AKA Ranking of DOOM Part 3

2016 is one of those years that felt like it was a decade long. It was some real Living Through History shit, and it is not hyperbolic (it is a little hyperbolic) to say that in terms of video games on offer we were spoiled. Release dates lined up the way they sometimes do for whatever reason, and we got a fucking smorgasbord of games that almost universally whipped ass. It also happened to have not one, but two franchises come back from a middling-to-bad (depending on who you ask) entry that sent the franchise into hibernation for years: You had Hitman: World of Assassination (or more accurately, just Hitman (2016)), and you had DOOM. Not DOOM 4, mind you: just DOOM. Initially marketed as a reboot (or soft reset), in the same way that DOOM³ was marketed as a reboot. The difference, of course, being that DOOM 2016 was a sequel, kind of, something that wasn’t completely clear until DOOM Eternal. “Reboot,” however, is still accurate: it’s just that instead of rebooting the DOOM franchise, it rebooted id Software.

Video Games are Hard to Make

If you are like me, you’ve watched the Noclip documentary on the development of DOOM before – maybe multiple times, if you’re a real sicko like me, but just in case you haven’t, here’s the deal:

DOOM³ released to a pretty good reception, although it failed to set the world on fire the way its predecessors had – if you are officially designating your game as the third DOOM game, there’s going to be some expectations of success there which are downright unrealistic. Which is not to imply that DOOM³ wasn’t a success, but it was a turning point for id. They went dark for years after its release, working on whatever was next.

For a while, everyone assumed what was next would be DOOM 4: after all, they announced the damn thing in 2008 and were pretty clear that it would arrive before Rage did – which, of course, extremely failed to happen. As for Rage, it certainly is a video game that you can play. Its shotgun does feel good, but that is about all I have to say about Rage, apart from having a clear memory of reading an article on Rock Paper Shotgun about how the author felt horny for a video game character for the first time playing it (I tried hunting this down, but I was not able to find it. I am positive it existed, however). I think about that article often.

Anyway, DOOM 4 was, it turned out, in development hell. There’s leaks about the campaign being like Call of Duty but there’s demons – so big setpieces and cinematics and even a (*deep, pained sigh*) turret section where an AI companion drove you around and you shot demons. If it had released, they probably would have done enough polish and tweaking so thatit would have been fine, but nothing special (kind of the way I feel about DOOM³). Much like DOOM II, you’d be on Earth fighting demon hordes and, you know what, you’ve probably seen all the footage that Danny O’Dwyer got but go ahead and look at it again and see how you feel.

Drawing on CoD would have also, one extrapolates, resulted in a game where you, the Doom Guy, hide behind cover to let your health regenerate before popping out to shoot some imps or whatever in the face. It would have been the second game where id looked to other FPSes to dictate their game mechanics rather than what they knew best – which again, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just weird to think about the people who made the perfect FPS needing to look somewhere else for good FPS mechanics. I dunno, I would have absolutely played it, but it probably would have been filed away mentally as something I beat once and then kind of stopped thinking about – like Quake 4, which actually I don’t think I ever even beat.

The vibes coming out of id in the years following the release of Rage (and its myriad of technical problems at launch on PC, no less) were rancid – a bunch of long-time names left (most notably John Carmack in November 2013), and there were a bunch of rumors about how nobody seemed to know what they should be doing with DOOM 4, and maybe that’s all true and maybe it isn’t but the fact of the matter is that eventually DOOM 4’s whole Call of DOOM-y direction got chucked into the bin and development restarted some time in late 2011 and wouldn’t stabilize until sometime in 2013.

The point being: everything that had come out about DOOM 4 was not exactly instilling confidence in the hearts of people who desperately wanted a new DOOM game. I was not really one of these people – DOOM³ had gotten me to go back to DOOM, which had really clicked for me for a while but even then I wasn’t really playing it that frequently. I was following along with the DOOM 4 development saga out of interest and (as someone who had not really gotten into Rage) feeling increasingly concerned that maybe id just didn’t have the spark anymore.

