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

[warpig]

I'll report when i finish the game. All i can say is that so far i'm not seeing Doom Eternal improving on any of those things, just doubling down on what Doom 2016 already offered, which i guess makes sense given how much success they had with it among the zoomers.

Not just the z00mers, oldschool gamers who liked original games also embraced the new Doom :/

 

[Lyric Suite]

I think those are coping because they want to experience that excitement again and that urge is so strong they'll pretend the game is great for the sake of feeling like they are kids again.

I noticed that tendency in some of my childhood friends.

And for the record, i can see why people think the game is an improvement compared to Call of Duty and that kind of shit. But... it's still a modern AAA game, with all that that implies.

At the very least so far the game seems hard.

 

[sser]

I thought it was very much a Doom game. Lots of well hidden secrets to find, lots of enemies, a mix of outside and inside brawling, verticality without getting obnoxious. Dunno what there is to be upset about. Within the context of all the advancements we've made in tech and gameplay, it's a solid hit on ball from id Software.

 

[warpig]

It's inferior to the original Doom from 1993. Whoa such improvement.

 

[vonAchdorf]

It could have been worse, but lots of enemies is an overstatement. And the arenas aren't fun.

 

[JDR13]

There's nothing wrong with Doom if you like that kind of game. The problem is people going into it expecting it to be like the old Doom and then stupidly bashing it when they discover it's not.

It wasn't intended to recreate the older Doom titles. It's its own game.

 

[schru]

Which is why it's called Doom, in contrast to Doom. One just has to accept Doom for the kind of game it is, just don't expect it to be like Doom.

 

[JDR13]

I thought it was very much a Doom game. Lots of well hidden secrets to find, lots of enemies, a mix of outside and inside brawling, verticality without getting obnoxious. Dunno what there is to be upset about. Within the context of all the advancements we've made in tech and gameplay, it's a solid hit on ball from id Software.

This is Grognard Codex. Everything is decline.

 

[warpig]

It wasn't intended to recreate the older Doom titles. It's its own game.

It's a DOOM game. It should at the very least recreate the gameplay style from older games with better visuals. At best improve on it. What we got is some watered down boring game that kind of resembles Doom.

 

[JDR13]

Case in point

It wasn't intended to recreate the older Doom titles. It's its own game.

It's a DOOM game. It should at the very least recreate the gameplay style from older games with better visuals. At best improve on it. What we got is some watered down boring game that kind of resembles Doom.

It improved certain aspects dramatically. The gunplay is a thousand times better than the older titles.

A lot of people don't like it because of the arena style enemy placement, and I can understand that. The game is definitely not boring though, but you're entitled to your opinion.


*Edit* No surprise that butthurt grognards are flocking to neg this post. Some people are still living in 1994.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The gunplay is a thousand times better than the older titles.

Now i know you are just retarded.

 

[sullynathan]

The gunplay is a thousand times better than the older titles.

Now i know you are just retarded.

First doom didn't have great shooting and had auto aim. What is wrong with what he said?

 

[Melcar]

Doom great gunplay? Oh my. I was just in it for the demon killing and music.

 

[JDR13]

The gunplay is a thousand times better than the older titles.

Now i know you are just retarded.

You're the perfect example of the kind of idiot grognard I was was talking about, but I'm curious how even an old turd like yourself could not acknowledge the difference.

I mean, gunplay in the old Dooms was literally just a shooting gallery. The AI consisted of enemies walking toward you in a straight line as you mowed them down. There was no lateral movement, they didn't jump, they didn't use the verticality of the levels, etc. It's not even comparable.

 

[schru]

The original game does in fact have great gunplay. For the longest time I kept ignoring the game on the assumption that it had come out too early in terms of technology and design ideas to be other than simplistic and repetitive. I gave it a proper try only a few years ago and I was taken aback by how good the whole game felt, from start to finish. What makes it so good is the flow or rhythm of the combat, but that probably depends on a really fine-tuned combination of enemy attack types, mixing different kinds of hit scan with various projectiles, their movement patterns, the way enemies complement one another and how that lends itself to switching between multiple weapons, the damage your weapons do, the spread, rate of fire, etc. Being limited to horizontal aiming is in no way a problem when the game is fully designed around that set-up, perhaps it even made Id put so much care into tuning the combat within the framework that was available.

