DOOM, and the Eternal lore problem.

Eyes fly open, only seeing the lid of a sarcophagus, suspended above, and at your level, arms chained to an alter of some sort while zombified scientists meander closer. Chains broken, and zombies killed, you see holograms of people worshiping you, and one woman scheming, before once again donning the armor of the DOOM Slayer. Then you get the first piece of concrete context for DOOM 2016: Dr. Samuel Hayden revealing that things have gone wrong as they possibly can, and the facility is overrun with demons.

And the Slayer's reaction is to be so rightly pissed off that by the end of this quick prologue, he punches a communication panel so hard it goes straight into a late title card.

In retrospect, DOOM 2016 (after this just referred to as "DOOM") has one of my favorite opening sequences. Definitely my favorite cold open, at least in any game I've played. It leaves so many tantalizing questions, and sets the stage for a game about ripping and tearing through countless demons, and being so furious that people would try literally fracking hell for demon energy that he doesn't care at all about whatever justifications they had. No amount of reasoning or, "we had no other choice" could ever make up for unleashing so many demons.

I think there's two main reasons why this stuff worked so well in DOOM. One, is that it was all relatively simple, and straightforward, and the other is that it felt like it understood that the mystery, the ability to let players' imaginations fill in the gaps was better than explaining every last little detail.

DOOM Eternal, however...is kind of the exact opposite. A galaxy and dimension spanning story about a one man war against now not just the hordes of hell, but also against the cyber-angel Makyrs, hell priests, and maybe also some intentionally zombified humans? DOOM was content to let the imagination fill the gaps, but Eternal has a codex entry for anything you could want to know, and so much more.

The weirdest thing, though, is that I feel like all this story and lore developed into something of a paradox. On the one hand, Eternal is overflowing with lore. Digital reams pouring out of the codex, to the point where codex entries became another collectible, like glowing trading cards floating amongst the levels. The problem being that almost all of this lore, these codex entries were so uninteresting that even when I tried to read them, I felt my eyes glaze, and just thought I should go back to the ripping and tearing.

That brings me to the paradox, which is that despite this game having more lore than it knows what to do with, more than could ever be interesting, Eternal still manages to not present enough direct information for me to feel like I fully grasped what was going on. In some ways it almost reminds me of stuff like Destiny 1? Though I'll at least give this to Eternal, it has the lore actually in the game.

I guess I should probably put in a spoilerwarning, just because.

The way Eternal handles "world-building" is to just say the names of Proper Nouns and Factions and Locations without any other context, as if everyone already knows what's going on, and if you don't, then find the codex entry collectible that will fill in that gap, if you have the endurance to read the ten part (or more?) series on the history of the Sentinels, for example.

I did not.

I really did not expect this to happen, but Eternal has left me thinking about Mass Effect. Many people talk, even to this day, about spending lots of time reading through every codex entry in that first game. I, as someone for whom Mass Effect 1 is my favorite game ever, am being sincerely honest when I say I barely read any of the codex entries in that game, or even across the whole trilogy.

I didn't feel the need to, because the game did such a great job of explaining the universe, all the different races, factions, etc, in world, through dialog. By giving me the opportunity to talk with characters, to ask questions, to delve into these topics in this way, I learned so much about the rich universe BioWare created, and I loved it. And now, all these years later, when I think about how to best introduce that sort of information about a universe, random bits of lore written in a codex isn't the answer, at least not for me. But who am I to say? It's not like I spend my spare time writing fiction in the hopes that someday literally anyone would read it. (Games writing is different, I know, I'm just being cheeky.)

I admit that part of it is just that I don't really jive with the codex format of world-building, even when the world being built is interesting. Another game I thought about in relation to this, is Pyre. The third Supergiant Games game, the one that's a mix of fantasy sports balling and visual novel. I hadn't played it until this year, and didn't write about it because I didn't feel like writing a full spoiler-blog at the time. Suffice to say I really like Pyre's story, the whole arc, all the characters, the choices (which certainly matter in some respect), everything.