It’s fun to look back on all the doom (har har) and gloom surrounding expectations of the game – even after id finally resurfaced to show footage of the game at E3 that looked… pretty good, actually! Seemed promising but a lot of people were worried about the glory kills because of the atrocious finishers in Duke Nukem Forever – and think about how fucking stupid we all were to have doubted for a second that in spite of its new ownership and internal upheaval, id Software still had the juice.

Get Your Ass to Mars

My first impressions of DOOM 2016 came courtesy of the multiplayer beta that I was in on account of buying Wolfenstein: The New Order (another game that breathed new life into a franchise that had been languishing for a while) – it was not particularly reassuring, but I had to admit the guns (no reloading!) and movement (super fuckin’ fast!) felt good. More importantly, underwhelming multiplayer wasn’t that big of a deal to me. The only DOOM game I played any significant sort of multiplayer in was DOOM³, oddly enough, and even that was not something I put more than, at most, like five or ten hours into. I very much doubt it was even that much.

The first time I experienced significant DOOM 2016 gameplay was via the Quick Look on this very website – I think about Jeff shouting “I THINK THE FUCKING DOOM GUY CAN HANDLE YOUR DUMB FUCKING ORB” at least a couple times a week, if not more. When the Quick Look finished, I turned on my PC, bought DOOM, and started installing it. I had briefly considered the merits of buying it on console – that was where I’d played the multiplayer demo, and it had felt good – but ultimately there is one place where I like to play DOOM the most and it is the Personal Computer. I wasn’t 100% sure that my computer at the time was up to the task (I danced this dance again when DOOM Eternal came out; I will be spared from dancing it a third time with DOOM: The Dark Ages for a change) but I took the leap and trusted that id Software would have an engine that could run well on older PCs.

Which as it turns out, they did. The engine is extremely optimized, and while the initial load into the game always took a while, once I was in there I was in there. I’d seen the intro for the game already, but there is always a difference between watching a game and playing the damn thing yourself. It was love at first sight, or first headshot – and it accelerated from there. By the time I got through the first gore nest to the elevator and title drop, I was completely on board – I knew that I was playing something special.

Special shoutout here to the soundtrack: Mick Gordon established himself as a fucking legend with this game, delivering bits of the original DOOM soundtrack and also giving us BFG Division, a song that if you play while running will shave at least five seconds off of your pace. You know a game soundtrack is good when it sets the tone of the whole fucking franchise, it compliments the metal visuals and brutal gameplay, and the way the soundtrack reacts to your actions is… well, you’ve probably played this game, you know what I am talking about.

The New Look

First impressions are important, and DOOM 2016 makes a hell of a first impression. The Imp is there, and you can dodge his fireball – I agree with Brad Shoemaker’s opinion that this is a key part of identifying a DOOM game – and also, he looks like a little guy! A little gremlin boy! Gone is the weird spider-eye look from DOOM³, and while the Imp does not look much like his original namesake, somehow the spirit of him feels similar. That’s the case with all the demons, as it turns out, including, most importantly, the Baron of Hell.

I have said this before, but the Baron of Hell is my favorite redesign/glow-up in all of DOOM. I think if you were going to take the art of the guy from the original game and press a magic button that said “make this a 3D guy” you would more or less get this. They keep the goat legs, they keep the horns, the only thing they did was change the face a little – he’s got piggy little eyes and he’s not quite as goatish in the face. He also sounds right – he’s massive, and he throws big fuck-off green fireballs, which is what he has always thrown, and that is why he rules. I love him, he is my favorite, and also the first time you encounter one you do not encounter one of them, you encounter two of them, which turns into four by the end of the encounter (this is at least the case on Ultraviolence, which is how I play the game. The first time I played through was on Hurt Me Plenty but I don’t remember if there were more demons or if it was just them hitting harder).

It is perhaps a testament to just how much I love the Baron of Hell redesign that I mentioned him first instead of the Cacodemon – you know, the thing I have a stuffed version of sitting on my desk right now, the thing that I have hanging on my wall as a piece of LED art, the thing that is on multiple t-shirts I own because I am a totally normal person. I don’t have anything bad to say about this Cacodemon redesign: it sets right the sin of what they did to him in DOOM³, and they also made him way deadlier, especially in terms of his bite attack. The dude will bite your ass in half if you aren’t paying attention, and that is how a Cacodemon should be. You can also shove a chainsaw blade into his eye, it’s great.

