My YouTube feed is filled with nothing but overwhelmingly positive reviews. All I did was watch the trailer a while back, then a review with gameplay from some influencer that got early access.
I’m a huge doom fan dork, since the 90s. I’m old. But the trailer and gameplay had me thinking… meh.
I’ll wait for a sale. But I’m curious if anyone else feels the same. Anyone normal play it? Specifically fans of 2016. Are these influencers getting paid to hype the game?
Anyone normal who bought day one, tell me I’m wrong and the hype is warranted. Just curious.
Are people getting paid to hype games
Are you kidding? This has been a growing issue since the 00s. Even back when Total Biscuit was still alive (rip), he was fighting it with tooth and nail. Microsoft and some other companies have AGGRESSIVELY attacked consumers and now, it’s entirely broken in almost every industry.
Finding real reviews on things is INSANELY difficult to find, not only because influencers are all heavily biased and censored or even blacklisted when they aren’t positive, but most normal people couldn’t give a decent review if they tried. Hype is everywhere, and colors everything.
TB called it years ago: the trick is to find a journalist that you know what they like, dislike, and are honest and with integrity, able to be brutal and fair, but have ethics and a strong sense of responsibility to the future of gaming. This requires a uniquely difficult and rare combination of intelligence, novel ideas, and sound judgement, along with consistency. And production, a refreshing articulation, and some brevity doesn’t hurt.
Find that source and support them, and help them grow. Get to know their tastes, and they should serve us all well.
But, until that person who can unite gamers appears again, and holds those important and knowledgeable discussions… Influencers will be just that: influencers - not journalists. And be unreliable shills.
Honestly I’ve thought about doing it more than once, but fear and risk of the wrath of sensitive gamers and corporate hr entities angry for me shitting on their games and decisions and suing me is a real thing. I could be a gaming journalist, one that gives my all and tries to serve the good of gamers and the future of society to the best of my ability. But I also seriously doubt anybody would want to listen to me.
Exponential feedback loops on a road to nowhere on tracks coming to an end. We are running off of fumes and experiencing high rates of enshitification. The Devil’s in the details and by God I love the Devil. Given that I own a lot of my own games, I have a wide collection that I could probably diddle with until I die. So I don’t know, I feel like the golden age of gaming is over. I don’t want to be a kermudgeon and hurt the feelings of kids, but it’s over. I mean, maybe they can improve graphics, but who cares at that point? I mean, I’m not gonna subscribe to shit. I don’t care what you dangle in front of me. I mean, I’m not in to prostitutes, and I don’t want to smell your farts, so… Yeah. That’s that. The ride is over. song, *It’s Closing Time playing in the background…
Can’t wait for that one modder who makes games look like shit to disable the raytracing.
If anything has Denuvo, I’ll skip it
I’m playing it right now, and ots actually a lot of fun. Exploration feels fun still like doom 2016 and Eternal, and you have different murder mechanics to choose from in the midst of a hundred enemies. I’d say the reviews are right.
Now, that being said, I think i still like 2016 better, but they both have a very different feel from each other.
I honestly think its really damn good. I love using the shield. It just feels amazing.
I’m loving it. But most of the people I talk to were put off by eternal. It’s more of that Soni can get people not picking it up for it’s very expensive cost currently.
Once I got adjusted to the difficulty of eternal I fell in love with it, once you realize you have to constantly stay moving and adjust on the fly it just became awesome. Still feel like the music is disjointed.
Music in dark ages just sucks
The music is the best part of both games.
That says something, since both games are the best shooters over the last 10 years.
Did you play the 2016 one or eternal? My first ever game was the first doom. Doom 3 is a great game but it just wasn’t really doom. Getting into the lore was cool though. A roommate forced me to try doom 2016 and it immediately brought back the memories and feelings, they also use and continue the lore in a non invasive way. I haven’t yet played dark ages but the modern ones are very much the successor to the originals.
I can’t support the studio after what they did to Mick Gordon. Fucking criminal if you ask me. His soundtrack was a pillar of Doom’s success in 2016 and with Eternal. So if you’re not sold on it here’s a moral angle to add to it lol
It’s so sad to see. I’ve spent way more time listening to the soundtrack than playing, I’ve listened to it working out, I’ve listened to it at work, I listen to it when commuting - his work is just amazing. All that lost because a higher-up fucked up and didn’t care enough to mend the relationship. Whilst straight up lying about the events of what really happened on reddit, of all places.
It was so unbelievably fucked up. They basically tried to ruin his life After putting him through an insane grind making that music
I almost feel like deeming Hulshult a scab/fink for doing the DLC soundtrack.
It’s tempting but man… Being a composer is difficult, doubly so if you’re in video games. Doom is an unbelievable opportunity and if I remember correctly ai think Mick even said he has no ill will towards who would inevitably take the reins after him. He has a very specific beef with a very specific group of people, in particular one person (Statton).
