DOOM/id stuff

The DLC adds a lot of cool stuff and it's pretty generous. Eternal levels are massive and you get 6 new ones, all very different and (I think) horde mode is also part of the DLC. Well worth 15 quid

Yup +2

Just couldn't get into the 2nd, loved 2016. It's on psplus so will try again.

Eternal feels like a game designed around having the entire tool set of abilities and weapons. In the first half where you don't have everything, it just doesn't flow or lend itself to letting you have a groove. Everything feels a bet restrictive.

It also has some godawful design in that half, such as sections of that slowdown sludge etc.

Once you have everything it's a lot better, but it's still a very different game even then - everything is turned into a mechanic, so to speak, regardless of if it makes sense. So it turns into this giant game of meter and cooldown management that I'm not a fan of, and results in stupid stuff like giving me a flamethrower whose only purpose is generating armour drops and a punch that does literally nothing unless I did 2 finishing moves before hand.

Hugo Martin in the runup to launch was calling it a "thinking man's shooter" but it's really not, it's just following a flowchart more than anything.

I'm not sure about what I saw in the trailer for this. It looked almost Serious Sam-like at first, which is a major turn off - flat environments with no verticality, lots of open spaces, etc. Reading their thoughts on it, they seem to be going for a projectile hell sort of approach which sounds interesting, but I'll have to wait and see.

Yeah that wasn't great, but at least it wasn't as bad as Wolfenstein 2 putting weapon upgrades as tiny pickups indistinguishable from their environments, randomly strewn about the place with your only hope of finding them checking the map then looking at the grey on grey environment trying to find it.

Yeah, in the Dark Ages trailer, when I saw that it seemed to have an emphasis on Hell environments rather than city ones, I was a tad concerned for similar reasons. The Hell levels in Doom16 in particular were very memorable and a nice change up from the city maps. Tbf, I'm sure this won't be lost on id, so I'm sure there will be all sorts of level designs.

All this talk is definitely making me want to replay Doom16, and maybe Eternal. Haven't played 16 since launch. Probably long enough that it's nice and fresh in mind again.

Eternals first DLC was great, probably the game at its best. You have the whole arsenal but instead of just throwing you into glorified death match arenas like the end of the main story, it has loads of interesting encounter spaces.

The only downside is they introduce an enemy that can only be killed using the plasma guns microwave beam secondary fire. Presumably they noticed nobody uses it because it sucks, and rather than buff it they did that instead.

The second DLC is not good though imo. It adds yet more enemy types that you have to wait until they do a certain animation to damage them, and another one that can only be hurt with a specific secondary fire.

Worst of all it adds a poison variant of the teleporting enemies who if they hit you prevent you from using dashes and quickly drain your health over time.

The only way to remove the poison is to punch the thing that did it to you. But it can Teleport. And you can't dash while poisoned. It's fucking dogshit.

What about me who sees what they're doing with it but finds some of it clever an some of it shit

re: the blood punch; what I mean is that when it's not charged it does literally nothing. It's great when it is charged, but it's just odd mechanic-ification of everything in my eyes in a way that isn't necessarily intuitive. Like "we gave you an actual melee in this one", but it doesn't actually perform any function *unless* you've met the mechanical requirements for it.

The ghosts bug me because on UV the thing that's possessed becomes a "kill this fucking thing immediately" level of danger, but then you also need to kill the ghost after to ensure it can't possess anything else. But because you focused that target, everything else is also still alive and using the microwave beam slows you down massively, leaving you a sitting duck. Just feels like mechanics working against each other.

I do like Ancient Gods Part 1 quite a lot otherwise though, I just find the experience of playing Doom Eternal a bit too rigid, as though I'm just following a flowchart of "use thing on thing" in order, while 2016 is a bit too "everything works on everything".

Part 2 still sucks though, I also forgot that half the environments in it are cramped as fuck and some of them have massive dead ends in them too so you just get railroaded into a corner and fucked up sometimes.

The more they do updated dooms, with all the bigger and better stuff/angle, the more I just want to fire up doom1 and doom2 and go through them again.

It's the purity that makes it work for me, 25 years or so later and it still works.

Dunno. Getting old I guess. But I'd love a doom1 and 2 remaster. The gameplay and music would have to remain 100% the same though so probably not really worth it, hence I just use gldoom or whatever client I have and have the qol bits and bobs.

The dark ages video just looks like any generic aaa shooter made nowadays to me.

/old and nostalgic

It’d be nice if they added the option of the PS1 soundtrack to the current versions of Doom 1 and 2 they’re selling.

I think 64 is basically the same score but I’m not a huge fan of the change in monster design that came with the updated graphics.

Doom 3 starts strongs then devolves to infinite enemies spawning behind you every fucking time. Also the shotgun has no god damn feedback to it despite sounding very loud.

3. It's not a good shotgun.

It is weak but it does mean you have to get up close to enemies with it, plus I really like its visual design

I think the sounds for the weapons in 3 are generally poor and is part of what makes them feel weak

Same as the one in Quake 4. They sound fragile, like they're going to fall apart

Plutonia is my fave. It's absolutely brutal and a bit patchy quality wise but its influence on WAD design is unparalleled.