This paragraph in particular was added because I was laying in bed the other day and realized, to my horror, that somehow I had forgotten to talk about the Pinky Demon redesign, which, I know I said the Baron of Hell is my favorite (because it is), but the Pinky may have had the perfect re-design. Not just from an artistic standpoint – the DOOM³ redesign is down there with the Crime Against Cacodemons in my estimation in terms of how much it deviates from the original vision, and not to its credit. The DOOM 2016 design gives him so much more personality, making him into a big, loveable goober that wants to bite you in half – and they changed up his gameplay as well! They took inspiration from his bull-like horns in the original design and made him a monster you need to play matador to defeat – you can shoot him in the face and kill him, but it will take forever and he’ll probably be chewing on your corpse before you stagger him. Dodge around him, though, and you can shoot a barrel full of buckshot right up his backside. Or you can use remote detonation on a rocket to send a bunch of shrapnel into is back. Then you can cut his throat with one of his own teeth! It’s great! Pinky, you will always be a hero to me. Jeff Minter agrees with me! Don’t fuckin’ argue this point!

I will kind of skip over the other monster designs because I am trying not to write another 4000 word monster here* – the Hell Knight keeps his look from DOOM³, but a little bloodier a lot more aggressive in terms of charging at you and ripping your legs off. The Revenant looks great (he’s bloody in a way his DOOM³ counterpart isn’t, and that helps with his vibe) the Mancubus is back to something more like the DOOM II look but also there’s the cyber one with an Oculus Rift on his face, and the Summoner is a nice variation on the Archvile who is not nearly as dangerous as the Archvile. It ain’t bad! The visual tone of the game is bloody to a degree that zips past scary right into the comical – it’s firmly in Evil Dead 2 territory, though not quite at Army of Darkness levels of nonsense yet (that’s for DOOM Eternal). It is fucking gorgeous – the Martian landscape is breathtaking (the first look at it as you come off the elevator in particular), and oh man does hell look good.

Hell takes the metal album cover vibes from DOOM³ and adds “giant demon skeletons” to the mix, including the corpse of the erstwhile Icon of Sin (which is maybe the biggest hint you get that maybe DOOM 2016 isn’t a reboot after all). Everything is covered in blood and the demons are, just like in the comic, everywhere, with huge guts to match. Sure, you don’t get giant swarms of demons at the level of Dead Simple in DOOM II, but the hell encounters certainly have more than their fair share of demons out for blood and guts (and guts and blood).

Plays Like a Dream

Most notably though is the way the game and mechanics all got overhauls. You are back to being insanely fast, and unlike DOOM³ where falling short distances breaks your legs, you can basically fall off of anything but a bottomless pit and be okay. I still don’t like the fact that falling into a bottomless pit – or from a high enough height, although it needs to be pretty damn high – kills you, mostly because there are some platforming sections in Hell I have gotten hung up on once or twice. Like all good DOOMs, you are exploring big environments to find keys (or skulls, if you are in hell) to open doors to get to the next batch of demons to kill. It worked in 1993, and it works now, and the fact that they made the keycards and skulls look like the ’93 keycards and skulls is just icing on the cake. Plus, there’s lots of secrets to get you ammo or upgrades or just cool little Doomguy figurines.

It feels like going back to the original game, only the graphics look amazing and you can jump now. Oh right, and the glory kill system encourages you to constantly run directly up into the faces of your foes, the better to perform any number of brutal finishers on them. They are comically over the top, especially the kills you get with the Berserk powerup (I especially enjoy the ones where you simply punch demons so hard they detonate on contact into a shower of meat and blood, it will never stop being satisfying). Just as promised, the demons may be rage, brutal and without mercy, but you are worse.

DOOM 2016 also has boss fights, just like DOOM³ did, but it also goes back to the tried and true “shoot this guy until he dies” scheme, which I appreciated. Plus, the Spider Mastermind fight at the end is easily one of the most satisfying boss battles you can do, and the glory kill end to that fight is such a good feeling that I think about it on a regular basis. It was the best boss fight DOOM had up to that point, if only because killing the Spider Mastermind in DOOM ’93 does not involve shoving a BFG in its mouth.

