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Koko Ricky

Is Doom done being serious?

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Exactly how is this game cartoony? If you want cartoony, go for Borderlands. THAT is cartoony. Duke Nukem and Serious Sam are more cartoony in tone. A lot of what you guys who are saying Eternal looks cartoony I am going to guess and say that the Devs did a great job in one aspect, getting the enemy models from Doom 1/2 looking like they should in Doom Eternal. You guys are looking at some of these enemies and weapons in Doom Eternal from the gameplay trailers, and seeing these elements through the lens of Doom 2, which nowadays LOOKS cartoony.

 

The reality is that these games from their very inception were meant in some form or another to pay homage to the movie Evil Dead/Army of Darkness. The Doom comic could not be more explicit from that approach with the Doomguy acting cocky like a certain Ash Williams. Be thankful that the Doom Reboot line did not include a Brutal Doom-esque guy talking silly asinine lines from the Doom comic in 2016, or taking its source material to the extreme like Duke Nukem Forever did.

 

The amount of blood, gore, violence, and hellish themes seen in Eternal so far, do not to me, lend themselves to cartoons at all. If one had to call it cartoonish though, I think the best way to look at it is like a penultimate issue in a comic series like Marvel's Punisher. Comics, by their very nature, look cartoonish, but can lend themselves to being serious. That aspect can be applied here to Eternal if you let you mind see from a better mental vantage point.

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1 hour ago, Tetzlaff said:

 

Let's take it this way: because Doom never was very realistic, they also could add funny hats to the monsters, give the player a colourful squeeky toy weapon that shoots bubbles and add some fart sounds. It wouldn't change the mood of the game at all because, you see, it was never meant to be realistic.

Earth is being invaded by blood thirsty creatures thanks to a corrupt corporation who's aim is to better humanity by siding with an evil entity.

 

Yeah Doom Eternal is ALL Bright Colors and Rainbows... Totally... 1000%

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Even Doom 3 had a lot of ridiculous shit in the logs, rare character dialogue, Martian Buddy, arcade machines (Kelly has a damn machine dedicated to himself shooting down bears floating on balloons in his office even postmortem), and things like the guide to demonic rituals.

 

I do think they're meming it up a bit too much with what little i'm bothering to look up for Eternal, but the series is built upon the backs of using hellish imagery and demons themselves for an arcadey shooter as you gobble up blue health drinks and tiny green helmets, carry an arsenal as large as yourself with more ammo than plausible while outrunning rockets, and the series never really bothered to be realistic, just movie-like for the sake of killing shit. And with 2016 and Eternal, you're still running through wartorn and gored places of genocide and extinction, the game just doesn't try to be grimdark about it despite the excess violence.

Edited by RaikohZX

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I love the tone and atmosphere of these new games! It has a rigid, laser focused fiction imo, light-hearted but not lacking an attitude or stakes. Its distinct from the original games but IMO all the doom games have distinct tones. I'm sure if people decide to go with something else in the future they will, doom is malleable that way. Look at all the mods that exist...theres evidently a lot of inspiration and a lot to work with from the OG games. I agree that OG Doom wasn't just a farce, and in fact wrote a whole thing about it:

edit: prematurely saved

 

But new doom isnt a farce either and doom 3 wasnt lacking in humor. These new games want to empower the player through tone and characterization rather just just circumstance and mechanics, which imo is how doom 1 empowered you. Doom 3 empowered you by essentially making you earn it, and on a mechanical level it seems like D:E is attempting to do something similar in a far shorter timescale than Doom 3 used with its campaign-long evolution. In other words its cool and im fascinated!

 

New visions dont come at the expense of old or yet to be ones. Someday someone else will make a new doom game and for that matter a new doom movie, etc etc. I'm just happy to see unique expressions of love and appreciation for this series especially from those contributing to it officially. We aren't existing in a contiguously divided set of spaces -- og, 64, mods, 3, new doom...... -- rather a unified pool of unique voices and such. It's cool and it's what makes Doom great, more than any analysis of its tone, from any rendition, could ever capture.

