RaikohZX

Honestly, if something like this existed in 1994, it would've defined itself among the best of the ports alongside the Playstation and Jaguar, and had a leg up on the Jaguar one at that with the music. This is seriously awesome stuff I'm seeing.

Kinda wish certain things like the explosion sprites were replaced with those neat gradient effects when you're running Quake 64 add-on, even if mostly just as a few slightly-transparent frames to simulate the authenticity more, and that you could do something like split-screen co-op on it or bring its deathmatch map takes in on the fun; trying to run that seems to jump to the default maps instead. But that's just wishing for things that aren't really that important and would be more novelty compared to the whole main package. Sure there's bugs and kinks to work out, but having an official port this good after all these years still can't be denied. Great job to all those involved.

Technically speaking Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition pulls off full raytracing on a fancy triple-A game, so it's not like it's impossible for this stuff. Most studios just want to push a constrained amount of it for NVIDIA sponsorship I presume, or so it doesn't get in the way of the rest of the game. It'd be a lot of work to give Doom Eternal's lighting a complete overhaul just for raytracing, when the entire point of the update was moreso for the Xbox Series and Playstation 5's sakes.

I am a bit disappointed that it's reflections only, and inconsistent at that. Doom Hunter Base is filled with wetter and shinier parts, and then right next to that are more matte surfaces that reflect absolutely nothing but generic point lights that an RTX reflection will show doesn't even exist. Even the wet and nasty Super Gore Nest is filled with "this is super reflective" and "this doesn't reflect anything at all". I honestly think the game would've benefited from a larger suite of RTX like enhanced lighting and so forth, but just this by itself is kinda.. eh? It supplements the visuals and that's just about it. I've already played the game plenty of times, not exactly a big reason to dive back on in.

The hammer bothers me very much not just because it bends the game over its knee, but also because there's nothing for it prior. You start the DLC and there's no goal of getting the hammer, Valen's ghost magic stuff lets him just hand it off, and unlike the main campaign's Crucible where there's build-up to getting it step by step before you forge and then try it out, it's entirely incidental. If the Slayer got the Crucible sword handed off like it was just another weapon pickup with next to no fanfare I'm sure people would've found that strange.

I mean, he's still a guy that killed armies of demons for unknown amounts of time before becoming the Slayer, and if we take Episode 1 from the original game as him dying at the end, even death won't keep him down properly. Plus Slayer is mostly a title for his Sentinel work, the title wouldn't just disappear because of the Dark Lord. If he lost the powers then he can't absorb Argent from his slain foes anymore, but that doesn't magically render his interactions and history moot.

It kind of almost completely invalidates the whole first two levels of the DLC if everyone else could casually warp in after the Slayer had to jump through those hurdles.

One big problem they have is being the ambush enemy type. There's not even a sound cue or a unique audio for them, no way to know one's in the area until you've already encountered it or played things before. It exists almost entirely to be a "Gotcha!" moment (no, not to Doom II) on your first playthrough and a UN run ender, because there's only like three of the damn things in the campaign, and if you can catch it before it hits you it dies just as easily as any regular Prowler. It's one thing to be surprise-slapped by a teleporting jerk without even seeing him first, it's another when their slaps turn your legs into jello and require a strong slap back after they already teleported away. Maybe you can't just remove them now that they're here, but if they never existed in the first place they wouldn't really leave some gaping hole in TAG2's pacing or design.

Honestly I don't mind if a property changes things up a bit. Doom 3 may be a weird black sheep, but as a game it's still a very solid alternate take on the same core premise. I don't want, say, Quake to suddenly become a multidimensional skateboarding career simulator or something, but it's like saying Quake 2 and 4 aren't Quake games because they're objective-driven and have Strogg instead of whatever the hell the devs felt like that day. Eternal's going to take some adjusting and replays to get its full value for me, but the fact that it's "not Doom" because of your personal dislikes for how the game was handed is simply that - your personal opinion.

I'd rather the games be tongue-in-cheek given the premise than super turbo duper serious hardcore manly man. It actually makes a good contrast; here's the Slayer with his literal toonami mancave of guitars, nunchucks and guns, whose response to his enemies involves death glares and buckshot while he plays with action figures of himself, and then over here the demons and not-angels and others all speak with a severity and seriousness like they think they call the shots as the ones in control that can overcome him. You don't need a Marvel snark to be a multidimensional character.

Some have taken the Samur-Samuel thing to be that Samur's manifesting in the robotic body somehow rather than having been Samuel the entire time, the man had a rather established business family and documented human life as well as seemingly little prior knowledge of anything involving Argent or Hell until his personal discoveries. It says a lot that despite the ambiguity of the two characters being one, Eternal distinctly has Samuel rejecting his past priorities once he realizes how bad he messed up, so I don't think he's been Samur the entire time or else he's one really bipolar dude.

