Doom With Less Gore: Helpful or Heresy?

I think gore is funny when it is obviously over-the-top in a satirical or pastiche-y way like Demonsteele but when it takes itself seriously like Brutal Doom it just comes off as super dorky. Like that kid you went to high school with who wore a trenchcoat because he thought it looked badass but all he really did was cement his status as a nerd with bad fashion sense.

Doom is a game about running 40mph and killing cartoon demons with a shotgun, not really a grimdark atmosphere. Maybe when it first came out but not in 2014.

Chexquest has it's version of gore, but it is the green goo that the invading monsters bring.
Red gore from Doom kept creeping in to Chexquest, so I had to take measures to lock out the Doom graphics when DoomLegacy was in Chex mode.
Playing Chexquest is not much different than playing Doom, as long as you are playing.

The blood splats are useful and it would look strange to not have some damage, considering the weapons our hero is toting into battle.

I like to use bloody textures in selected locations, and a few pools of blood. The suggestion of what happened there works better for me than the gory sprites. Can barely identify the brains, it would have been much better as a leg or arm.

Those twitching bodies on a stake I could do without. Have never used them in a level map and probably never will.

Doom has been around long enough that some of us are getting older. The attitude towards gore differs, and definitely changes with age.
Some 14 year old cannot get enough, cause they are not old enough to have it mean anything personal. Be old enough to know a couple people killed and maybe it will look different.

brutal doom is suppossed to be serious!?

I really like the way Enhanced Doom handles the extra gore.

Why the need for more gore and violence? That's the only thing I'm going to have a problem with in Doom 4. It seems childish and wrong to demand Gore - like horror film websites who rate films down for having fewer gory scenes. To each their own I suppose.

There is no such thing as a gory level that is funny or cannot be taken serious. At best the level mapper can do is superimpose the gore with other design elements (maybe funny) and hope about the effect it has. The problem I see here is the belief that because a mapper does something with out being serious that somehow that is supposed to be the mood that every player will see. It does not work that way. This is the failing of every practical joke, that because it was funny to think up that somehow that will carry over to the one experiencing it.

There have already been games that had a gore switch. The problem with Doom is the variety of the level maps and the difficulty of designing a gore switch to alter the right elements. It would have to substitute alternative graphics for most of the really gory ones. When a level map uses a gory sprite for something entirely different, the setting would have to disable itself or the player would never know that some interesting non-gory sprite element was missing from their play experience.

MajorRawne said:

Why the need for more gore and violence? That's the only thing I'm going to have a problem with in Doom 4. It seems childish and wrong to demand Gore - like horror film websites who rate films down for having fewer gory scenes. To each their own I suppose.

Context is key here. The original Doom, with its skin-tarp walls, skies made of screaming viscera, ritualistic sacrifices, incredibly gory death animations and sadistic weapons, definitely relies on gore as part of the experience. Doom 4, I think, wants to retain this, but must necessarily up the ante in order to be as violent now as the original was 21 years ago. This is why the reveal had so much carnage. That said, I did find it a bit excessive, but not necessarily unrealistic or stupid looking. I think Doom 4 will be variable in how gory it will be, rather than being pornographic in its display of violence.

For me, green blood wasn't the main problem with killing monsters in GBA Doom. It was the disappearing bodies. I use the dead bodies of monsters to know if I've already visited a room or not. So you can see how that was a problem.

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geekmarine said:
You can't read monster health levels or anything, but the amount of blood gives you a good indication of, "Okay, he took the full blast of a super shotgun," or, "Damn, I just nicked him." I'm not saying the blood is absolutely necessary or anything, or that I couldn't judge based on aim how much damage I likely did, but it's an extra little thing that helps, you know, when trying to figure out if you're gonna need one more blast or two to take down that cacodemon or hell knight.
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I agree with this. As for adding or subtracting blood from Doom, I'd prefer if they added just a little bit more gore (Not like Brutal Doom. That's way too much). But I would still play the game even if they removed gore entirely.