No, I haven’t yet played either dlc yet but I’d like to. I’ve been a bit intimidated because I’ve heard that the dlc is even harder than the last few levels of the main game which I found plenty tough. Though I’ve also heard they nerfed the difficulty a good deal in the latest patch which seems to have pissed off the streamers I watch but might put it back in the realm of average players like me.
Yeah, not only DLC2 is shorter and eaiser than DLC1, plus an end boss that pissed off everyone, but they retouched DLC1 to lower difficulty and nerfed also a number of monsters, so even the main campaign is now easier.
The most obvious is the spider monster thing that now shoots slower and misses most of the time.
Well, I wanted to eventually test the mods and there are already custom patches that roll back at least some of these changes and remove some annoying sounds and graphic effects they added:
I was lucky. The mod injector used to restore the difficulty also enables by default the dev commands.
So now I have both restored the difficulty to how it was, AND permanently fixed the crashes without the need to use Cheat Engine.
Oh wow, so they made the game easier? I wonder if that means I can make progress in the game now? I should give it another try. This game really humbled me.
I stopped my playthrough on PS4 hurt me plenty difficulty. It just too too much time to progress. Maybe now it feel better on HMP.
Yeah, I was doing it on UV, just because I had no problems finishing Doom 2016 on UV, and I’m too stubborn to lower the difficulty. I was dying to those spider-bots a LOT though. So now that HRose says they lowered the fire rate on the spiderbots and that they miss a lot, I might actually start making progress again.
I don’t go to baby mode either. HMP or nothing. I could play HMP on all Doom games before and it felt right for me.
I felt no shame dropping to baby mode on Doom Eternal. I get no personal validation from difficulty settings.
I do. The feeling of overcoming a hard difficulty after several failed attempts is oh so sweet.
Of course, that actually requires actually successfully overcoming it. Unlike Doom Eternal where I couldn’t, or Super Meat Boy where I came so tantalizingly close a million times at beating the first boss, but could never get there. Of course, Super Meat Boy doesn’t have difficulty settings, so I didn’t even have a choice of baby mode there.
I gotta admit I’m having a hard time with Doom Eternal, I’m only at the start, just have a couple of weapons, and the ammo system feels like it’s a punishment for something I did. I assume it’ll work better once I have a bunch of weapons so the whole don’t fixate on your favorite weapons part of the design kicks in, but right now, not so much.
It’s not all that significant. For the spiderbots the biggest change is that they seem overall less aggressive. Like if they shoot in short burst rather than sustain it.
They’ve changed small things here and there. But I’m not sure it’s a big deal, especially on lower difficulty levels.
Anyway, again about design:
- Ammo is never limited. In other games you have magazine size and reloading. In Doom Eternal the reloading is the chainsaw. That’s all.
- The difficulty isn’t about the gratification, it’s because playing the game is fun. Replaying the game, even over and over the same fight, because it’s hard, IS FUN. This isn’t a linear game you play for the story, you play because it’s fun, and it’s more fun when it’s hard. The difficulty simply means it last a very long time before you master the gameplay. Then it’s over. (no, it’s not over, there are DLCs, there are master levels, then there are mods)
Enjoy the game, this isn’t about progression.
One of the change they made is now you have icons (bigger or smaller, it’s customizable) close to the center, so you know immediately what powers come up.
Right, I agree, that’s how Doom 2016 was for me. But since I could make no progress in Doom Eternal, I couldn’t enjoy the game. Yet.
I understand that it gets easier once you have more than just the shotgun and rifle. But first I have to get to that point.
It depends for a lot of players, but for example I’ve seen some struggling really hard with the spiderbots. Some encounters are like puzzles and these players struggling just kept treating them like every other monster.
It’s not. You need sticky bombs with the spiderbot, and as soon you see one you have to shoot the turret. Once the turret is gone, it’s easy (that’s why they nerfed the turret).
I’ve seen players not shooting the turret because they think they can’t aim too well, and so end up feeling that if they miss they waste the bomb. So they’d rather just shoot them in the face.
That’s not how it works. You don’t need to aim perfectly. You can just throw a sticky bomb in a general area that’s simply higher than the spider, and the auto-aim is so generous (even on PC) that the grenade WILL stick to the turret. You just aim higher, you don’t have to aim precisely.
The real difficulty is about how to move and switch weapons. That takes time, but it’s also the fun of getting better when you know what and how.
Btw, Doom 2016 wasn’t fun, because the difficulty was entirely random (at Nightmare), and the game started excessively hard, killing you in two hits and in the middle of glory kills, to then become easier and easier. That game was hard for all the wrong reasons (when most deaths are due to random factors rather than an error you make). Doom Eternal is like a new genre, you can restore life the same you can restore ammo. You have all the control.
