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

[Bigg Boss]

This is what Doom is all about.

Spoiler

 

[DalekFlay]

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.

Yep, I posted a dozen pages ago that Doom 3 is a lot more like the original shareware episode than anyone admits. There are also a lot more nuDoom style "big monster arenas" in Doom 1-2 than people admit as well.

 

[Lyric Suite]

You know what's funny? The combination of straightforward maps and no saves kinda reminds me of Alien vs Predator. If the game had no checkpoints the two would play rather similarly.

Also interesting there's an iron man mode for nightmare, which is probably a bit much as one false move and you could lose hours of gameplay, while a middle of the road, no checkpoints for each map might have been more interesting as an option.

That said, now that i got used to the style of the arenas the game isn't actually as hard as i thought. Cleared the second map without dying once. You just need to keep tracks of the demons, which is easier now that i know what their moving and attack patterns are.

 

[Biscotti]

You'll notice an even further decrease in difficulty as the game progresses and you become more powerful and gain more mobility. The first couple of arena fights are probably the hardest of the game ironically enough, after about the midway point the only fight that gave me some degree of trouble for the remaining playthrough was the one at the very end of the VEGA core level.

That's probably my biggest concern. Eternal not only starts you out with the abilities that trivialized many encounters in 2016 to some degree, it scoops a bunch of other stuff on top too. I know of the interview where Hugo admits they reworked the AI to more effectively restrict the player's unparalleled freedom of movement and survivability, but I have yet to see examples of competent players tackling the game.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Well, i redid some fights to check out what the AI is actually doing, and i'll say it's actually pretty clever. I tried luring a group behind a corner but they knew how to fish me out. The grunt guys have this aoe energy bomb thing that they kept firing constantly so i couldn't just popeamole behind corners while the imps too caught me off guard a few times by firing and jumping around the corner at the same time. I'll say the AI is a strong point in this game but the take down thing makes it a bit too convenient to recoup in the middle of a fight, at least with those early enemies, we'll see what the stronger guys are able to do when i start encountering them.

Either way, i'll just restate what i said, this game seems to have more in common with Alien vs Predator than it does with Serious Sam.

 

[OctavianRomulus]

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.

Yep, I posted a dozen pages ago that Doom 3 is a lot more like the original shareware episode than anyone admits. There are also a lot more nuDoom style "big monster arenas" in Doom 1-2 than people admit as well.

Yep, that's what I think too.

Doom 3 could have been truly great and it had all the ingredients. Even now, after all these years the engine still feels smooth and well made, the textures are well-made, the lighting is still impressive and some of the enemy designs are just really cool.

It was clearly a labour of love, which is why I have a certain fondness for it but it has serious pacing issues due to the fact that the Mars levels drag on for too long and for some strange, inexplicable reason, there is only one Hell level aside from the final level. I will never understand why you returned to Mars just as the game was starting to get more interesting. It's like you eat steak and when you are full of it and can't take another bite, the desert comes but after you take a couple of bites they take the desert away and give you more steak. They could have done so much in Hell that would have been a contrast to the realistic sci-fi levels and not just visually but also gameplay wise. Demonic cathedrals, castles, weird abstract shapes, fleshy areas with pools of blood, fights that involve more enemies at a time, devious traps.

Due to the fact that you can make hell abstract, some areas can be more simplistic looking and have simpler lighting so you can have more monsters at the same time but since temples and such places don't require so much geometry to make them look good you can make it work visually too. On an unrelated note, I think Croteam chose Egypt for this exact reason. A pyramid requires only a couple of polygons to look convincing, as opposed to a martian installation.

You see glimpses of what could have been and it's just really sad the developers didn't manage to fully articulate what they wanted to say. It's almost like they wanted to avoid a Xen situation so they wanted to make a single hell level that was really good and while it was, it felt more like an appetizer for something much more interesting. You get a few more glimpses in the Lost Mission hell levels, where each room is expansive and looks distinct and I especially like the gothic cathedral and the boat sequence but the journey is sadly very linear and short.

Ultimately, the thing that makes Doom really interesting is the contrast in all of its aspects. For example, the blue key area from E1M3 I mentioned that feels like a retro Doom 3 area is dark, cramped, poorly lit and has a monster closet but the area right before it is large, expansive and very bright. Some areas are colorful, others are very brown. Some fights take place in tight corridors with a couple of imps and well placed shotgunners while others are slaugherfests in large areas. It's like Doom 3 based the whole game on areas that were only like the blue keycard room. There might have been technical reasons for this but I see no excuse for they there was a single hell level in the game. They got the moody sci fi base and fire and brimstone feel right but that's not enough to fill a 13 hour experience. Likewise, there is nothing wrong with arena fights just like there is nothing wrong with dark areas and monster closets. The problem arises when these features become a crutch for your game.

