Comment by phaus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phaus | Hacker News Reader

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I think you are on to something about the impact being forced to use your imagination has. Quake 1 had amazing art direction and each chapter had its own feel because each of them was designed by a different dev following his own ideas.

I think perhaps the biggest reason why Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal don't feel "creepy" like the old games is because they are completely missing the point. The newer games are fun, beautiful, well designed games. However, instead of making a game that captures the essence of Doom its more like a Michael Bay version of Doom. Instead of desperately fighting never ending hordes of increasingly horrifying creatures from hell so you can get out in one piece and save the world, you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons for lulz. The whole way the story makes it seem like its a foregone conclusion that you've won. Its not a struggle, its just you punishing the hordes of hell that are powerless to stop you.

Aesthetically they nailed the look of the creatures although as you pointed out less can be more. The sound track is good but at some point the composer was consumed by his own pretentiousness (IMO Dusk's composer that replaced him produces far better "Doom" music). The combat is fun and if it wasn't a Doom game it would still be rightly lauded as one of the best shooters of the generation, but glory kills annihilate the flow of the game IMO and detract from any authentic feeling it may have had. Glory kills feel like shortened, dumbed-down quick time events that you're supposed to spam the entire time you play and quick time events always feel bad.

They are some of the best single player games I've played in years, but I was there with Id since the Commander Keen games and this does not feel like a Doom game to me.

I mean its literally a Doom game, but the franchise has clearly lost something and I feel like a lot of the people that preach about how authentically they captured the experience might be too young to have bothered to play it.

Doom II: Hell On Earth is IMO one of the top 5 games of all time. Quake 1 is also on the list. I hope some day we get proper remakes or spiritual successors that capture not just the aesthetic, but the feel and the point of the original games.

Dusk was a decently sized step in the right direction.

Doom scary creepy game?

People flipped out when Doom 3 ended up being low light horror game and not a fast paced shooter.

Heck the lore of the Doom is that the protagonist is the 'Doom of demonkind'. Its the game where you are not locked in room with demons but they are locked in room with you.

> you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons

That is the 100% the core idea of Doom lore.

Tldr: The doom marine was entangled with 'hell' and at some stage was tricked that his dead son could be brought to life by a some demon deal - he came back as twisted undead. Doomguy got really angry and his anger propelled him to destroy all that is hell.

> They are some of the best single player games I've played in years, but I was there with Id since the Commander Keen games and this does not feel like a Doom game to me.

I have some mixed feelings about Doom Eternal as it sometimes feels like a puzzle and bit gamey. But Doom 2016 is quite literally a modernised version of Doom 1.

You've got the lore a little mixed up. Doom Guy was mad that the demons killed his rabbit Daisy after they invaded, and ended up voluntarily staying in Hell to kill demons after saving Earth. The Betrayer's son is the one who was resurrected as the Icon of Sin.

I think you just proved their point. Your two minds filled in the blanks completely differently.

If you were a child in the 90s, Doom was very scary. I'm not sure if a modern child could be scared by it.

>That is the 100% the core idea of Doom lore.

That was created specifically in 2016 Doom. Prior to that, Doom didn't really have much of a story.

> I'm not sure if a modern child could be scared by it.

I grew up on N64/Gamecube/XB360, and can confirm that Doom was not scary the first time I played it (about 10 years old).

It feels like a generational thing, too. My aunt and uncle showed me the 1932 production of "The Mummy," and it terrified them. They were born in the 40s, and so saw this movie in their teens. (and perhaps even later) I watched it recently, and can't even imagine being scared.

I'd like to think that there is both an objective and subjective aspect to this. On the one hand, maybe people just can't appreciate the older styles of art. On the other hand, after being exposed to modern violence, cinematography, and suspense, the old techniques truly do pale in comparison, at least in the visceral, emotional sense.

I wonder how much of the difference is attributable to sensitivity (or lack thereof) to the art/medium/representation, and how much is due to the fact that the fears addressed by the work of art were more relatable to people at the time than they are to a modern audience.

My mom found "The Exorcist" truly frightening, so much so that she refused to re-watch it in adulthood. So my friend and I rented it one night looking forward to a good scare; instead, we mostly found ourselves laughing at how ridiculous it seemed. We must have been around 12 at the time, so probably already quite desensitized to horror movies in general, but I think it is also the case that the subject matter was just less frightening to us than it was to her. We were all raised Catholic, but she was of the stern-nuns-with-rulers generation whereas our elementary school in the 90's had been of the hippie-nuns-with-guitars variety. I don't think things like demons/the devil had ever felt like real objects of fear for us like they may have been for her (in such a deep way that their representation continued to creep her out long after she stopped believing in their literal existence).

Granted, I was a teen in the 90s, but I never found Doom to be scary. However, Wolfenstein 3D left me an anxious wreck -- likely because the AI always (seemed to?) know where you were. (I also didn't get to play Wolf3d until DOOM had already come out, so I don't think it's related.)

>Doom scary creepy game?

>People flipped out when Doom 3 ended up being low light horror game and not a fast paced shooter.

A game can have a creepy aesthetic and even scare people without being a slow paced survival game where you walk around awkwardly pointing at things with a flashlight. The early games had creepy vibes at many different parts of the game. If you disagree to each his own.