Can you elaborate? I wasn’t aware of this.
Wow man that marty guy what an extremely unprofessional dickbag. Im off to find a way to purchase something Mick has released and hopefully to leave an encouraging comment. Will report back.
Something like this does not bode well for bethesdas reputation. This other company, ID software? Purchased by zenimax or whatever, are they considered contractors for bethesda? They seem to be behaving like shell companies
Id used to be like the realest of the real hardcore pc gaming companies. It’s where John carmack claims his fame and id made doom and quake in the 90s, and where half life got its engine from and why games like counter strike and valorant exist, and why insane movement games like Titanfall exist.
I’m not talking about who they are now, mostly because I don’t really know, but, historically, they have a FUCK TON of positive karma built up, but since the 2000s, have generally been an engine studio, with their games all generally being tech demos for said engine, id-tech.
Fun fact: “id” (pronounced like the last part of “kid”) is a psychology term, referring to one of three parts of your psyche (the other two are ego and super-ego) that wants to gorge, fuck, steal, and eat, right now. Which is, I suspect, why they make games that are pretty violent, and satisfying to that part of our minds, generally… Probably.
Wow, holy shit. Fuuuuck Marty Stratton. Straight up childish and vindictive behavior.
To treat Mick Gordon after everything he did for them like that… It’s really unconscionable
Holy shit that was a ride to read. Thank you for posting this. I remember the post from Marty shitting on Mick but had no idea he had responded nor the depth of fuckery that occured. It’s a damn shame Mick was treat that way
Honestly, Gordon has a huuuge fan following now, and it’s sad to see how he was VERY close to like gaben levels of influence, and one shitty suit threw that all away. Gordon is still awesome, but Doom and him were a match made in heaven that’s sad to see go away. I’d venture to argue that everything that made the doom reboot special was from him: the sound design, the music, the vibe. Most people do not appreciate audio in the way I do, but almost everybody hears it and experiences it, even if they don’t consciously know. Meaning, everybody knew it was special, but most people don’t realize the depths of which it is the audio doing it. We were all robbed the day this all went down with Mick Gordon, and I will never forgive Bethesda for it, and until they fix it, will never, ever spend a cent or say a good thing about them. It is that big of a deal. Doom and Bethesda are dead to me. My condolences to the other talent that work there.
For real. And I definitely think it’s reasonable to assume mick’s story is the more accurate one. He went out on a serious limb writing this and clearly worked tirelessly to make sure his case was airtight
conpletely agree. That’s a hell of a lengthy post with facts and proof to back it up
I absolutely love Doom Eternal, it’s my favorite shooter of all time by a landslide.
Dark Ages still hasn’t sold me, parries are the last thing I ever wanted from a Doom game and they seem to be the game’s main focus.
I can respect Id Software for trying new things with every game, but taking away movement and focusing on parry mechanics isn’t really innovative to me.
The 80 euro price tag doesn’t help, there is no way in hell I’m paying that much for a game.
This is basically LGR’s review summarized.
I haven’t watched it, I guess we just feel the same about the game.
Yeah, sorry, I didn’t mean to accuse you of plagiarism or anything; I just found the comparison apt.
In case you find yourself interested, feel free to compare and contrast: https://youtu.be/imFr96t_XuA
Oh good, I wasn’t really sure what you meant with your last comment. I’ll give the review I watch, I didn’t know the YouTuber.
No worries, sorry for being unclear.
IMHO he’s pretty good to watch. “LGR” stands for “lazy game reviews,” which I guess is how he started, but these days he mainly talks about retro hardware with an occasional game review (such as the one above). He gained popularity recently after being impacted by a weather event that unfortunately damaged a lot of rare hardware he was storing.
Hope you like him!
I just watched the review, it’s really good and sounds honest, thanks for the recommendation!
My pleasure!
I’m loving Doom Dark ages, I’m on about level 8 out of 22. I like that there’s enough room in levels to move around. Movement is awesome, you can just run everywhere. The weapons are extremely effective and your toolkit is reduced so you have shield-block shield-slam shield-throw melee and then guns. It’s pretty easy to remember everything you have and then select an appropriate attack for the situation.
I really love it. Hopefully there aren’t any more Mech-pilot missions because that one sucked. The dragon wasn’t my favorite either but you can make it through without much difficulty and it didn’t take forever.It’s a great game but it runs like ass and uses Denuvo so I can’t recommend it.
Dude, what are you on about? Sure, it’s not as easy to run at 300 FPS, but it’s a new boundary pushing game and for what it’s doing it runs astoundingly well.
Absolutely gorgeous, and must rely on black magic because even DF reports it never has any stutter, traversal or shader, despite having massive levels with ridiculous fidelity and not even having a shader precompilation step. Hell, I can’t even understand how they got Denuvo to not introduce stutter.
