Oh god there's a milestone for completing Ultra Nightmare.
And I like the hard counter thing. Makes me feel like the skill ceiling has been raised - you can just plug everything like in 2016, or time weapon changes, switch mods on the fly to take advantage, etc.
On Hurt mMe Plenty while I get my bearings. Looking forward to Ultra Violence and the alternate modes.
What difficulty are you playing? You're contradicting yourself by saying "everything else feels like a step back" and then saying "several enemies having specific counters" which is it? I like that. It means you can't rely on 1-2 weapons for most of your playthrough. Although, it does get to be a clusterfuck remembering how much shit you can do: use chainsaw, switch weapon, switch weapon mod, use the grenade, use the flamethrower, and use the powered up melee.
I think it's about how enemies like Cacodemons will have you defaulting to the shotgun's grenade launcher attachment instead of taking it down with whatever you have on hand, the usual complacent gaming syndrome. Compare it to fighting a Mancubus in Doom 2016, where the only option is to keep pumping bullets into its gut and thus feels more cathartic to some.
I don't think it's that big of an issue though; more often than not, I'm actually out of ammo so I have to switch tactics and toss a frag grenade instead. That's not the only alternative counter I've found; for example, you can snipe the plasma guns off the aracnotrons with the Heavy Cannon. Plus, the specific counters give the game much more liberty to spawn even more powerful demons in every arena, because now you have the tools to make them manageable - the 2016 version by comparison is more conservative with enemy placement to make up for them being bullet sponges.
I'm kind of unimpressed by Eternal so far. Chiefly with how they seem to be handling ammo and cooldowns. Doom 2016 had the equipment system, it was one thing on cooldown. In Eternal so far I have five things with cooldowns: dash, melee (blood fist or whatever, melee seems to actually do zero damage without it unless you're doing a glory kill), two types of grenades, and the chainsaw. And I'm sure there's more to come. I recognize this is an old man gripe but I think cooldowns suck in general. That shit belongs in MMOs, not action games.
Ammo is stupidly scarce, in Doom 2016 the chainsaw was like your backup for if you happen to run out but generally there was plenty of it around in the combat arenas and to be found exploring so you weren't constantly running out, now it feels like they barely let you hold any (first thing I upgraded, barely helped) and they just put the chainsaw on a cooldown timer so they didn't have to balance their fucking game.
Also there's way more platforming and jumping puzzle bullshit than I'd like. Again, Doom 2016 had some of this stuff but they turned it up to 11 in Eternal with the swing bars and airdashing and wall climbing and timed switches.
I hate to admit it but I lowered the difficulty from Nightmare to Ultra Violence. I was just getting tired of a Mancubus or Aracnotron spawning out of nowhere and one-shotting me. Ultra Violence is still challenging but it's less insane and more fun.
So far the Doom 64 Port has been really good with a couple issues that mostly stems from the key bindings for the weapons not being correct from my experience
“I was pretty annoyed with Doom Eternal's combat before I got some upgrades because having "low ammo warning" almost constantly flashing on the screen sucks and it took a while to get used to juggling fire, glory kills, and chainsaw. I had to turn it down to HMP from UV.”
twitter.com
Civvie is also annoyed at the low ammo you get. I feel like Nightmare would be more fun if you just got more ammo.
I fully upgraded ammo. The absolute max shotty ammo you get is... Drum Roll... 22 shells.
What
The
Fuck
Another complaint: a lot of weapon mods are kind of worthless. Same thing as Doom 2016. Some mods are just clearly better. Get the Sniper bolt thing for your machine gun, get the pulse-wave thing for the Plasma gun, get the lock on for the rocket launcher, get the wave axe thing for the other gun. There's no reason to get the rest of the shit.
So far the Doom 64 Port has been really good with a couple issues that mostly stems from the key bindings for the weapons not being correct from my experience
The run key threw me off; for some reason the default key was the space bar.
Personally, I think the game's too bright. Half of what makes Doom 64 so creepy is the darkness but the port cranks it up. You can turn it down, along with the environmental brightness but it's still a little off-putting to me. Outside of that it's an excellent port.
I've just spent a fair amount of time myself going through Doom Eternal and...
hoo. I really don't know where to start with this one. I'm struggling to think of a single area Eternal pulls ahead of DOOM 2016, either matching in capability or usually falling behind. My laundry list of gripes that I've already run into are:
Combat overall is more bullet-helly. Guys throw out more projectiles that travel faster, usually with less wind-up or warning. This makes some segments literally better taken as cover shooters, which is just.. sad.
Staying still will get you mobbed incredibly quickly. This is normally fine, except glory kills obviously root you in-place for a good second or so, which is more than enough time to get dog-piled like it's an ancient roman orgy.
