Yeah I mostly agree with you. Except there was plot and lore in 2016, it was just minimalist as you said, but more importantly it was executed really well. It had the “doom” feel. In addition to awesome gameplay and soundtrack.
Eternal was great for the gameplay, and even an improvement in some ways. The lore and plot was ridiculous though. Way overdone, didn’t feel like doom.
I say go back to 2016 style with the gameplay improvements of eternal.
To me the essence of 2016 is the scene in the beginning where an info screen tries to dump exposition on you and you chuck it into a wall.
There is plot, but you don’t need to pay attention to it. Doomguy is angry and needs to kill demons.
To me a big fumble in Eternal was trying to explain why doomguy is angry and so good at killing. He’s like an inverse Cthulhu, terrifying, unknowable and mysterious. Trying to explain or understand him breaks the basis for the character.
On gameplay, I didn’t mind the changes, but I thought the embellishments were a little on the nose. The technicolor rainbow explosion of ammo when you chainsaw someone, and the increased focus on using abilities to replenish resources scream “This is a video game!” in a over the top way that I felt took away from the immersion and grit that I associate with Doom.
Agreed on all points. I tried getting into Eternal a couple times and still haven’t finished it. It’s more than likely a good game but it doesn’t have the flow of the first.
Yep, agree to agree here. I just thought the gameplay improvements in eternal were fun. But I agree the way you put it, kind of a departure from what doom should be.
I felt like the decision to make jumping and mobility more a factor in Eternal hurt it a lot. Jumping puzzles and jumping mechanics in FPS games don’t really work for a lot of reasons (see: Half-Life) and it made the levels feel much more linear than 2016, the arenas much more smaller and less mobile. id did invent this genre, and even they can’t make it work. What does that tell you?
Also the changing of the ammo metaelements to prioritize chainsawing felt dumb. Having to pinata every so often was the most obvious thing that felt straight up wrong compared to 2016, and that’s a sign of a garbage core loop.
The writing was pretty good, but I have the attention span of a summer ant when I play Doom.
Eternal actually made my hands hurt. Still haven’t gotten very far in it. Having to constantly cycle weapons, jump, dash, and do precision shooting, often all at the same time, was murder on my hands.
It may be but the engine team is mostly Ex-Crytek folks carrying over from Carmack’s work with OpenGL. Even the Raytracing support is just a Vulkan Extension. They could change gears.
I never thought the music in nu-Doom was all that great anyway. Not compared to classic Doom at least. E1M1 is forever stuck in my head and if you hum a couple bars to anyone who has played it, they’ll immediately know the tune.
The music in nu-Doom is fine while you’re playing, but I can’t remember a single track.
Probably not exactly what you’re looking for, but Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands was a great campaign that’s technically an FPS with a lot of RPG heaped on top.
Not exactly, but I have found a taste for loot games lately, so maybe someday I’ll get around to that one. It still wouldn’t scratch the same itch though.
Has Microsoft put out a single worthwhile AAA title in the entire console generation? I bought an Xbox Series X after the Bethesda acquisition and I’ve used it once to boot up Starfield and then quit after 15 minutes when I realized it was boring as hell.
They have this uncanny ability to spend more money on acquisitions and then completely stall the output from that company until every game blows.
They had one good franchise that they didn’t run into the ground, Halo. And after they got control of it they killed that too. They own half the industry now and I feel like they produce less games than ever before.
I feel like they’re going to get bored, kill their games division in 5 years and the whole industry will have to rebuild.
They’ve actually stated within the last year that they are in fact considering moving away from the games industry if certain things dont happen for them. This game out during the whole court proceedings surrounding their attempted Activision buyout.
I can’t remember the details and I’m too lazy to look into it again lol. There are some interesting articles out there tho
They want to be a cloud gaming provider and sell Xbox fire TV sticks instead of consoles, with controllers that connect directly to the azure server running their games. Why do you think Nvidia and the UK weren’t happy with Microsoft a few years ago and they made so many deals with cloud gaming providers like boosteroid and GeForce now?
Microsoft turned every Windows PC into an Xbox overnight with XCloud and they had little to no overhead costs. That’s where their business is right now, cloud and AI, not gaming, Xbox will take a backseat and I’m going to bet we will see them transition from a console maker to simply publisher that conveniently sells a cloud TV stick that can play games.
Ground Branch on PC has some of the best I’ve ever seen. NPCs will, for example, if shot in the neck, clutch their throat and dynamically transition into a ragdoll as their animations become more sloppy until they go completely limp. It’s actually kind of unsettling how brutal it is.