Naturally, the level design, music (especially rendered on Roland SC-55), and the way atmosphere was conveyed with the little means the texturing permitted are also important. This is why Doom II wasn't quite as good, despite some interesting encounter design: the levels looked blander and more often halted the player's pace; the music also was coposed more for a sort of slower, methodical play. It's important to set up DOSBox right if playing that way and not to enable any additional features in source ports (like the standard lighting in GZDoom which makes everything look duller), they only spoil it.

Verticality isn't used to that great effect in most fully 3-D games anyway, but that's rather because they don't below to the same type of games as those nineties shooters. Amusingly enough, Id used verticality far better in Quake than it did in any of its later games. But the main problem with the development of shooters was that the whole approach to design simply changed towards the end of the nineties and all the possiblities of better engines were never really utilized to attempt to expand on that original approach. At least the new Id is trying with this new take on the series and it's something substantially different from the earlier multi-platform shooters, but it's put forward as a successor to the original game, which still literally holds up, it's still one of the best shooters, not for historical reasons. I'm not nostalgic about the game, I didn't play it anywhere close to when it was released.

 

[sullynathan]

That isn't great gunplay. You'll notice how no one has refuted the point as expected.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Because of the above, the "arcade" facade of the game works AGAINST the game rather than for it, for you cannot really immerse yourself in the environments because of all the times the game wants to remind you this is an arcade and not actually an escapist fantasy.

What's wrong with that?
This isn't an RPG or a metroivania. It's a pure action game. You're suposed to be immersed in the mechanics, not the game world.
Also when does the game break the 4th? I have no recollections of that.

It wasn't intended to recreate the older Doom titles. It's its own game.

It's a DOOM game. It should at the very least recreate the gameplay style from older games with better visuals. At best improve on it. What we got is some watered down boring game that kind of resembles Doom.

You can't improve on something that pretty much has no room for improvement, and trying to make the same game experience has the classic titles would be a bad idea as even if sucessful it would simply be a rethread, and such superflous and ultimately less valuable.
So really the best course of action would be to make a different experience but one that at least tried to be faithful to the originals core design principles.
It was gamble given how there haden't been any succesful big budget shooters of similiar design in a long time, and D16 does sometimes feel like it's playing safe.
But in the end they succeeded., and with Eternal so far they've shown that they are trying to not to hold back.

 

[sullynathan]

Codex complains about how your modern isometric rpgs were just recreating old games and now want new doom to just be old doom with modern graphics

 

[schru]

That isn't great gunplay. You'll notice how no one has refuted the point as expected.

Fair enough, I got carried away talking about the game as a whole, but in the end this is what matters in regards to why the original is great. Its ‘gunplay’ in the strict sense is quite excellent regardless—in how it feels, how the weapons work, how they match the kinds of encounters you're up against—but sure, there's no denying that many games did more elaborate and interesting things in this area that were not even possible on that engine. I did not say the new Dooms are bad.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Doom had perfect gunplay so much so that game just never gets tiring. The same cannot be said for Heretic or Hexen for instance which, while good and creative just don't have that addictive quality to them.

Killing monsters in Doom never get boring. I've been playing the game on and off for 20+ years and i still come back to it. You can argue about the lack of verticality but obviously that was a limitation of the engine and you have to look at Quake for that aspect of the gameplay. But for anything else. The combination in the kind of attacks, the effectiveness of the weapons and how satisfying they were to use, the variety of monsters, how unique they were, how well they all complemented with each other in group etc. Doom is one of those rare games where almost everything in it is near perfect. It's like Starcraft when it comes to online RTS.

