@WhooFlungPoo I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm a huge fan of the franchise but wasn't able to play
DOOM (2016) until 2020, and I loved it. It was a fatntastic game that had a classic but modern feel, simple storytelling, great atmosphere, and a non-traditional FPS combat system.
I fired up
DOOM Eternal this past February for the first time (via Xbox Game Pass Ultimate), and by the time I had reached the game's third level, I was done. I couldn't believe how far off the mark the game was in its frustrating gameplay, platforming, character and art design, etc. I wanted to like it, but couldn't wrap my head around the decision making behind the game and how different it was from its predecessor.
Shortly after I saw that Hugo Martin, the game's director, had been doing a live stream of the game, level by level, and I decided to check it out to see if he'd explain some of the things that were bugging me. And he did.
In brief, he explained:
- They didn't want to make the same game, DOOM (2016) held it's own, and they wanted to expand on the game's combat and truly focus on that and on challenging the player.
- He describes it as in this game, you're a race car going along really fast, so for the monsters, items, and pick ups, everything was done art style/design-wise for identification purposes. Since you're moving so fast, you need to know what's what instantly. So all enemies are actually not more colourful, they're actually all lit from underneath their character models so they're always clearly visible. A gun in a corpse would be easily missed, but a spinning weapon is easy to spot and identify, medikits are crazy bright white so they can be seen even farther away, etc.
- The game's story is secondary, and they had b-movie style fun with it.
- Every single encounter in the game has a purpose and something to teach the player. There are Arenas, Incidental Combat Encounters, Combat Puzzles, Navigational Puzzles, etc., and he actually discusses many of them individually and what they were designed to teach the player.
Overall,
DOOM Eternal is what he calls a skill based FPS.
@Plays2_MX mentioned the game has been criticized for "forcing" you to play a certain way, which it has been, but that's actually not true. It's a skill-based game and the game is teaching you to fully use your tools, kit, and options.
Think of it like a fighting game. It's like playing
Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate and saying "Mileena's Ball Roll should launch without amplifying it, so I'm
not going to ever amp it!" Could you do well and win by playing that way, sure, but ultimately you're just making things tougher for yourself. If you play a rushdown character as a zoner, you're going to make things tougher for yourself. If you don't properly use your tools the way they were designed to be used, and combined, you're going to have a rougher time.
Once I understood all this (even if I didn't agree with all the decisions he explained), I went back and started the game over, and had an absolute blast. I stopped putting up mental blocks, playing the game the way I thought it should be played, and started playing it with an open mind and learning, and the gameplay is absolutely fantastic once you understand it. The only FPS series to come close to this kind involved gameplay is
Halo, as
@Dankster Morgan said, and the rush you get while playing
DOOM Eternal and it's more intense encounters is fantastic.
And just like any other skill-based game, the more you play and learn, the more you'll improve and you'll see your own improvement over time.
If you want to check out Hugo's Series, it starts here:
. Or I can play that at 1080p 144fps with DLSS and RTX enabled. DLSS is just awesome.