> you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons

> That is the 100% the core idea of Doom lore.

> But Doom 2016 is quite literally a modernised version of Doom 1.

Not really, here's the final paragraphs to the introduction to Doom 1 from the original manual:

> Things aren't looking too good. You'll never navigate off the planet on your own. Plus, all the heavy weapons have been taken by the assault team leaving you only with a pistol. If only you could get your hands around a plasma rifle or even a shotgun you could take a few down on your way out. Whatever killed your buddies deserves a couple pellets in the forehead. Securing your helmet, you exit the landing pod. Hopefully you can find more substantial firepower somewhere within the station. As you walk through the main entrance of the base, you hear animal-like growls echoing throughout the distant corridors. They know you're here. There's no turning back now.

Yes, he's a highly trained badass, but he's just a Marine. He ends up killing all of the monsters if you finish the game, but the setup and the aesthetic and lore of the entire game makes it seem like an insurmountable challenge ahead of you, just a guy, fighting through hell and later on repelling the hordes of hell from earth.

The art team did a great job replicating doom, the composer did a great job of renewing classic Doom music and merging it with modern takes on the Doom aesthetic, although it is ridiculous that the music is intended to overpower the other sounds in the game.

The gameplay is where they really screwed up IMO. Its a great game but its not authentic old school Doom gameplay. You could modernize it properly, I'm just saying that in my opinion they haven't for the reasons I explained elsewhere. They instead created a new thing that uses the Doom franchise and it just happens to be fantastic. As great as it is though I would rather have had a well executed modern take that also feels authentic.

Doom came out right when I left univeristy. Loved that game. I like the new Dooms too. I think they're fun. Way more "doom like" than anything else I've played since.

The "New Doom" music/sound producer gave a pretty good GDC one hour talk about the music came about. Some fun stories there ( the sound easter egg story was fun). Its more than about just the sound, its about process and change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FNBMZsqrY

He's definitely talented and I did watch his talk a while back. It was a pretty good talk and pretty enlightening. I didn't realize how much effort some musicians put into setting up like 40 different pieces of equipment to achieve a single effect for a small part of a song.

The Doom soundtrack to me constitutes excellent video game music. I didn't enjoy it enough to listen to the OST like many folks did. I'm a metal head but it didn't quite do it for me like Mr. Bungle/Meshuggah does. I do listen to the parts of the Dusk soundtrack once in a while though.

I appreciated the sounds in that game, especially after getting better speakers.

Mr bungle... wasn’t that a 90s faith no more offshoot that was like crazy circus music? I’ll have to check them out again.

They just re-recorded their first album which was a pretty straightforward but still weird trash album from 85 that's arguably as good as anything else from the era. It was recorded by a kid on a 4 track though so the quality of the original was too bad to really understand how good it was.

Dave Lombardo (Slayer Drummer) and Scott Ian (Anthrax Guitarist) joined three of the original members for the re-recording. Scott Ian was a fan of it back in the day and thinks it was more musically complex than what they and most of the other big metal bands were doing at the time. And it was written by 15-17 year olds inspired by Slayer's Reign in Blood.

But yes Bungle did a later album that was crazy circus metal and eventually they did a really great album of music that was less heavy (not metal at all) and more accessible called California.

I love all of it. Search for the 2020 version of Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny for their new stuff. Easily the best album released this year IMO. RTJ4 was also pretty good though.

Bungle wasn't really an offshoot of FNM, it was the lead singer Mike Patton's first band. FNM is also criminally under-rated. Their only really famous song "Epic" isn't really representative of the rest of their work. IMO the follow-up album Angel Dust is the best album of all time. They experiment with lots of genres and its still weird stuff though so its not gonna be everyone's cup of tea.

Sample of the Re-Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U5ZKKxqUzY

> Doom 2016 is quite literally a modernised version of Doom 1.

It's one of the best games I've played in a long time. Way better than Doom Eternal.

> However, instead of making a game that captures the essence of Doom its more like a Michael Bay version of Doom. Instead of desperately fighting never ending hordes of increasingly horrifying creatures from hell so you can get out in one piece and save the world, you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons for lulz.

Doom was structured in such a way that when you started off playing it was practically survival horror, but when you "got gud" you were practically the unkillable demigod. That's what I loved about it: it was so open-ended. It could be that way because its engine was so limited. There were only so many possible level layouts, and only a few different parameters that determined how enemies behaved. Using those, you could construct a combinatoric explosion of battle scenarios that ran the gamut from balls-out arena battle to hunting down enemies in dark narrow corridors and everything in between. Furthermore, the level data was small enough that the entire level, and all objects spawned within it, could live in memory at once. This made each level feel like a living world. Enemies from a faraway part of the level you haven't reached yet can spot you and start chasing and attacking.

In Doom 3, Doom (2016), and Doom Eternal, the engine is so unlimited that the designers had to basically pick a playstyle in order to narrow down the solution space, just to get started. Doom 3 opted for a survival horror style while the latter two games opted for a Serious Sam/Painkiller style combat game: move to area, sweep all enemies, move to next area, repeat. They feel more fun and more like Doom than Doom 3 did, but there's still something missing. Not that I blame them for adopting a few modern shooter conventions. Had they made it a total "boomer shooter" I doubt it would have sold as well.

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