Can’t play DOOM the dark ages because of mandatory Ray tracing. My GPU is too old and I don’t have 1M€ right now to get a new one.
Not giving id any of my money after what they did to Mick Gordon.
Tbh I really liked Doom 2016, but couldn’t really play Eternal (I never got around to it because there were other games to play, and I didn’t want to just buy it full price), and Dark Ages looked fucking awesome.
I hope there will be a big bundle with all the games and all DLC at some point in the next couple years, because the DLC looked awesome.
Doom Eternal is fantastic. It really made me look at FPS games in a different light.
It grabs the solid but simple gameplay of DOOM 2016, and then develops it into a fast paced combat puzzle where every tool in your arsenal has a role to play and you are rewarded for cycling through them.
It definitely expects a lot more from the player, but if you are open to it, it’s an amazing experience.
Gotta disagree with the people hating on Eternal here. Eternal is very different than 2016, so it’s understandable 2016 will be some people’s favourite.
The key difference is that Eternal has a much stricter way the game wants you to play it. When speaking about the changes, the devs pointed to some incredibly lame review footage where a game journo beat several levels while barely turning the camera, ramming around corners and only using the shotgun. You can play 2016 that way, simply forcing a gun you like as a silver bullet into every scenario.
Eternal will demand significantly more from you. Guns to target weak points, special interactions like grenades for cacodemons, enemies like marauders who want to dance at specific ranges or require trickery like shooting rockets at the ground behind them to beat them, you’ll even need to cycle between multiple guns to skip lengthy reloads to get your full DPS. You need to make macro level decisions constantly, not just point at the nearest demon and shoot it. It’s often referred to as “combat chess”. If you give yourself over to it and play with an open mind, getting good at Eternal’s combat is fun as hell, and is likely the best combat I’ve ever experienced. You feel like a beast when you’re successfully executing the dance, 2016 will feel like a slow slog in comparison.
Bonus review, since I’m here. TDA is a total shakeup again. Combat is slower and more flexible, striking a middle ground between 2016 and Eternal. Many of the varied tools you needed to swap weapons for in Eternal are just shield abilities you always have here, so you can pick a favourite weapon and stick with it again. Should, actually, swapping around is slow and guns don’t have huge speciality advantages. The game leans more into being a power fantasy, but the shield is very good, you don’t have to earn it nearly as hard as you did in Eternal. For reference, I fairly easily beat TDA on Nightmare for my first playthrough, and failed to do so when returning to Eternal that same year, getting totally walled in a fairly early level. They did rebalance the campaign since I played TDA though, and it’s supposed to be harder. Planning to check it out in a replay before playing this DLC.
All in all, I really love that each entry is bold enough to totally revisit the core design and do something fresh. Eternal is basically the perfect version of that vision, especially in the DLC. I might have loved more of that, but it there really wouldn’t have been anything new to add. So TDA does its own thing and does it really well. Each entry is radically different, and they’re all awesome (although I really can’t go back to 2016 lol).
2016 is the superior game of the three. If you only had to play only one of them, I think you wound up making the correct choice.
Eternal had some highly questionable gameplay design choices made about it and I have no idea what the fuck Dark Ages is supposed to be doing or what anyone thinks it’s got to do with Doom. It’s begging to have a new setting and IP made for it. And in fact I suspect (with zero evidence) that this was the original intent before some suits got involved and insisted on slapping the Doom trademark on it for the brand recognition, or whatever the hell.
But it’s Bethesda, and now they’re owned by goddamn Microslop of all people. So I’m not buying Dark Ages at any price, DLC or not, and not especially how they did Mick Gordon dirty the way they did during the development of Eternal, and et cetera and so on and so forth. Fuck 'em.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I can think of few stewards worse for Doom and it’s legacy than Bethesda and fucking Microslop.
classic doom is the best. and dark ages brings it back to that slower gameplay
Having played all Doom games I’d argue the closest to the classic was Doom 2016. Dark ages IMO was too reliant on the shield and melee to the point where at times it didn’t even feel like a Doom game. 2016 had an overall faster pace but the core gameplay loop felt more like the classic and the faster pace is IMO also the more entertaining way to play classic Doom. 2016 IMO nails the essence of the classic doom.
Current “classic” Doom is generally played at a much faster pace overall than in the DOS era anyway, now that auto-run is a thing and the assumed default for many WADs and maps, and the majority of people are at minimum using mouse aiming and also probably mouselook.
