit
racofer
Thread Incliner
Both nuDooms are disgusting garbage. Stick with the original games.
I played the orginal games for hundreds of hours when I was young. Now I want a new experience, since I've played the classic ones to death, which is why I am asking.
I don't really care if they dont live up the classic games. If they can give me 5-10 hours of fun, thats fine for me.
Play Dusk or Hedon instead.
Max Damage
Savant
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2017
- Messages
- 791
Hedon sucks.
Dusk is good if you want a more retro looking FPS, Hedon if you enjoy open worlds, light RPG elements and orc tiddy.
ferratilis
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2019
- Messages
- 3,012
Zeriel
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2012
- Messages
- 14,049
Holy shit I'm writing this one down for the record books. A time where Morgoth was based and I agreed with him 100%.
Love the Bethestard reponse.
>Post lengthy post-op about the situation including reciepts of all the shit going down
>Bethestards detailed response with counter-evidence to all these allegations: "lolno"
Source: we got much evidence wow, we can post on reddit if we want, trust me bro
>Post lengthy post-op about the situation including reciepts of all the shit going down
>Bethestards detailed response with counter-evidence to all these allegations: "lolno"
Source: we got much evidence wow, we can post on reddit if we want, trust me bro
Lyric Suite
Converting to Islam
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2006
- Messages
- 58,576
Just play actual old school shooters since the genre is a lost cause at this point. Even the best of those retro shooter is adequate at best and among the nu-shooters nu-Doom is probably the best which says all there is to be said. Genre was killed by consoles in 2003 and the attempt to resurrect it produced the typical effects you'd expect from all acts of necromancy: grotesque, twisted and contorted parodies of what were once thriving, living things but have now been reduced to unliving abominations.
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2009
- Messages
- 10,255
If you liked 2016 you'll probably like it. I couldn't stand 2016, but I still had a good time with eternal. I have later been told that 2016 eventually gets as good as eternal but it takes a lot of hours to get there. The game is free on gamepass, which is probably the cheapest way to get it.
Also, I feel bad for Mick but he also kind of deserves it for doubling down on diplomacy even after they screw him. Don't accept a contract with unrealistic schedule, and if another company makes false promises under your name contact a lawyer and send a cease&desist...
And you know, never make a deal with bethesda, it's not like it's secret that they're evil?
Multidirectional
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 18, 2009
- Messages
- 7,667
I wouldn't be quick to say that about everyone who dislikes Eternal, but comments like "game is made for spastics" obviously come from a place of butthurt. With couple of playthroughs I got to the point where Nightmare difficulty is mostly really easy and I'm far from being good at shooters. In most situations on Nightmare I now feel pretty safe even while still making plenty of mistakes and miss clicks. Yes, I'm still miss clicking all the time when switching weapons, that never went away for me no matter how many shooters I played.
The actual flaws of the game have been laid out pretty well by RoSoDude. Yes it's far from a perfect game but still one of the very best shooters in many years. When it comes to AAA shooters, it's actually the best one in at least a decade if not more.
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Multidirectional
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 18, 2009
- Messages
- 7,667
Game is more boring in first few maps because you only have a shitty selection of weapons. But I don't think it ever becomes as good as Eternal. It does have better visuals though.
The combat system some praise here is like taking a MMORPG DPS class rotation and turning it into a real time thing. It's not anywhere near as innovative as you think, and it's certainly as unfunny as playing dps classes in MMO after a while. They shouldn't have doubled down on things like trying to make glory kills useful, they should have removed them from the game altogether.
What really happens in practice is that if you're playing on a more difficult mode where you take some damage you will inevitably just press all the things on cooldown and it devolves not as a side tool to use once in a while but into the sequence of key you memorize and press like in MMORPGs, while the weapon switching based on enemy type isn't that different from things like elemental weaknesses to exploit.
This game is a mishmash of random ideas and genre, lacks serious moddabliity or good multiplayer and will not leave a mark. It's the end of id software.
Doom being "the best of AAA" is like winning the special olympics. You're number one, but number one of the pathetic lot.
What really happens in practice is that if you're playing on a more difficult mode where you take some damage you will inevitably just press all the things on cooldown and it devolves not as a side tool to use once in a while but into the sequence of key you memorize and press like in MMORPGs, while the weapon switching based on enemy type isn't that different from things like elemental weaknesses to exploit.
This game is a mishmash of random ideas and genre, lacks serious moddabliity or good multiplayer and will not leave a mark. It's the end of id software.
Doom being "the best of AAA" is like winning the special olympics. You're number one, but number one of the pathetic lot.
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Blutwurstritter
Scholar
The optional battles in the second DLC were pretty good. The new enemy types also worked well. I would also say its a harder than the base game but a bit easier than the first DLC regarding the non optional content. The only thing that stood out negatively was the boss. That was some lame shit. I have no idea why they made 3 "stages" when every stage is pretty much the same. All in all a pretty dull, repetitive encounter. Besides that, I would recommend the DLC if you liked the base game and the first DLC.
Lyric Suite
Converting to Islam
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2006
- Messages
- 58,576
Better levels too, though it's nothing to write home about in that respect.
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