What is actually the "essence" of doom?

[HQDefault]

Y'know, this concept is something that I've been thinking a lot about recently. And I think if we're to argue that the core "essence" of Doom lies in its classic entries and the sequels are iterations of that essence, here's how I'd illustrate it:

 

Doom 3 and Doom 2016/Eternal are two halves of Classic Doom's core identity.

Doom 3 is probably closer to what they were originally going for when creating the originals, being a dark romp through a sci-fi environment watching it progressively get overtaken by demonic influences. But feels the need to significantly slow the combat down in the service of that goal.

New Doom iterates on the aspects of Classic Doom that people remember, fast-paced action, no reloading, ripping and tearing, etc. I believe LGR described the concept as "Zeitgeist Doom" in that it's more a sequel to Doom as it exists in the cultural identity rather than a sequel to what Doom was at the time. Which is certainly a very clever way of updating a franchise for the modern era, and I think does a lot to give New Doom a distinct identity from Old Doom.

 

But like I said earlier... to me, each of these things only represent half of the essence of classic Doom. They don't feel reductive in any way because they each supplement their missing half with something new.

But to me, the "essence" of Doom is a combination of 1: B-Horror atmosphere and aesthetics, 2: Demons and weird Hell magic, 3: Sci-Fi and Space Marines, and 4: That classic fast-paced action.

Every Doom game gets #2 and #3 right on some level, but I have yet to see a modern iteration of Doom that really does both #1 and #4 on that list simultaneously. And the classic games aren't usually remembered for that first thing because they simply weren't implemented in a way that holds up nowadays... And that kinda sucks.

[Pechudin]

What about loneliness? Since there are no friendly (or neutral) NPCs, every Doom map will feel like you are on your own. Unless you think of the map's creator as a character, but that is going beyond the game itself.

 

Classic Doom - all alone in Hell; tale of survival

Exploration/moody WADs (LostCiv, etc.) - everyone else spirited away/all alone on the planet

[RataUnderground]

I think the essence is the cervical collar (No mouselook)

 

Spoiler

 

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

See, I don't think there is such a thing as a pure essence. In doom or in anything else. There's no one or any number of attributes that would unmistakably include all the doom games and exclude all the non-doom ones. 

 

If you say that the essence of doom is a lone marine shooting demons in space, well plenty other games do that. Like the recent boltgun. 

Maybe it also has to be made by id. But plenty official doom games are not made by id. 

So it's not the engine either. Because there's plenty official doom games on different engines, and plenty non-doom games on the doom engine.

Maybe shooting demons in space AND it's an fps format AND with the official doom logo. But doom rpg on the old phones is a thing. (It's really good btw, you should check it out)

Maybe it's the logo alone giving it the identity of uniquely doom? But freedoom exists, which is functionally all doom except the trademark. 

Maybe it's a completely abstract feeling that cannot be put into words but you just know it's doom when you play it. 

But if you play doom with a an overhaul mod like hideous destructor, it's the same game but feels entirely different. 

 

Names like this are just a simplified representation of real things we can all more or less agree on, when we talk about them. But they're not the real thing itself. Looking for an essence is trying to fit the concept perfectly onto the real thing, and it just doesn't work, in my opinion. It's fool's errand.

[Klear]

2 hours ago, Wo0p said:

It's funny.. as a child when I first got introduced to Doom the theme or concept or "essence" that stuck with me when I had to tell someone else about it was "Demons in space" because usually up until that point in my young life, demons belonged to medieval settings and aliens to sci-fi, so my little smoothbrain nugget was blown by the melding of those two "genres."

 

Incidentally there should be more "aliens in a medieval setting" games.

[Wo0p]

32 minutes ago, Klear said:

 

Incidentally there should be more "aliens in a medieval setting" games.

 

I agree! Most of which I have encountered that comes close to that are RPG games, but I'd like to see this in other genres as well. Hm... next project? oof

[Widow]

I like Doom. That's it. That's the essence.

[roadworx]

5 hours ago, Maribo said:

Strange, icy things, long dreams, most violence, monochromatic love stories, cuteness, goofiness, big screen blockbusters, pure mud, silly tributes, incomprehensible nightmares, sketchbook drawings, personal gifts, thinking outside the box, getting lost in the world.