 

[Biscotti]

Well, i redid some fights to check out what the AI is actually doing, and i'll say it's actually pretty clever. I tried luring a group behind a corner but they knew how to fish me out. The grunt guys have this aoe energy bomb thing that they kept firing constantly so i couldn't just popeamole behind corners while the imps too caught me off guard a few times by firing and jumping around the corner at the same time. I'll say the AI is a strong point in this game but the take down thing makes it a bit too convenient to recoup in the middle of a fight, at least with those early enemies, we'll see what the stronger guys are able to do when i start encountering them.

Either way, i'll just restate what i said, this game seems to have more in common with Alien vs Predator than it does with Serious Sam.

Once you get the jump boots with full air control on both jumps most of the enemies have a tough time doing anything to you from what I can remember. If you're decent at managing crowds you can finish most fights with barely a scratch on you at that point.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Seems like RPG elements in shooters were a bad idea. Already i had to pause playing the game because i'm being presented with an upgrade tree and suddenly my autism is kicking in with the urge to know what the fuck everything does and which paths are the shit ones lmao (already knew to take the barrel immunity path though because those things are annoying as shit).

Sometimes less is more.

 

[Jezal_k23]

Which difficulty level did you pick?

 

[Durandal]

IMO, the best way of playing nuDoom is to never upgrade max ammo so you actually have to manage your ammo and don't have way too much Chainsaw fuel to instakill demons with, never upgrade the Super Shotgun so it doesn't become completely broken, never use the Stun Bomb because it just lets you stun any demon for several seconds with zero effort and barely any ammo which trivializes the whole shebang, never upgrade Siege Mode so it retains its unique risk/reward dynamic without becoming absolutely trivial to use, never use the BFG because it is literally an 'I win' button, never use the mid-air control rune because it makes it trivial to dodge enemy shots with leading and reduces the focus on committing with your positioning, not take the reduced weapon self-damage upgrade so you can't just use the Rocket Launcher whenever, never upgrade Remote Detonation so you can't turn Pinkies into an absolute joke, and never use power-ups (except Haste) because they further trivialize combat as the arenas are never that impossible that it's impossible to beat them without using power-ups.

nuDoom has some balancing issues.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Which difficulty level did you pick?

Nightmare. Ultra-nightmare is locked but since it's an iron man mode i wouldn't play it anyway.

 

[Lyric Suite]

IMO, the best way of playing nuDoom is to never upgrade max ammo so you actually have to manage your ammo and don't have way too much Chainsaw fuel to instakill demons with, never upgrade the Super Shotgun so it doesn't become completely broken, never use the Stun Bomb because it just lets you stun any demon for several seconds with zero effort and barely any ammo which trivializes the whole shebang, never upgrade Siege Mode so it retains its unique risk/reward dynamic without becoming absolutely trivial to use, never use the BFG because it is literally an 'I win' button, never use the mid-air control rune because it makes it trivial to dodge enemy shots with leading and reduces the focus on committing with your positioning, not take the reduced weapon self-damage upgrade so you can't just use the Rocket Launcher whenever, never upgrade Remote Detonation so you can't turn Pinkies into an absolute joke, and never use power-ups (except Haste) because they further trivialize combat as the arenas are never that impossible that it's impossible to beat them without using power-ups.

nuDoom has some balancing issues.

I'm going to use every single one of those so i can blast through the game quickly while laughing at the plebs who think this game is teh hard along the way.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

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.

I guess it's something one could've only experienced back in the day.
Since I was born later in the decade, by the time I tried Doom, 3D enviroments were already ubiquitous, so I never felt that awe and only really realise it now really (which should've have been obvious if I had framed the game back it's day).
But that said, I believe Doom level design are quite "gamey" and not to be a believable world like an RPG or Metroidvania would be. Which is not a bad thing, and in fact it's good, as it means the level where designed with the sole objective of presenting a good challenge while being fun.

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.

What few improvements you could make to the originals, are not quite substancial, they wouldn't change the experience that much. No to mention there's already enough mods and wads that do those improvements and also deliver even better content than the base game.
And again that's the problem with doing something that plays exactely like the originals, it's superflous, there would be no reason to play (let alone keep playing) D16 because whatever it did was already present excellently in the originals plus with years of as good, and even better, content.
So gameplay wise, for the game to be truly worthwhile it had to do something unique while also being respectful to the series core ideas. The biggest fail to the game, that prevents it from having all those apsects you said, is the lack of greatly designed levels and good mod tools.