But as much as I like that game, and its world, I just found myself unable to read too much of the lore entries in its codex either. For the life of me I couldn't tell you why, because I think that world is pretty cool. And since there's very little voice acted dialog in that game, it's almost all reading, so it's not like I have some aversion to literally just reading. It's odd and I haven't really thought about it until playing Eternal, because some games like Control, or Prey, I'd read every memo or email I found in the game. For some reason my attention just drops like a rock when the info is presented like an abridged Wikipedia article.

Heck, even in DOOM, I read most of those corporate emails I found!

Okay, the last game, that I cannot believe Eternal made me think about, and please don't stop reading as soon as I say this because I know it's the most tired thing to bring up, is Dark Souls. Or rather, the From Software style of world-building sparsity. Those games (aside from Sekiro) have mastered the art of dribbling out bits of lore, through the environments, off hand dialog from depressed NPCs, and snippets in item descriptions. Now, we all know this, but what exactly made me think about Dark Souls in DOOM Eternal?

Early on, in one of the first few levels, the Slayer encounters a character known as The Betrayer. Upon meeting him, I was given a codex entry, which I read some of, and that boring lore just got me thinking about a much more interesting way of presenting a character named The Betrayer. Think about From games, where often the only direct information you are given about a boss is the name that appears above its life bar. I don't know anything about the Cleric Beast in Bloodborne aside from its name, but there is something fundamentally intriguing about the first boss in that game being called Cleric Beast. This beast much taller than a human, twisted and gnarled, scraggly haired, and antlered, used to be a cleric, or perhaps still is. Without directly showing anything aside from that name and its visual design, it says quite a lot about the world of Bloodborne. More importantly, it raises questions that are key to the bigger story/lore of that world.

I'm not saying that simply naming this NPC The Betrayer and giving no other information would be as informative or world-building as the Cleric Beast, but it would have been a hell of a lot more interesting to just have that name and let my imagination fill in the rest.

And that, really, is probably the most disappointing part of Eternal's lore. The thing that made DOOM's lore so cool was that there was very little of it. Someone referred to as The DOOM SLAYER who was imprisoned in a sarcophagus in hell is cool and left my imagination running wild. The endless possibilities that my mind ran through after finishing that game, things that ranged from eternal cycles of the Slayer awaking to deal with demons, to thinking he was BJ Blazkowics from Wolfenstein.

Finding out he was just some dude muttering about ripping and tearing (I cannot believethey gave him a voice and then THAT was what they had him say) who was given super powers...was disappointing. I'm sure the reveal that he got his powers from the same hell priests he's killing was supposed to have impact, but it really doesn't when those hell priests could just as easily have been MacGuffin crystals for all they actually affect the story.

I don't know what sorts of decisions led to DOOM's story and lore being the way that it was, but after Eternal, I get the impression that maybe intriguing snippets of lore that is far better off with the gaps left unfilled was perhaps not their ultimate goal after all. Even so, the vibe of that game, where the Slayer was just so disdainful of everyone around him, and fed up with having yet another demonic mess to clean up isn't here, aside from maybe one or two instances.

Two moments in Eternal stand out to me in terms of anything writing related, and channeling that vibe from DOOM. The first is when a scientist says they need to carefully remove Samuel Hayden from some stasis thing and the Slayer just yanks him out and he falls to the floor with a clunk. The second is later when Hayden says the Slayer can't just shoot a hole directly into the surface of Mars, followed immediately by Vega just opening the portal for him to go shoot a hole directly into the surface of Mars. Or maybe Hayden said that right before the Slayer fired the BFG 10,000 at Mars, I forget.

When I think about those couple moments, those are the ones that best replicate that feeling from the previous game. The Slayer doesn't care, he just has demons to kill, and he's furious that people were arrogant and foolish enough to let this happen, presumably again. I so wish Eternal felt like that more, because that's how I felt about all this lore. I just wanted to rip and tear, not have Hayden walk me through the step by step process of demons torturing humans to get Ardent Energy out of them, read some lore about the Khan Makyr, and proceed to roll my eyes. Makyr? You know, like maker, because they're angels, except not really.

