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.

[Grampire]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Edwina_Van_BrownPants:

Guy makes several valid points

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Sure he did partner. ROFL

[Erwin_Von_Braun]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Grampire:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Edwina_Van_BrownPants:

Guy makes several valid points

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Sure he did partner. ROFL

Yes, he did & rather than refute them you act in a rather disappointing manner.
Thank you for proving me right though.

[Grampire]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Edwina_Van_BrownPants:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Grampire:

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Sure he did partner. ROFL

Yes, he did & rather than refute them you act in a rather disappointing manner.
Thank you for proving me right though.

Oh, you'd like me to refute his post? No problem! Here you go:

Oprindeligt skrevet af carmatic:

Eternal has left the Doom lineage, there are indie games out there which are more Doom than Eternal....

it's got too much MOBA and Soulslike influences , with its multi-modal attacks, emphasis on positioning over shooting , cooldown periods, etc etc.... it rewards actions-per-minute over precision, with the things like the reload cancel weapon switch being intentional, and the impetus to constantly and simultaneously use grenades, punches, the flamethrower as well as any number of combinations of weapon firing modes

and worst of all are the frankly un-Doom-like aspects such as the Marauder's attack and invulnerability patterns, having to farm resources from enemies, as well as the platforming... I mean, flaming chain obstacles? what is this, Bowsers Castle?

There you go! Completely refuted - provided you can read of course! You're welcome!

[Erwin_Von_Braun]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Grampire:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Edwina_Van_BrownPants:

Yes, he did & rather than refute them you act in a rather disappointing manner.
Thank you for proving me right though.

Oh, you'd like me to refuge his post? No problem! Here you go:

Oprindeligt skrevet af carmatic:

Eternal has left the Doom lineage, there are indie games out there which are more Doom than Eternal....

it's got too much MOBA and Soulslike influences , with its multi-modal attacks, emphasis on positioning over shooting , cooldown periods, etc etc.... it rewards actions-per-minute over precision, with the things like the reload cancel weapon switch being intentional, and the impetus to constantly and simultaneously use grenades, punches, the flamethrower as well as any number of combinations of weapon firing modes

and worst of all are the frankly un-Doom-like aspects such as the Marauder's attack and invulnerability patterns, having to farm resources from enemies, as well as the platforming... I mean, flaming chain obstacles? what is this, Bowsers Castle?

There you! Completely refuted - soon easy!

You've actually managed to disappoint me, and I'm not referring to your somewhat poor spelling & grammar.
If you're not going to participate in the discussion in a reasonable manner, then maybe you shouldn't say anything at all?

[Ace]

If you're not going to participate in the discussion in a reasonable manner erwin, then why should we? picking fights with people & making statements that you think are true does not count btw.

[Grampire]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Edwina_Van_BrownPants:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Grampire:

Oh, you'd like me to refuge his post? No problem! Here you go:



There you! Completely refuted - soon easy!

You've actually managed to disappoint me, and I'm not referring to your somewhat poor spelling & grammar.
If you're not going to participate in the discussion in a reasonable manner, then maybe you shouldn't say anything at all?

Ah yeah, I'm fighting against autocorrect. I did some edits to clean it up.

If you'd like an honest, decent conversation - what can I say? Join the club. I've been waiting for 4 years.

I don't need to refute that post - if you can read English it - in an almost satirical fashion - refutes itself better than I ever could.

Sometimes you just need to stand aside and let people prove your point?

[Wiesshund]

Oprindeligt skrevet af carmatic:

meanwhile Eternal has monkey bars , while in original Doom you couldn't even jump
I mean seriously, if we had modern optical mice in 1993, Carmack, Romero et al would have turned off the auto-aim to keep the game fair... its all about context

I have not seen monkeybars.
What location / level ? i gotta go check them out.

For what it is worth, we had good mice in 1993.
If someone thinks they did not exist, they are nuts.
Maybe not on par with a laser mouse, for for the time, they were damned good.
You could even get custom weighted balls, brass rollwer with super fin cut digitizer wheels etc
Mind you, most people did not have them, cause most people didn't use a mouse.
It took a lot of brutal beatings, to get people to start using mice instead of keyboarding it.

Autoaim wasn't a product of the mouse, or lack of.
And It isn't really autoaim either, you can miss, pretty easily too, but not on the vertical plane
Vertically everything is valid, if the horizontal is right.
But we could not look up, that would come later.

Better aiming would come with better hardware, with nothing at all to do with mice.
It has to do with being able to actually compute more precise aiming and still run acceptably.
Doom and Doom II were designed to be able to run on a 386SX

[Wiesshund]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Edwina_Van_BrownPants:

you act in a rather disappointing manner.

I don't think anyone is here to please you.
at4's probably frowned upon.

[Jordan_Peterson]

And here we go again, the usual suspects taking things way too personally and veering wildly off-topic.

