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Comment by dkonofalski | Hacker News Reader

I'm a huge DooM fan and have been playing since I downloaded the original off of a BBS back in the day and I have to, respectfully, disagree.

With DooM Eternal, there's actually a fully running port of DooM and DooM II inside the game and jumping into that after playing the main game for a while feels incredibly seamless. DooM (2016) and DooM Eternal feel like they took the scary shotgun ballet of the originals and added verticality and modern game mechanics to it. The only thing I think they missed an opportunity on are the dark levels that were in the originals. Not every level in the original games was a full speed dance with demons.

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Of course, agree to disagree. But in particular, having to constantly perform glory kills and chainsaw attacks to get more than 5 bullets or having to snipe coordinates XY on enemy Z with alternate firing mode N to weaken him and only then succeed in taking them down is, in my opinion, not that "Doomy". But I get what you're saying, they can't just make the same game again of course. Also, these days expectations from new games are way bigger than they were back then. Still all great games.

I don't think that's a fair assessment. You don't have to constantly perform glory kills or chainsaw attacks and there's not a single instance in the game where you have to kill an enemy with an alternate firing mode to a specific region. I think you're exaggerating for effect, and that's fine, but I don't feel like you'd need to do that if your argument had any meat to it. You're right that it's not the same game (because that would be boring) but to say that it's not "Doomy" because of reasons that aren't even accurate makes your whole argument fall apart.

Case in point, there's already a pistol-only playthrough of DooM (2016) and I know people are already working on shotgun-only playthroughs of Eternal.

Ok, I was exaggerating a bit but as far as I remember, the game specifically breaks the flow to pause and show you a little instructional clip [0] [1] on how to better kill each enemy, so there's that. But hey, your point is made, I was just throwing my opinion out there, I don't think we need to continue nitpicking since tastes are tastes.

0 - https://youtu.be/5Zp_RMO19aM?t=633

1 - https://youtu.be/x9pL9X9V4iU?t=1536

Huh, I don’t think Doom 2016 has those. Or at least I didn’t get them when I played it through just recently.

DooM 2016 does not but Eternal shows you a codex entry the first time you encounter an enemy that highlights their weaknesses. None of them have to do with an alternate fire mode or anything else, so it's still an exaggeration, but it does tell you which weapons are particularly effective. Shields, for example, blow up if you use the plasma rifle.

Ok. I just feel like "breaking the flow" is a lot different than having to use a specific secondary fire mode of a weapon at a specific location on an enemy and stuck out to me because, if that was an actual thing in the game, it would make the game unplayable and annoying to me.

Sure, you don't have to do any of those things, but you'll be seriously disadvantaged if you don't because the games are designed around these mechanics. Maybe it's exaggerated, but on the other hand, as a fan of both Doom and Doom 2016 it seems your response downplays the difference these mechanics and using them to your advantage makes, and I agree with GP that these are substantial differences that fundamentally make the games play differently.

Not in a bad way (well, mostly. I still loathe the weapon/armor/character upgrade part of the game). There's no real mowing or herding like in the more intense levels of Doom and Doom II, but instead we get really intense fights that are cool in a different sense.

> Sure, you don't have to do any of those things, but you'll be seriously disadvantaged if you don't because the games are designed around these mechanics.

That's not the case, though. You might be somewhat disadvantaged, but not seriously.

On my first playthrough on normal difficulty I essentially only used the Super Shotgun. I can't remember using the Chainsaw for ammo, but I did use the BFG a handful of times.

The developers have even said that a goal of theirs was to make this "playstyle" (using only the SS) less viable in Doom Eternal, because it was too simple and powerful. It might have been on a NoClip podcast, I can't remember OTOH.

I've not played Eternal yet, I'm waiting for updated nvidia drivers to hit my distributions repositories.

> That's not the case, though. You might be somewhat disadvantaged, but not seriously.

Well, that's not my experience. I initially hated the concept of glory kills, and especially the blinking effect on staggered monsters. Even just turning the blinking effect off made the game much harder in my experience. I had to learn how to appreciate the mechanic instead. Maybe you are just a much better player than I am and could cope better with the disadvantage.

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