I have tested the ‘weapon switch during chainsaw animation’ crash you describe and you will find no satisfaction in my answer that I was unable to reproduce it.
I even reset the game to defaults in order to use those wack WASD controls the youngin’s insist upon using, and other than my fingers being crippled by exposure to such a vastly inferior control scheme, can observe no other ill effects.
(The unwelcome advice here that you will not be looking for is that you would likely be a better player if you ditched weapon switch and developed the muscle memory to select the exact weapon you want instead.)
It doesn’t depend on the key, I tried remapping everything, including just using the mouse buttons. It always crashes just the same.
To test you should try glory kills. Just go into a glory kill and spam the key you use for weapon switch/weapon wheel. Spam in the sense of tapping it quickly, without holding it down.
In any case I completed the first level in Ultra Nightmare yesterday (with difficulty restored mods), and the crashes are gone with the fix. The weapon wheel is also working as usual.
Well, TAG2 was definitely substantially easier than TAG1, though given the nerfs I’m seeing I’m sure TAG1 is probably easier now too. I do feel TAG1 at release went too far in places, and the closest TAG2 gets to those difficulty spikes is in the optional 2nd tier of the new gore nests. Given that they’re optional, I think that’s a better implementation, though whether people’s egos allow them to walk by rather than frustrate themselves into rage quitting over a couple of pointless cosmetics is another question.
Overall I think such extreme challenges and the associated rewards would have been better wrapped into the master levels, far away from the critical path. Unfortunately these remain criminally underutilised and mostly just serve to make me mourn the loss of snap map all the more.
That aside, TAG2 does a much better job of easing in returning players with a fairly easy start to the proceedings. The level design is also a bit more playful in places, more willing to indulge excessive power fantasies. Trapping you in a small space, a whole bunch of exploding barrels spawn in alongside a pile of pinkys. “Go on” it nudges you, “You do remember that you have all runes unlocked here, right? Even those silly barrel ones?”
Very enjoyable overall, though it contains one of the lamest boss fights I’ve experienced in recent memory. An extended marauder-style duel with little in the way of excitement or new mechanics, it egregiously overstays its welcome thanks to some very poor design decisions. Prepare to have a lot of time wasted just dancing around waiting for him to choose to do the one attack that you can interrupt, coupled with said interruption needing you to have hammer ammo (which you will not always have) to fully capitalise on it. All further exacerbated due to the massive amounts of health recovery the boss gets if he lands a hit on you. A boring and irritating end, the Dark Lord deserved much better.
Finally, RIP arachnotrons, you gloriously vicious little spidey bastards. Your UN-ending torrents of plasmaspam will be missed.
@HRose yes, should’ve made it clear - I did check glory kills as well. Works on my machineTM.
The arachnotrons are the perfect symbol of the unsolvable design:
The first time one appears you get a pop up screen that tells you that you have to shoot a bomb at the turret. That’s what the game wants you to do.
Yet, as I said, I’ve seen players that think they aren’t very good, and they “feel” that with the tension and the confusion of the battle they cannot aim precisely, and if they miss with the bomb, they are wasting it. So they end up deciding that shooting the bomb right in the arachnotron’s face is the best thing to do. It’s a path of least resistance: it’s safer a bomb to the face, than the risk of missing. They wrongly assume that aiming the turret is a trick shot requiring high skill, and so they desist almost immediately.
But this also has the consequence of turning those monsters into a difficulty spike, because they stay longer in the fight, and end up being far more deadly than intended.
Then devs collect the data, and decide they are deadlier than intended, and nerf that turret.
But this is WORSE. Because what pushes a player to learn to prioritize the turret is the threat itself. The difficulty spike itself is what makes the turret a priority to not underestimate. And nerfing that turret just reinforces the incorrect behavior.
Either the turret is a real threat, and so you prioritize it, or it isn’t, and so you can ignore the design and miss the occasion to understand an important part of the game.
The way the game works is actually perfect, because there’s a hugely generous auto-aim that makes almost impossible to miss, just as long you aim in the general direction of the monster, and aim at the space above, instead of its giant rosy face. It something that feels fun once you understand how easy it is. But to understand how easy and fun it is, you have to try. And players won’t try if the difficulty won’t push them to repeat.
Players don’t want to learn a game. They want to slap the monsters’ rosy butt cheeks. Doom Eternal is that: juggling the three resources while cartwheeling in the air and slapping monsters’ butt cheeks.
