DOOM: The Dark Ages | Gameplay Sizzle | Coming May 15, 2025

[simple@lemm.ee]

This post did not contain any content.

[simple@lemm.ee]

More info in the 11 minute developer direct for the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGFuaVUI6_E

[dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world]

That recycled yank-the-keycard-off-the-corpse animation, though...

It doesn't look like they learned much from Eternal. I think I'm going to give this one a miss. All I'm seeing is more mechanic overload, and a really annoying parry system that's just going to result in about 1/3 of the monster roster being, "The only way to deal with this guy is to wait for his green attack and parry it, then you get to hit him once. Other than that he's functionally invulnerable." Yeah, because the Marauders were totally the highlight of Eternal, and absolutely didn't grind the entire game to a tedious three minute halt every time you encountered one and played its silly song-and-dance.

I will happily don my asbestos underpants and declare that I really don't like the direction the new Doom games are taking. Whatever this is isn't Doom; they could have just as well slapped a new original IP over top of it without any difference.

[stevedice@sh.itjust.works]

They did learn a lot from Eternal. Mainly that people loved it and people complaining about the Marauders just need to git gud.

[katana314@lemmy.world]

Someday I'd like to hope our game design sensibilities evolve enough that we can stop deflecting every negative review with "git gud". There are absolutely things that hard games can design badly that don't add to the overall enjoyment of the game.

Marauders were one of those things.

[noobdoomguy8658@feddit.org]

Not happy about these Indiana Jones type of system requirements. I was coping that DOOM: The Dark Ages won't have mandatory ray-tracing, even though I knew they'll be using either identical engine or some "minor" variation of it, because. well, id software, idetch engine, etc. Fitting name!

DOOM (2016) and DOOM: Eternal ran extremely well on my GTX 1080 paired with Intel i5 3470. Now I won't be able to run the new title with same GPU paired with Ryzen 5 5600x. There's a lot of people in the comments in various places saying it's totally fine or just arguing with people that are not in favor of such demands.

And there won't be any multiplayer.

The mighty have fallen.

[hadriscus@lemm.ee]

"git gud" is honestly never a good defense against any given criticism. Saying this as someone who's reasonably gud

[regrettable_incident@lemmy.world]

Yeah, it also puts off people like me who are crap at games but still want to enjoy them. I am in my 50s and missed a couple decades of gaming. Recently got a steam deck and been trying to catch up. Recently finished bioshock! And I'm about halfway through doom 2016, enjoying it a lot. But I know I'm shit, I'm playing on little bitch difficulty and I still got stuck on a boss for two frustrating weeks.

My point is that some of their market is going to be people like me who don't have time to put hundreds of hours into learning the mechanics but just want to have fun for an hour here or there and blow up some monsters.

[hadriscus@lemm.ee]

Absolutely, I can relate. How well does Doom 2016 run on the steam deck ?

[dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world]

And here's the thing with the Marauders, too. They were just in the wrong game.

If having to play silly distance and timing games with solitary enemies were Doom's jam -- If this were ever Doom's jam -- it would be one thing. But it's not, and it never has been. The fuckers would fit right in the Dark Souls universe and nobody would even notice. But that's just not how the rest of the game is structured.

The telltale heart thumping under the floorboard here is that the game feels the need to literally give you a popup that pauses the action the first time you encounter one for the explicit purpose of teaching you how to work the fight. If your mechanics are so non-discoverable that this is necessary, maybe that's a clue that a stop and rethink is in order.

Doom Eternal was actually really bad at that across the board. You will recall that almost every new mechanic was preceded by an action stopping popup and in some cases an incongruous teleportation to a tutorial room to force-feed you the correct course of action (and the only correct course of action, which is my other gripe) for that monster or situation. Very few of its mechanics beyond stick-shotgun-down-monster's-throat-pull-trigger are organically discoverable, and even the ones that could have been aren't because of the tutorial popups.

I guess at least you can turn them off... If you know about them in advance.

[katana314@lemmy.world]

I maintain it was more an issue with basing their fight around spacing, than teaching via popups. I didn’t even mind the many enemies that had unintuitive concepts like feeding them grenades. Once you attune to them, they’re simple enough.

Even after they teach you all that about Marauders, it’s not just a matter of how to shoot them, and when - but when NOT to. Plus hoping for their AI to act reliably as described.

[regrettable_incident@lemmy.world]

Seems to run great.

[echodot@feddit.uk]

I think it's because they've started designing games that use PS5 as the minimum standard for hardware requirements.

I don't mind about Ray tracing being a requirement in theory I just think that they're doing it about 5 years too early. If they just waited until Real-Time Ray tracing had been around long enough that some cards had hit the second hand market it wouldn't be so bad

[noobdoomguy8658@feddit.org]

Wouldn't have been that bad if the push for ray-tracing didn't come together with a higher price. Isn't the point of ray-tracing to make things easier for the developers to work on lightning and shadows and such? Apart from the obvious graphical fidelity.

There's absolutely nothing good about it. I've been reluctant to get into RT because it just doesn't offer that much to me and seems to have launched us into the upscaling and frame generation era of gaming because the oh-so-wonderful ray-tracing capable GPUs actually need some crutches to deliver their killer features. And mandatory ray-tracing now, alongside the mandatory DLSS to see any benefit from a 5000 series card from Nvidia are absolutely going to contribute to me doing my best not to buy into ray-tracing for even longer.

I know it's lost battle because of how many have either happily or silently jumped ship, but it's now a matter of a principle. It's not even that kind of situation when one is not enough until there's one too many to ignore - it's just me not feeling right about it; even less right than before.

I'm the old man yelling at the clouds.