The weapons all got a much-needed facelift as well: the shotgun is a fucking shotgun again. It is once again the workhorse of the game – something you will keep coming back to even after getting the super shotgun. Speaking of the super shotgun: the super shotgun is so good, it’s… it’s so good. You can beat the whole goddamn game using just the super shotgun once you find it and upgrade it, although I tend to swap weapons a lot. I am fond of the plasma rifle – it is probably the best-feeling weapon in DOOM³ and it still feels pretty damn good in DOOM 2016. I am less fond of the rifle, although the micro missiles are a lot of fun. The rocket launcher also feels great, especially when you have remote detonation upgraded. It’s deeply satisfying to have a well-timed detonation wipe out a group of demons, a feeling you must experience to truly appreciate. I haven’t even gotten into all the runes and perks they added – you can basically turn yourself into a brutal killing machine, especially if you take advantage of Rich Get Richer’s extremely broken mechanics of giving you infinite ammo as long as your armor is up high enough (100+ base, 75+ when you upgrade it). Turns out it is easy to keep armor up when you can also just hold the fire button on the chaingun down.

By the end of the game you feel indestructible – which is appropriate given what the various lore tables tell you about the DOOMSLAYER, the guy who chose the path of perpetual torment and visited ruin upon the demon hordes etc. etc. It’s needed, too, because the end of the game is a particularly vicious streak of giant combat arena after giant combat arena, so much so that the first time I played I was downright exhausted by the end of it and ended up putting the game down once I’d gotten to the final level and took a break for a while. This was a stupid move, because I had to go back and re-learn how to play, but it was needed. I was worn out and frankly it had been a long time since an FPS had felt so demanding. It comes close to feeling like a slog, but the combat feels so good that I don’t care all that much.

It's Got Jokes

The narrative – which you can be forgiven for not paying attention to, because the Doomslayer doesn’t pay attention to it either – is good! You’ve got your standard plot of uh…. Fracking hell for energy in something that is absolutely not a metaphor or some kind of social commentary, why would you ever think that. The Doomslayer isn’t really concerned with that – he just wants to kill every demon he can see and then, maybe, kill the people responsible for fracking hell in the first place.

You find out all this information via cutscenes: unskippable and locked to first person (I am sure this is annoying for people who don’t wanna listen to Sam Hayden talk about the Helix stone again. I do not mind it, but I am, as previously mentioned, a sicko who spends more time than anyone should thinking about the plot of DOOM (2016)). The voice acting is all great too! I have zero complaints here.

Unlike DOOM³, you aren’t finding corporate emails or anything, but you do get some quality writing in the various codex entries for the monsters and environments in the game which, of course, you can also just ignore. The game isn’t gonna make you read all that if you don’t want to – but I read it all because I enjoy the increasingly unhinged tone of the later entries. The deeper into the facility you go, the more open the company literature is about the whole demon worshipping thing. It stops being surprising that they had “Demonic invasion in process” alarms set up ahead of time once you get to the entries encouraging employees to volunteer for the Revenant Program, or encouraging them to feel honored to be eviscerated by a Baron of Hell.

Samuel Hayden is a great foil for you – a big old clanky man who gets extremely annoyed when you destroy his precious hell fracking tech, but who knows you are the only way things don’t end with Mars covered in demons. You hunt down Olivia, you get an ancient demonic artifact, you set the souls of the Wraiths of Argent D’Nur free (don’t worry about what that all means), and then ol’ Sammy Hayden stabs you in the back (metaphorically), sending your ass off to Who Knows Where. Somewhere you can’t interfere with his plan to get the whole hell fracking operation back up and running, presumably.

It's a good ending that teases a sequel – hell, it all but promises one – and you get to sit back and watch some genuinely delightful ending credits. It is the perfect amount of narrative – it hits the ground running so fast that you have no choice but to keep up, and thanks to the Doomslayer’s own impatience to get on with things, you don’t feel bad for not paying attention to anything anyone is saying. You just have to wait patiently until they’ve stopped talking so you can get back to demon killing. Or, you know, you can enjoy the story for what it is – I think all the Deep Lore they drop with no explanation is extremely fun to read, and they avoid having giant setpieces – the end of the Argent Tower level is the closest they come and it is really just a big fight while a countdown is happening.

id’s Big Win

After DOOM³’s somewhat uneven reception and the tepid reception of Rage, id had started to look shaky – and the stories about DOOM 4 being stuck in development hell and the big names leaving didn’t help matters. One report that sticks with me though is the report that during one of the meetings just before the scrapping of the Call of DOOM concept, Carmack declared that DOOM only meant two things: Shotguns and demons. He was 100% right.