 

I think that thanks to the nature of Doom being open source, its essence was able to evolve into much more than "killing demons to the tune of midi-fied metal music". From a more commercial perspective, the prevalence of certain nu-Doom (especially Doom Eternal) design choice would suggest that the essence of Doom is summed up as "RIP & TEAR", but I can't really subscribe to that after playing so many fan works that aren't aligned with that view in the slightest. Doom's essence is whatever the person who paints the WAD file chooses it to be. Sometimes it's an E1 tech base homage, sometimes it's a brutalist slaughterfest, sometimes it's walking in the void with nothing but yourself and your thoughts. It's all Doom in the end, just thrown into a kaleidoscope.

i was about to post something similar until i saw that you had already stated my thoughts, heh.

 

doom can be a lot of things, and i think that that's at least partially exemplified by the variety of opinions on why people like the original games. it could be the fast-paced action, the exploration and sense of adventure, the atmosphere...you can't really narrow it down to one single thing. as widow very succinctly put it:

38 minutes ago, Widow said:

I like Doom. That's it. That's the essence.

 

[DoomGuy999]

You are one of the strongest soldiers ever alive which can survive things which normal humans can't. When the US Space Marines were sent to phobos you were the only one to make it through. You rip and tear endlessly through the hordes, fighting even harder after they killed daisy. Save earth from demons and become one of the greatest heroes ever in this demon fighting sci-fi game.

[Gez]

4 hours ago, Wo0p said:

It's funny.. as a child when I first got introduced to Doom the theme or concept or "essence" that stuck with me when I had to tell someone else about it was "Demons in space" because usually up until that point in my young life, demons belonged to medieval settings and aliens to sci-fi, so my little smoothbrain nugget was blown by the melding of those two "genres."

 

And I guess I kept that view up until 2016 (Mostly because I didn't think anything deeper about it) when Doom 2016 was introduced with the words "Badass demons, big f'ing guns, and moving really really fast" - Marty Stratton

I was like... wait... is that what Doom is about? And that's when I began to ruminate on what made Doom Doom. So what are my thoughts today on what the essence of Doom is?

Well it's still "Demons in space." But I'll internally accept "Demons in a sci-fi setting" too :^)

This is why people say that Event Horizon is the real Doom movie.

[banjiepixel]

Quake with hell and demons.

[Wo0p]

21 minutes ago, Gez said:

This is why people say that Event Horizon is the real Doom movie.

 

Really? Huh.. I never saw that film as a Doom film in any way. But the first thing that popped into my head when I read that was "But there's literally no shooty action or demonic aesthetics in that film (As far as I recall?) aside from that one 'discovering the bridge' scene." so I guess my updated essence of doom is...

 

"Blasting demons in space action-hero-style" 

[Dreamskull]

7 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

Doom has three "pillars" that comprise its core gameplay: Action, Exploration and Suspense. Combined, they are the essence of Doom. 

 

Mr Freeze is more right, proper and correct than we realize. Here I was talking to down on Horror when I needed to talk suspense.

Edited September 21 by Dreamskull

[Helm]

Doom essence after 30 years too multifarious to pin down, too kaleidoscopic. It changed the media landscape and it arguably changed the world and continues to change it by having introduced immersive 3d 'metaverses' to the mass market... for lack of a better term. Dialectical materialism would dictate that 'if Doom didn't get invented, we would have to invent it by another name'. As in to say, on the spiral we are on we would do this immersive 3d viewport technology because humans eventually do all the things, but on our timeline it was Doom, made by a bunch of texans in the 90s and we were around for that. 

So when we are searching for some 'quintessence' we are essentially doing some sort of reduction and it's hard to reduce something so inchoate to the broader culture,  if it even is a worthwhile exercise to do so at all. Depends from the vantage you're describing it and the moment in history etc. What I love the most about my interaction with it is that when I am playing the game I feel connected to every other 'doomperson' who is also looking at the dumb mug in the middle of their hud and they're on to some strange adventure somewhere out there in the infinitely broad but charmingly particular wadverse. It's the same doomguy/gal because it was the seminal, original one. There's no other game where you can engage with a living piece of history that is continuously expanded by generations of users who have cut their teeth on it. I think perhaps only the competitive tetris scene has a game as ancient that is still getting sharpened, and truly none so ancient that is also applied so continuously to new contexts, new milieux, new 'campaign settings' as it were, like the stuff doom mappers put their abstract purposes to. In increasingly many generations of videogamer people (on the internet it feels like 'a generation' is like 5 years to the 50 in the real world), reinforcing what they learned from the past and joyfully rebelling against an ingrained status quo, reinventing... that's the best thing about the doom 'scene', perhaps. The essence of doom in the play of it is run fast, shoot demon, don't die 

[camper]

I think the essence is contained in Lovecraft's story "From Beyond", but transferred to the moons of Mars.
P.S. And even earlier, in Giordano Bruno’s idea of a plurality of worlds and attempts to summon demons from these worlds.