It's hilarious how I've seen it so often in the past that they find any excuse to trash the original games just because it bothers them that their beloved Doom Eternal is riddled with game design flaws. They bring up the auto-aim function from the originals as if it's some sort of "gotcha" argument whenever Doom Eternal gets criticized for its abysmal aiming mechanics, where you just point in the direction of a blinking enemy.

It's like criticizing the newer models of a car for having faulty brakes and someone retorting, "Well, cars 100 years ago didn’t even have seatbelts."

One thing is critisizing bad game design that every game can be measured with and the other thing is an innovation that older games did not have back then cause it was technically not possible at that time to do it any other way.

Oprindeligt skrevet af Wiesshund:

You could even get custom weighted balls, brass rollwer with super fin cut digitizer wheels etc

Wow, fascinating. We should all take a moment to appreciate how deeply they've thought about... mouse balls. But sure, let's pretend that has anything to do with why Doom Eternal's design is a mess.

Oprindeligt skrevet af Grampire:

If you'd like an honest, decent conversation - what can I say? Join the club. I've been waiting for 4 years.

I don't need to refute that post - if you can read English it - in an almost satirical fashion - refutes itself better than I ever could.

Sometimes you just need to stand aside and let people prove your point?

Ah, the classic, faking the “I’m too sophisticated for this” stance. If only they realized that their own words are the perfect self-debunking evidence.

[BubonicDuck]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Jordan Peterson:

And here we go again, the usual suspects taking things way too personally and veering wildly off-topic.

It's hilarious how I've seen it so often in the past that they find any excuse to trash the original games just because it bothers them that their beloved Doom Eternal is riddled with game design flaws. They bring up the auto-aim function from the originals as if it's some sort of "gotcha" argument whenever Doom Eternal gets criticized for its abysmal aiming mechanics, where you just point in the direction of a blinking enemy.

It's like criticizing the newer models of a car for having faulty brakes and someone retorting, "Well, cars 100 years ago didn’t even have seatbelts."

No one was criticising Doom for having auto-aim. Stop lying.
If you were paying any attention and not having a fanboy meltdown you would have realised it was in response to:

Oprindeligt skrevet af carmatic:

Eternal has left the Doom lineage... it's got too much ... emphasis on positioning over shooting

When in reality aiming was practically non-exisitent in Doom, II and 64 and positioning was vital to map control.
Again, no one brought this up as a criticism, it was brought up as the truth.

Oprindeligt skrevet af Jordan Peterson:

One thing is critisizing bad game design that every game can be measured with and the other thing is an innovation that older games did not have back then cause it was technically not possible at that time to do it any other way.

It was absolutely technically possible to not have auto-aim and instead have shots head towards the centre of the screen. What are you even on about?

I yet again don't expect you to reply, because you always cower away when someone proves you're wrong.

[Grampire]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Wiesshund:

For what it is worth, we had good mice in 1993.
If someone thinks they did not exist, they are nuts.
Maybe not on par with a laser mouse, for for the time, they were damned good.
You could even get custom weighted balls, brass rollwer with super fin cut digitizer wheels etc
Mind you, most people did not have them, cause most people didn't use a mouse.
It took a lot of brutal beatings, to get people to start using mice instead of keyboarding it.

You don't even need to get that detailed with it.

The Microsoft Mouse 2.0 was more than good enough for FPS titles like Doom at the time - any current mouse would really not provide any actual functional benefit over it.

And in 96 the intellimouse was released, and people were using the OG versions of it for the next 20+ years. It's just recently been phased out with replacements (which some purists reject, ironically).

Oprindeligt skrevet af BubonicDuck:

No one was criticising Doom for having auto-aim. Stop lying.
If you were paying any attention and not having a fanboy meltdown

Well stated. I think the thing that's actually sad is the way they desperately attempt to fabricate a criticism we don't actually have using other Doom titles as fodder because they ran out of actual ammunition so long ago.

They're more interested in creating damaging narratives about other Doom games than we are that's for sure.

[Erwin_Von_Braun]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Grampire:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Edwina_Van_BrownPants:

You've actually managed to disappoint me, and I'm not referring to your somewhat poor spelling & grammar.
If you're not going to participate in the discussion in a reasonable manner, then maybe you shouldn't say anything at all?

Sometimes you just need to stand aside and let people prove your point?

Which is what exactly?

[Erwin_Von_Braun]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Wiesshund:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Edwina_Van_BrownPants:

you act in a rather disappointing manner.

I don't think anyone is here to please you.
at4's probably frowned upon.

I wasn't asking them to...

[RJX3029]

Bah it's a good game and good doom.

[Erwin_Von_Braun]

Oprindeligt skrevet af RJX3029:

Bah it's a good game and good doom.

At best it's DOOM in a pretty dress.
Rather like when you meet a lass who is no stranger to a fish supper wearing a dress two sizes too small ;)