Edited by EtherBot

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8 hours ago, GoatLord said:

Every iteration of Doom has its own tonality and mood, and it's commendable that id isn't afraid to shift that around with each subsequent release. However, despite my insistence that "cartoony" is not really an appropriate descriptor of Eternal's overall direction, Hugo Martin has talked pretty explicitly about the "Saturday morning cartoon" vibe they were going for, something that was evident in Doom '16 but is more blatant here. That's fine, and I understand the motivation to go for that angle, but recall the unused concept art for the cancelled Doom 4; in particular, these images really encapsulate how much darker and more horror-soaked it was going to be.

*pics here*

While some elements of these ideas made it to Doom '16, it's pretty obvious that a lot of it was scrapped or toned down. There was clearly a darker, more serious mood present at this stage of development, and in a way it modernizes what the PSX and N64 incarnations were going for. In particular, the cyberdemon concept is the stuff of nightmares; it exists in total contrast to the frankly silly version we ended up with. Might future incarnations of Doom return to this darker, more overtly gothic style, or is this just a pipe dream? Does anyone else want to see a return to this vision of the game?

Smells like one of those topics where "back in my day" or "those damn (insert someone you do not like here) ruining x or y" is somewhat hidden. Should I just type ok boomer and carry on? Yeah, so... ok boomer.

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OG Doom/Doom II were at times dark but never horrific. Yes there was sometimes a sense of trepidation entering a darker portion of the map, or right before you triggered a trap, or when you saw a new enemy type for the first time. But it wasn't a horror fps in the sense that FEAR was. Sure, OG Doom's version of Hell was filled with hellish traps, dark corridors, catacombs and occult symbols, but at the same time handed you a super shotgun and rocket launcher to make minced meat out of its denizens. And it wasn't all dark either, some levels were positively...cheerful. I feel like the crux of OG Doom's tone was to take the concept of hell and make it...fun. So on the one hand you'll see people writhing about stuck on spikes, lost souls screaming out of the walls and desolate (yet colorful) landscapes, but it wasn't horrific because the art style, level design, and gameplay never compromised on the fun factor of shooting demons and figuring out the red/blue/yellow key puzzles. IMHO Doom Eternal, with its strong sense of environmental storytelling and over-the-top action, hits that balance of atmospheric immersion and fun, notwithstanding some tongue-in-cheek references and self-aware comedic elements. Id COULD make it darker in future, but I hope they don't compromise on the 'hell is a fun place to be' tone that I think OG Doom was based on.

Edited by FortressOfDoom

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My image of Doom was built when I was pretty little, so I definitely took it very seriously and all the comedic/wacky parts of it didn't set the tone at all. Hell, when I was little freaking Ghostbusters was 100% horror and 0% comedy to me. Same with the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, I never perceived anything in them as funny when I was a kid, it was all just scary.

 

Doom 64 and Doom 3 were closer to recreating that sort of impression and that's why they're my favorite atmosphere-wise, but I have to accept that the general public perception of Doom is very much not like that. Of course I do wish Eternal and 2016 were more 3-like, or Quake1-like or even just DUSK-like, but I've embraced the new games' direction as well, and I'm hyped for Eternal despite all the giant green switches and the 1-ups and demons spraying colorful loot everywhere and all that shit, as well as environments I would've never asked for in a Doom game. I can't wait to see how it turns out, and I'd rather have this than Doom attempt to be the survival horror series I wish it was, fail horribly, and be shelved forever as a franchise.

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3 hours ago, High On Berserk said:

Smells like one of those topics where "back in my day" or "those damn (insert someone you do not like here) ruining x or y" is somewhat hidden. Should I just type ok boomer and carry on? Yeah, so... ok boomer.

I'm really excited about Eternal so this doesn't make sense.

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I mean i am sorry if i sound selfish but people who cry on things they don't like ... I don't get it. I don't go on wow bitching about it, or diablo 3 forums. I'm sorry for this little rant, but I had to. Think about it this way, I hated doom3 and ppl loved it. I was nowhere to be found tellin em it sucks, i had other important things to take care of in my life. Doom eternal is serious with lots of colors as visual cues. The story or characters or hellish markings are not 'unserious' are they? The art style is different, its hard to please everyone all the time. You guys had doom3, now we have a different doom. I'm not saying your concerns arent valid, but at this stage of the game close to release they aint changing it, lets face it. And going with a title like 'is doom done being serious?' We are being a bit trolly here now arent we?

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5 hours ago, High On Berserk said:

Smells like one of those topics where "back in my day" or "those damn (insert someone you do not like here) ruining x or y" is somewhat hidden. Should I just type ok boomer and carry on? Yeah, so... ok boomer.