Honestly, not to get on a huge tangent, but there is something I find profoundly cowardly about so readily and quickly invoking hell, demons, etc, but not doing the same with heaven. The word angel appears in a codex entry, at least, in relation to the Makyrs, but that's about as close as they get. I'm not saying they need to or should go all the way and make these games literally tied to any specific religion (I say as someone agnostic at most). I'm saying that if it was really metal, they would have called it heaven and not been afraid of making people angry, especially when those people were never the ones to play something like this anyway. Let me rip and tear god into pieces, you cowards!!

Okay, last story complaint here: In DOOM, about the only time the Slayer showed any care toward another character was when he transferred Vega into a storage device, and brought him to safety. Thus why Vega is your AI buddy through Eternal. Now, I know Vega doesn't really have much personality beyond a pleasing voice, because he fills the role of generic AI character. But I like Vega, and I was bummed that he just kinda gets left at that terminal on the Makyr world. I mean, I also enjoy Hayden's voice talking to me, but Vega is the one character in these games that deserved better than to presumably die. On the other hand, since Eternal begins with the Slayer in a space castle with no other context, and all his upgrades/weapons from the last game gone, I don't know that continuity is something that especially matters, so they could just bring him back next time.

At least the game is fun, right? Even then, as much as there are some improvements, I didn't come away from this one feeling like it was the best shooter I'd ever played, which was my feeling after DOOM in 2016. And that's despite additions like the double-dashing, flamethrower to get armor, grenades actually being useful, overall better feeling weapons, etc that I think would make replaying DOOM now a little harder to get back into. Obviously that game wasn't designed with that stuff in mind, but even things like how the ammo/chainsaw are balanced I like better. In DOOM, midway into the game I barely ever needed to use the chainsaw for ammo, whereas here, I guess the Slayer's pockets in the new suit are a lot smaller, because he can't carry nearly as much, so that part of the loop stayed useful.

Then again, there's no Marauder in DOOM, and I'd never have to hear the indescribably unfunny phrase "mortally challenged" again if I just replayed DOOM, so there's that. And the soundtrack's better, sounds like maybe due to old Mick Gordon not having full control this time/having a falling out with Bethesda?

So, DOOM Eternal, fun game, despite some missteps. Glad I played it, still looking forward to whatever that team does next (probably another DOOM), and hopefully they can reign in some of the lore stuff then.

Unrelated, I have a couple other games on my docket. After finishing Eternal, I've been playing Nioh 2, which is more Nioh, but in a good way. In some ways, it is the most, "they made that game again" sequels that I've played in years. But also there are additions and changes to the combat, like stealing special moves from Yokai like this was a DS Castlevania game. And I like that I can play an anime purple haired samurai lady instead of generic white dude from the first game, so I'm having fun. I like the rolly Yokai cat friends a lot (that you can pet). I probably won't have enough to say to write a full blog about that game, but I'm enjoying it.

I really want to play Final Fantasy VII Remake, but as of this writing, the copy I ordered has yet to arrive, but that'll probably be what I play after Nioh 2. Unless something screwy happens with the shipping, at which point I'd have to go directly to the last game I've got here.

As for what it is, well, it's a newer re-release of a game, but...

You'll never see it coming...

I'm honestly glad they didn't just make 2016 again. Minimal lore in that one, plenty of (skippable) lore in this one.

At the time, I recall people saying "ha, in this one a collectible makes Doom Guy seem like a mythical force the demons are afraid of." And Eternal just built off that. What were they supposed to do, write the same story? "We fear the Doom Slayer... again."

Eternal still has its over-the-top moments, where Mr. Doom does his best Kratos impression of not thinking too far ahead, as long as the job gets done. So the ethereal argument of 2016 having a better vibe doesn't make much sense to me. The character still does whatever he needs to, with people talking at him, while he engages in some killer combat.

@csl316: they were supposed to, or rather it would have been much preferable, if they wrote a new story but with the same tone. The tone In Eternal is vastly different this time around. There are a few call backs to the fun way 2016 told its story but I can count them on one hand and they’re mostly from that BFG10000 level. That one part where you kneel in front of the Sentinel king or whatever must have been the complete antithesis of everything that the previous game built up. The Doom Slayer..kneeling?

