DOOM Eternal - the sequel to the 2016 reboot - now with The Ancient Gods DLC

[Reinhardt]

This isn't 2 hour 20 dollar DLC. No, the first level alone will take you two hours to beat and there are 4. This sort of feels like a sequel actually. Honestly, another developer would have charged 60 dollars for this. You give the money, you get the product. No bullshit. I wish more companies did this. Some skins in some games cost just as much.

So we already went from "60$ for 8 hours?!" to "at least it's not 2 hours!"

 

[DemonKing]

I think they went even more in with the arena element in this one, mostly because they just keep throwing enemies at you and the doors just won't open until the 20th wave.

The problem with this approach is there's very little world building (unless you like to get everything from journal entries). You basically walk into arena after arena, the door behind you closes, and you spend the next ten minutes running around like a lunatic waiting for your nades to recharge and trying to find an imp to chainsaw to get your health/ammo back up. I have no idea why I'm doing this.

The arenas are better integrated in Doom 2016 and even the base game than here and at least in those games I had a vague idea what my motivation was for mindless slaughter and there was a little room to breathe between arena encounters.

 

[Ol' Willy]

How hard is Doom Eternal compared to some Doom megawads on UV?

 

[Multidirectional]

How hard is Doom Eternal compared to some Doom megawads on UV?

Would be a stupid comparison, gameplay is completely different from original Doom. Playing Doom megawads does not prepare you for this at all, you need to learn new mechanics here.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Would be a stupid comparison, gameplay is completely different from original Doom. Playing Doom megawads does not prepare you for this at all, you need to learn new mechanics here.

There's plenty of arena-based Doom megawads. E.G., Ancient Aliens uses this approach, locks the door behind you and throws a lot of stuff your way.

 

[vortex]

How hard is Doom Eternal compared to some Doom megawads on UV?

Eternal is completely new and different experience.

 

[Multidirectional]

There's plenty of arena-based Doom megawads. E.G., Ancient Aliens uses this approach, locks the door behind you and throws a lot of stuff your way.

Which megawads have you jumping/dashing around all over the place and milking enemies for health/armor/ammo? Eternal is a fun shooter but it simply isn't Doom.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Which megawads have you jumping/dashing around all over the place and milking enemies for health/armor/ammo? Eternal is a fun shooter but it simply isn't Doom.

Well, I was wondering about the overall difficulty, since folks seem to praise it a lot in that regard.

Although Guncaster allows for flying/jumping around and has goodies dropping out from monsters...

 

[Israfael]

Don't think you can compare a game with auto-aim and different sort of dynamic to a bona fide single-player competitive online arena shooter. It's simply too different, you need different skillsets here.

 

[Multidirectional]

Well, I was wondering about the overall difficulty, since folks seem to praise it a lot in that regard.

You shouldn't lack challenge playing it on Nightmare. It gets easier once you get more upgrades in but the game also does a decent job of ramping things up until the end.

 

[Ol' Willy]

game with auto-aim and different sort of dynamic

This mod is very OP, but the difficulty can be tweaked

 

[Lyric Suite]

How hard is Doom Eternal compared to some Doom megawads on UV?

Impossible to compare.

Both nuDoom games play out like Quake Arena with monsters instead of enemy players and enemy piñatas instead of health or ammo pick ups (so that level design matters even less than it does on those online shooters), like i said. Every fight in nuDoom consists in you going around like an headless chicken trying to get an opening on some of the nastier demons (which you have to prioritize) in the few milliseconds of time you have to take aim before the entire horde gets on your ass. The cacophony is amplified by the fact the enemies have a vast array of nasty attacks and a pretty smart move set. It's probably the most "impressive" aspect of the game, from a technical point of view. I remember toying around an imp in Doom 2016 and the array of things they can do is actually remarkable. They can shot you from the front with either a normal fireball or a charged up one. Or they can shoot while strafing around. If they are running away from you they can hurl a ball from behind their backs without stopping. If you are behind a corner they can jump, hurl a ball, and jump back before you can shoot back (the game is designed to punish popeamole hard), and finally they can climb or hang from shit so they can shoot you from basically every direction.

