I would think the health kill and the chainsaw are the only non-standard things. Don’t skip those bits.
Ugh yeah, the deadzone implementation feels awful at first blush, it feels borderline broken. I’m sure I’ll adjust, but damn.
Tutorials are super infrequent. The health and ammo system loop (Glory Kill and Chainsaw) tutorials only take a couple of minutes and you use them the entire game. Probably worth gritting your teeth and enduring.
Thanks for confirming it’s not just on my end or in my head.
Fair enough but I find this implementation just so…bad
I also got this because it was $25 cheap including both DLCs.
I’m having a religious revelation.
Because of that. I went back and downloaded Doom 2016 as well. It sucks. So I was sort of right. I had no real interest in the previous Doom, but this one is a whole different world and sets a precedent for the future. It’s game design bliss. I could write a wall of text.
The summary is: this is the next evolutionary step of that Dark Souls design concept. The problem with DS, starting right with Demon’s Souls, is that the difficulty pushes most players to cheese the game. Whether it is by farming souls to level, or by exploiting the bad pathing, monsters constantly falling off cliffs and dying, or other things. It was obvious with DemS because if a boss is hard and requires you repeating a fight, over and over and over, you’d eventually trigger one of the many glitches, and so transform the challenging fight into an easy one. If you repeated that battle 15-20 times, you suck it up and exploit it when the occasion comes.
DemS itself, and it’s obvious even in the remake, was designed around its technical shortcomings. To create unexpected behaviors based on some arcade abstractions. Take for example the third world, I think, with the tumbling warriors on that tiny cliff. There’s a little step that gets them stuck and unable to reach you. It looks very silly, and it’s very deliberate anyway. But sometime they manage to surpass the obstacle anyway and they hit you when you thought you were safe. That’s pretty much the game. Even the more recent installments still work the same. They are more consistent overall, but they still leave big margins for cheesing the fights. That’s their choice of variable difficulty and it’s been a tradition coming right from Final Fantasy (no difficulty selection, but you can farm, and farming lets you push down the challenge).
In Doom Eternal there’s no way of cheesing (that I could see). You either get good or you die. There’s the difficulty selection, though. And I expect most players to play at the wrong difficulty for themselves.
And here’s the revelation: forget that ancient relic that is Doom 2016. Doom Eternal is so old that is new again.
Doom Eternal works like an arcade cabinet.
This is where the controversy lands. Go play Spelunky 2 for the first time. You’ll die 10 times before finishing the first screen unless you’re a veteran of the game. And yet no one dying 10 times in the first screen of that game would really complain. Because that’s the game. But Doom Eternal comes with this enormous baggage of FPS traditions, and linear games, that want you to move forward. It’s the same story of the original Doom: no one played it “right.” Original Doom was slow and sluggish. You used arrow keys and ALT to strafe. There was no “always run”. You peeked past a corner and shoot the monster because it couldn’t see you, then quickly retreat and save the game. And no one really had the hardware to make it practical for the true run & gun. That came much later, when you saw how the online completely changed the playstyle and it was like a totally new game. But I’m pretty sure even those guys at ID “found out” the real Doom, rather than built it. They found a game into their game.
So the ingrained cultural perception of FPS wants you to make progress. You can be faster or slower, depending on your skill and experience, but it’s still about that progress. Get to the end, play some other game then.
But Doom Eternal is a cabinet arcade. You play it for the fun. Not for the progress. It’s like me at the time of the Commodore 64. If I felt like playing Ghost 'n Goblins I’d load it up, play for an hour or two. A few days later I’d repeat the process. Maybe, playing over and over, would make me better, or lucky, and see a new part of the level, but that was not the point. I was just playing a game that I felt like playing. There wasn’t any notion of progress, and, because of it, any notion of the game becoming obsolete either.
The whole point is that dying over and over in Doom Eternal is the game. It’s not the signal the game sends you to make you lower the difficulty. It’s the signal that the game works as intended. The difficulty is the CONTENT. It means the game is meaty enough to not be expendable and forgettable in a few hours, to make you move on.
That’s why I decided to try Doom 2016, for the first time, and in parallel with Doom Eternal. I have no biases because I’m playing both for the first time, at the same time. And I can tell you, playing both at Nightmare, that at least at the beginning Doom 2016 is way harder (and less fun). To begin with, reloading the level takes way longer, and I had to repeat the very first room 20 times or so. This was me coming right after Doom Eternal. Doom 2016 starts with no chainsaw and no double jump. It has no momentum, and no actual control. Even climbing a ledge is much slower. One hit from the enemies can kill you. It’s a whole different affair from Doom Eternal. In that game you have stuff, it gives, right from the start, options. That means that every time I died and retried, I had new ideas. I tried different strategies, different moves. I always died in different ways, and I was almost always in control. Every time I died I knew why, and I knew what I could do about it.
Why should I worry that I died 20-30 times? This is the game. I’m getting used to the controls, to the movement, finding the flow, understanding patterns. The raw “feel” I get from the game is empowering, and the opposite coming from Doom 2016, where I was forced to play defensively and retreat. I learned from Eternal that if there’s a group of monsters I jump RIGHT IN. Doom 2016 punished me for doing the same. In Doom Eternal the game is a playground, and monsters the toys that make funny faces at you to keep you entertained.
