Doom Eternal - Good Game, Bad Doom?

[DM Science]

I'm an old school gamer. Was around to play original Doom (and Wolfenstein before that). I generally try to be positive and try to separate my personal feelings about games, movies, music, etc from the work in and of itself.

I tried Doom Eternal for the second time recently. Doom 2016 was the most fun I had in a long time on a computer game with high intensity. I like most types of games. I started on Atari and Pong, so can appreciate the bounty of modern gaming. I usually enjoy depth and story, but occasionally, I want a game that I can jump and tear stuff up at 100 mph without thinking too much. It's like music. Sometimes I want Pink Floyd, with its complex arrangements and layered lyrics giving me pause to reflect on the human condition. Other times, I want Ministry- can't understand most of the lyrics, but it makes me feel like moving fast and breaking stuff.

Now imagine you were feeling aggressive. Had a long week and you don't want to think about anything, just let off some steam. You pick up a newly released Ministry album, only to find they have branched off from industrial speed metal to a slower, more clean sound. The vocals are clearer and they are taking distortion out of the guitar.
It may be brilliant and beautiful- a work of musical art. But you're still angry. Why? You bought a Ministry album, you expect Ministry. If they wanted to experiment under a different name, you would be fine. But don't say it's Ministry, if it's mellow.

This is the problem with Doom Eternal, and why I have multiple completions of Doom 2016 and have given up on Doom Eternal twice now when I realized I wasn't having fun.

Doom Eternal is a polished, well-thought-out, creative, and visually gorgeous video game. So why the complaint? It doesn't feel like DOOM. It's complicated. The problem is that I think developers sometimes confuse complexity with creativity. You see, the enemies require more planning and precision to kill. You need to use the right weapons and hit the right weak points. The weapon mods and runes and points and whatever else they throw in, requires planning and customization, secrets abound that you are encouraged to look for, and finally there is the challenging platforming aspect- always fun in a FPS. (They only managed to get climbing ladders in FPS a less monitor-smashing exercise a few years ago). While they emphasize "keep moving" to keep the action looking frenetic, the reality is that my mind is constantly engaged in trying to keep track if I need health, so I need to hit E and glory kill, or do I need ammo, so I hit c to chainsaw, or armor so I got to hit r for my flamer, then kill the enemy, but which weapon do I have, which mod is set on it, what enemies are here, what are their weaknesses, does it match my weapon mod, and where do I need to go on this map, can't stop to look what's over the edge because KEEP MOVING, and so on... My mind is definitely engaged- Which is what is WRONG!

As I described above, when I sit down and decide to play Doom, it is because I am in a certain "mood"- a DOOMMOOD if you will. The DOOMMOOD hits when I'm stressed, been doing lots of problem solving, bummed out, etc... I play Doom because I want to kill stuff fast. So when I sat down to play Doom Eternal, that's what I wanted to do. I was just on stage 2, Exultia when I realized I had not really fought that much. But I had spent hours trying to execute dashes and jumps to hard to reach secrets and dying in that stupid ********* lava. It wasn't scratching my Doom itch. And because I was already in a DOOMMOOD, this changed to anger and made me begin to resent and hate the game.

As I reflect now, I think if I had bought a game called The Sentinels, that was described as a challenging platformer, with a story spanning divine and infernal realms, a mysterious hub where you can refine your tools and techniques, and enemies that you dominate by precision application of force combined with knowledge of their weakness, and then played this, I would give it an A+. I would have been in a Portal type mood, or maybe an Ori type mood. But it was called Doom. So I was disappointed. And while I may try to reframe the game in my brain as "The Sentinels" and play it again in another mood, my conclusion will stand that this is a really good Game, but a really disappointing DOOM.

[Ace]

Oprindeligt skrevet af SuperFly:

It's only attractive to a very specific subset of players, and not in keeping with the attractiveness & draw of its brand namesake. Happy to clarify that for you, bud.

2k players would tend to disagree with that misinformation.

Be better.

