Doom: The Dark Ages

[one-armed dwarf]

wow these lovecraft areas suck balls. Really not enjoying the later levels of this.

 

Don't know if I'd replay this one, game is too long

 

Bloodborne remains the only game I've played to do cosmic horror stuff well (apparently Eternal Darkness is good too)

 

Kinda want to replay 2016 after this tho, and wash this game's terrible music out of my ears

 

edit more substantive take is that the game lacks enemy and gimmick variety. It felt really varied up until just before these sections, and now it's butter over too much bread. I read it has the same number of enemies as Eternal, but Eternal was a lot shorter and then its DLC had its own tricks (not all of which were good, but still).

 

Might still end up a 7/10 then

[mfnick]

I’ve just done level 9. My initial positive feelings are starting to wain. There’s really no point in using anything other than the Super Shotgun (& plasma for blue shields) is there? Ammo is plentiful and it just destroys enemies far quicker than anything else. No point swapping, I can kill them in the time it takes to swap or bring up the weapon wheel.
 

The large barren environments are becoming more frequent a real slog to get through too. Even though some of Eternals levels were long I never felt bored and drained playing them like I do here. I feel none of the enemies really stand out here too. They were really distinctive in Eternal. Here they’re just a bit bland looking and similar. 
 

It’s still fun. And still feels good to play. I like the set pieces it keeps pulling off too, they’re cool and impressive. But I’m definitely not feeling it like I did the incredible Eternal and great 2016. 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

Yeah, they had this podcast the other day, I've not listened to it cause it's really long. But one of the things they talk about apparently is nerfing the 'Ravager', which is a gun I've not really used but apparently the DPS is unbeatable. They probably want stuff to stand out but not present itself overwhelmingly as the best option.

 

 

So if they're looking at things like that then I guess they will bring the weapons more in line with each other, cause it's more of an issue in this to have weapon imbalances when weapon swapping is so unsafe. So I'm sure later patches will make it good. But my main problem now is the lack of new ideas in the later sections, I was pretty OK with the big levels tbh but it was carried but the novelty of learning how each new gun works and how to build offense, but now it's plateauing far too early and I'm not really interested in playing it anymore. There's a bank holiday weekend in June so I might drag myself across the finish line then cause I don't really want to spend much more time on it now

 

Like, fighting these whiplashes and mancubus isn't doing anything new right now, Eternal at this point had introduced the Makyr pinata enemy, which was great fun to snipe in difficult fight. They witch enemy is probably supposed to be that late game curveball, but I dunno, even that gets introduced fairly early. Like this isn't a criticism of just 'difficulty' or not difficult enough or anything like that, the game has plenty of difficulty and ways to turn it up and down, it's more an issue of pacing and variety

[Maf]

Left alt is a really nice button

[Maf]

One thing I’ve realised I really dislike about this is it’s basically shaky cam the video game. The parry and melee strikes which I feel are the core of the game, and the shooting is second rate. I mean I’ve said this before but the way they do guns in this series is shit. They’re so light, unsatisfying and unfun to use. But then in this game they also focus on the shield and punching and it’s such an ugly, head shaking, blurry fucking mess I’m just like yuck. I don’t like this at all

 

I don’t like Doom Eternal, either. But I understand why people like the game because it’s fluid and acrobatic and all this

 

This game is so not that. It’s just head banging. It’s just running in to a wall and smashing your head against it. And everything is so horrible to do. Punching is horrible, parrying is horrible, blowing up rows of guys is horrible. The screen is just shake, shake, shake

 

At first when it’s kind of calm it feels powerful but when you constantly spinning and smashing spinning and smash it’s like ugh. Get me off this ride 

[one-armed dwarf]

Turn off screenshake, it disables the getting punched in the head feeling. The gameplay vids (and stream) I posted of my own gameplay don't have it on and it looks a lot cleaner. There's also a screen effects setting that I'm less sure of but it turns off that disgusting sprint effects. With that, I've no major complaints like this left, other than audio cues.