 

[sullynathan]

 

[sullynathan]

 

[Lyric Suite]

BTW, i think i figured out what is going with the sound. The game is actually playing around with the intensity to make some sounds stand up above others. It thought it was some retarded positional crap, but instead if monsters are screaming for instance, the game lowers the volume of the other effects, which i think it's intentional.

Wonder if there's a way to turn off this crap.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Ho wow, this morning i noticed the game getting easier, and lo and behold, the difficulty changed by itself. I googled this shit and apparently the game changes to whatever difficulty your arcade mode is, so if you run that it will change your main campaign difficulty lmao:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/379720/discussions/0/333656722967821608/

Wow, muh AAA experience right here. I fixed it by using the method mentioned in that post, but fuck me man.

 

[soulburner]

BTW, i think i figured out what is going with the sound. The game is actually playing around with the intensity to make some sounds stand up above others. It thought it was some retarded positional crap, but instead if monsters are screaming for instance, the game lowers the volume of the other effects, which i think it's intentional.

Wonder if there's a way to turn off this crap.

This happens in several other games and is part of the loudness war thing. The game tries to keep all sounds on the same level so you never ever miss a thing. Instead of making the monster scream loud, so you jump on your seat and neighbours call police, it's all on the same constant volume, which is fatiguing. You don't get tired of the gameplay after an hour, you get tired of audio.

Other games use a similar approach with all voiceovers, which lower the volume of the rest of the game. It was the number one reason why I couldn't play Mass Effect Andromeda - I was ready to give this shit a chance, but each time a party member said something, the overall volume of the game world lowered. It was especially annoying in that game because generally titles running on this engine have a high dynamic range audio, just like the Battlefield series. So everything sounds great in Andromeda, the gunfire is loud, explosions are explosive, etc. But the party members can't keep their damn mouths shut and the game volume constantly goes up and down.

It's common in many other games I played in the last few years. This trend is weird because older games could have a high dynamic range and not use such methods of making sure you don't miss someone talking.

The Doom Eternal videos seem to sound better than the prequel, there's less of a feeling of being inside a barrel, it sounds much clearer. The release is just around the corner, so I guess I'll check it out soon after.

 

[RoSoDude]

From what I've heard in previews, Doom Eternal's soundscape is cluttered with various audio cues intended to communicate gameplay effects -- for example, a low growl whenever your Blood Punch is ready and a high-pitch "wawah" when you're low on health. This stuff gets really repetitive and detracts from the sound effects for enemy attacks and hit feedback for me, on top of the distracting djent music. Hopefully you can turn those things off.

 

[sullynathan]

 

[Lyric Suite]

HAHAHAHA:



Serves id Soft right for itching their wagon to this shit company.

 

[sser]

Yeah that's a shit TV spot. Why wouldn't they just roll with the game's composer, he's got some awesome stuff. And it's not really egregious, and I'm sure no one really gives a shit, but the words they chose there do not fit the series' themes much. "Defiance, Power, Courage" fall more into the traditional lexicon of heroism. Doomguy is more of the mindless aggro rip'n'tear variety. Annihilation. Decimation. Obliteration. You get the gist.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Bethesda doing their hardest to annihilate all their profitable franchises.

 

[AW8]

The only mistake they did was to upload that shit to their official Youtube channel. TV spots go on TV(!!!) and are meant to inform a wider audience of the game, i.e. the people who have no idea what the fuck it is. To reach more people, they can drape the game in whatever unfitting and unrepresentative theme they want to at that point.

It's like making a trailer marketed for a kindergarten but showing it at a retirement home. What were they thinking?

 

[Biscotti]

Yeah that's a shit TV spot. Why wouldn't they just roll with the game's composer, he's got some awesome stuff. And it's not really egregious, and I'm sure no one really gives a shit, but the words they chose there do not fit the series' themes much. "Defiance, Power, Courage" fall more into the traditional lexicon of heroism. Doomguy is more of the mindless aggro rip'n'tear variety. Annihilation. Decimation. Obliteration. You get the gist.

I disagree. OG Doomguy was a badass, but not the edgy kind. His motivations were always avenging his fallen comrades and protecting humanity from an imminent demonic invasion. I never liked the faceless edgelord shtick they ran with in 2016, and am very glad they went back to giving him more of a humanity's protector/champion vibe in Eternal.

That doesn't take anything away from just how horribly that TV spot misses the mark though.