Not to mention it’s somehow fairly light on the CPU despite huge enemy counts with good AI, raytracing, the best destruction physics I’ve seen in ages, and the streaming demands of massive levels. I’m completely GPU limited with a decent CPU and a 7900XTX.
Hell, it even hits 60 on consoles while doing all of this, the game’s performance is witchcraft. Eager to see the path tracing and how far we’ll be able to push this game a decade from now, like how I can run Eternal at native 4K/120 now.
The fun thing about PC is everyone is using different hardware.
I dunno what DF is but I assume they’re running Nvidia cards on Windows, in which case you probably won’t have a problem.
My 6800XT doesn’t go above 40 FPS.
I think you may want to look into DF’s recommended settings (just skip to the table and read from there if you aren’t interested in the details), touching base with my friend who I sold my previous 6700XT to, he reports a rock solid 60FPS targeting native 1080p.
That said, they don’t claim a performance increase that drastic, so you may have some other performance issues?
Oh, and DF stands for Digital Foundry, often considered the best source for benchmarking new games these days. They have several recent videos on Doom: The Dark Ages, graphics nerds always take an interest in a new idTech title.
you may have some other performance issues?
The game has forced Ray Tracing and FSR is broken. Both of which lead to terrible performance on AMD machines. Those are the issues I’m having.
he reports a rock solid 60FPS targeting native 1080p
…am I supposed to be impressed by that?
… am I supposed to be impressed by that?
It’s better than you’re getting on the tier-up card from the exact same generation as what you’re running, so… it pretty clearly indicates something is going wrong on your end.
And that’s with the forced ray tracing. Regarding FSR, DF recommends using XeSS, which I’ve had no problems with even using performance mode to play on a 4K display.
It’s only really fair to judge the performance cost of the ray tracing if you’re actually running the game fairly. If you’ve maxed out every setting to ultra nightmare at native 4K or something to get that “can’t go above 40FPS” figure, then I have no sympathy for you or your performance complaints.
It’s better than you’re getting
It’s not. I’m running in 4k.
DF recommends using XeSS
Which also does not work. I am not alone here. Tons of people are reporting this. It’s not on my end.
If you’ve maxed out every setting
I haven’t. It’s the same settings I use for most games.
I have no sympathy for you or your performance complaints.
I’m not here for your sympathy. I’m here to answer OP’s question.
Alright, fair enough. The brand new AAA graphical showcase doesn’t run above 40FPS if you’re insistent on native 4K from a 6800XT. I’m not sure that qualifies as “runs like ass” like your original comment, but it’s a fine thing to qualify.
I will add however that there’s no mention of XeSS issues on the “known issues” page, so I’m unsure what you’re referring to. Only an issue with FSR frame generation and manual window resizing, and frankly I wouldn’t recommend frame generation in any circumstance anyway. Perhaps the issue you’re referring to has already been resolved?
Same reason I still haven’t played Black Myth Wukong
I’m currently playing the game, got like a handful of levels left. It’s a good game, but with the way the Doom games have evolved and changed over the time, I don’t think you can really say “if you like that Doom, you’ll like this Doom.”
I definitely enjoy the gameplay of Eternal more, but Dark Ages is really good.
The feel of running around is great. You sound massive, your jumps create shockwaves and kill enemies. If you’ve played Boltgun, it’s like that.
The shield is feels great. The charge is awesome, just like the Meathook was in Eternal to get right next to your enemy, and fodder demons just explode on impact.
Parries feel good, but are extremely easy. The timing is super forgiving and the range is massive.
I think a big thing, that not many people are talking about, are the difficulty sliders. You can change so many things, but ID just ignores 90% of them with their presets. You can change so much stuff, and make it feel like a completely different game. Crank up the game speed and just zoom around. Increase your and the enemies damage, so it’s all about dodging, or you get one-shot. Make the projectiles slow, but a lot more deadly.
There’s still some ammo management, but it’s not like Eternal, not even like 2016. Your melee attack, that you can use for the execute drops ammo, just like the Chainsaw, but you’re using it regularly anyway. Some guns also have upgrades that shooting demons with it also drops ammo for the weapon.
The game is a lot more story heavy, but just like in Eternal you can just skip it and not read the Codex entries.
The mech stuff is alright, but pretty basic, but also really short segments. The dragon is cool in theory, but I really hate these parts, and they just drag on for far too long. Flying around just isn’t fun.
Weapons are pretty good, and I have some favorites. The normal Combat Shotgun with upgrades is great this time and not just outshined by the Super Shotgun immediately. That Ball-on-a-Chain gun is also really nice, with some cool upgrades. Because you don’t really have any ammo issues if you use the melee regularly, I’ve just used one gun for long stretches of time, because there’s just no reason real reason to switch, and you can just use what you want.