 

Whenever a game has a screenshake setting, OFF immediately. FFVII R as well

[one-armed dwarf]

14 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

But one of the things they talk about apparently is nerfing the 'Ravager', which is a gun I've not really used but apparently the DPS is unbeatable

'Unbeatable' by any gun in any game ever made, it looks like

 

 

 

edit in the podcast above, they said that the game is way too easy, so they patched it to be harder. Based

 

I tried to play some more this evening and beat chapter 17, or got to 17, I'm not sure. But the game has totally lost me at this point, it's gotten so boring. The combat feels so 'solved', or I don't feel motivated to 'solve' it anymore than I have. It makes me want to play Eternal again, which I will never ever solve because there's so much to learn in it.

 

Some of the Cthulu levels make me annoyed with how boring they are, so I'm definitely not going to push it too hard and will stick with BG2 for a while. No point in wasting time. That Onimusha 2 remaster is also looking interesting

[mfnick]

Holy shit some of these levels just go on forever. I’ve started to mainline then rather than going for secrets which is helping but just done the one where you free the monster & it still went on far too long. 

[DANGERMAN]

I was coming in to post that 😅 like, I know hunting for secrets is adding time to them, but I'm early in and some of the levels are a commitment! Wonder what happens if you bounce out halfway through 

 

I did the first dragon level last night. I quite enjoyed it, the dodge can be a bit funny but it's not exactly punishing. It made me laugh a few times too, your dragon compared to the others, and the finisher where you force open a demons mouth and blast fire down their throat, very extra 😅

[mfnick]

I completed it last night. It’s undoubtedly a good game and is technically amazing - I had no bugs, it ran buttery smooth with zero stutters or anything all the way through, and there’s no (noticeable to me) texture draw or pop in at all. Finally a game which doesn’t take a split second to load the textures whenever there’s a camera or scene change! Incredible.

 

But I just found it all a bit tedious. I was bored. Every fight felt the exact same from about half way through. Shield charge then super shotgun just absolutely wrecks everything with little to no reason to ever change up. & the majority of levels just go on a bit too long even when mainlining them.
 

Everything just outstayed its welcome for me. Like controlling the mech. That would have been an awesome set piece near the end if done once. However doing it multiple times when theres no difference in how it plays just made it tiresome instead of the massive, exciting moment it should have been. 
 

Disappointing. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Hugo Martin is playing through the game on youtube, nightmare mode with default sliders I think, controller gameplay. Apparently he did this with Eternal also, might need to watch those

 

edit the vid I posted earlier is actually also part of the playthrough, for some reason I just thought it was a podcast. Well, cool enough to post again anyway

 

 

[spatular]

Finished this last night too, sounds like I enjoyed it more than most here, overall enjoyed it, but do agree with most of the complaints too, it’s too long, the second half of the game doesn’t really change things up so is quite samey. I still thought the combat was mostly fun though, and having good pad controls/auto aim is nice to see.

 

it sort of reminds me of a cod style action game with set pieces and the flying and mechs and stuff.

 

im not a fan of the style of the graphics but technically it runs really well and looks impressive.

[one-armed dwarf]

Interesting vid here if, like me, you were treating some of the ordering of melee attacks as largely interchangeable animations, they really are totally different. The kick does a lot of stun

 

The kick is the third melee attack to come out, so one, two, save three for a really mean fucker. Pretty neat

 

 

[DANGERMAN]

Missed a secret at the start of a level and couldn't get back to that section. So I've no choice but to uninstall the game and set fire to my hard drive 

[DANGERMAN]

Finally getting to the end of this, as in the next mission is called something like 'The Final Fight', despite not being the last level. There's 2 levels where I've missed something, both are massive and on both of them the thing I've missed is at the end. 

 

I've enjoyed it quite a bit, aside from the length of the levels, it can be a bit tiring. They should let you teleport between sigils (shop statues) once you've discovered them, or start from certain chapters. 

