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hardcore_gamer

What happened to Betruger after RoE?

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I know that the marine defeated him and that he vanished into nothing besides his skull, but what actually happened to him?

The reason I wonder is that since we know hell exists in the Doom universe there is an afterlife. So, by defeating Betruger what happened to his soul? Did it just go to hell? But if that's the case then would that not mean that Betruger isn't actually defeated since he was working for hell anyways?

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So there's a hell within a hell? What would happen if Doomguy went there and defeated Betruger all over again? He'd have to go even deeper? What then?

>dat hellception

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DoomUK said:

So there's a hell within a hell?


You know all these noob maps from 1994 that are just irregular flat shapes all textured in misaligned STARTAN and with a hundred cyberdemon stuck in explosive barrels?

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My theory is that the demons who fail (die) probably undergo physical torment for a time relative to their failure. My guess is that Betruger is gonna get some hurtin' for a long time. He'd better not drop the soap while there's a Hell Knight there...either that or they just die.

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Demons have no souls so they disappear forever or their energy gets recycled or something.

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Avoozl said:

I don't think Betruger even has a soul.


Why not? He starts the game out as a human, and he is still at least semi-human after getting his demon powers.

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It's an inconsistency in Doom3's storytelling. This applies to both Hell and the Ancients. They go into great detail explaining the technology on Mars and the origins of the Ancients, but when it comes to hell they've placed themselves between two chairs where chair A is "Other Dimension" and chair B is "Biblical Hell". The end result is something they refer to as "perhaps" being hell, but nothing really backs this up in the game. Sure you have pentagrams and other symbolic crap, but there is nothing to place it as HELL with a devil and what have you. I would prefer it if the "demons" and "hell" in Doom were just another dimension and the hell part would be people referring to it as hell. Because it's unpleasant. Biblical hell opens up doors to every kind of stupid.

Another problem with the storytelling in Doom3 is that apparently the ancients are extremely advanced and has floating "egg" thingies, teleporters and what not, but absolutely nothing you see in the game points at any kind of technology beyond temples made of bricks. The art style is awesome and all, but it really doesn't resemble anything that's technologically advanced, what so ever.

Also. The Betruger part of the story was moronic. A game about a monster invasion seriously doesn't need an antagonist laughing at you and unlocking doors for you at every corner. Doom was better when it was about opening a portal to the unknown by accident and then paying the price. Not some corrupted retarded paperthin onesided moron with a glass eye doing something that in no way gains himself for no apparent reason other than because the script says so.

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Shaviro said:

The Betruger part of the story was moronic. A game about a monster invasion seriously doesn't need an antagonist laughing at you and unlocking doors for you at every corner. Doom was better when it was about opening a portal to the unknown by accident and then paying the price. Not some corrupted retarded paperthin onesided moron with a glass eye doing something that in no way gains himself for no apparent reason other than because the script says so.

I guess they Tim Willits felt that Hell needed a personality to interact with the player, and the whole idea of a creepy, torturous, nameless other dimension invading ours wasn't cool enough.

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DoomUK said:

I guess they Tim Willits felt that Hell needed a personality to interact with the player, and the whole idea of a creepy, torturous, nameless other dimension invading ours wasn't cool enough.


I personally liked Betruger.

Hell is cool and all, but hell is a setting and not a character. Betruger is a character, so he is more interesting.

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Shaviro said:

Another problem with the storytelling in Doom3 is that apparently the ancients are extremely advanced and has floating "egg" thingies, teleporters and what not, but absolutely nothing you see in the game points at any kind of technology beyond temples made of bricks. The art style is awesome and all, but it really doesn't resemble anything that's technologically advanced, what so ever.


They were an environmentally conscious society and made sure all their technology was perfectly biodegradable. All that remains are the big monuments their ancestors built and which they carefully preserved for their historical value. :p

(This of course is complete bullshit I just made up.)

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hardcore_gamer said:

I personally liked Betruger.

Hell is cool and all, but hell is a setting and not a character. Betruger is a character, so he is more interesting.


Huh? That's a terrible generalization. He may be a character, but he's one dimensional and is much more of a poster child for hell than an actual person with thoughts, desires and flaws. Going "Bwahahaha your friends are with me now. I am evil and you will die in flames. Also I am evil" doesn't make for much of a character.

DoomUK said:

I guess they Tim Willits felt that Hell needed a personality to interact with the player, and the whole idea of a creepy, torturous, nameless other dimension invading ours wasn't cool enough.


Pretty much. Too bad he actually ends up helping the player more than hurting him. Why does he keep unlocking doors for me? Seriously, doesn't he know that actually helps me out quite a bit? :P
The problem here is that you either do the orchestrated invasion a la Independence Day or even Battleship where there is an intelligent mind behind it or you do the "Oops you let a zoo out of its cage" like The Mist or Half-Life 1 - until Half-Life 2 came around and wrecked it completely. With Betruger it's like somewhere in between. He's not the intelligent mastermind. He's been corrupted by...what? Hell? But Nothing in hell seems intelligent at all. Hell is like a zoo of dangerous animals. Who corrupted Betruger and what does he gain from it all? Betruger is the root of all that is wrong with Doom3's story.