What’s sad is that this game is a low budget passion project made by former Rainbow Six devs (the OG R6 games), not a AAA game backed by a massive corperation.
I personally really like it. It’s rough around the edges, but IMO it does a good job of bringing back the feel of those old R6 games. Enemy AI is really good and you can customize their skill in a pretty granular manor (cones of vision, reaction times, full auto burst lengths, and much more, rather than just Easy, Medium and Hard). There’s a handful of nice levels each with a few types of missions, really nice weapon and gear customization, very snappy and authentic gunplay.
My biggest gripe is a lack of friendly AI. However, I believe this is planned, so it’s just a matter of time. It’s still a lot of fun lone wolf or co-op
Writers these days just seem to not know how to write an enjoyable story period. So much bad writing in the entertainment sector now, its not like back in the 80s and 90s where movie theaters were showing slapper after slapper, you’ll be lucky to find maybe one or two that match up to the likes of Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, or Titanic.
Its similar with games, but shifted forward a decade to the 90s and 00s. Games these days have a very hard time matching up to games like Ocarina of Time, Chrono Trigger, Silent Hill, or Metal Gear Solid. While games like Silent Hill 1 have laughably poor quality voice acting by todays standards in terms of sound quality, the story was well written and kept the player’s interest. Of games from my recent memory, the only one that matches up is Elden Ring, which has gone the direction of basically removing all the writing from the game.
I can think of plenty of games with writing I’ve really enjoyed in recent years, not the least of which is Baldur’s Gate 3 just last year, but FPSes in particular are in one of only a few genres where I haven’t been well served lately.
BG3 is another good example but surely you can agree that was like a drop of water in an ocean of sand. Games that well done are incredibly rare, and it mostly comes down to just writing. The actual game mechanics and graphics quality of games now are better than they have ever been for the most part. But the games are bad, not because of those things, but because the writing fails to capture the players interest.
I would not agree with that, no. First because I’d say mechanics are almost always the most important part anyway, and also because I’ve probably come across more stories that have held my interest in recent years than I did 25 years ago. Stories were pretty basic back then, more often than not. In fact, these days, I’ve been carried through mediocre gameplay by well-told stories more than a few times, and I don’t think that ever happened 25 years ago.
As someone with an avatar of the Q from Quake 1, I can avidly say that writing was not better in the past.
Just off the top of my head from the last decade:
-Baldurs gate 3 -Firewatch -Return of the Obra Dinn -Disco Elysium -Tyranny -Shadowrun Dragonfall -Red Dead Redemption 2 -Witcher 3 -Hellblade Senuas Sacrifice -Life is Strange -Prey (2017) -The Red Strings Club
Seriously, go check the story to Perfect Dark. Hilarious? Yes. A “good story”? No.
There are myriad issues in gaming now that weren’t there in the past, but good writing is (thankfully) still around.
The writing in Disco Elysium is so good that it wouldn’t matter if the gameplay between dialogue was just some match 4 bejewelled ripoff, it’d be worth it.
Anyway, I agree we’ve got so much better in the last decade+ at fitting fiction and gameplay together in a satisfying and complimentary manner.
I remember finding games like Chrono Trigger being as stumbling upon an overflowing oasis, compared to the paltry and usually badly translated heroes journeys that we typically got.
But now I can think of dozens of games, many of them indie, that have stories on par (and if I set aside my nostalgia goggles, even surpassing) that of old classics like CT.
It’s easy to remember just the successes of the past and ignore the fact that the vast majority of media then was shit too… we’ve simply forgotten about the things that ended up being mediocre. Survivorship bias is really really strong.
Nah fam – go look at the movies that came out in 92 or 94. They were all absolute masterpieces we still about. There’s definitely a filter of time but there’s a reason for the precedent. We went from having a good bell-curve of quality to just 95% shit, 5% sufficient.
An example a lot of people here can relate to is thinking about game consoles and handhelds they played growing up like the GBA.
There were likely some great games produced for it but there was also a lot of shovelware movie tie-ins and horrendous ports that were misrepresented in advertisements.
Idk, my favourite writer is Brandon Sanderson and he still keeps writing with the supersonic speed. Maybe that’s just you. Unless you mean writing in games and movies specifically, for which I am not qualified enough to say
I was specifically talking about writing for video games and movies, I haven’t read very many books or comics lately so I couldn’t know if it applies there as well or not.
gamespot.com
Gorące