They went back to basics, and as a result, we got a DOOM so good that it made everyone remember why id Software was a name people respected in the first place. It didn’t have Romero or either Carmack involved, but it felt like something they would have made: a game engine so optimized they managed to port it to the fucking Nintendo Switch (and it actually plays okay! I own it! I am not proud of this fact)! It continued a trend of eschewing regenerating health in favor of pickups, and it made sure you knew that the best way to kill demons was by walking right up to them and punching them so hard they blew up into meaty chunks. It was the game that we didn’t know we needed! It’s the game that made me fall completely down the rabbit hole of DOOM games, responsible for turning me into the absolute sicko that would do something like write a series of essays ranking the DOOM games.

Speaking of which:

The Updated Underexplained Ranking of DOOMs

1. DOOM (2016)

2. DOOM 64

3. DOOM³

A new number one! That shouldn’t surprise you, we all knew DOOM 64 could not last too long on the heights. I love it, but I love DOOM 2016 more, because, you know, that shit whips ass.

What’s next?

Oh, nothing much. Just the DOOM game I have probably put the most time into which isn’t DOOM ’93. We’re talking hundreds of hours, here. It’s a real goddamn problem. You thought this essay was long, you ain’t seen nothing yet (or maybe you have, and I will manage to show restraint. Anyway, look forward to DOOM Eternal**, coming out… I dunno, at some point?

* UPDATE DURING THE EDITING PROCESS: I was not successful in this goal to a degree that actually boggles the mind.

**Yes, including Ancient Gods 1 and 2. I have a whole thing about those from both a gameplay and narrative perspective that I will definitely burn several hundred words on. I apologize in advance.

Thank you for the write-up! I haven't played any of the Doom games and probably never will, but this game seemed supremely polished and well made, fully deserving of its accolades.

@nuttism: I will refrain from being the guy saying "oh you should definitely play them" because even the best games aren't necessarily gonna be for everyone, but I will say it is at least worth watching some playthroughs of them at some point! Especially DOOM (1993), it is... well, I'll get it ranked eventually. It's pretty high up on the ranking, though!

They actually just did a DOOM 64 speedrun at SGDQ that was mindblowing to me, but that is mostly because speedrunning is always kinda mindblowing to me. It's neat though!

@ford_dent: I did actually watch someone play through the entirety of Doom 2016, which is how I know that the game is really polished, but I also enjoyed reading your in depth writing. I enjoyed watching it, and could definitely tell it was well made, but yeah, not really for me in terms of gameplay (and I can't really play anything above the level of simple indie games anyways on my laptop).

Ooh man, yeah: this game slaps with enough force to shatter the sound barrier! Look forward to the Eternal write-up(s). I think I prefer the comparative leanness of 2016, and I can sort of see where some people are coming from if they feel id cooked a bit too hard with Eternal, overcomplicating matters, and made Doomguy feel like you're piloting a mecha with all the weapon systems you're juggling— but I still definitively dig it and Ancient Gods.

Also, huh. Regarding that RPS article: I've been reading that site since ca 1873 AD and I was going to say it does not seem like something they'd publish, (even back in the day) and I feel like I'd remember— but it must've been incepted into my brain because then I felt the vaguest hint of recollection... could it have been Kieron Gillen?? That boy is straight wildin'.

Edit: Oh, shit! Haha, okay. So, it was not actually a whole post about the topic, but I suddenly rediscovered this interview that features some uh, awkward lines:

RPS: I was really, pleasantly surprised by the character designs, especially the faces. The Wingstick girl…

Tim Willits: [Interrupting] She’s pretty hot, isn’t she?

RPS: [Blushes]. I'm not usually a lech towards videogame characters, but I kept going back up to look at her because the detail in the face was fascinating.