Gez said:

They were an environmentally conscious society and made sure all their technology was perfectly biodegradable. All that remains are the big monuments their ancestors built and which they carefully preserved for their historical value. :p

(This of course is complete bullshit I just made up.)


Haha, I was going to respond to that as I couldn't quite remember if it were true or not. I was going to write "Copout" :D

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Shaviro said:

Pretty much. Too bad he actually ends up helping the player more than hurting him. Why does he keep unlocking doors for me? Seriously, doesn't he know that actually helps me out quite a bit?


Most of what you say I agree with, but I honestly don't remember this happening.

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I always assumed that Betruger was already punished after Doom 3 to suffer a hell in a demon's mouth, even though in fact I thought he was eaten. What happens after RoE? The combat engineer doesn't seem concerned any more. The ending is too surreal. We can assume his fate is sealed.

I find Betruger funny, his laughs are priceless. I also laughed at hardcore_gamer's interpretation of Betruger's character in his maps :)

Doom 3 without Betruger would have been too much like Doom 1. If anything, the main difference between these two games is this guy. His appeal is that he's a human with strange god-like powers, whom you never fight as such, but he can turn things from relaxed Mars City state to DOOM 3 SPECIFIC on a whim. He seems to oversee everything of this invasion, from his frail human form. And he's not really a demon morphed into a human, either. I'd love to watch a machinima of Doom 3 from his point of view. He appears one-dimensional to the player, but I'm still curious of his motives. Like all demons, he's ultra-predictable, but at least manages to pose as a scientist.

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The biggest problem with his is that you don't know whether you are supposed to be scared of him or to laugh at him.

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printz said:

I find Betruger funny, his laughs are priceless. I also laughed at hardcore_gamer's interpretation of Betruger's character in his maps :)


I hate sounding like an idiot, but how did I treat Betruger's character in my maps?

No seriously, its been YEARS since I even came close to Doom 3 modding. If I did something funny I want know what it was :)

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hardcore_gamer said:

Why not? He starts the game out as a human, and he is still at least semi-human after getting his demon powers.

I don't think he's truely human.

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hardcore_gamer said:

I hate sounding like an idiot, but how did I treat Betruger's character in my maps?

No seriously, its been YEARS since I even came close to Doom 3 modding. If I did something funny I want know what it was :)

Well, just read through his emails to his employees :P

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printz said:

Like all demons

Where did you get this idea that Betruger was a demon (prior to the invasion)?

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He became a demon at the end of D3. He died (ceased to exist) in RoE. I don't really see what's there to debate. There's no explaination for this. He's just gone.

If you want to speculate, different fictional universes treat the death of a demon in different ways. In Painkiller when you kill a demon (in Purgatory where essentially the entire game takes place), he goes back to Hell. When a demon is killed in Hell, he's permanently destroyed.

In Diablo, when you kill a demon in Sanctuary, he's resurrected in Hell (I'm not sure about lesser demons, but that's definitively true for demonic lords). When he's killed in Hell, same applies (except that he dies first anyways). When the Soulstone is destroyed (with a demonic essense / soul trapped within), the demon is not resurrected but instead sent to the Abyss from which it cannot escape.

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Touchdown said:

I don't really see what's there to debate. There's no explaination for this.

Don't debate and discussion naturally arise when there's no explanation for things?

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DoomUK said:

Where did you get this idea that Betruger was a demon (prior to the invasion)?

Well, not necessarily demon. Even Doom 3 distinguishes between zombies and demons. I mean simply someone allied with the forces of hell without question.

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If you think about it in Warhammer terms, Betruger was a mortal man who was granted daemonhood for his part in orchestrating the invasion. ;)

As to the nature of the Hellish dimension, you could speculate that in the fictional Doom universe, biblical descriptions of Hell were influenced by earlier encounters with the 'real' Hell - this would explain the similar imagery (inverted crosses, fire and brimstone etc.) whilst hand-waving away stuff like the Devil and where you go when you die.

Of course, it's all a load of nonsense anyway.

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Another weird thing about Betruger's story is that he made a deal with Hell... and Hell honored it. No catch, no Faustian bargain. The dude just wanted to be a big demon dragon with spooky necromancy powers and Hell said it'd make that happen if Betruger helped it invade. Hell didn't betray him on general principle or try to punish him when his invasion plan was a total failure, not even in a monkey's paw careful-what-you-wish-for way.

Betruger seems to be living it up in Doom 3's ending, not suffering, and in the expansion he's totally happy with his new job and new body. If not for the second marine blowing him up, he would have faced no negative consequences for selling his fellow man down the river Styx. The Pit was portrayed as being more honest and equitable than most government officials.