The devs always said in Dark Ages you’re like a tank, but with default settings on Nightmare difficulty, you’re made out of paper. Projectiles are extremely dangerous, and enemies like to spawn behind you and shoot you in the back. The game is actually not great on telling you where you’re getting attacked from, and there’s just always tons of enemies around and some deaths can be kinda frustrating.
Then there are also some minor UI/UX issues. You get small icons in the middle for your melee charges, but they don’t show the progress like in Eternal with the Blood Punch. There’s no dedicated Map button, just open your Dossier, which remembers your last screen, which is annoying, because you want that map 99% of the time. Sprinting has this terrible vignette effect around your screen, and you want to sprint all the time, but you can only disable all screen effects, which includes some stuff I’d like to see.
For some dumb reason, the Fast Travel option, at the end of a level has been removed, so if you miss a secret, you’ll have to play the level again. There’s also tons of points-of-no-return, so you’ll have to stare at the map constantly, to make sure you haven’t missed anything, which makes the lack of a map button so terrible.
After I’m done with my Nightmare run, I want to do another one, where I play around with the sliders a bit. I want to turn up the game speed, but will probably lower the damage and projectile speed to compensate.
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Fwiw it shows the charge % to the next pip down next to the ammo counter
Yes, but it would still be nice to have in the middle.
I went back to check in Eternal, and I was wrong about that game showing the progress on the icons in the middle of the screen. Just like Dark Ages it just shows charges that are ready to use, and the progress in the full HUD on the edges of the screen. Seems like I just need to get good and look at the full HUD, like I did in Eternal.
I feel the same. The atmosphere is decidedly less doom-like in my view and I’m a little skeptical of these new gameplay mechanics. Riding flying dragons? I’m also not a fan of the way Marty Stratton handled the situation with Mick Gordon, which has damped my goodwill for the studio. I bought Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal on launch. I will not buy this game until it is bargain bin prices.
2016 had the perfect balance between story and gameplay to me, in that the player character expressed flagrant disregard for any narrative elements. This was doom 1 af.
Just keep moving and turn the bad guys into chunks. Need nothing more.
I fucking hated the loop in eternal. I get that the developers wanted you to play in a specific way, they partially achieved this through arbitrary mechanics like ammo scarcity. I can appreciate that it’s a good game, but I didn’t get on with it.
The art style went full Hollywood horror, and the exposition was kinda dialed up to eleven by contrast to its direct predecessor. Very much disliked that you couldn’t crouch (definitely more of a me issue, though I think sliding is a missed opportunity in Eternal’s movement repertoire).
2016’s PvP was imperfect but still fun and much appreciated. Snapmap was super underrated and has many sick community made levels.
The later games are a phenomenal technical showcase; the absolute posterchild for the Vulkan gfx API, but it’s not very ‘doom’ in spirit to me any more
I remember physically pumping my fist in the air when the first exposition dump happens in doom 2016 and he just punches the screen seconds in then moves on. That’s all the narrative/storytelling I need or want out of doom. My buddy and I were thrilled when that happened lol
This is exactly how I view Doom as well.
If you want lore, put it in the environment. Let people hunt and find it (makes it more rewarding for those people too). But the core gameplay loop of doom needs to not have hours of exposition dump. The whole point of Doom guy is literally rip and tear. Not to give a shit about why he’s ripping and tearing. He’s a Marine. Simple motivations.
Source:https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Doom_Slayer
The Doom Marine was originally a human from Earth who served in the Marines and was dishonorably discharged due to assaulting his commanding officer after refusing to fire upon a crowd of unarmed civilians and was later transferred to the UAC Phobos base as security. The Marine soon found himself trying to prevent the demons of Hell from invading Earth. After having fought demonic hordes through Phobos, Deimos and Hell, he returned home to find Earth now overrun by demons. Among the billions of people killed were his family, including his pet rabbit Daisy, giving him further reason to pursue hunting the demons. He continued fighting the horde on Earth, before taking the fight to Hell once more.
There isn’t a “reason” outside of pure rage that makes Doom guy. Doom guy would not give 2 fucking shits about “why”, just murder and rage.
To tie this back to another topic, Mick Gordon fucking captured it perfectly in the music. No sense for the “norms” of music. Just pure rage in music form. It’s cathartic. It was a perfect fit. And they fucked it up.
the player character expressed flagrant disregard for any narrative elements
They don’t. Doomguy does like two things in the very beginning, but it’s not like they don’t care, but rather about what Hayden has to say and his justifications for everything that has happened, that’s the part which he doesn’t want.
You meet Hayden later in his office, with a few minutes unskippable “cutscene,” but it’s not like Doomguy ignores him or jumps out of a window in the middle of it.