I actually read a lot of the lore and it’s fine for the most part but nothing special. As mentioned above it’s strange that they call hell and demons by name and yet the Maykrs who are clearly meant to be from heaven are always spoken of as this alien race. For the longest time I thought they were an intricate AI collective given the lore so it was even stranger when the Khan Maykr turns out to have this big alien face with a brain once you defeat her...it..I guess?

@humanity: What would a new story with the same tone look like? In other words, what would you guys have wanted instead of this take of Hell on Earth?

@csl316: That is a tough question because it's like asking someone to describe what a hit single sounds like.

For me personally a big part of 2016's charm was how they approached this corporate privatization of hell in a very mundane way. I won't pretend like I read everything in that "first" game because honestly I find it hard to sit down and read lore in the middle of playing something, even when it's a slow paced RPG. That said the things I liked were e-mails of managers complaining about having to approve overtime for hell expeditions. These absurd situations that poke fun at both corporate greed and how straight faced it is presented.

I also liked that there was a sense of space to the level design which tied into the atmosphere and story. I would have liked to see them expand on this weird Earth government that convenes with a giant robot scientist and see them bumbling in trying to contain the "hell on Earth" that they've caused but still worrying about maintain intellectual property rights or something (although in Eternal it's the Maykrs that bring the hell to other worlds so I guess they did nothing wrong!). The scene where you rip Hayden out of glass casing in Eternal and casually throw him into the portal or drag the guys around on his keycard lanyard - those were things that I liked. Picking up a flaming page and then reading several paragraphs about ancient knights from some alien planet going through a fantastical version of the crusades is a lot less exciting to me. Maybe because I just can't identify with any of it and it's not good enough to genuinely get engaged? This is just me of course. I'm sure everyone has their own idea of what they liked or what they wanted.

They gotta a n awful lot of cyberdemons in that franchise😑🤔

I'm not so much bothered that they chose to add so much lore, or even that this game wasn't as over-the-top bordering on silly as 2016...I'm just bothered that the new lore is just not very good. I loved this game so much, but I glazed over much of the cutscenes because they weren't all that exciting or interesting, and I stopped regularly reading the codex by the end of like, the second level because of how much there was both in number of entries and length.

And man, the mortally challenged thing is just...woof. I knew about it going in, but thought (hoped?) it would kind of be a one-off thing. Boy was it not.

@csl316: Well, personally, I'd like the writing to be a whole lot better. Doom 2016's codex was actually really well written and had a great wry sense of humor that gradually revealed itself as the entries went from typically banal corporate cheerleading to merging that what Satanism.

Eternal's codex is just . . . blech. I've seen Encyclopedia Britannica entries written with more style and verve.

Then there is the "main story," which in Eternal borders on incoherence. In Doom 2016, once the game starts, the events move in a logical order from A->B->C. The central premise might have been ridiculous - a future super-human trapped in a stone coffin and who awakens to Hell invading Mars - but the story was cogent once you bought in.

By comparison, Eternal's story just doesn't really make sense as a continuation of the 2016. Like, you start out in this giant space fortress that just . . . exists with no explanation. Somehow Vega came back, with no sense of when or how. You're thrust into hunting these Hell Priests who were introduced only in the most threadbare fashion in 2016's codex, but suddenly they are central to the plot.

Basically in 2016, the codex was really good but completely unnecessary to understand or enjoy the game. In Eternal, you are kind of forced into reading the codex to have even the most basic idea of what's happening, but the codex is capital T-Terrible.

I guess I'm an outlier.

I never played more than an hour of Doom 2016 for whatever reason. Started the game like 3 times I think, but it just never clicked with me. The resource/ammo management just wasn't something I enjoyed. When Eternal came out I had basically no desire to play it because it seemed to be more of the same.

But then this funny thing happened where I watched a streamer play through the opening bits, and it was the codex entries that got me interested in the game. Seeing the first few entries describe this epic battle for Earth and the ancient order of Sentinels was what hooked me. I picked up the game and played through most of it because I wanted more of the lore. Along the way I figured out the gameplay is amazing, and I liked the lore so much that I went back and played through most of Doom 2016, because I figured it would be an origin story to this narrative they've created (turns out the lore isn't really a focus of that game, but I enjoyed what I played).