And every monster is like this, and many of them also have devastating melee attacks that makes getting close to them a very bad idea. A couple can even create environmental hazards.

So the game is "hard" in the sense you have an immense number of variables (and the AI never fucks up either, which i guess is a testament to their coding) so that you are not allowed at any point to take it easy and the only rest you get is when you are performing a take down. The "bad" part of the gameplay is that in this cacophony you can often die through no fault of your own. It isn't unusual to die because you dodged an enemy attack only to fly straight into another. Second, your running speech is much lower than what it should be, which makes you feel like you have an artificial handicap. You have some utilities that helps you with mobility, but if your running speed was the same as it was in the original Doom the game wouldn't be half as hard as it is. And finally, the game forces you to use certain tools for specific situations and you get punished if you deviate from how the designers decided you should play the game. If you see a spider, you need to take out their turrets asap with the scope rifle or a sticky bomb. Before you get your hands on the more powerful weapons, you are forced to hurl a sticky bomb down the throat of every Cacodemon you meet or they'll never go down. Pinkies will take forever as they have way too much armor if you shoot them from the front but you can bypass that with a blood punch (an attack that recharges with take downs). If you don't have that you have to freeze them and shoot them from behind, or if you are good enough get them with the remote detonate mod from the rocket launcher. You can neuter the Mancubuses if you shoot their arms off. You can knock the armor off the Cyber Mancubuses with a blood bunch making them a lot easier to kill and so on and so forth.

Basically, the game has very little relation to classic Doom. It's not a bad game in so far as modern shooters go. At least it requires skill and nu-id soft seem to have a sadistic streak to them which in the current age of decline is certainly refreshing to see. But don't expect anything like Doom and if you like level design in your shooters forget about it as there's very little here. All the exploration revolves around finding secrets and most of them consist of shit like plastic dolls and the like, which is pretty fucking retarded but i was compelled to get them all just because at least you get a change to explore the level, for whatever that's worth.

 

[Lyric Suite]

game with auto-aim and different sort of dynamic

This mod is very OP, but the difficulty can be tweaked

Still can't be compared because the mobility and variety of attacks of monsters in nuDoom is more advanced. Running in a circle while never changing weapon like the guy does in your video doesn't actually work. Your situation feels a lot more precarious in nuDoom than it does in even those insane megawads. So in a sense nuDoom is actually harder than old Doom, but the reason for that is that you can then just recharge yourself with a take down meaning the game ends up being easier as a result, paradoxically enough. Nightmare difficulty is the only exception because monsters do so much damage there that you really have to get into online shooter mode for that, up to having special keybinds for your weapons exactly like you would in Quake 3 because you need to be able to switch attacks on the fly really fast or you are dead within seconds (you can also override the recoil animation of the heavier weapons by switching between them fast, allowing you to get "free" shots to heavy demons).

Here's an example of how the game plays out with online shooter level of skill:



Which, BTW, the fact the gameplay is so centered on arena fighting makes the lack of proper multiplayer really, really, REALLY infuriating. The game is already fucking half-way there in the single player itself the only reason i can think of why they didn't go all the way with a proper online mode is that they didn't want to run into the problem of people playing on consoles getting their ass raped by people playing on PC.

 

[Lyric Suite]

BTW, regarding some of the "unfairness" of the game, i would say the fact an iron mode exists and that people play them is proof that you can actually git gud enough to a point you can actually avoid ever dying. This shows that even though the gameplay is often chaotic to a point you feel you are dying to random shit beyond your control, there's really no "unfair" difficulty in this game or it wouldn't be possible to do no dying or no hit runs.

 

[Average Manatee]

The gameplay isn't that different between Doom slaughter maps and DoomE. In both cases the focus is figuring out a circular path and not getting cornered. DoomE is much, much more lenient about it though, with how many extra movement options you have and how you can constantly leech health/armor/ammo to make up for mistakes. There's also panic-button options like the freeze grenades (basically a free win against anything hard), and later the BFG (BFG is just a bonus in nuDoom where Doom wads never give you a BFG unless you are meant to use it).