[CrocMagnum]

4 hours ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

See, I don't think there is such a thing as a pure essence. In doom or in anything else. There's no one or any number of attributes that would unmistakably include all the doom games and exclude all the non-doom ones. 

 

If you say that the essence of doom is a lone marine shooting demons in space, well plenty other games do that. Like the recent boltgun. 

Maybe it also has to be made by id. But plenty official doom games are not made by id. 

So it's not the engine either. Because there's plenty official doom games on different engines, and plenty non-doom games on the doom engine.

Maybe shooting demons in space AND it's an fps format AND with the official doom logo. But doom rpg on the old phones is a thing. (It's really good btw, you should check it out)

Maybe it's the logo alone giving it the identity of uniquely doom? But freedoom exists, which is functionally all doom except the trademark. 

Maybe it's a completely abstract feeling that cannot be put into words but you just know it's doom when you play it. 

But if you play doom with a an overhaul mod like hideous destructor, it's the same game but feels entirely different. 

 

Names like this are just a simplified representation of real things we can all more or less agree on, when we talk about them. But they're not the real thing itself. Looking for an essence is trying to fit the concept perfectly onto the real thing, and it just doesn't work, in my opinion. It's fool's errand.

You might admit that Doom stands out from every other shooters of its era. Why? I don't have a definitive answer, really.

I believe what makes Doom is the gunplay.

 

Then there's a phenomenal level of polish in Doom, the menus, the presentation, the soundwork and, of course, the feeling of the weapons. Besides most of these guns have a purpose. 

 

Before Doom became dirt cheap, millions of people played the shareware version for a very looong time (litterary years). There's probably a reason(s) for that. 

Edited September 21 by CrocMagnum

[Alt3000]

14 hours ago, Cutman 999 said:

Doom como franquicia cambió mucho en tono y enfoque sobre cómo se hacen los juegos hasta el punto de que lo que originalmente escribió Tom Hall en la Biblia de Doom es completamente irreconciliable. Como odio el argumento de "X es una mala Y, pero una buena Z Y", quiero escuchar lo que crees que tiene todas las propiedades de Doom en común en términos de tono, jugabilidad y atmósfera.

In fact, what makes me feel the essence of Doom for me is the first time you play it and start getting into it, my first time playing Doom 1 and Doom 2 in pirated DOSBOX (Obviously being defended with the argument of "Abandonware") It was mostly the graphics and controls and outdated gameplay of Doom at that time, that you will play only with the keyboard, that they are only pixels simulating 3D rooms and that the MIDI music was originally electronic farts like 8 Bit is something that I feel is very recognizable from the game, when I go to other modern source ports like ZDoom and variables there it is another different experience from Doom that goes from being a nostalgic old, to a modern shooting game with outdated graphics and gameplay (Of course if we talk about how this is configured, and I'm also talking to you normies about brutal doom). But getting back to the topic, what for me is the essence of Doom is not just the first time you go through it and play it. If not the things that make up for playing it, at least in DOSBox or some old-fashioned emulator where *The true essence of the 90's* sits there, at least if we think about it in a deeper way and going around.

 

Or maybe I'm searching, I have no idea XD

[Gifty]

The core of doom to me isn't really a specific mechanic, it's more rhythmic and musical. Doom implies a certain tempo and intensity that's meant to exhilarate and make one feel alive in a happy fight-or-flight kind of way. It's about the mechanics all firing together so smoothly that you experience it as something not mechanical, you experience the groove of it and the high of surviving just barely by the skin of your teeth.