So it's interesting seeing how most people consider the lore in Eternal to be the worst part of the game, when it was the one thing that finally got me to play the series.

I was incredibly disappointed by the story and lore in Eternal and agree with every point you made. Giving the Slayer a voice was so cheesy and lame, but not cheesy and lame in a good way. The codex entries are boring to bad, and the entire main plot is very difficult to follow. I remember DOOM 2016 ending with robot Hayden locking the Slayer up again? But then in Eternal hes just riding around on his floating Slayer ship still fighting demons? And the whole back story of how he got his powers was something I did not need or care to know. I liked the fact that he was just a nameless, faceless being that only cares about killing demons.

I also agree with you on the gameplay. I absolutely loved it, it is one of the best playable, most satisfying FPS games I've ever played and I easily think it's more fun and more challenging than DOOM 2016, but I still don't think it's a better game.

@cjduke: Maybe it was my lack of playing Doom 2016 that made me enjoy the lore in Eternal. Seeing the Doomslayer start in the Fortress of Doom made perfect sense because I had no notion of the ending of the previous game. I figured Doom 2016 was the setup (or origin story), and this is where the real story starts.

Also, I don't understand how everybody prefers 2016's codex entries over Eternal's. I didn't play the whole game, but all the codex entries I saw were just eye-roll inducing cheeky corporate-speak explanations of the demons and events of that game. The only codex entries I can actually remember at this point are the innumerable explanations of the UAC employee tiers (again with the shitty corporate wink-and-nod tone). After playing Eternal first, I just thought to myself how could anyone prefer this?? Like, I get if you don't enjoy the lore they created for Eternal and where they took things, but to say 2016's codex entries are better makes no sense to me.

Excuse me I'll have you know her name is Daisy not "doom bun" and she was a precious little cinnamon bun that was taken from us far too soon.

@therealturk: The fortress and many things in the game are explained in the lore, but it just doesn't make chronological sense. It really seems like they got a whole new writer for the lore bits and that person wasn't the least bit interested in continuing where 2016 ended or in fact to have much to do with the events happening in the actual game itself.

According to the lore the Doom guy was found washed up in the hell realm and was brought back to the Sentinel world where they threw him into an actual roman style gladiator arena and he fought his way into their favor. The codex specifically mentions that he came from a strange land with primitive weapons, yet the entire game only ever depicts these Sentinels as knights with swords and spears. I guess it's the Maykrs that brought with them all their technology as they latched onto this world in order to secretly harvest it's precious goop. Then there is a ton of writing and eventually some advisor to the Khan Maykr decides to use a big machine (the sarcophagus) to imbue the Doom slayer with what I assume is argent energy since at this point the entire planet is running on the stuff. Argent Energy OF COURSE being created from eviscerating people down in the hell factories until their souls are weak enough to be pried off the body and combined with Wraith Essence from Argent D'Nur and I think combined with "hell essence" as well? Anyway he gets juiced up, the Sentinels start realizing that maybe the Maykrs aren't so good after all and then they get betrayed by the priests and trapped in hell. The last entry states that there are legends of the Doom slayer still slayin' down in hell to this day.

So with all that nonsense in mind.. it makes little sense that in 2016 you find the Doom slayer in the coffin. I guess maybe after he got tired he went back to the sarcophagus to take a nap? But the sarcophagus machine that gave him the special powers was, as far as I can tell, on Argent D'Nur and the Doom slayer gets teleported to hell with the rest of the Sentinels and then the priests cut off the portals, essentially trapping them to be whittled away by the endless hordes of demons.

It's all very dumb and disjointed.

The coffin he's in is from Kadingir Sanctum in Hell (and a level in 2016). The demons drop a building on him and he ends up in the coffin. If he gets in himself or he got knocked out and put in against his will I don't know. Then in Doom 2016, Hayden and a bunch of marines go into Hell to try and find out more about how to harvest the Argent Energy and find the Kadingir Sanctum and the ruins that the Doom Slayer is under and bring his coffin back with them.

