DOOM Eternal gameplay world premiere: Devil horns in the air—literally

[Karlston]

DOOM Eternal gameplay world premiere: Devil horns in the air—literally

I played E3's new DOOM demo twice. I'm not sure it was enough.

 

SANTA MONICA, Calif.—I don't often get as jazzed about an in-development video game the way I have about DOOM Eternal. After playing its 20-minute E3 demo to completion for my first time, I yelled, "AGAIN! AGAIN!" like a child unwilling to get off of a rollercoaster (and was thankfully granted another go at the fun). Upon getting home and preparing this article before Bethesda's Sunday E3 press conference, I combed through a full playthrough video provided by the developers like a sad ex flipping through a photo album. I had to look again. I wanted to remember.

 

That's not my normal way; I'm a gaming curmudgeon, to put it lightly. And yet I am struck by how pristinely iterative this game feels—a perfect execution of the cheesy poster quote, "If you liked DOOM 2016, you'll love DOOM Eternal." By carrying familiar elements forward and then supercharging them with compelling twists, DOOM Eternal (launching November 22 on Windows 10, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Google Stadia) could very well rank alongside past elite sequels like Super Mario Bros. 3, Uncharted 2, and Burnout 3: Takedown.

Familiar demons, meet new flamethrower

I mention those specific sequels because they each returned to unsurprising gameplay mechanics and art styles, only polished like crazy and met with a zillion new features that all somehow fit. DOOM Eternal sits in that category, so much so that a peek at its supercharged screenshots might elicit a mix of "ooh, crazy demons" and "uh, haven't we seen this before?"

 

Indeed, id Software returns to the idTech 6 rendering engine for this high-speed, 60fps combat frenzy (er, technically, our demo PC kiosks used variable refresh monitors that roared into 90fps-and-above territory). In addition to returning monsters, the brutal "glory kill" mechanic still dominates. That asks players to use a special melee attack when an enemy is on its last legs. Do this, and you'll deliver a dramatic "fatality" blow that also coughs up useful health pickups. As ever, this offers a tantalizing risk-reward balance by encouraging players to stupidly rush into a crowd.

 

You've seen all of that before to some extent. But not like this.

 

To start, the glory kill concept has been covered in hot sauce by offering a few additional melee-for-boost options. The first is a "flame belcher," which has a recharge timer and spews a wave of fire from a shoulder-mounted turret. Any enemies that you kill while they're set on fire will explode in armor pickups.

 

There's also a new meter to manage, which fills up as you accumulate glory kills. You can spend this meter on an overcharged melee attack, dubbed the "blood punch," which does explosive damage to whatever you're punching and anything nearby (no "wait for stagger" required). I didn't get enough time with this to see if it insta-kills any enemy, but this option did prove useful enough to clear a crowd when a battle got too hot.

A different kind of "mod" support

Additionally, each weapon seems to be getting at least one new "right mouse button" modification. The double-barreled super shotgun's DOOM Eternal twist had already been revealed: a grappling hook (dubbed the meathook) that extends from your gun, grabs onto an enemy, and flings you directly into that demon's face. I came to discover the secret sauce once I actually used this attachment—you need to shoot your gun just a moment before you think you should. Your grappling-motion's momentum will drive all of this buckshot directly into your foe, then fling you away from the enemy via shotgun recoil so that you can neatly bounce toward your next threat. What already looked cool in last year's trailer only feels more awesome in action.

 

The machine gun gets a "precision bolt," which requires that you hold a sniped perspective for long enough to charge a single bullet. And, wouldn'tcha know it, enemies now have a variety of weak points (shields on extremities, body-mounted guns) that can all be torn off with one of these bullets. The eight-legged Arachnotron conveniently appeared right after I equipped this mod, and many of its bits were clearly destructible, as evidenced by shiny, metal attachment points.

 

I took advantage of a second playthrough of this mission to focus on this aspect, and it's pretty solid in action. The precision bolt offers enough of a momentum freeze to focus and debilitate this foe, then whiz around and bludgeon other enemies with standard machine gun fire before returning to focused, limb-stripping sniper rounds. Should you simply wish to pick off smaller enemies with a single headshot, the precision bolt will take their heads clean off, as well.

 

Other new mods include the "arbalest," whose charged rounds stick into foes and then explode shortly after insertion. It also has a wider explosion-damage radius when fired at flying enemies. Then there's the plasma rifle's "microwave beam," which lets you pump an enemy full of radiation. Focus that beam on a single foe for long enough, and it, too, will hurt nearby foes with an explosive radius. (The bigger the radiation victim, the more sustained fire required—but, of course, a bigger boom.)

 

After I finished the demo, Creative Director Hugo Martin gave me a hint about one more default weapon mod that we didn't yet see: a freeze gun. Shameless yank of an old Duke Nukem 3D favorite? Maybe. But if it turns out to be fun, I'll forgive the transgression.