An apt comparison because Doom 2016 kinda reminds me of Starcraft 2 so far. Right off the bad, the sounds are fucking shit, like they were in Starcraft 2 (especially with the Zerg, a far cry from the original where every grunt or screech was instantly recognizable). Honestly i don't understand how they could mess up this aspect of the game so much. I tried loading some of the maps on the arcade mode to check out the other weapons, and a couple of them are good, like the Heavy Assault Rifle, but the rest just seem to lack that punch to them and the sounds of the monster so far has that problem too. But more than the sounds themselves it seems the audio system itself is fucked. Like it's trying to do this whole dynamic thing but somehow it's all wrong, the biggest problem so far being that nothing sounds up close. I blew one of those red canisters right in my face and it sounded like the explosion occurred 20 yards away.

I mean right off the bat the sound was broken and the only way i could fix it was to go to the audio options of my card in the control panel and lower everything to CD audio quality, which fixed the problem with missing sounds but that's about it.

So that's that. In so far as enemies moving around, jumping, climbing shit, i guess i can appreciate the effort they put into that, but i'll reserve judgement on how well that works later on when i start getting the more dangerous enemies. So far i found this style to be very chaotic and i don't feel like i'm in control of the fight all that much. One thing i liked is that i'm allowed to disable that shimmering effect the guys get when they are ready for a glory kill, which added a level of challenge as now i have to actually look at the animation and in the chaos of the fight it is making glory kills more difficulty to performs. I also removed the cross hair for good measure but i kept the other stuff for now as i want to get a feel first for what it's supposed to be interactive or not. For instance, i completely missed the lever in the first level that opens up the door to the classic doom level (which i assumed was going to be playable right into the mission but instead it just gets unlocked in the campaign menu lmao) because i just assumed nothing in the environment was interactive. But i think i got a feel for that now so i may disable the other glowy crap.

 

[Lyric Suite]

What's wrong with that?
This isn't an RPG or a metroivania. It's a pure action game. You're suposed to be immersed in the mechanics, not the game world.
Also when does the game break the 4th? I have no recollections of that.

Well, when Doom first came out it did not just popularize a genre but introduced a whole new way on how to experience video games, by offering a very realistic first person environment. For those of us who played it when it was new, it was an incredibly immersive experience. I remember when i was a kid i used to sometime just stand there to soak the atmosphere, look at the skybox wondering what may have been out there in the distance etc.

With Doom 2016, it doesn't seem like you are supposed to feel you are in a real place. The environment it's just this pretty backdrop and there's some stuff that simply seems to take me out of it. Like all those glowy effects everywhere, or stuff like those collectible dolls. When i pressed the lever that opened the door to the secret Doom 1 level, it even played this coin up style sound. The game has all those winks and nods to old school coin op arcade games (it even has an arcade mode that has actually lives) but that's not what Doom was.

 

[DalekFlay]

*Man bites into well prepared ribeye steak*

"WTF! This is the worst chocolate I've ever tasted!"

 

[warpig]

You can't improve on something that pretty much has no room for improvement, and trying to make the same game experience has the classic titles would be a bad idea as even if sucessful it would simply be a rethread, and such superflous and ultimately less valuable.

Just making a game in the vein of original Doom with modern graphics would be enough since there arent any relatively modern games like this. And you could imporve on the original, the old Doom engine had certain limitations that you don't have to worry about now. NuDoom didn't really intruduce anything more interesting, they watered down the whole exploration aspect and reduced the game to just shooting baddies. Original had this tension to it when you would explore a level not knowing what is waiting for you, there was curiosity to it and a kind of "sense of wonder", what's going to happen next, what will the next level be like etc. Finding you way through the maps, the scarcity of items etc. was a challenge in itself and another layer of game, NuDoom doesn't have this. You just walk into a big area and you know whats in store.
If it was similar to the original you could have all the running and shooting and killing and stuff AND the things I mentioned.

 

[OctavianRomulus]

The original Doom games (and especially 64) are the best but I view the new games as a great and very refreshing expression of the formula set in 1993.

This might also be why I have a certain fondness for Doom 3. It's definitely very flawed and not as good of an entry as the current franchise but I see it as an expression of OG Doom's scarier moments, such as the blue keycard area in E1M3.

 

[janior]