Doom is the quintessential Boomer franchise for mature and serious gamers. I suggest the Zoomers floss along over to Fortnite for their memes and wacky visuals.

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47 minutes ago, Spectre01 said:

Doom is the quintessential Boomer franchise for mature and serious gamers. I suggest the Zoomers floss along over to Fortnite for their memes and wacky visuals.

 

Another thing that bothers me. Why classify ppl and discriminate when they were born? There could be gen zers who love doom2 and boomers or genxers like me who love doom eternal or even both. What you did, putting all boomers in your own niche and speaking for them, is very childish and immature for someone who wants 'mature and serious games only plz'. I cant believe the stuff I read sometimes. Why can't you dedicate your energy in something positive? Doom eternal is going to release the way it is, and ppl will love it regardless 

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1 hour ago, Antroid said:

My image of Doom was built when I was pretty little, so I definitely took it very seriously and all the comedic/wacky parts of it didn't set the tone at all. Hell, when I was little freaking Ghostbusters was 100% horror and 0% comedy to me. Same with the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, I never perceived anything in them as funny when I was a kid, it was all just scary.

 

I think this is a crucially important aspect that's so rarely acknowledged in how one perceives a game like Doom, and how their perception changes over time. Plenty of classic Doom players were preteens, (including myself) or at the most, early adolescents the first time they were exposed to the game. 

 

If you were at that age when you first played Doom, it was somewhat similar to watching horror movies at a young age---you didn't perceive most of what you were seeing on screen as bring silly and ridiculous, even when some of it was *meant* to be silly and ridiculous. Then, when you got better at the game, it became more of an intense action experience, as opposed to an intense fight for survival experience, and when you got a little older, you also realized just how goofy a lot of the stuff in the game was. Your perspective on the game shifted along with your age and skill level.

 

As silly as much of the content of this game is in retrospect, it sure didn't seem that way when you first played it, especially if you were young at the time, and *especially* if you first played it at a time when the graphics and sound weren't so antiquated. Those Pinky snarls, the red screen flashes, the sight of a Cyberdemon rocket zooming directly into your screen and getting bigger until the microsecond it explodes---all of that made an impression on a 10 year old the first time he played the game. 

 

Hell, the game *still* has the ability to engage people, and make them tense up freak out when playing it the first time:

 

 

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28 minutes ago, Caffeine Freak said:

If you were at that age when you first played Doom, it was somewhat similar to watching horror movies at a young age---you didn't perceive most of what you were seeing on screen as bring silly and ridiculous, even when some of it was *meant* to be silly and ridiculous. Then, when you got better at the game, it became more of an intense action experience, as opposed to an intense fight for survival experience, and when you got a little older, you also realized just how goofy a lot of the stuff in the game was. Your perspective on the game shifted along with your age and skill level.

 

It would've happened this way for me but I have fought very hard against this perspective shift. I pretty much don't play slaughters or wads that go against the classic atmosphere, like all the "saturated colors and smooth abstract shapes" ones that look so good in screenshots. Of course, I got massively better than I was as a kid, but I'm still not too good to struggle in many modern wads.

 

Some of my favorite games tone-wise are ones that have utterly ridiculous things in them that are played straight, or at least passably straight, such as wolfenstein TNO or serious sam 3 or mortal kombat story modes or the original Turoks. I think the playing-it-straight thing is what allows me to accept the ridiculous things from the perspective of the characters in-universe. There's a level of self-awareness that doesn't go into blatant self-mockery and allows whoever so chooses to take everything depicted "at face value" and with a straight face. This is the same way I've kept seeing the Doom games, so to me the humorous elements are still insignificant. Funnily enough, I've recently played through Blood for the first time and my experience there was the exact opposite, the game clearly not bothering to take itself seriously completely ruined the atmosphere for me, but I can imagine how engrossed I would've been had I played it as a kid. DUSK had done for me what I wish Blood did. I can't really begin to try to dissect the differences and causes of this though, screw that.