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Splatter said:

Another weird thing about Betruger's story is that he made a deal with Hell... and Hell honored it. No catch, no Faustian bargain. The dude just wanted to be a big demon dragon with spooky necromancy powers and Hell said it'd make that happen if Betruger helped it invade. Hell didn't betray him on general principle or try to punish him when his invasion plan was a total failure, not even in a monkey's paw careful-what-you-wish-for way.

Betruger seems to be living it up in Doom 3's ending, not suffering, and in the expansion he's totally happy with his new job and new body. If not for the second marine blowing him up, he would have faced no negative consequences for selling his fellow man down the river Styx. The Pit was portrayed as being more honest and equitable than most government officials.

I am just not entirely sure. After he comes back from Hell, Betruger no longer acts like himself - he acts like he is in fact the Devil himself. In charge. The demons are HIS children, and he orders them to do everything - "Stop him!", "Kill ALL who oppose me!", "My guardian will destroy you!", etc. The Guardian example is particularly good, as the guardian is implied to be ancient, a demon having existed since the beginning of time, far predating Betruger - but not the Devil.

The idea that Betruger made a deal is only confirmed by secondary info - someone from id involved in the development of the game said that. The game itself seems to paint a different picture, one of an obsessed scientist who entered the portal initially to disprove all the hub-bub about the other side being Hell when he would come back perfectly fine. Instead he gets possessed by the Devil himself when the demons realize he's the one in charge of the teleportation experiments, and has the access needed to bring the Soul Cube back with him - opening the gates permanently.

I personally believe that when Betruger came back, his original personality and motives were already gone and he was now a puppet of the Devil, doing nothing other than what was necessary to open up the portal. Once it was open, he went back to Hell permanently and transfigured into a grotesque beast.

PS: The idea of retro-looking technology being used by drastically advanced societies isn't unique to Doom 3. It also occurs in the Metroid universe, with the Chozo whom, despite being a post-singularity species, build "stone" statues (which are apparently actually biotechnology of some sort), live in ancient ruins built by their forebears, etc. The games make explicit reference to this and their reasonings for it - their belief that a balance between technology and spirituality/naturalism is necessary.

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Captain Toenail said:

As to the nature of the Hellish dimension, you could speculate that in the fictional Doom universe, biblical descriptions of Hell were influenced by earlier encounters with the 'real' Hell - this would explain the similar imagery (inverted crosses, fire and brimstone etc.)

Inverted crosses aren't part of biblical imagery of Hell. If anything, its association to satanism is very recent. Traditionally, it is associated to the martyrdom of Saint Peter, which is why it's called a Petrine Cross by the Catholics. The idea that being upside-down makes it a negation appeared somewhere in the 1960s in the USA, popularized by Hollywood and later by Black metal bands; neither of which can be considered reliable sources on theology.

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Splatter said:

wanted to be a big demon dragon

Looks more like a gargoyle than a dragon to me. :P

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Quasar said:

I am just not entirely sure. After he comes back from Hell, Betruger no longer acts like himself - he acts like he is in fact the Devil himself. In charge. The demons are HIS children, and he orders them to do everything - "Stop him!", "Kill ALL who oppose me!", "My guardian will destroy you!", etc. The Guardian example is particularly good, as the guardian is implied to be ancient, a demon having existed since the beginning of time, far predating Betruger - but not the Devil.

The idea that Betruger made a deal is only confirmed by secondary info - someone from id involved in the development of the game said that. The game itself seems to paint a different picture, one of an obsessed scientist who entered the portal initially to disprove all the hub-bub about the other side being Hell when he would come back perfectly fine. Instead he gets possessed by the Devil himself when the demons realize he's the one in charge of the teleportation experiments, and has the access needed to bring the Soul Cube back with him - opening the gates permanently.


There's a disk in the BFG edition's new (old) levels that says Betruger was way into the occult and communicated with the demons in his dreams to make a deal for "unimaginable power" in exchange for helping them invade. It also seems weird for the Maledict to keep using Betruger's face and voice if he was just some guy whose body it swiped for a short time. But like Shaviro said, the writing's inconsistent, and I see what you mean about some parts of it suggesting possession. I wonder what perspective the Doom 3 novels take? I haven't read them yet.

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Splatter said:

There's a disk in the BFG edition's new (old) levels that says Betruger was way into the occult and communicated with the demons in his dreams to make a deal for "unimaginable power" in exchange for helping them invade. It also seems weird for the Maledict to keep using Betruger's face and voice if he was just some guy whose body it swiped for a short time. But like Shaviro said, the writing's inconsistent, and I see what you mean about some parts of it suggesting possession. I wonder what perspective the Doom 3 novels take? I haven't read them yet.

Well that's definitely a much more explicit explanation of Betruger's actions than was ever offered in the original game. In the face of that info, I suppose I have to change my mind.

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you all overthink to much. its like a hollywood movie. hit with unlogic and flaws, but the overall feel is fine.

the open end with betruger makes no sense. we will never see him again in a doom game. there is no need, im sure. theres always other people who will help the hell. i guess its more about a horror movie ending.

@Gez
about historical hell. game designers and story writers just use clichees that normal people know, they arent satanists :)

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