Doom Eternal: Real Talk Guide To Dealing With The Bullshit
N.B. This highlights various difficulties and issues with the game and thus has a negative tone, which is only part of the picture. There are a lot of good things about the game and the better prepared you are for the various perculiarities and frustrations, the more you'll be able to appreciate the good stuff.
1. This is not the straight up action shooter you're looking for...
It might look like it on the surface. You do move around, shoot demons, and actually the core combat is theoretically very good. But it is overwhelmed and cluttered with many other gameplay aspects i.e.:
Double jump - Dash - Double dash - Trapeze bars - Wall climbing - Grappling hook - Glory kills - Chainsaw kills - Blood punch - Sword - Flame belch - Offfhand grenade - Offhand ice grenade - Two alt fire modes for most weapons - Demonic kitchen sink and all.
Jesus. Yeah. This is not the Doom you remember. There are a lot of game guides on the internet. Most of them have words of wisdom like "keep moving in combat arenas" (really??) and "chainsaw zombies in between arenas to get ammo" (like the game shows you 2 minutes in...). Utterly useless (apart from the occasional boss / mini-boss guide). They don't tell you that you need a different approach from the start, so here we go...
2. It's a gimmick shooter, learn the gimmicks straight away.
Apart from glory kills and chainsaw kills which are shown prominently earlier on, the gimmicks are mostly presented as fun optional extras. They're not, the game is fundamentally balanced around them. So you need to base your gameplay around them, rather than just straight up shooting. Ideally you'll genesplice yourself with an octopus for the constant weapon changing / alt fire / alt-fire changing / off-hand / off-hand changing / multiple melee options, but failing that, at least focus on them early on. This includes getting a comfortable configuration for those extras - and for weapon changes because you'll be low on ammo a lot.
Practise all the options even when you don't need them, because you will bloody need them, almost all of them (including different combos of jump-dash). Even go to the basical tutorial course or the arena in your homebase to practise. You'll be glad you did pretty soon. Also the glory kills are pretty funny / stylish / horrifying.
3. Read stuff and explore menus, yay!
Is that what you signed up for, instead of just jumping in the game?? No....but it does really help. There's bloody loads of options in the menu so you might as well play around and
try to get it as comfortable as possible. Again, not what you expect
from a streamlined FPS, but worth tinkering with. On the subject of
boring menu stuff, read all the codexes about the monster weaknesses
too, it can save plenty of ammo / time. BTW, monsters have good damage
skins, if you can see them through the effects they're worth heeding to
focus your fire.
4. Warm-up with deathmatch FFA, parkour platformers, and boss combat games
If it was a straight action shooter you might warm up by playing some Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Painkiller, modern Wolfenstein games, etc. Pretty much useless for DE. More realistically, a recent diet of, say, Quake Champions FFA deathmatch (for the very deathmatchy arena chaos - including learning to care a lot less about losing health or dying), Mirror's Edge or Ghostrunner (for the parkour platforming sections), and a bit of a Soulsborne game of your choice (for the fun of the Marauder mini-bosses and the few but lengthy main bosses) will get you into the spirit more.
5 Expect the other bullshits:
A. The upgrade bullshit
Just like there being a lot of movement / melee / off-hand gimmicks, there's a lot of upgrade gimmicks. And most of these affect the other gimmicks, rather than desirably basic factors like "more armour" or "stronger plasma balls". Best to look into them fairly closely to see what will make the gameplay more palatable - and best to keep exploring as despite their fiddliness, the benefits do add up. One thing to note is that most levels have points where you can't backtrack from so keep using the map to make sure you're not missing potentially useful stuff.
Keep an eye out for: Armour upgrades - Weapon upgrades for each alt-fire mode - Crystal upgrades for stats and extra gimmicks - Rune upgrades for extra....stuff - Home base items to access more upgrades.
Be warned that some upgrades and weapon mods are far better than others at certain points....e.g. best get the shotgun grenade mod to start to avoid wasting the tiny ammo pool with the auto shotty mod.
B. The OTT effects bullshit
A reliable fundamental of straight up shooter gameplay is being able to see what you're doing. DE dispenses with that misguided and outdated concept and throws such a vast amount of hallucinatory and obfuscatory visual clutter at you it's more like being in a rave held at an autopsy than it is playing a shooter. Expect masses of lurid plasma and fireball attacks, enemies flaming red due to your flamebelch, enemies flaming red due to a Buff Totem, enemies flaming red due to an Archvile summoning, Dread Knights flaming red for the sheer annoyance of it, enemies flashing orange and blue for glory kills, constant explosions, showers of items for glory / chainsaw kills, constant centreprint notifications for low health / low ammo (a state the game intends you to be in a lot)....and one of the worst design decisions in any game, a moronic red haze at low health, specifically to punish you and distract you when you need the most clarity. There's not many ways to avoid the visual mess, except:
- You can turn down the saturation (but not brightness) of the item showers in a menu option....somewhere.
- Upgrading health via crystals earlier on reduces the chance of dipping into red haze low health.
- You can get rid of some of the HUD notifications in the menu options.
C. The Marauder bullshit
Just bullshit. You'll know what I mean.