The same for the overall perceived difficulty of the game. The difference between me playing at nightmare and some other player isn’t that I have more skill. The difference is that I enjoy the gameplay loop to the point I want to master the encounter, rather than simply get through it in the shorter amount of time possible. And so repeating it 25 times is something I embrace. If I win a fight by random chance, I replay it anyway, because I don’t simply want to get through, I want that the performance is good. I want to develop a good strategy.
It’s a difference of approach, not of skill. For other players repeating a fight more than three times is a personal judgement on their worth and they feel bad about it. It’s the signal that tells them to lower the difficulty.
…By the way. Now I can play the game, but I realized the “extra-lives” mode doesn’t work as I thought. My idea was to play at “nightmare” and have a few extra lives during the level like soft fail states, and if you run out you have to restart the level rather than resuming from checkpoints. …Nope. Dying DELETES the save. You’re being sent to the beginning of the game, and also all other progress is lost.
Now I’m wondering if I should play at ultra-nightmare. What’s the difference from nightmare? As far as I know it saves the progress, so that you just have to repeat the whole level (and that’s what I want), but it also seems to completely remove the “+1 lives” that you find around a level?
I just want an hybrid where difficulty is maxed, with a few extra lives attempts each level, but if you run out you have to restart all of it, so removing the checkpoints. I guess I could play the standard Nightmare and restart manually the level when I die…
UN only allows you to save at the end of a level. If you die or exit early for any reason (including game crashes and even just while you’re in your fortress) your save is wiped.
You essentially get one shot to complete the entire campaign. There are no checkpoints or 1ups. The only do-over you get is the rune that prevents dying one time.
I get where you’re coming from but I disagree. It’s true that every game pretty much allows infinite retries and thus in theory allows for infinite continuous self-improvement, but I think people still have a hard cap on what they can achieve, beyond the soft cap of what they want to achieve. I may be a much wiser FPS player than when I was younger, more able to play to my own strengths, but there is no argument that my unnatural fox-like reflexes ain’t quite what they used to be, either.
More simply; even given an infinite amount of rematches and willingness to use them, I don’t see myself beating a chess grand master.
Of course. But when it comes to the generalization, EVERYONE can get much, much better at playing chess. It’s one of those games with a huge space for improvement. Doom Eternal has a huge space as well.
You aren’t going to be successful if you don’t have a decent grasp of FPS controls, that’s for sure. But I also assure you that many, many people simply refuse to play a fight for more than a few times. They don’t give themselves the chance (and it’s a big general trend of all games, getting easier, fighting for your attention).
In any case, it will be standard Nightmare for me (but I restored monster behaviors, stun effects and DLC1 spawns, if I eventually get there). I’ll just set the rule to avoid using checkpoints.
My fun in this game is nightmare + doing one level from start to finish in one go.
I also feel already at level 2 I’ve yet to get better to be on par with the tools I have. I have already a pretty good grasp of controls, glory kills and chainsaw. But I need to get used to the flame belch and launcher, I simply forget about them. In this case other players would just keep moving on. I’ll keep replaying the 2nd level until I have a good control.
The thing that makes Eternal good and 2016 bad: in 2016 if you were surrounded by 5 close enemy, and you risked going for a glory kill, you died. Because you can still die while the animation plays, and glory kills at Nightmare often do not even restore health. In Eternal, you go for a glory kill, being invulnerable for the whole animation, go into the chainsaw animation smoothly (so now you already killed two), then jump and dash away. In a situation like this, in 2016 you’re dead, in Eternal you killed two monsters, got back health and ammo, and are already observing from above so that you can re-engage the fight on your own terms. That’s control. That’s why the difficulty in Eternal is great, and in 2016 is shit.
That’s never been my problem. The tutorial makes it clear: aim the bomb generally above them and the bomb usually gets stuck to the turret and destroys it. What gets me is if I’m fighting something else and suddenly an unseen spiderbot comes in and gets me. Or the other problem is ammo. In Doom 2016, I finished the whole game on UltraViolence and never had to use the chainsaw for ammo. There was enough ammo lying around. If I ran out of something I just switched to a different weapon. But in Doom Eternal there’s only two or three weapons, so you have to use the chainsaw. Once I’m out of shotgun bombs I have to use a chainsaw to get another to kill the spiderbot shooting at me, and if I’m out of chainsaw fuel, which I usually am, I usually can’t survive long enough to recharge that fuel by running around with a spiderbot targeting me the whole time.
Maybe now that they needed that enemy a bit, I can dodge the fire until I get more chainsaw fuel.