That's my understanding of it from the Doom 2016 and what I read of the Eternal lore, which admittedly I did give up on because I started losing interest when it started introducing heaven robot aliens who clearly look a lot like the demons and will very likely just turn out to be from the same blood line or genealogy as the demons.

@cjduke: Yeah, so far as the game side goes, overall I think the feel, abilities, etc are better. But my memory of 2016 is that at some point that game became kind of like a ballet, in the sense that it just flowed and I felt like I was in total control. Here, and I think I may have said this to you before, but a lot of time I kinda felt like I was flailing, having fun, but spiraling between just barely in control and just out of control.

That, and a couple things like the Marauder specifically that I actively disliked, to the point where when he'd show up I'd just sigh, and end up losing a couple lives (which didn't matter since I usually had about fifteen) because I didn't care enough to dodge every one of his attacks.

Overall, though, definitely a fun game. Still might try playing it again on a harder difficulty (assuming I can turn the difficulty up in level select so I can pseudo-new game + it) once I'm through all these other games.

@jesus_phish: Oh thats weird - I'll take your word for it since I remember very little from the serious lore of 2016. I know in Eternal the machine that was meant to find impurity in the sentinels and then is used to give the Doom slayer his abilities has that coffin motif. I guess I'll...ugh... just go read some of the Doom wikis.

To the OP. Not that it should get a pass for you personally as it's not something you enjoy, but to be clear, the developers did say that, that's what was going to happen right? That the lore is there for those that really want to dig in, and it's out of the way for those that just want to shoot demons. They just took it too far perhaps and some didn't expect that. I also appreciated 2016's more as it allowed for more imagination and questions while Eternal laid out all the answers, and not everything was wholly satisfying. Also, while I was like 'whoa! they made him talk!?' I was let down by that soon after it happened. I really didn't like that they put a voice on him (made me think of his characterization from the terrible comic) and I probably would have come away from the entire thing more satisfied if they hadn't done that.

Things I didn't love:

I didn't love what they did with Samuel Hayden in Eternal as he was relegated to pretty much becoming the voice in your head and of the Fortress of Doom.

I wish the Marauders were more balanced.

Although I think the locations were really cool and looked awesome, I liked the more seamless transition between locations in 2016 rather than portal jumping over vastly different places.

The lore left little to nothing to think about once they were read and were describing things that weren't that unique.

Doom Slayer talking (albeit, for a very short time in a story sequence).

Oh god, I accidentally wrote a thesis. TL;DR: the plot of Doom Eternal bleeds through to really interrupt the game's pacing with a need to introduce this plot. The Doom Slayer is a turbo-nerd. Platforming bad. Shooting good.

Personally, I think the "well, you don't have to engage with the lore if you don't want to" argument is pretty weak, mainly because the progression of the game is so completely intertwined with the lore that if you don't engage with it (as I didn't because I'm not reading lore entries in a goddamn Doom game), the game is gibberish. Especially in the early stages of the game, Doom Eternal has a series of missions that focus entirely around Proper Nouns That It Does Not Explain. What the hell is a Celestial Locator? Who's this dweeb with the beard? What's a Super Gore Nest, and why does killing it apparently basically end the demonic invasion? Why didn't I just shoot the Hell Priests while they were admonishing me back in the first level?

As an aside, the Super Gore Nest is so painfully "oh, shit, this game's a level too short, let's throw another Earth level in there" that it hurts.

The game strings you along with this hurky-jerky series of objectives that don't feel like you're progressing towards anything, you're just checking items off a checklist until the game arbitrarily decides you can go kill a named character now. Nothing's set up (except the nineteen cutscenes they use to show you the Doom Slayer being built despite the fact that you see a complete mockup of it four minutes into the level), nothing pays off, and the game hitches its narrative wagon to hoping you really care about the backstory of the Doom Slayer being revealed, which, no, I absolutely do not care, and Doom 2016 had me under the impression you knew that.