[Downcologo one]

For me the essence of doom is the fluidity of the player and having several enemies on the screen could also tell you which music is more rock or metal, it is also in first person and has more of a background narrative (I know it is eternal and 2016 has much more story but in the already mentioned it is more in the background while in eternal there is more story but there is much more left for the codex), doom 3 is a slower game because the player is slow (if you have the stamina it bar but when it runs out you become slow again and have to wait for it to regenerate to become fast again and so on, which makes the game slower) and at times the player is left almost defenseless (this is exactly at the beginning of the game) where the ammo is low) compared to classic games where ammunition rains down on you and you are armed to the teeth, what would be the most characteristic thing about doom (in the game obviously) would be the movement of the player, this is what I feel characterizes the saga in the gameplay.
That would be, in my opinion, the ESSENCE of doom.

(Sorry if something is not understood, I use Google Translate)

[average rodent]

7 palabras
E S E N C I A

 

Biomechanical alien demons and Evil Dead spirits in a futuristic and (post)apocalyptic B-horror environment, with gory, fast-paced action and a balanced gameplay ... and open source and consequently portability and modding, of course.

[Downcologo one]

Just now, average rodent said:

7 palabras
E S E N C I A

 

Demonios alienígenas biomecánicos y espíritus Evil Dead en un entorno futurista y ( post ) apocalíptico de terror B, con acción sangrienta y acelerada y un juego equilibrado ... y de código abierto y, en consecuencia, portabilidad y modificación, por supuesto.

The essence runs even in my balls

[average rodent]

6 minutes ago, Downcologo one said:

The essence runs even in my balls

Autorizó que John Romero controle mi mente.

[Gravepicker]

7 hours ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

See, I don't think there is such a thing as a pure essence. In doom or in anything else. [...]

 

Aristotle will remember that.

 

Seriously though, if maybe not for absolutely everything (too much philosophy for me in that question), I think you're right when it comes to art. Art is made to elicit emotional response, but the response depends substantially on the person doing the "experiencing" of the piece of art.

 

The first Doom titles were made to be scary, but the palette and technical limitations have made it so that, for most people today, they're not that scary anymore. Still, 10 years ago, when I first played Doom I & II, the dark maze of E1M2 was pretty scary to me, maybe to do with the fact that I was going though a rough patch and was a very excitable young man. And I bet that if you get someone younger than 8-10 years old playing that section they will be scared.

 

To me, when I first played them, the classic Doom games appeared to be really fast and over the top FPS games. But I think it was because:

1. They were fast and over the top compared to other shooters I had played up until then.

2. When I started reading people's opinions on the games online, those were the qualities that seemed to pop up the most.

 

So Doom is a million different things to a just as many different doomers, which is what I got away from Maribo's post. And with its modability and enduring modding community, it's becoming more and more of that as we speak. And I love it.

[Downcologo one]

3 hours ago, average rodent said:

Autorizó que John Romero controle mi mente.

Jajajajjajajjaja

[Stroggman]

Blasting away at armies of imps with RL, dealing with traps, taking out skeleton men with ssg and stunning them with cg  and I will stop adding to this list cause I can add an endless amout of essence lol

[SupremeBioVizier]

The colour red, screams, door sounds...when I was 6 doom was cool because you were on Mars basically.

[Cutman 999]

17 hours ago, Maribo said:

Strange, icy things, long dreams, most violence, monochromatic love stories, cuteness, goofiness, big screen blockbusters, pure mud, silly tributes, incomprehensible nightmares, sketchbook drawings, personal gifts, thinking outside the box, getting lost in the world.

Emmm most of that is related to what the community has done, and that has nothing to do with the franchise in reality. I should had specified that in the main post.

[Cutman 999]

17 hours ago, Murdoch said:

 

I actually think Doom 2016 came about as close as possible to replicating the feel of classic Doom as one could in a modern engine. For me, anyway. Obviously, everyone reads things differently. They grossly overthought Eternal in every conceivable way, but Doom 2016 still had that kind of simplicity and purity to it.

But the tone and gameplay is drastically different... I know part of doom was being metal as shit, although i see more of the sinister side influencing the franchise in ist early days, rather than the badass shit now is known for. 

[Cutman 999]

17 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

 it's basically a canvas from which you can make some very un-doomy sorts of wads.

Besides the point, all you said is really good, but remember, that's what came from here, the community, not the doom franchise itself.

[Cutman 999]

13 hours ago, RataUnderground said:

I think the essence is the cervical collar (No mouselook)

 

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