u/thekokoricky

My personal assessment:

• OG Doom: Introduced the world to a much more refined and addictive 3D shooter than any previous effort.
• Doom 2: The way the super shotty and new enemies significantly deepened the possibilities for level creators.
• Doom 64: Solid map puzzles and an extremely effective horror approach.
• Doom 3: Further maturation of the horror angle set inside highly interactive environments.
• Doom (2016): Perfectly balanced a complex combat system with straightforward run-and-gun gameplay.
• Doom Eternal: Over-the-top and dense gameplay with mountains of things to do.
• Doom: The Dark Ages: The most addictive and satisfying combat loop of the entire franchise.

Basically, I would like to play Duke 3D with Cheello's voxel pack on a source port with strong dynamic lighting. Suggestions?

Story is only as important as the art dictates. An RPG will suffer without an involved story. A puzzle game can often work with little to no story. And Doom? The OG had a story, but with many questions left unanswered. This allowed gamers to elaborate on the possibilities in the same way that 1979's Alien left us wondering about the specifics of the xenomorph, as well as the space jockey, all without frustrating the viewer. The sense of wonder was part of the appeal.

Personally, I enjoyed imagining what the demons in Doom actually were, where they came from, whether they possess human-like language, etc. This continued with Doom 3 as well as the 2016 reboot. Those entries elaborated more on plot, but like before, left major details in the shadows.

However, with Doom Eternal and Doom: The Dark Ages—both of which are excellent games—the plot opened up in a way that, for a longtime fan like myself, was largely juvenile and uninteresting. Strong character and environmental designs were hindered by dialogue and hierarchies and histories which simply weren't engaging, especially when your protagonist is an unnamed mute with no discernible personality traits other than one-track aggression.

This creates a Stranger Things issue, where ideas that weren't fully planned from the get-go now have to be explained in increasing detail, resulting in a story that is more complicated than it is interesting. This is especially evident in the way the newer games make tenuous links to the older ones, a retcon that feels unnecessary in a series where each game feels largely self-contained.

Moving forward, the IP now has such a dense lore that it is not clear how to progress the series without further complicating its universe. Storytelling was never id's strength, and the studio would be better off by keeping its worlds more open to interpretation.