 

I recently had an interesting experience relating to the perception of the original Dooms. Bought the Doom ports on the Switch and played them in handheld mode, specifically trying out several of the master levels for the first time. Despite me being an avid hater of playing FPS games with anything but KB+M, it was pretty nostalgic for my SNES doom days, and honestly I didn't mind having one tenth of the dexterity (especially with my drifting left stick, Switches, amirite?), because it made the game feel more like I remember it from my childhood. I was excited by the levels that honestly I would've passed on playing at all on PC (which is why I haven't played the master levels on PC), and a lot of the situations you get into became scary and dangerous again. Part of it honestly could've been just playing-on-a-console thing (it doesn't have access to all the custom wads so the ones it does have feel more important), but part of it is being really depowered through the clunky stick cotrols. It's really gotten me thinking, but that's way off-topic.

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30 minutes ago, Allstin said:

The cutscenes we’ve seen seem pretty serious

 

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6 minutes ago, Archi said:

 

 

Gold. I want someone to do a super gruff voice over saying "Weee!"

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3 hours ago, Caffeine Freak said:

I think this is a crucially important aspect that's so rarely acknowledged in how one perceives a game like Doom, and how their perception changes over time. Plenty of classic Doom players were preteens, (including myself) or at the most, early adolescents the first time they were exposed to the game. 

 

If you were at that age when you first played Doom, it was somewhat similar to watching horror movies at a young age---you didn't perceive most of what you were seeing on screen as bring silly and ridiculous, even when some of it was *meant* to be silly and ridiculous.

Maybe it's just because my dad and older brother were often with me in my early Dooming days, but even as a kid some of the more silly aspects of Doom were apparent to me. A very early Doom memory is seeing the shotgun guy corpses slowly slide down the stairs on E1M1, which made my dad laugh his ass off, which in turn made my brother and I laugh. Maybe it's just because I was young and was copying my dad's behavior or something, but there were elements of the game I can't ever remember being anything but amusing to me. Satisfying sets of kills using a chain of barrels is another similar one! My brain just always registered the game as being somewhat in the realm of "cartoon violence".

 

That's not to say it wasn't gripping, atmospheric and flat out scary at times. I've stated many times the impact seeing those hung Barons on Tower of Babel had on me.. I was genuinely shitting my pants waiting to see what could easily kill 4 Barons. It didn't matter that I understood the game was fictional and semi-cartoony, those aspects didn't stop me from getting utterly immersed.. I just always managed to find humor in some of that slapstick-like stuff that happens, not to mention the obviously silly quit messages and endoom screens. I could never have articulated it at the time, but what kept (keeps) me so addicted is the mix of horror, humor, action and atmosphere. All those pieces of the pie just fit perfectly together.

 

Anyway, I think the point I'm getting at in a very roundabout way is that the game never seemed realistic to me even as a kid, despite being very very engrossing.

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Btw, I still wonder why Eternal is not considered being serious. The demons have a gritty, grotesque and sometimes disturbing look. Of course there's some stylistic exaggeration in visual effects, but this has always been a visual element in id Softwares games.

 

One of id Softwares darkest games, Quake, had blood and body explosions. Some of Eternals monsters even have a very Quake-ish look.

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2 minutes ago, igg said:

Btw, I still wonder why Eternal is not considered being serious. The demons have a gritty, grotesque and sometimes disturbing look. Of course there's some stylistic exaggeration in visual effects, but this has always been a visual element in id Softwares games.

 

One of id Softwares darkest games, Quake, had blood and body explosions. Some of Eternals monsters even have a very Quake-ish look.

 

Right! The colors were always super bright, its just visual cues really needed in eternal. The art style and the lore/story/atmosphere are not the same. If the enemies were unicorns or teddybears i would understand.

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I think the core premise of each Doom game is treated seriously - demons are invading our reality and through the player's eyes it's shown as a grim affair, and everyone in the narrative acts like they're in a drama rather than a farce - but there's always been that knowing, wink-wink nudge-nudge stuff around the edges. The end screens in the classics, the sacrificial guidelines in Doom 3, and many of the codex entries in 2016 are all examples.

In my opinion this works for Doom because although the situation is horrific, the protagonist is a major bad-ass (or at least becomes one when the player gains enough confidence), and the humorous bits are a good way of addressing that contradiction.

