Yeah I loved 2016 but couldn’t get into eternal at all. I’ll probably try the dark ages in a couple of years when it’s on sale for a few quid, I’m less enthused as it’s not Mick Gordon doing the music and the music was such a big part of the vibe.
Zahille7@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Tbh I really liked Doom 2016, but couldn’t really play Eternal (I never got around to it because there were other games to play, and I didn’t want to just buy it full price), and Dark Ages looked fucking awesome.
I hope there will be a big bundle with all the games and all DLC at some point in the next couple years, because the DLC looked awesome.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Hazzard@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Gotta disagree with the people hating on Eternal here. Eternal is very different than 2016, so it’s understandable 2016 will be some people’s favourite.
The key difference is that Eternal has a much stricter way the game wants you to play it. When speaking about the changes, the devs pointed to some incredibly lame review footage where a game journo beat several levels while barely turning the camera, ramming around corners and only using the shotgun. You can play 2016 that way, simply forcing a gun you like as a silver bullet into every scenario.
Eternal will demand significantly more from you. Guns to target weak points, special interactions like grenades for cacodemons, enemies like marauders who want to dance at specific ranges or require trickery like shooting rockets at the ground behind them to beat them, you’ll even need to cycle between multiple guns to skip lengthy reloads to get your full DPS. You need to macro level decisions constantly, not just point at the nearest demon and shoot it. It’s often referred to as “combat chess”. If you give yourself over to it and play with an open mind, getting good at Eternal’s combat is fun as hell, and is likely the best combat I’ve ever experienced. You feel like a beast when you’re successfully executing the dance, 2016 will feel like a slow slog in comparison.
Bonus review, since I’m here. TDA is a total shakeup again. Combat is slower and more flexible, striking a middle ground between 2016 and Eternal. Many of the varied tools you needed to swap weapons for in Eternal are just shield abilities you always have here, so you can pick a favourite weapon and stick with it again. Should, actually, swapping around is slow and guns don’t have huge speciality advantages. The game leans more into being a power fantasy, but the shield is very good, you don’t have to earn it nearly as hard as you did in Eternal. For reference, I fairly easily beat TDA on Nightmare for my first playthrough, and failed to do so when returning to Eternal that same year, getting totally walled in a fairly early level. They did rebalance the campaign since I played TDA though, and it’s supposed to be harder. Planning to check it out in a replay before playing this DLC.
All in all, I really love that each entry is bold enough to totally revisit the core design and do something fresh. Eternal is basically the perfect version of that vision, especially in the DLC. I might have loved more of that, but it there really wouldn’t have been anything new to add. So TDA does its own thing and does it really well. Each entry is radically different, and they’re all awesome (although I really can’t go back to 2016 lol).
favoredponcho@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Eternal is super fun. It’s feels less like you’re just shooting and strafing and more like you’re ripping and tearing.
The mechanics encourage you to keep moving and hitting enemies in a series of continuous actions. The game feels more fast paced.
Renacles@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Doom Eternal is fantastic. It really made me look at FPS games in a different light.
It grabs the solid but simple gameplay of DOOM 2016, and then develops it into a fast paced combat puzzle where every tool in your arsenal has a role to play and you are rewarded for cycling through them.
It definitely expects a lot more from the player, but if you are open to it, it’s an amazing experience.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 4 days ago
2016 is the superior game of the three. If you only had to play only one of them, I think you wound up making the correct choice.
Eternal had some highly questionable gameplay design choices made about it and I have no idea what the fuck Dark Ages is supposed to be doing or what anyone thinks it’s got to do with Doom. It’s begging to have a new setting and IP made for it. And in fact I suspect (with zero evidence) that this was the original intent before some suits got involved and insisted on slapping the Doom trademark on it for the brand recognition, or whatever the hell.
But it’s Bethesda, and now they’re owned by goddamn Microslop of all people. So I’m not buying Dark Ages at any price, DLC or not, and not especially how they did Mick Gordon dirty the way they did during the development of Eternal, and et cetera and so on and so forth. Fuck 'em.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I can think of few stewards worse for Doom and it’s legacy than Bethesda and fucking Microslop.
terabyterex@lemmy.world 4 days ago
doom 2 is one of the best. and dark ages brings it back to that slower gameplay
Goodeye8@piefed.social 4 days ago
Having played all Doom games I’d argue the closest to the classic was Doom 2016. Dark ages IMO was too reliant on the shield and melee to the point where at times it didn’t even feel like a Doom game. 2016 had an overall faster pace but the core gameplay loop felt more like the classic and the faster pace is IMO also the more entertaining way to play classic Doom. 2016 IMO nails the essence of the classic doom.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Current “classic” Doom is generally played at a much faster pace overall than in the DOS era anyway, now that auto-run is a thing and the assumed default for many WADs and maps, and the majority of people are at minimum using mouse aiming and also probably mouselook.
2016 felt pretty spot-on by comparison. Eternal and its restrictive ammo capacities and “you must defeat this kind of monster exactly this way” bullshit got tiresome very quickly. Evidently nobody was brave enough at the time to tell id that if the discoverability of your gameplay mechanics is such that you feel you have to yank the player away into a dream-sequence arena to tutorialize at them with the One Approved Way to defeat that type of monster, your design is bad.
I could feel the block and parry thing in Dark Ages getting old before the trailer was even over.
pycorax@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Having played all 3 of them, I enjoyed The Dark Ages far more than Eternal. With the exception of the Marauder, Eternal was basically just “keep shooting and moving and you’ll never die” and was way too fast on its default setting. While 2016 was plenty fast, it was still somewhat tactical at times. The Dark Ages goes in that direction but with the parries which is an interesting mechanic that was refreshing imo. At times it feels like a rhythm game which was pretty fun. My main issue with it is that it drags in for a bit too long and that it felt like they weren’t really willing to commit all the way with the parry gameplay.