2016 felt pretty spot-on by comparison. Eternal and its restrictive ammo capacities and “you must defeat this kind of monster exactly this way” bullshit got tiresome very quickly. Evidently nobody was brave enough at the time to tell id that if the discoverability of your gameplay mechanics is such that you feel you have to yank the player away into a dream-sequence arena to tutorialize at them with the One Approved Way to defeat that type of monster, your design is bad.
I could feel the block and parry thing in Dark Ages getting old before the trailer was even over.
OG Doom didn’t have autorun, but most of us that were good at it back then played it insanely fast, especially if you used a mouse. You used the mouse for forward and backward movement and when run held down, you could bolt in and out of areas in a speed I don’t think i have ever seen in any other game. The modern ports with autorun and mouselook can also be played very fast, but it still feels slower to me and it is more like a slightly sped up Q3A (which I admittedly also love).
I watched someone do a playthrough of Dark Ages and in the first or second level, control was yanked away from him to play a cutscene of an opening door. While he was shooting at an enemy.
That’s unforgivable. I have no idea why that doesn’t seem to be a big deal to so many people.
Having played all 3 of them, I enjoyed The Dark Ages far more than Eternal. With the exception of the Marauder, Eternal was basically just “keep shooting and moving and you’ll never die” and was way too fast on its default setting. While 2016 was plenty fast, it was still somewhat tactical at times. The Dark Ages goes in that direction but with the parries which is an interesting mechanic that was refreshing imo. At times it feels like a rhythm game which was pretty fun. My main issue with it is that it drags in for a bit too long and that it felt like they weren’t really willing to commit all the way with the parry gameplay.
Yeah I loved 2016 but couldn’t get into eternal at all. I’ll probably try the dark ages in a couple of years when it’s on sale for a few quid, I’m less enthused as it’s not Mick Gordon doing the music and the music was such a big part of the vibe.
Doom Guy does not look cool with his helmet off.
Another sequel of something called “Revelations?” Doom has officially jumped the shark, hasn’t it?
The more Bethesda milks the DOOM franchise, the more it looks like Skyrim
What?
It started as a sci-fi shooter. DoomMarine was just a human left behind to guard a ship with a pistol and ends up fighting the hordes of hell with an array of modern and sci-fi weapons. The only medieval elements you would see were when you were in the hell world. The back story was essentially he got assigned there as a punishment for punching an officer who was ordering him to shoot civilians. He was a human, representing humanity in a fight against evil.
Now with all the changes they made The Doom Slayer is a demigod being wielding medieval and fantasy weapons in an increasingly medieval-looking armor of alien origin with an insanely convoluted backstory of him being the twin brother of the devil or some BS I don’t know I just stopped caring at that point. He is completely dehumanized. The whole game looks and feels more like a fantasy game in a medieval world of magic than a sci-fi shooter.
IMO the creators of the Brutal Doom mod/campaign came up with a far better expansion of the Doom universe that stayed much more true to the source material. I’d love to see a high budget game made in that universe.
The whole game looks and feels more like a fantasy game in a medieval world of magic than a sci-fi shooter.
Isn’t that the point though? Doom The Dark Ages is a dark fantasy style Doom. You even get a flail and sword in this one. I liked the change of scenery as opposed to yet another set of sci-fi bases, it’s the opposite of what I’d call “milking it” because the simpler option would be to do the same thing again.
I’d argue that if you make a game with a style, story, time period and even what the protagonist is that have entirely departed from the original content, you’re just slapping the original’s name on it to boost sales.
If they ever made a Halo game where MasterChief removes his helmet to reveal that he was an orc all along and that he’s now riding a literal giant warthog in battle wielding a stone axe, people would flip their lids over this. Especially since because of that the style and soul of the game people love is now dead unless they do a hard reset of the franchise. I think it’s the same there, except that the transformation was made gradually since Doom 2016 that people didn’t notice as much. It really looks like Bethesda preferred to do medieval fantasy games so they just turned the Doom franchise into it.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure it perfectly capable of being a good game. But is it really a Doom game still?
I’m probably in the minority here, but I much prefer the original Doom and Doom 2 to the Bethesda Doom games. Even 2016’s departed a lot from the style while only retaining the themes and introducing theatrics. I’ve never really cared for “arena” shooters; I like the labyrinths.