[Wiesshund]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Jordan Peterson:

I already posted the verdict here:

No, really you did not.
You may think you did, but that which goes in in the theater of your mind is not reality.

Oprindeligt skrevet af Jordan Peterson:

we're essentially holding a masterclass

You and the pocket mouse may well be holding a class on master something
but i do not think anyone is listening.
You do not even exist to anyone, except the few who pull your strings and make you dance for amusement as meat puppets are inclined to do.

[Wiesshund]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Ace:

2k players would tend to disagree with that misinformation.

Be better.

With a hand wave, 2k people will not exist

[Ace]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Wiesshund:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Ace:

2k players would tend to disagree with that misinformation.

Be better.

With a hand wave, 2k people will not exist

Yeah, running on his 3 D's of principle.

Deny.
Deflect.
Derail.

[Grampire]

Oprindeligt skrevet af SuperFly:

It's only attractive to a very specific subset of players, and not in keeping with the attractiveness & draw of its brand namesake. Happy to clarify that for you, bud.

By that reasoning the Doom brand itself is and always has been a niche IP compared to contemporary FPS games and other forms of entertainment.

As an example - Call of Duty has tens of millions of players log in and play each and every day.[www.esports.net]

Back in it's day, Doom 1 sold 3.5 million copies by the end of 1999,[www.newspapers.com] with an estimated 20 million playing the game at some point 2 years after it's release.

That means Call of Duty has more players per day touching the franchise than Doom had in it's first 2 years of existence.

Doom existed at a time when video games were a niche, taboo medium that was not mainstream. That the franchise hasn't stepped out of that framework - of being niche - is both authentic to the brand and in no way surprising given the title's history and content.

[Damien]

Excellent analysis above here. It's nice to see people using their minds instead of spewing out arguments for their ego.

[Wiesshund]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Grampire:

By that reasoning the Doom brand itself is and always has been a niche IP compared to contemporary FPS games and other forms of entertainment.

As an example - Call of Duty has tens of millions of players log in and play each and every day.[www.esports.net]

Back in it's day, Doom 1 sold 3.5 million copies by the end of 1999,[www.newspapers.com] with an estimated 20 million playing the game at some point 2 years after it's release.

That means Call of Duty has more players per day touching the franchise than Doom had in it's first 2 years of existence.

Doom existed at a time when video games were a niche, taboo medium that was not mainstream. That the franchise hasn't stepped out of that framework - of being niche - is both authentic to the brand and in no way surprising given the title's history and content.

Doom (Original) existed at a time that you were lucky if you could find 3 million people with a PC capable of doing much more than connecting to AOL

Just being able to run it right was niche.
486 DX2 66 cost more than a 5ghz CPU does today
And we will not discuss RAM prices.

Lots of people were still on 286 and 386 platforms as most everything at that time ran on that stuff.

But that was a very special point in time and that genie left the bottle long ago.
You can not re-bottle it now.
3D 1st person shooter, fast gameplay, 3D maps of any arbitrary shape and layout, real lighting, multiplayer co-op, deathmatch, full content creation tools etc.

All of that just BOOM out of the lamp like magic, all at once.

Cant ever do that again, not even fair to try comparing

[Damien]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Wiesshund:

Lots of people were still on 286 and 386 platforms as most everything at that time ran on that stuff.

Can confirm, I was puzzled to understand in my 12 year old head, why it didn't ran on my system. Later I started to understand more about memory. Our 386 had only 1 megs of ram and doom required four.

[Wiesshund]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Damien:

Can confirm, I was puzzled to understand in my 12 year old head, why it didn't ran on my system. Later I started to understand more about memory. Our 386 had only 1 megs of ram and doom required four.

A lot of people were, because Wolf3D ran stupendously in a 286 with 640k of ram
and only an 8mhz CPU and literally anything that would eek out a sound.

Doom came along and suddenly here was something that would only sort of run on the fastest 386's which was the 386DX40 and only with more RAM than most typical people had in the home PC (and they usually had 1 single home PC, not one per person)

Doom influenced a lot of PC upgrading, and it was not just plug N play upgrading back then.