Ammo being scarce is obviously mentioned before, but it means often you're under so much pressure that you can do nothing but try and dump ammo into the horde trailing after you, which quickly leaves you with dry guns. It's hard to switch weapons / be intelligent on the fly when literally 10 demons are bearing down on you, covered by another couple spraying you down with bullets.
Speaking of, if you're not able to hit their specific weakness points, large demons can be very bullet spongy for how much ammo you have to waste.
One nasty bit I seem to keep running into is dashing typically causing me to get stuck on little bits of geometry scattered around for flavour, such as candle sconces and the like. Which then causes the dog-pile and so on.
1-ups as single-fire consumables kind of feel like a crutch for punishing difficulty; it feels like you're meant to burn 1-2 of them or so every level, instead of restarting to get the combat encounter "right"
Individually, each one of these is not really a problem, probably an interesting challenge even. However with all of them together you get this interlocking puzzle of fuck which mean your options are so limited you never quite feel you're playing correctly. It's like having 6 different options in each encounter but they're all so shallow you quickly suck shit whenever you try one.
Doesn't mean I don't have minor gripes either:
Bethesda's account / out of game level bullshit. uuurgh, expected but still unsavoury
The user interface looks like it's straight out of the early 2000s (and not in a good way). I think it even literally looks like Quake 4 in quite a few screens.
The story feels incredibly schizophrenic, almost Destiny-like. Fundamental aspects of the "story" are kinda touched on fleetingly then partially fleshed out in a Codex entry, usually with some fart-sniffing prose passage.
Sections involving floors that stop you from dashing / jumping / moveing quickly. In a game all about doing those 3 things, this is baffling.
I really want to like the game, DOOM 2016 was an incredible leap forward in actual fast paced action gunplay, but this feels like it tried to almost strip that down to the quick, then layer on shallow mechanics to make it all ok again.
For now I've taken it down from UV to HMP because maybe I'm just old and shit. Or maybe the game has a weak first half. It'll be interesting to see how many other people have the same kinds of frustrations.
I've just spent a fair amount of time myself going through Doom Eternal and...
hoo. I really don't know where to start with this one. I'm struggling to think of a single area Eternal pulls ahead of DOOM 2016, either matching in capability or usually falling behind. My laundry list of gripes that I've already run into are:
Combat overall is more bullet-helly. Guys throw out more projectiles that travel faster, usually with less wind-up or warning. This makes some segments literally better taken as cover shooters, which is just.. sad.
Staying still will get you mobbed incredibly quickly. This is normally fine, except glory kills obviously root you in-place for a good second or so, which is more than enough time to get dog-piled like it's an ancient roman orgy.
Ammo being scarce is obviously mentioned before, but it means often you're under so much pressure that you can do nothing but try and dump ammo into the horde trailing after you, which quickly leaves you with dry guns. It's hard to switch weapons / be intelligent on the fly when literally 10 demons are bearing down on you, covered by another couple spraying you down with bullets.
Speaking of, if you're not able to hit their specific weakness points, large demons can be very bullet spongy for how much ammo you have to waste.
One nasty bit I seem to keep running into is dashing typically causing me to get stuck on little bits of geometry scattered around for flavour, such as candle sconces and the like. Which then causes the dog-pile and so on.
1-ups as single-fire consumables kind of feel like a crutch for punishing difficulty; it feels like you're meant to burn 1-2 of them or so every level, instead of restarting to get the combat encounter "right"
Individually, each one of these is not really a problem, probably an interesting challenge even. However with all of them together you get this interlocking puzzle of fuck which mean your options are so limited you never quite feel you're playing correctly. It's like having 6 different options in each encounter but they're all so shallow you quickly suck shit whenever you try one.
Doesn't mean I don't have minor gripes either:
Bethesda's account / out of game level bullshit. uuurgh, expected but still unsavoury
The user interface looks like it's straight out of the early 2000s (and not in a good way). I think it even literally looks like Quake 4 in quite a few screens.
The story feels incredibly schizophrenic, almost Destiny-like. Fundamental aspects of the "story" are kinda touched on fleetingly then partially fleshed out in a Codex entry, usually with some fart-sniffing prose passage.
Sections involving floors that stop you from dashing / jumping / moveing quickly. In a game all about doing those 3 things, this is baffling.
I really want to like the game, DOOM 2016 was an incredible leap forward in actual fast paced action gunplay, but this feels like it tried to almost strip that down to the quick, then layer on shallow mechanics to make it all ok again.
For now I've taken it down from UV to HMP because maybe I'm just old and shit. Or maybe the game has a weak first half. It'll be interesting to see how many other people have the same kinds of frustrations.
I like it more than you but I mostly agree. Never had an issue with dashing into walls though. I still think it's a damn good FPS and probably the best Doom game, aside from the fact that it's not mod friendly like before, it just has a few rough edges.