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6 hours ago, Urdak5891 said:

I mean i am sorry if i sound selfish but people who cry on things they don't like ... I don't get it. I don't go on wow bitching about it, or diablo 3 forums. I'm sorry for this little rant, but I had to. Think about it this way, I hated doom3 and ppl loved it. I was nowhere to be found tellin em it sucks, i had other important things to take care of in my life. Doom eternal is serious with lots of colors as visual cues. The story or characters or hellish markings are not 'unserious' are they? The art style is different, its hard to please everyone all the time. You guys had doom3, now we have a different doom. I'm not saying your concerns arent valid, but at this stage of the game close to release they aint changing it, lets face it. And going with a title like 'is doom done being serious?' We are being a bit trolly here now arent we?

Ok, once again, I'm stoked for Eternal, I dig the art style and I'm fine with the more over-the-top approach. How is that trolly?

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A grimdark(tm) Doom just wouldn't have stood out nowadays. Plenty of games have done that, and Doom 2016 would have ended up feeling uninspired as a result. The posted screenshots could be from any other Marine vs Aliens game on the market.

 

It was a brilliant move to double-down on the black humor absurdity of Doom. A lesser team would have fumbled it badly, but id pulled it off.

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Doom has always mixed serious creepiness with irreverent humor and slapstick exaggeration. It was a very teenagers game, shying away from the cutesy style of previous id titles (like Commander Keen) but still pretty much focused on being nothing more than a game, something fun. There's lots of little anecdotes about game development that have been collected through Masters of Doom, and interviews, stuff like Romero making mouth noises to provide the soundtrack before the sound system was plugged in, or Prince putting a harpsichord in one of the songs because the team didn't like the piano he used initially, the revenant's exaggerated punching sound, the whole Icon of Sin prank and counter-prank, etc.

 

Mixing horror themes with humor is extremely common (there's a whole holiday about it after all, Halloween) since it's a way for us to tame the idea of death, take the edge out of tragedy. And it's especially attractive to teenagers, since that's about the age where the carefree insouciance of childhood is shed and we become fully aware of our mortality. Anyway, enough pop psychology.

 

The new Doom series took the same premise of burlesque horror taken half-seriously and half-humorously but went even further by making the player's avatar not just a badass survivor who triumphs against (not so) impossible odds, but actually into a cartoon. The Doom Slayer is extremely interesting as a player character. First, the way he's introduced: he's literally an antiquity, dug out of some ancient ruins by archaeologists. He's an anachronism. That was id saying "we dug the coffin of the Doom Guy, and bringing him back from the dead, along with all the apparently archaic gameplay of running around to shoot monsters in their face while dodging their fireballs". Secondly, the way he's built-up as this impossibly badass demon-slaughtering messiah. In the original games, there was a survival horror element, you had to manage to survive against the hordes of Hell. But in the new Doom, you can't really use this anymore, because you already did that, Doomguy already went through Doom and Doom II and Final Doom and Doom 64 and the countless PWADs out there. Also games need to have some identity to their protagonists now, it's harder to sell the whole nameless player avatar because of how detailed the character models now are. The way around is to define the avatar's identity by in-game reputation, giving a reason why the player is able to do badass stuff and also why only the player is able to do badass stuff. Bethesda does that all the time with the Elder Scrolls series, since you can choose any race, class, and sex combination, so you get nicknames to identify the character, like "the Dragonborn" and so on. They didn't invent this technique (the Ultima series called the player character "the Avatar" because, in-universe, the NPCs recognized your character as being the embodiment of a being from another dimension who came to their world to help them in their hour of need, which is a literally true description of the player). It's interesting to note that there's only one letter that differs between "the Doom Slayer" and "the Doom Player".

 

In short, the whole mythos about the Doom Slayer is extremely meta. Doom is not serious because it is a game, and it is perfectly aware that it is a game. That doesn't mean it doesn't have genuine atmosphere, but it knows what it is, the players know what it is, and nobody's pretending something different is happening.

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6 hours ago, Spectre01 said:

I suggest the Zoomers floss along over to Fortnite for their memes and wacky visuals.

nah I think we'll just floss here

tenor.gif.db27ecc3c6eb39de0e99fe8d1e781839.gif

 

 

 

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Anyone else think that, given the size and scope of Doom Eternal, it would simply be exhausting if it was completely po-faced and grimdark and srs bznss?

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29 minutes ago, Super Mighty G said:

I still hate that meme. 

flossing itself or the gif? because if you want I´ll film myself flossing and replace it

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24 minutes ago, NoXion said:

Anyone else think that, given the size and scope of Doom Eternal, it would simply be exhausting if it was completely po-faced and grimdark and srs bznss?

I do.

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