Tim Willits: Yes, yes. That’s Loosum. We want to maybe make her sister or something sometime and maybe call her Finesome. And Amanda Troop is the actress, she’s been in Mad Men and she’s done commercials…

RPS: Is that her face as well as her voice in the game?

Tim Willits: No, but we try to pick people where their voice fits how the character looks. So we audition a lot of people and go ‘ooh, that one works!’ And then in real life, she is as cute as a button.

RPS: Are you a little bit in love, Tim?

Tim Willits: [Laughs] Inside I was thinking ‘I’m always going to hire her.’ And then Claudia Black, she’s in it too, she’s from Stargate and Farscape, and she’s hot. When I was watching that show I thought ‘man, she is cute’, then I saw her on the list and I was ‘we’ve gotta hire her! We’ve gotta hire her!’ And then in real life she’s tall too – she towers over me.

@manburger: Okay so I actually was wrong about it - it was not a whole article, although that is the part that stuck in my mind - the writeup of that very same preview event where the Tim Willits interview came from features this bit:

I… I don’t usually do this sort of thing. But… Well… God, this is embarrassing. I went back for a second and then third look at her. Because… well… because she was kinda cute. Oh no! I've admitted it. Honestly, I don't tend to go in for fancying polygons; never entirely understood it. But there's something about Loosum... Fortunately, project lead Tim Willits, when I chatted to him later, confessed that he thought the same thing, so at least I'm not the only one feeling funny about someone who doesn't exist.

I didn’t think she was cute because she had a bare navel or a pneumatic cleavage, though Rage has not proved itself immune to such tawdriness. Loosum was incongruously glamorous for the setting and wasn't dressed at all appropriately for desert survival (so you've armoured your shoulders but you're wearing hotpants? Really?), which is always a source of annoyance, but at least she hadn't just fallen right out of a Jim Lee comic: she looked fairly, well, possible. My silly thought was entirely and only because of her face. It is a lovely face, and that is both because it is a very well-animated face with a nice smile, and because it is an imperfect face. A hint of a kink in the nose, a ever so slightly wonky smile, a smudge of dirt or dust here and there. A person’s face, not an eerily symmetrical, ultimately characterless, plastic porn star videogame face. Imperfection, it transpires, is a great to way to escape the uncanny valley, at least a bit, and especially when paired with what seems to be top-flight facial animation. The same odd magnetism is true of the male characters too, though I wasn't being so creepy about them: they've got small things wrong with them, like those daftly protruding ears, and that makes me believe in them that much more.

So there's where that particularly half-memory came from. The things that stick in the brain are varied and strange, as it turns out. It doesn't say anything good about Rage that this is the first thing that comes to mind when I think about it (John Goodman was also in it, which is still wild to think about).

Glad you enjoyed this writeup! I really am a big fan of DOOM 2016, I love it to bits, but hoo boy DOOM Eternal is... well, it's something else for me. So much so that when I sat down to start writing the entry on it (coming... I dunno, sometime soon, maybe, depending on how much time I find to sit down and work on it this week) I felt it was necessary to throw up a big caveat at the beginning which boils down to "this game has a death grip on my brain so whatever veneer of objectivity you thought these blogs may have is gonna be sandblasted away."

I remember Hugo describing the way the Doomslayer controls in Eternal as "like a fighter jet" and especially with the new HUD I think that's accurate. I also think I fucking love it (and can understand why some don't). Please look forward to it, I guess?

@ford_dent: Haha oh shit x2! Seeing it now, I did begin to recall reading that 13 (uh-oh) years ago. Can see why that bit would stick. I should've dug a bit deeper. (It was linked in the opening— woops!) Thank you for your dilligence.

Hey, objectivity is for cowards anyway. Godspeed!

Great write-up! I played a lil Doom '93 and Doom II back in the day and never played much else after that. Reading this is giving me the itch to try out Doom '16. I believe it's still on Game Pass...

@chamurai: All of the DOOM games are in fact on Game Pass - Game Pass PC, even! I think id's entire catalogue is on there - I literally installed Wolfenstein 3D and ran around in it just the other day. Well worth checking out all of 'em if you have the urge.