What difficulty are you playing? You're contradicting yourself by saying "everything else feels like a step back" and then saying "several enemies having specific counters" which is it? I like that. It means you can't rely on 1-2 weapons for most of your playthrough. Although, it does get to be a clusterfuck remembering how much shit you can do: use chainsaw, switch weapon, switch weapon mod, use the grenade, use the flamethrower, and use the powered up melee.
Also, I feel like I keep grabbing the wrong weapon mods. First it was Micro Missiles which were 'meh' then the overcharge whateverthefuckyoucallit for the Plasma Rifle. It's good on the Aracnotron's and Revnant's BUT it leaves you stationary which -when you're playing on Nightmare- you DON'T want to be doing. I like the full auto mode for the shotty but you just don't get enough ammo to have fun with it in the early game.
There is no contradiction for two reasons: (1) I specifically said 'everything but for the gameplay', then described the counters part as an exception to the exception. (2) Adding a counter system to a shooter is not obviously a step forward and I would argue is quite obviously a step back, because it's less fun.
Just found something kinda stupid about rebinding controls in Doom 64.
Generally when I play shooters, I like to make the mouse wheel down to go to the next weapon and up for previous, which seems to be the opposite of every shooter's default controls, and of course the PC port of Doom 64 is no exception. However, if you want to unbind an action, you have to input that key a second time when it prompts you to put in a new key. If you put in a different key that's already in use, it won't swap out the keys and in fact will make them share that action. That's how I got both mouse wheel up and down to mean both next and previous. What's worse is that the game doesn't tell you this. You just have to know to put in the key a second time if you want to unbind it.
I figured it out, but it's a lot of hassle over something that could have been fixed with an option to clear bindings.
Just finished taking out the second Hell Priest on Nightmare difficulty.
The good:
Dashing is really fun and compensates well enough for the lower movement speed.
Lots of demon variety, combat feels frantic as fuck. The savagery rune is an absolute must-have now.
The boss fights are much better designed and substantially more challenging than their 2016 counterparts. Getting my ass kicked repeatedly should not be this fun.
Having secondary utility for the Super Shotgun is pretty neat.
The story is exactly the kind of pulp grimdark I'd want from a Doom game.
Soundtrack sounds a lot less like Nu-Metal and a lot more like actual metal.
The bad:
LOTS of controls, feels overwhelming.
Weapon swapping is much slower, even when upgraded. In 2016 you could get it down to a split second. That is no longer the case. That is the one major issue I have with the game so far.
As I thought, Demon-on-player glory kills are gone, at least for now. Hope they return eventually.
This game is seriously CPU heavy. I'm running an i7-7700 and getting bottlenecked.
Hearing that stupid Hell-Priest's taunt every single time I died to the Doom Hunter... they weren't kidding when they said they were fine with frustrating the player as long as the player had something to learn.
I'll be honest, I would have been just fine with a Doom 2016 expansion that contained modest gameplay changes coupled with better graphics/music and new storyline. I didn't really want a total overhaul.
All in all though, it fundamentally feels like a Doom game and a pretty damn good one at that. I'd say I've gotten my money's worth, if nothing else. I don't disagree with the sentiment that the control kit feels a bit bloated initially, but with a few rebindings and some time it everything starts to fall into place. Strangely enough, the combat feels more flexible than the previous game, just in a much different way. It feels much more focused on risk vs. reward. I'm actually legitimately seeing what they were getting at with "combat puzzle" after the first boss encounter. You definitely have the best experience when you swap through your weapons more frequently based on range and enemy type. The more I play it, the more sense it makes and the more I like it.
Taking on those twin Doomhunters actually forced me to think much more strategically than I am inclined to do. Whittling both Doomhunters down such that I could kill them within a short span of time and not get swamped by the wave that killing one unleashes was not easy, especially on Nightmare. But once I pulled it off, it made the 20 times I died trying to beat both the single and twin doomhunters feel completely worth it.
For the record, I did not use that Sentinel armor feature, so I don't know what effect that would have on the boss fight. Don't ask why.
Eternal delves a little too much into wackiness at times. The previous game felt like a perfect balance of arcade shooter, serious story and game pacing. In this one the pacing feels bloated, inconsistent and full of annoying stops to do lame puzzles. I think weapon-swapping needs a buff since the combat is rock/paper/scissors.
Out of all things coming out of Eternal, I was not expecting the frag grenade to be my most used piece of equipment. The base recharge rate has been improved from its predecessor, so it's a lot easier to just pop one off at random without a care in the world. There's also a Praetor Suit skill that creates chain explosions with each enemy kill, which is always the best type of upgrade. A favored tactic of mine is to ignite some mobs with the flamethrower, chuck a grenade or two, and then sit back as they explode into a confetti of miniature bombs and armor pieces.
As for the ice bomb... I'm still working out a way to use it best.