You want to talk about inconvenient, I used cheat codes for some completionist stuff before reaching the mission with the 6th Slayer Gate, but because I didn't disable them on the mission select menu, the main campaign simply did not spawn the gate's key because it registered me as having cheats enabled. Even despite the glowing light for it on the floor. Had to do the whole mission over again to be allowed to actually get the key to spawn.

I'm not sure if any rockets can daze him, or just the flare/master upgraded ones, but he auto-blocks everything he's facing if he's not vulnerable, and anything behind or around that shield is valid even if he doesn't stagger. You can notice this behavior if you fire the BFG in a large open area, he faces the rays to block them the entire time, and since he's usually facing you all the time it's hard to notice.

To be fair, Pete Hines is notoriously stupid and arrogant, and should not be taken as the face of id's opinions. Just look at him disparaging Fallout fans for not appreciating 76.

You want to melt him, set up the Ballista and Super Shotgun for quick-swap between the two. Then stagger him with the SSG, swap and shoot him with the Ballista for more damage than what a second SSG shot would do. Alternatively, you can use grenades and sticky nades as well as remote detonation rockets to bypass his shield.

I still finished HMP at over 30 lives, mostly because you can stock them up via mission select and my completion runs didn't have my skipping them if they were in the way, but yeah, the game kinda goes apeshit. Way more enemies on the field at once and consistently compared to 2016, all of them gunning for you. The Mancubus got buffed to insane projectile speeds and tracking, Cyber-Manucbi have super-obnoxious area denial at any range, Whiplashes are plain assholes, and Marauders are super nightmares. I can see why they added Extra Lives, you soak up so much damage in a matter of seconds on the game's equivalent of a normal difficulty that you can end up trapped and dead in seconds; of the official Doom games, it's probably easily the hardest installment if you were to go on a single life run. That's not to say you're at a complete disadvantage all the time, by late game you're so potentially overpowered that you can mitigate a lot of the difficulty with plain skill and hard counters for each enemy type to the point that aside from 2016's Rich Get Richer, you easily outstrip that game's redonkulous scaling. But it's also a necessity because the devs absolutely went postal with how aggressive enemies are. 2016 only had projectile tracking for player movement on Ultra-Violence and up for example, but here every enemy that isn't spraying randomly is insanely accurate now and very good at predicting where you're gonna go, regardless of difficulty. Everything attacks more often, rushes more often, and pressures more often. Half the time in the end game I ate so much damage between my glory kills to survive that if the game tracked damage taken i'd probably be in the tens of thousands. If you learn how the game wants to be played, it can be a chaotic and brutal dance of destruction and mayhem. If you try to play it just like 2016, you're in for a bruising.

After Wolfenstein Youngblood tried to sell you gold bars as boosters for progression, it doesn't matter much if all the in-game skins are earnable without MTX - you still need EXP to get the unlockables, and they can still sell you boosters so you can pay to accelerate that EXP growth. I can't shoulder the blame on id here, this is distinctly a Bethesda publishing / Zenimax problem. The big decider is if the EXP rates are fair or you're expected to deal with way too much grinding just to get some really stupid cosmetics. It also doesn't help that with the multiplayer only being Battle Mode and the game allegedly not launching with Invasion, there's intrinsically no value in any skins but the Slayers, so there's not much point in a battle pass or any of this.

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.

There's also the fact that ultimately one can attribute Carmack's quote to his preferences in particular, given the massive dump he took over Tom Hall and the then-preexisting content up to that point in the original game's development just to make it more arcade-like. Every time someone uses that damn Carmack quote it feels like yet another case of using a lack of context to justify bullshit.

I'm actually pretty interested in the story even if it's batshit insane or absolutely predictable, but the spoilers i'm more worried about is seeing major experiences and sequences. I wanna play through shit for the first time, not know it's coming, so the big swathes of content just the other day put me on edge about things that might show up and make me want to avoid 'em. Just knowing about some of the hub unlockables hurts.

You're not even cherry-picking correctly. Only Bethesda's games have genuinely been absolutely fucked, everything else is a little buggy or stable. Fallout 76 may have been bad, but do not assume id, Arkane, Machinehead and everyone else are suddenly going up in the toilet bowl all because of one damn game.

I'm honestly curious what kind of add-ons are being considered for support, whether they're straight up vanilla-compatible map packs or slight limit removers only, or if things like the visual / audio tweaks some folks want to see would be able to make it in there seeing as you can technically activate multiple add-ons at once. Because something like a D2 add-on of the PSX maps with colored lighting and the audio that would be reused for 64 would be neat, but that's not entirely plausible on a strictly-vanilla engine for that sort of lighting as far as I know?

My only beef is it seems there's going to be a lot more cutscenes this time around, and I just hope it isn't a pace-breaker.

Guess I missed that part, sorry.

To be fair I don't think we're expected to mod this port on PC (nothing against the devs, that's just how it seems to be designed), and if BTSX was ever made an official add-on I can imagine them finding a way to combine files together to get it to work proper or it just outright packs and loads multiple files at once in those sorts of situations. It would be a bit cumbersome if you had to download and activate multiple add-ons to get one mod to work.