I've said this before, but there was a time where it really seemed like id Software was washed. After DOOM³, they went quiet for years, resurfacing to deliver Rage - a game that is...
It's not very good. I guess it's fine? The guns have a better feel than some of the guns in DOOM³ (the shotgun in particular), and adding vehicle combat is an... interesting idea, at least, but the main lesson was that id wasn't much of an "open world" kind of developer. Like there's just no real way around it - the parts where you drive from place to place aren't interesting and the vehicles themselves don't feel good. I mostly remember it for the megatexture tech that is in fact really neat but nobody used it so like, sure.
Sure.
I kind of assumed this would be the next DOOM thing we'd get
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Anyway, I've already covered this: DOOM 4 was in development hell forever and the multiplayer beta was not particularly inspiring and there were no review copies sent out and then... well, it turned out the game kicked enormous amounts of ass. Like, I fired it up again just now to refresh myself and two hours went by because I just got caught up shooting shit with the BFG.
I love the BFG
I shot them with a lot of other things too, of course, but the DOOM 2016 BFG might just be my favorite BFG. The DOOM Eternal BFG is unsurprisingly also very good, but I swear they toned its damage down a little compared to 2016, kind of like they did with the super shotgun. DOOM 2016 also made the call to change the way the story was delivered, which is to say that it's all told from first person and for the most part you're just seeing recordings of stuff that happened.
You can ignore this stuff. The bits where you actually interact with Hayden are less optional.
This whole thing was a massive hit, is the point. id's decision to forego repeated setpieces in favor of big ol' combat arenas was revolutionary for a genre that was, at this point, primarily fancy-looking corridors with waist-high cover that you could hide behind to wait for your health to come back. Some of these corriders are really entertaining! I really like a lot of the Halo series, which is in fact mostly this exact thing, apart from a sort of vague gesture at open world in ODST. Others usually have "Call of Duty" in the title somewhere.
I will admit, I was a little surprised that the only post-DOOM FPSes which copied the arena shooter style were all smaller releases. It's still, somehow, an underrepresented genre these days, although to be honest "AAA FPS" is basically just... Call of Duty these days. I mean Halo Infinity came out, but it's an open world... thing. It's pretty fun, if you ask me, but it's no DOOM 2016. id made a game that felt like the old stuff, even if it wasn't really the old stuff - there's no glory kills in DOOM, and while you are more or less a dude who goes through demons like a woodchipper goes through tree branches, I also spend time falling back to regroup and pick up some health or ammo that I'd left laying around earlier in the level. DOOM 2016 says "fuck that" and made murdering demons the primary way to recover health.
Then we got DOOM Eternal and it made demons the source of health, ammo, and even armor! It was the logical evolution of the nonsense id started in 2016. It's like a top 5 game of All Time for me, although there are plenty of people who think it is asking the player to juggle too many balls which is probably fair.
To be fair there is a lot going on in this. So much that it was hard to grab a screenshot where I wasn't getting fuckin' shot because I had to move my hand to hit the button
It turned out to be about as far as you could go with the 2016 idea - which is partially why DOOM: The Dark Ages ended up being a much more grounded and deliberate kind of combat. It's still mostly combat arenas, but there's a shield now and also you do not have a bitchin' airdash. That's been replaced with the ability to parry and also kill fodder demons just by charging into them. That also fucking ruled in its own way, or at lest ruled enough that I'm pretty sure we will end up with more Nü DOOM in the future.
A Pivotal Decision
None of this success comes without the decision to scrap DOOM 4 in favor of trying something different. We don't get a revitalized id with DOOM 4, I don't think, because while I am sure that would've been a fine shooter in its own right, it wouldn't have been DOOM, to me. It was Grim and Gritty and BROWN, the way everything from that era was brown, and the decision to instead shift to metal, blood, lava, and sickass skull keys was, like its combat, very much an aesthetic that had been set aside.
The most 2010s thing about DOOM 2016 is, well, I was going to say the music but it really feels like Mick Gordon was drawing on early 00s nü metal for most of it. Then, of course, he mixed in some electronica there and ginned up some all-time great tunes and two soundtracks which, if not for the fact that the first two games are fucking awesome, could've almost carried the first two games on their backs alone. He wasn't around for DOOM: The Dark Ages on account of Some Real Fuckin' Bullshit, but hey, the game is still good (and the soundtrack is also, you know, it fits well enough).
This is what happens if you turn the volume up too loud on BFG Division
What comes now for Nü DOOM? We're ten years in, and in the meantime it feels like game development has only gotten more fraught. id has been lucky, I suppose in that they've seemingly dodged major layoffs (for now) and even formed a wall-to-wall union at the end of last year, so things are going surprisingly well for them. The response to DOOM: The Dark Ages does make me a little nervous - I don't know how its sales were, and by the time Game of the Year discussions came around it felt like most places had forgotten about it entirely - but most likely I'm just being overly pessimistic.
Hell still looks pretty kickass in the Dark Ages
There's still DLC on the horizon - I will be very surprised if we don't get a release date for it during Microsoft's showcase next week - which might get some eyes back on the game. I've been playing through it again primarily because I have a fancy new computer I bought just before prices really went to hell and it looks nice as fuck on there. When I ended up rambling about DOOM³ again a little while back, I mentioned Hugo's musing on doing a more Survival Horror focused take on the game, and while I would be sad to see the Ridiculous Metal Shit of DOOM 2016 be set aside, I think id's got my trust here.
So happy 10th birthday to Nü DOOM! Let's see where we end up in another 10 years, eh?
I hope we get a new Quake first.