Also, the characterization of the Doom Slayer in Eternal is so lame. In 2016 he was this marauding berserker, more a force of nature than a character, to the point where characters had to immobilize him literally just to get a word in. Here he patiently waits for enemies to finish their monologues, he kneels in deference to characters you've never heard of before, he collects Funko Pops and has cool guitars. I think the implied storytelling here is even worse: there's a pair of nunchucks in the Fortress of Doom's office, and the idea of the Doom Slayer A) having a home office and B) standing in that home office practicing with nunchucks while looking at a framed painting of himself makes him seem like the biggest loser in the world. He's like Duke Nukem, or 2010s-era Steven Seagal.

Other than that, I have a bunch of other quibbles that mostly come from the bad pacing. VEGA in the plot oscillates violently between "near omnipotent" and "completely useless", with the toggle being wherever it needs to be for the video game to happen, which makes him feel less like a character and more like a contrivance. The platforming is awful, and the fact that it's never really given any room to shine, either by being given its own setpiece moments (Titanfall 2 is full of these), nor cleanly integrated with combat (I know there are monkey bars in a lot of the arenas, but there's absolutely no reason to use them) makes me wonder why it's even there other than to artificially create a bunch of downtime.

I personally felt like they had a really good core with Doom 2016, and all they really needed to do was build out around that core in a way that preserved it while also extending it out into some new design space, which, for the record, I think is exactly what they nailed with the (very good) combat. It's just that the plot instead decided to go in and muck around with the main narrative concepts and ruined 'em.

This is truly the worst part. The more time that you spend in the Slayer's """man-cave,""" the worse it becomes. A triple monitor computer setup with glory kill compilations? You're telling me that the Doom Slayer records everything he does, edits them together, and then watches them back? He's basically making Naruto fan edits set to Linkin Park. The Doom Slayer seems like such a massive dipshit through and through.

Yeah, the Doom Eternal writing and lore is very, very bad. When it isn't just lame and boring, it's internally inconsistent, makes no damn sense, and honestly the game barely fits in with the previous one. Simplicity is best. It's a problem I have with lots of things that get popular and have sequels, everything needs to be explained, every little detail, one off joke, whatever, needs lore behind it and Doom Eternal does exactly that.

Add to that the Doom Slayer's characterization being so much worse, the corporate hologram being lame has hell compared to 2016 (especially performance wise, it's like they missed the joke entirely), and the Samuel Hayden lore making no sense, the story side of things really is a complete and total regression.

The problem isn't just that the writing, story, characterization and so on is bad, it's that there's so much of it too. It's everywhere, there's a level that's basically just a linear corridor with lore entries and no combat, enemies or even gameplay until you reach the boss. They really, really want to make Doom's lore a thing but it sucks so bad. If you're gonna put this much effort in, go for quality of story not quantity.

If the gameplay weren't so damn good, and such an improvement over the already stellar Doom 2016, I'd be very disappointed in the game.

The reboot had two exposition rooms which went on for minutes which you couldn't skip and the "Doom Slayer doesn't care about lore" point was never true to begin with - it's Hayden he doesn't like. The whole narcissism aspect of the character was already present with the collectible figurine you find that had its own unique animation. In the sequel, things like him kneeling to Novik's spirit show that he isn't a complete psychopath and there's some humanity there, not unlike him backing up Vega in D2016. At worst the game is a victim of the bigger and more aspect sequels tend to have since some of those aspects are even more pronounced and exaggerated as they were things people liked in the previous game, but in others it's definitely better - the scant cutscenes it has are 30-60 seconds tops and can all be skipped and the Doom Slayer cares even less about the plot in this game than he did in the first. The poor in media res introduction that doesn't make sense until 5 hours into the game and switch from trite but entertaining corporate satire (made unintentionally funnier by id's shitty work practices and one of the Doom 2016 writers being pro-crunch) to fantasy are so-so choices, but a lot of these complaints feel like they come from people who only played through Doom 2016 once during release and their memories come from key moments they remember and internet memes about the Doom Marine throwing that monitor.