And PC parts were actually a lot more expensive at that time, and also harder to buy.
You had to find a mail order catalog, or look around for one of the few very niche shops in your area if you had one.

Back in the late 80's and early 90's it might cost you $10,000 to have me build what is a rather laughable PC now, to run your company's accounting software on.
Take something like this
https://i2.wp.com/christopherchaos.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/90s-pc.jpg
And then bump the ram up to 6mb, then add a couple 10mb hdd's and a math coprocessor and a few other things and suddenly it was grossly expensive.

And then came quake, and suddenly that generic VGA card that ran Doom great (cause Doom ran the graphics all on the CPU) became Pooh.
Suddenly you need a vesa local bus super VGA adapter, that actually hard memory.

And then the next day(figuratively), 3DFX explodes into existence.
ZOMG! we can do actual 3D poly models?????
Between 1992 and 1997, a lot of magic happened that you just can't create again.

[Grampire]

I still remember getting my 16 mg Voodoo3 3DFX card. It was like a dream.

[Jordan_Peterson]

Oprindeligt skrevet af SuperFly:

Oprindeligt skrevet af cheetah-navara:

And what is the final verdict of this thread ?

It's a niche game, and a poor DOOM entry.
That new paradigm for a "combat loop" doesn't gel with the brand they stamped on it.

True. The rest of the gaming community has abandoned this one long time ago and never looked back.
It was a nice filler but could never hold up to its expectations.
Some people obviously are hung up with nostalgic feelings reminising about old times but that does not help them or their arguments. It's rather silly and kinda funny how hard they try and how much they care about an IP that got butchered and altered to an extend you can not say it has much to do with its origin.
It's EA-ism at it's finest, with direct influence from Hollywood, if you know what I mean! ;)

[Viddaz]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Jordan Peterson:

Oprindeligt skrevet af SuperFly:

It's a niche game, and a poor DOOM entry.
That new paradigm for a "combat loop" doesn't gel with the brand they stamped on it.

True. The rest of the gaming community has abandoned this one long time ago and never looked back.
It was a nice filler but could never hold up to its expectations.
Some people obviously are hung up with nostalgic feelings reminising about old times but that does not help them or their arguments. It's rather silly and kinda funny how hard they try and how much they care about an IP that got butchered and altered to an extend you can not say it has much to do with its origin.
It's EA-ism at it's finest, with direct influence from Hollywood, if you know what I mean! ;)

What are you trying to achieve here if I may ask? You spend a whole lot of time on these threads spreading your uninformed opinion on the game while debating with people who not only love the game but have actually played it and therefore know about it a lot more than you do. You won't change our minds no matter how hard you try. If your goal is to boycott the franchise, you're in the wrong place. Go to Twitter instead, and see how that works for you ;)

[Damien]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Wiesshund:

Back in the late 80's and early 90's it might cost you $10,000 to have me build what is a rather laughable PC now, to run your company's accounting software on.
Take something like this
https://i2.wp.com/christopherchaos.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/90s-pc.jpg
And then bump the ram up to 6mb, then add a couple 10mb hdd's and a math coprocessor and a few other things and suddenly it was grossly expensive.

Our next upgrade was a pentium 60 with a 15" monitor. over 17 000marks, which is todays money over 4 500€. ♥♥♥♥ was expensive, luckily my father was visionary in buying tech, even though he never quite understood it. So thankful, my 90s is legendary because of him.

[Damien]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Grampire:

I still remember getting my 16 mg Voodoo3 3DFX card. It was like a dream.

Man tell me about it. Voodo 3 was the first GFX /3d card upgrade I actually bought with my own money. Those were solid GFX cards !

[Wolf68]

Oprindeligt skrevet af SuperFly:

Oprindeligt skrevet af cheetah-navara:

And what is the final verdict of this thread ?

It's a niche game, and a poor DOOM entry.
That new paradigm for a "combat loop" doesn't gel with the brand they stamped on it.

Its definitely niche. Filters skillets. Its the best Doom.