Doom

Might just be a dev's family photo, the Fortress is full of silly easter eggs.

Continuing Doom 64. I am now 5 levels in. My arsenal is fist, pistol, shotgun, super shotgun, chaingun, and rocket launcher.

I wish I could drop the regular shotgun and pistol so I can cycle through my weapons faster.

Come to think of it, I don't see the iconic intro of Doom 64.

The game just absolutely loves pressing switches. I once go to a new room, press a button in the new room,then go back to the previous room, and grab the key there, then go back to the new room, and then use that key to open another room.

My only complain about the game. There's too much platforming.

Like in one of the Dev diaries they mention people complained that between fight arenas in 2016 there wasnt much to do. And that wasn't wrong. But they've sort of overcompensated. After each fight it's like "Okay what Insane Troll Logic do I have to follow to figure out how to cross this room?". Like at some point I just want to go to the next fucking fight, if I wanted to be platforming this much I'd not be playing a Doom game.

Its annoying coz imho it kinda wrecks the environments. Like in 2016, it's all destroyed shit, but the layouts make sense. It's mars base and areas are identifiable. "Oh that's a locker room. That's a cargo area."

Here its like "nah bro this base is built like a super mario level. Don't ask questions and welcome to the floating platform and wall jump room."

Edited by Ghilz on Mar 20th 2020 at 1:40:09 PM

Obviously, I enjoy things weirdly, so the invincible badass thing in the story doesn't do much for me. This gameplay is pretty brutal though, I'm playing on Ultra-Violence. I like the new mechanic of demons having specific weak points, and shooting them either makes them stagger or takes away some of their offensive capability. Like, shooting a Mancubus' arm cannons prevents it from firing massive blasts at you.

It's a first-person shooter version of the kind of stuff I adored in the Arkham games. Where you had to use different techniques and abilities to counter different types of enemies in massive swarms, so it always keeps you on your toes and thinking.

The game doesn't fuck around either. On the very first level, it expects you to fight a spider mastermind in a narrow subway corridor while fireballs fly down the hall at you as well.

Edited by GNinja on Mar 20th 2020 at 5:45:15 PM

Arachnotron. No spider mastermind in Doom Eternal.

And yeah the combat is stellar. I love it. I just wish there was less platforming around it. Like the first level is fine, but around the third it becomes ridiculous.

Edited by Ghilz on Mar 20th 2020 at 2:02:38 PM

I haven't played Eternal yet, but one thing that I distinctly remember from a promotional vid was one of the directors commenting that they felt they had to create that congruous, immersive experience for 2016 because that was just how things had to be done at the time, in order to get the game off the ground and be properly received by a wider audience (since Doom had been out of the picture for so long).

They were at least very upfront that they were going to discard a lot of that for more openly "video game-y" stuff, using the cred they now established to try new things and also not just retread 2016, but I could tell right away that would be one of the more contentious things about the sequel, since it would extend to a lot of design aspects.

Edited by Eschaton on Mar 20th 2020 at 11:04:12 AM

I think it's there for pacing reasons. To break up the combat.

IMHO there's just too much of it. Individually or in moderation it's fine, but when it's like the fifth room in a level where you have to pause to try and comprehend how the game expects you to move forward.

The level where you fight the Doom Hunters. Most of the level is this series of complex transversals your doing in a flying city each more complex and over the top culminating with one where you're expected to jump on wall segments held in mid air by robots but if you stay too long the segments becomes impossible to cling to and the drones fall and you need to jump from drone to drone through a mid air moving laser grid and it's like "WTF is going on what am I playing?!"

I get that. Like I said. I feel like it's overcompensating. Like, there's already a ton of secrets to hunt in each levels (over a dozen per level without counting stuff like extra lives which the game doesn't always count as secrets). The extra platforming I feel ends up overdoing it and hurting the pacing.

Edited by Ghilz on Mar 20th 2020 at 2:15:08 PM

You know what the Doom revival is reminding me of?

John Wick. John Wick is also about a ridiculous, memetically badass main character who's relatively quiet, and through the simple premise of a guy wanting revenge for his dead dog we get introduced to a lush, well-developed world with a lot of meticulous lore laid out for it, that gets expanded on with each entry.