@brick_shithouse: I guess there is something to be said that people actually had key moments they remember from the scant story of the original while Eternal has very few memorable moments at all. Even most combat arenas blend together. It has been a week since I beat it and I can't really recall any truly unique location - a lot of it had this very Quake-ish motif of skulls and lava. It's been 4 years so I can't exactly recall many places from 2016 either but I do carry a feeling of that game having some sort of environmental through-line where the facilities you ran through actually made sense. Then again I do recall the Hell levels of 2016 to be my least favorite part of the game.

But I do think you make a great point about people having played that first game once. This is an argument I've made in the past and have gotten some pushback on but I do think it is valid in that Eternal is very much a game made with the other gamer group in mind - specifically the people who didn't just play it once, but continued playing it on harder difficulties for a long time after release. I'm fairly sure the average player really does only plays through games once. Most people do not chip away at a single title for hundreds of hours unless it is a competitive shooter like Overwatch or something. Doom Eternal offers a LOT to the more hardcore group of Doom enthusiasts while it doesn't offer nearly as much to the layman, because the layman wants a fun cinematic ride with some challenge sprinkled about.

In the tradition of Hugo Martin I present a fun analogy: Doom 2016 was like a ski resort with all sorts of trails from basic green to the nearly vertical drops of a double back diamond. There was something for everyone. Doom Eternal is like the same ski resort but now every trail is a black diamond. For the enthusiast a very technically challenging and fun time to test their skills. The regular player is left either plowing all the way to the bottom of the mountain or simply taking their skis off and checking out entirely.

@brick_shithouse: For context, I played Doom 2016 again, my second playthrough of the game, right before Eternal. I still agree with all the criticisms about the story in this thread, the game couldn't be fresher in my mind. There is a stark, stark difference between how the games handle their writing, most obvious to is how terrible the new corporate hologram is compared to the one from 2016. Doom 2016 is a tight, lean story, Eternal is bloated with so much backstory and lore and none of it is very well written, but damn is there a lot of it. Each game has about the same amount of actual plot, as in the main story, but eternal goes hard on the lore and that's what bogs it down so hard.

I also agree with @cjduke is really in form the most egregious of Doom Eternal's missteps. It sets the stage for the whole lore overload and presentation.

If they had to show a face, I don't think it should of been just some thick white dude who works out before and after his day at the law firm. To meet the suggested tenets of the lore, I think it could have been a more primeval individual. A mix of racial traits might have worked pretty darn well, done right. And just not that acceptable to polite society haircut, either. You are a law to yourself, even as you seek to save humanity, right?

But before all that, I would opt first for not face at all. And no voice, if it could be avoided. Though I do not hear him speak too much, so far. Something about the mythic silent type who understands much more than he says, would have worked well

Happily for me at the moment He's just come across an 'old friend' of his, that threatens some needed give and take. Hopefully. Really a little tired of a progressively wound up lady leaving some verbal transcripts behind that sound like she has just found out who she is going to procreate many times with. Also the AI sounds so generic in tone it' becomes noticeably short of quality.

The game isn't ruined for me though by all this. I love a good story and presentation of such. But it is still Doom.

Btw, I do love the corporate lady with the cod-piece that shows up giving her twisted encouragements to the apocalyptical events going on. She can be a treasure. Is she some kind of satirical take on Mass Effect? I do wonders...

Totally! And fairness where fairness is due, those parts of 2016 are awful, genuinely the worst part of that game, and had me saying what ended up becoming my mantra in Eternal, "Who the hell wanted this in Doom?". I staunchly disagree with the idea that the Doom Slayer is still as ambivalent to the narrative as in 2016, given the game starts with him patiently waiting for the game's named antagonists to finish admonishing him before he even considers, I dunno, shooting them.

As far as the Slayer hating Hayden, not the narrative, Hayden kinda is the narrative in 2016, so drawing that distinction feels somewhat arbitrary. Sure, he was nice to VEGA, but what, he showed an almost effortless act of compassion to one character, a regular Gandhi that one.

I did replay Doom relatively recently, and while, sure, it isn't literally 100% rippin' and tearin' (it's why I'm willing to be a bit forgiving to how much of Doom Eternal is spent collecting off-brand Funko Pops, because at least that has precedent), but when those quiet bits were pretty unanimously the things people didn't like about 2016, I'm scratching my head as to why there's more here.