 

Listing image by id Software

Verticality, monkey bars, and wall-jumping

 

If you're looking for new demons, you can spy a few in the above gallery, including the aforementioned Arachnotron, the robo-legged Carcass, and the yikes-stay-away terror of the Whiplash. And you probably won't be surprised to learn that facing off against demons old and new is still all kinds of frantic.

 

The mission we played, "Mars Core," which Martin says takes place in the "middle" of the campaign, saw us reaching the Mars-orbiting moon of Phobos after the game's Doomslayer hero had already dealt with demonic combat elsewhere (possibly on Earth, as has been hinted in earlier teaser trailers). We're clearly violating Earth military protocol by coming here in search of a one-way ticket to Mars to take on a rising demonic scourge. But nobody is keen on enforcing the rules as we storm past, take their weapons, and eventually activate a dormant rocket launcher—then aim it at Mars, kick a cannonball out, and launch ourselves through space.

 

This mission included three veritable arenas in which monsters began spawning in every direction, then we had to kill them all before moving on. The first was a straight-ahead hallway of sorts, albeit one with mostly open-air skies instead of claustrophobic ceilings, and it emphasized the use of the machine gun's new sniper mod—as in, pick off the biggest creatures in the distance, then move forward to shoot and stomp a 360-degree whirlwind of enemies advancing on our position before queueing up a few more sniper rounds.

 

That open-air quality figured into nearly every fight in this demo, honestly, and the result was a welcome change of pace from the somewhat cramped quarters of DOOM 2016's lesser fight sequences. Every fight also emphasized two- or three-level combat in which enemies would appear at different altitudes. And while they stood on various cobblestone structures, these had all crumbled enough so that demons could still enjoy diabolical sightlines on my position. A new air-dash maneuver became imperative to keep myself moving from one high structure to the next, and this was aided by a new "monkey bar" swing. Whenever you see a horizontal yellow bar hanging in a DOOM Eternal level, jump at it and you'll instantly propel yourself forward.

 

Martin also admitted that DOOM 2016's interstitial movement between combat zones was a huge weak point. There's no telling whether the full game will play out the way this demo did, but instead of constantly checking a 3D map to reorient myself, I instead spent my demo's between-combat moments taking massive, air-boosted leaps across floating, low-gravity platforms. I still had to sleuth out the best jumping paths to reach and claim shiny bonuses, so there was at least something puzzle-like to these zones. Plus, they also showed off a new wall-grabbing and wall-jumping system. (I mean, I'm not a big fan of grabbing onto and launching from walls in a first-person game, but it was fine enough here.)

A blue bloodbath

 

One curious tweak coming to the game, to keep newer players moving rapidly through their first playthrough, is an "extra lives" system. Break through walls and dig through each level's hidden corners to turn these up as part of the series' usual arsenal of secret boosts. Should your Doomslayer run out of health, he'll respawn in a slightly safer point in the same battle with health refilled, armor dropped back down to zero.

 

I pish-poshed this feature at first, only to burn through an allotment of four lives in the demo's final, super-sized battle. In my second playthrough of the entire demo, I believe I only lost a single life.

 

I'll be honest: I like this option of extra lives as a first-time boost through the game's combat, especially in contrast to the momentum-slowing save-and-retry stuff of old. (Don't @ me. If you can't go back to your 386 PC of old and show me a completely clear Doom II save folder, you're likely in the same boat.) That being said, I hope (and assume) this option will be disabled in harder difficulties.

 

In this first-blush demo, at least, I was happy to see DOOM Eternal do everything to keep me moving, bouncing, and slaying. The organic restriction of each weapon's maximum ammo, paired with a good sense of "each weapon works best against certain demon types," kept me happily shuffling through my guns. The new melee-for-boost options played into the original game's accordion-like sense of momentum, always pulling me in for close kills before pushing me away to set off rockets.

 

And the battle arenas' clear designs didn't just dump a bunch of verticality into the fray as a press-release bullet point. Not only did I always have a threat coming from all directions, I also had clear sight lines and easy controls to help me confidently whip-and-shoot from one end of a fight to the other.

 

Plus, of course, the game encourages so much movement and combat with its gib-filled demon explosions. Maybe I used a grappling hook to zip through a three-frame blood-'splosion. Maybe I waited for the perfect time to set a bunch of demons on fire, then blood-punched the one in the front to turn them all into an orange-red explosion of death (and recoup armor points in the process). Or, maybe I just glory-killed the heck out of them, like the time I yanked a grenade off an Arachnotron's belt of toys, shoved that into its mouth, and let the resulting fountain of blue blood rain over my hands.

 

Yeah, now that I think about it, I kinda cannot wait to play this incredible game again.

 

Source: DOOM Eternal gameplay world premiere: Devil horns in the air—literally (Ars Technica)

 

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[mjall]

one of the best games ever