Now think about the rest. If Eternal had those “exploratory” sections, where you find how an intricate level loops around and connects, find new tunnels going to secrets… That stuff begins and ends in a single playthrough. The fun of a secret area lasts one time.
Doom Eternal is meant to be replayed, like a classic arcade cabinet. You play it, it’s a TOY. It doesn’t go anywhere. There’s no linear “progress” to it, just a progression of complexity and challenges. The exploratory sections have no place in this game because there’s nothing replayable about them. It’s a piece that belongs to a different game.
As with the original Doom, they found a game in their game. And Eternal is a clear vision after they stumbled on its potential while building the 2016 version.
This is a game “eternally” replayable because it has a sleek design and is eternally replayable same as Bubble Bobble is. You just have to accept that the feel and purpose of linear progression doesn’t belong here, even if this game comes in a shape ingrained in a different game-style.
I’ve read people comparing the difference between Doom and Doom 2 with Doom 2016 and Eternal, but it couldn’t be more wrong. Doom 2016 and Eternal look almost the same, but it’s incredible how they don’t play like anything alike. I’ve never seen such a complete, radical shift in the gameplay feel between a title and its sequel. (an even if I saw many videos about both, I had no real notion of how massive was this difference)
In general I also prefer a grittier, serious and less arcade experience. But this game has a different personality. I guess the next step, to go even further, is to ditch the classic single player campaign and just use a structure like The Binding of Isaac. Just accept it for what it is, it’s an arcade.
From a pure game design point of view Eternal is one of the most important games to come out in the last twenty years. And probably one of those that execute in practice that design more closely to its goal.
P.S.
To better explain, the disconnection between Doom 2016 and Eternal is of the same nature of the disconnection you feel between Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Hyrule Warriors. They aren’t in the same genre.
Are you sure about that?
Well, you’ve convinced me to try this game out, interesting write up!
Sounds like someone finally got an SSD :)
Guess I’ll have to get this when it’s back on Sale on Steam.
And you’re not the first person I’ve seen complain that higher difficulty levels on Doom 2016 are just not fun.
I played them both not on Nightmare but the level below that, and I had a much easier time in Doom 2016 than I did in Doom Eternal.
In Doom Eternal, first on PC and now on Xbox, my progress is glacial. Most days I can’t even make it past a single checkpoint. But it’s still fun to try.
I know this has been discussed a million times, but will I be bored on HMP? I really don’t like modern linear shooters, and HRose’s manifesto notwithstanding, I think I’d prefer to zip through this on a tour and then play it on Ultra-Violence when the RTX upgrades come out. I just hate the idea of taking a lot of damage and retrying fights in a game I don’t expect to be thrilled about.
I’m afraid that is the kind of subjective question you can only really answer for yourself. How can anyone say if HMP difficulty fits you? What’s your aim and reaction time like?
I will note that I think this game excels when you’re prepared to push yourself. If you’re not dying, and often, on your first time through I’d argue that you’re (ironically) doing it wrong and have perhaps missed the point. Like Hotline Miami, the near-instant reloading is a pretty strong hint as to what it expects you to be doing quite often (I don’t think enough praise is heaped on that technical achievement, if it were much longer I half feel the game would become too frustrating to persist with).
The levels are pretty, the guns cool (if wholly unoriginal) but the writing sucks. Consequently I’d resist the urge to ‘tourist’ your way through it on your first play as you will misread the entire tempo of the game start to finish and be condemned to slowly plodding through levels without relying on the mobility skills and will likely just fall back on ‘bad’ habits cultivated in slower FPSes.
You’d finish and be entirely absent that feeling of knowing you’d actually done something pretty awesome. As in, not your character or the scripted scene at the end being awesome. You being awesome.
Whether that actually matters or not to you is something you’ll have to explore - if you don’t already know the answer.
I imagine a game like this people with so-so controller right-stick aiming ability better stick with mouse and keyboard? Sounds too fast and furious with my controller skills. I need to finish my Ubi games before that subscription runs out on the 17th.
I play just about everything with a controller (since I play just about everything on a console, at least every AAA game) and this was probably the first time I’ve really felt like I was probably at a disadvantage. I definitely wouldn’t have attempted a higher difficulty level. Watching the folks who can really perform in this game it’s all basically point and click, and I definitely can’t do that with a controller.
Well, you just answered it for me, so I guess like that.
Ultra-Violence it is.
I’m on Hurt Me Plenty and I die plenty.
Yeah, I’m not suggesting everyone just whack it UP TO THE MAX and suck it up. You should adjust depending on how you find it. Make it as hard as you can without it feeling like a total brick wall, I guess. Just… don’t throw in the towel too quickly?
Anyone who can beat it on HMP with a controller is pretty awesome in my book. :)
For the record, I had to bump it down to ‘Baby’s First FPS’ difficulty to actually beat the game.
You’re saying I should try this game with a mouse and keyboard? I haven’t played a shooter with a mouse since Bioshock 2. I wonder if I even have the skill set anymore. Is it like riding a bicycle?
The problem with m+k, for me at least, is never the mouse. It’s getting my fingers to cooperate together to manage all the various keys. It’s very fumbly to me - I remember getting Borderlands for cheap on Steam and I figured I’d see how the other half live and play just mouse and keyboard and oof, what a disaster. It’s a training thing, just like I could give up inverted controls if I wanted to (but who would want to?) it’s just investing the time to get better that holds me back.