 

As much as I've enjoyed it, I don't think I really want to play it again, not in the way I've gone back to Doom and Eternal over the last few years, dipping in every so often. If I end up clearing those secrets it'll probably be when the path tracing is added

[DANGERMAN]

the Path Tracing patch is out so I've played a bit with it. It's cool, and it does look nice. Dark Ages looks nice anyway, it's full of RT, and it ran really well with it. With the Path Tracing it runs really well 'considering', but I don't think it's worth it having played it at a higher frame rate

 

Basically, I'm playing with frame generation x3, so I'm getting extra frames I can see but they aren't necessarily reading inputs. I'm still getting 100fps theoretically, but it's noticeably sluggish, maybe not so if I hadn't been playing it at a supposed 200+ for my entire playthrough, but I can feel it a little in movement and definitely in combat. It sometimes feels like it's missing inputs, and it's really noticeable when it comes to blocking and parrying. Getting to the late game it's in built in me now to leave the parry to the last minute and get more damage in before it, now I'm parrying too late

 

It looks good, and I'm waiting for something to turn up so I might just play a little more, try to get some more missed secrets if I can be arsed, but even on a 5070 I'm feeling the loss of frames too much

[one-armed dwarf]

It's one of those things which has made me mad skeptical of nvidia's performance claims, cause it's not really a performance boost I find in games which are specifically action packed like this one. Useful for something like a Naughty Dog style narrative adventure maybe. 

 

I didn't use the FGx2 option when I was playing this, opted I think for high settings instead of ultra settings on 1440

[Maf]

I’ve been watching a fun playthrough of the game and I wished I enjoyed the gameplay, because I really like what these games go for in theory. When the Slayer falls from too greater height and it’s the enemies that take the fall damage, that’s a really funny joke

[one-armed dwarf]

Despite its criticism, it's fundamentally doing the same thing as Eternal was, or trying to. Which is pursuing a power fantasy that's about looking at every enemy on the playing field as not just problems to solve but resource farms, movement opportunities. Obstacles that can be interacted with in different ways to produce side effects that you chain across the map. It's what makes Eternal a really brainy game in the moment to moment. It's a kind of violent pinata game, literally when you see the ammo pop out of enemies, but the blood letting lets you keep on moving to the next pinata and so on. Enemies are like chained together functions, but full of blood and guts.

 

What Dark Ages gets wrong is that the power fantasy here is undermined if you make the Slayer too strong, and shortcut all the combinational aspects of its gameplay design. Which is what happened for me when the (very boring) parry mechanic got upgraded and just shut down loads of enemies at once. Eternal only begins to get like that in one of its DLC when you get the hammer ability, which can be rotated such that you never see the enemy have a chance to do anything about it. Though even there, it required a far greater level of awareness, you needed to already be good. I don't think Dark Ages made a bad decision in trying to lower the skill floor of its gameplay, I think it was a good idea actually and it managed to remain fast paced even though it was much more grounded. But the power scaling just completely went off the rails, and the things that made it interesting didn't hold together when it did

[Maf]

My interpretation of the Doom slayer is that he has the mindset of a wild dog on a crusade which is founded on 90% stimuli. I don’t think there are human style thoughts behind the eyes anymore, it’s just a low growl and a hard rock track at fast bpm. The music in the game is what his synapses sound like 

 

Everything he sees is just a resource (guns), obstacle (talking NPC’s) and enemy (demons) shaped thing that his brain flags as “kill” or “kill later” or “kill with”. There’s no emotional connect it’s pure rip and tear operating drive and the world is simplified down to “meat” and “not meat”

 

Even when good guys betray him I don’t think he really cares. He was never working for them anyway they were just looking in the same direction and facilitating targets 

 

I like the idea that when people are talking at him it’s like a dog looking at you when you talk to them. They absolutely don’t know what you’re saying but waiting for key phrases like “demon”, “hell” or “chainsaw” and waiting for you to shut up like “Walkies or not?” Or in Doom Guy’s case “Killing Demons now or not?”