 

[Ol' Willy]

This is the answers I was looking for, mates. So, it's slaughtermap level design + more enemy variety + more enemy mobility, which equals liquid assrape; but to counter this player is given some quite powerful tools. This kind of gameplay philosophy is not bad at all.

 

[Ash]

Any gameplayfag that rightly expects a challenge and is a veteran of FPS should gain some satisfaction on Ultra Violence and Nightmare -- I know I did. If you want to go one step further you can try ultra nightmare but that's for people with severe autism (iron man mode) that don't mind losing many, many hours of progress many, many times instead of playing different games once they were done with UV/Nightmare. It's a good game but not that good.

It's overall tamer than slaughterfest wads in terms of enemy count and asshole enemy placement, but AI is smarter and there are no manual saves - survive each designed gauntlet and earn your monocle.

FWIW been playing shooters (and games in general) obsessively since I first played the original Doom in the 90s, and have quite a bit of experience with slaughterwads too.

 

[Israfael]

Which, BTW, the fact the gameplay is so centered on arena fighting makes the lack of proper multiplayer really, really, REALLY infuriating

Yeah, I thought the same when I was going through DE on nightmare in the spring or when it came out, don't remember it. But then there's too many tools (and frost grenade would be outright removed due to how OP it is, although you can make something out of it with the punch or dash breaking the stun or something like that) that are too OP against an opponent with the typical health pool of a player. Also, it's a big unknown if this engine can handle spacious environments and unpredictable number of entities on screen (I think nu-Doom 2016 had some sort of hard limit encoded in it, but it might have been map generator only thing)

 

[Lyric Suite]

This is the answers I was looking for, mates. So, it's slaughtermap level design + more enemy variety + more enemy mobility, which equals liquid assrape; but to counter this player is given some quite powerful tools. This kind of gameplay philosophy is not bad at all.

Better than Call of Dooty, that's for sure.

 

[OctavianRomulus]

This isn't 2 hour 20 dollar DLC. No, the first level alone will take you two hours to beat and there are 4. This sort of feels like a sequel actually. Honestly, another developer would have charged 60 dollars for this. You give the money, you get the product. No bullshit. I wish more companies did this. Some skins in some games cost just as much.

So we already went from "60$ for 8 hours?!" to "at least it's not 2 hours!"

For a shooter of this kind, this is a lot of content.

Also, the base game is around twice as long as 8 hours.

 

[DalekFlay]

So we already went from "60$ for 8 hours?!" to "at least it's not 2 hours!"

Length is a massively overrated value decider.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/doom-eternal-the-ancient-gods-part-one-review/

DOOM ETERNAL: THE ANCIENT GODS – PART ONE REVIEW
Hell boils over.

If the Doom Slayer is a race car, as id Software has described him, then The Ancient Gods – Part One is a series of victory laps around three new courses. It picks up right at the finish line of Doom Eternal, and the experience is akin to waking up at the wheel of a Ferrari screaming down the track at 200mph. It's precisely as alarming and exhilarating as that sounds.

You inherit the Slayer plus all the extras, souped up with weapon mods and ability runes picked up during Eternal's original campaign. And despite having completed it, I spent the first 20 minutes thoroughly embarrassing myself, thumping at a reload key that doesn't exist and never has. It's the shooter equivalent of flicking into sports mode and realising you've activated the windscreen wipers instead.

id Software, like the Slayer, is at the height of its powers. 2016's Doom saw the studio reinvent the wheel—quite literally, building the game around spinning arenas that set you in constant motion. Ever since, it's been coming up with inventive ways to thrust a stick in the spokes, tripping up players by disrupting the formula.

Doom Eternal's most notorious example was the Marauder, a relentless runner who pursued the Slayer like a shadow, if your shadow owned an axe and a bright-orange attack dog. He returns in The Ancient Gods, and exemplifies id's trend towards enemies who can only be defeated in highly specific fashion. Take the Turrets, new fixed placement shooters that appear like miniature Eyes of Sauron. A couple of shots through the scope of your assault rifle will burst the orb—but take too long during targeting and the ball will retreat inside its pillar, surviving until you can loop around for another try.