Edited by GNinja on Mar 20th 2020 at 6:21:48 PM

I actually like the platforming. It's a nice break between the fights. It's very Metroid-y and I'm here for that.

The platforming isn't the greatest, but when it works it works. When it doesn't it just becomes too complex for its own good like that Doom Hunter level mentioned before.

All that aside, I think we can all agree that we'd take them over stealth sections.

What part of the Doom Hunter level is too complex?

The one where you have to trump from floating walls that plummet if you hold onto them for more than a second.

Huh, I really didn't think those were that bad at all. You just gotta make sure you can see where you're going to jump to.

I actually think the level design is pretty great for signposting where you can jump to at any given time.

I think it says a lot that I can do the platforming stuff fine so far (beat Exultia) but I still haven't gotten into the combat groove quite yet, and that's on Hurt Me Plenty.

Yeah, not sure what Ghilz is seeing or not seeing what I don't see or see, but to each their own.

Platforming looks solid and I can't wait to feel it. They should make special challenge levels where it's nothing but platforming, parkour and an occasional trapped cacodemon or pain elemental in mid-air for meathooking.

Anyone got to that new chapter of Doom 64 and is there any lore devs described as "satisfying for those old and new"?

Like I said, it's not that the platforming is bad, I feel that there's just TOO much of it. It's fine when it's to get secrets and such. But when you're just trying to get from fight to fight I find they kill the pacing especially in abundance.

And yeah, they also kinda mess with the level design. Where levels no longer look like locations that should exist and fulfill a purpose, but just series of jumping and platforming puzzle that has no diegetic reason to exist. Like a mario level.

Generally yes, but I've had more than a few moments where the sign posting fails. Right after you open the first door with the cult key in the cultist base, there's a big locked door, a level behind metal bar, and it took me a while to find the wall you can cling too off a cliff and down to the side of the map.

Walls you can cling to are often put in dickish angles that makes them hard to spot, not helped by them being often colors that makes them meld in the background. The rest tends to be signposted with green lights, but the scalable walls aren't.

Edited by Ghilz on Mar 21st 2020 at 12:52:47 PM

You're saying as if it's a bad thing. I like it and it isn't literally at every waking turn you bounce from wall and do dashes.

So I don't agree with "overdone" or that it kills pacing, sorry. I've watched videos and I actually would love to get to it when fight ends. The more intricate and crazier, the better

Edited by Dhiruxide on Mar 21st 2020 at 5:58:18 PM

It is though for some levels.

I have heard it said that platforming is a difficult mechanic to implement in a game with a 1st-person camera, since it's hard to see where your feet are relative to the platforms. I've recently played an FPS remake of a stage from Mega Man 1 and definitely got that impression, too. So it's possible that could be working against Doom?

Though I will note that it's not impossible to get an FPS-platformer to work, there are examples of such games being successful.

well, if you're somewhat close to a wall, slap E (or the console button for it) and you magnetize yourself to it. You jump off walls pretty distantly and with dash boost and poles it's great.

And the game doesn't penalize you if you bungle it up, you lose some armor or health. You can die if you can't take a hint already tho

I don't like the purple titan shit when you stroll in their insides. It more than halves your movement, you cannot jump and you get sucked punched by tentacles as well

I had more shit to deal with Serious Sam: The Next Encounter's jumping puzzles

Edited by Dhiruxide on Mar 21st 2020 at 6:26:06 PM

My nightmare was a section where you had to walk through a narrow corridor of that purple stuff, and then Hell Knights started teleporting in towards the other end.

Yeah the game's controls for an FPS platformers are fine, it avoids issues that plague the genre generally. There are a very few times where you are expected to jump and land on relatively small platforms, and it can be tricky to figure if you're on that platform and where to stop. but those times are so rare its barely worth mentioning.

I should mention that once you get the dash, you automatically cling onto the climbable surfaces when you dash into the wall.

That's a nice Anti-Frustration Feature.

Just dash head first into walls lol. Fully body vertical slam ho!

Anyone got to end game yet and started reading codex entries?