Then there's the Spirit, which makes a ghostbuster of the Slayer. Mostly invisible, you'll know it by the blue aura that encircles its host—as well as the super-speed, hyper-aggressive assaults on your person. Once the host is killed, the possessing Spirit bursts out, and you have a few seconds to zap it with the plasma rifle's microwave beam. That would be an easy enough task were it just the two of you—but in Doom, you're always surrounded. If you're tardy with the beam or get distracted, then the Spirit will hop into another host and you'll have to begin again.

You would think this kind of step-by-step enemy disposal would trap you into a process—as if shooting by instruction manual. But the Spirit presents more tactical choice, not less: do you focus your firepower on the host, and hope you can follow through with the plasma? Or demolish the most powerful demons on the periphery first, ensuring there are no large homes left for the ghost to haunt?

The Turret is a sign that the membrane between Doom's fight and exploration phases is weakening. While huge arena fights still provide the punctuation of each level, new threats conspire to push you through the intervening corridors. In the festering Blood Swamps, battered by acid rain, pustules rise from the sodden earth. They bulge as you pass, and blister with a roar if you hang about, causing damage. The rising fog hurts, too, pushing you to keep pace in a Prince of Persia-style platforming puzzle. And remember those annoying tentacles in Doom Eternal? Their gigantic sister lives here, and she heard what you said.

As a consequence, The Ancient Gods is Doom at its most oppressive and intimidating. If there's little respite outside combat, you certainly won't find any in the centrepiece battles, where id holds an occult candle to your arse until your pants start to singe.

There were moments, after several minutes in the mosh pit, where the appearance of a chainsaw-endowed Doom Slayer or two towering Tyrants or three Barons of Hell left me buckling emotionally, not knowing how I'd keep up the act that I was the Slayer, the only thing the demons fear. The truth is that The Ancient Gods regularly frightened me with its intensity.

Ironically, only the Marauder provides the closest thing to a break—despite its first appearance triggering an involuntary, out-loud "oh no". It now triggers the strongest muscle memory, and its patterns are so predictable they're almost comforting in a storm.

If both the imps and the Slayer are quaking, pun intended, the only truly fearless party involved in The Ancient Gods is id Software. Unbowed by the naysayers who objected to jumping sequences and lore, it's pushed forward with both. This is no side story, delivering critical blows to major characters from the past half-a-decade of Doom, while artfully consolidating new additions to keep things simple. There's even some meta-comedy, courtesy of a UAC intern who has a direct view of your HUD and its revelations.

It's hard to complain that Doom has plot when it results in environments like The Holt, where digital plant life blooms against the backdrop of a bloodsoaked forest; where, if you chip away at the bark of the trees, it reveals gold beneath. Heaven has done right by id's art department.

The biggest worry going into The Ancient Gods was that Doom's momentum might be stalled by the absence of Mick Gordon, its composer since 2016, whose hell choirs and industrial crunch have become as central to the series as the Super Shotgun. It's a fitting compliment to Gordon's work that he's been replaced by not one man, but two—and while there's nothing as striking as BFG Division soundtracking the Ancient Gods, Andrew Hulshult and David Levy do an admirable job of matching Gordon's pulsing, downtuned precedent.

The Ancient Gods – Part One is a virtuostic display from id Software, then, and asks the same from you. The only question is how far it makes sense to turn up the temperature. After finishing these three campaign missions on Ultra-Violence difficulty, I was so exhausted I couldn't quite tell whether I'd enjoyed myself—synapses fried by sheer mental and physical challenge.

THE VERDICT
89

DOOM ETERNAL
A frankly terrifying exercise in pushing Doom as far as it can go.

 

[Lyric Suite]

So satisfying to see gayming journos squirm.

 

[sullynathan]

I'm 69% sure death match etc was cut out because it wasn't received well in D44M 2016

 

[Lyric Suite]

It wasn't received well because it was shit. But maybe the problem is that it was shit because they put so much of their resources on the single player and didn't have much left for the multi, so they figured why bother.