So, people who know me will know I've always been a HUGE doom fan. I got the first game 30 years ago on the Genesis 32x and have been addicted to it ever since. It's always been simple. Here's a gun, there's a bunch of demons from hell, KILL. RIP AND TEAR UNTIL IT IS DONE!
The OG games were classics and still hold up to this day. Even more so with modded engines like GZdoom.
Doom 3 took the series in a survival horror direction that kind of was divisive, but I didnt DISlike it. I mean, it still felt like doom. It was slower, and more corridor shooty, but that was the zeitgeist of the times, and the 2000s era FPS games are kinda my thing.
After that, Id kinda dropped the franchise. THey made quake 4, Rage, Wolfenstein games, and eventually came back in 2016. And Doom 2016 was arguably the best FPS of the 2010s campaign wise. 2016 was the peak of gaming for me, and after that, everything went to crap.
In 2020, they released Doom Eternal. That one was a bit divisive for me. here's the thing. When I play doom, I wanna shut my brain off and shoot things. Doom eternal added too much strategy to the game. Now it's like, use X gun to kill X demon in specific way. And then you face giant arenas full of varied demon types and you either switch between the guns every 5 seconds to kill X demon with Y gun as intended, or you just blast everything with the super shotgun and hope it works. And I'm...the latter. I dont got time for that crap.
I also disliked the direction the DLC took where they made the game more punishingly hard, the levels tedious and long, and doubled down on "use X gun to kill Y demon" not even making it optional.
So....after eternal, I went into dark ages with a mixed view on the direction of the franchise....and the dark ages seemed to double down on the bad stuff. Now there's a shield with a gun, you gotta parry and dodge at the right moments, use the shield at the right moment to block attacks, and it's like despite being like 6 levels in they're dropping more and more mechanics and sub mechanics on me. I'm frustrated with it. This isn't the good I grew up with. it's not the doom that I love. I wouldnt even call it doom any more. It's more like....some warhammer game or something like vermintide with guns.
Really. ANd it just begs the question: why? Why did the game have to go in this direction? Again, originally it was here's a gun, there's your enemy, shoot them until you win. But now we need tons of mechanics and sub mechanics and parrying and all of this complexity and difficulty. Just having an experience of shooting stuff isn't enough. It has to be hard, it has to be complicated.
It feels like every game is like this. It's why I'm nostalgic of the 90s and 2000s where games were just, shoot things until you win. But those are like "uncslop" type games now or whatever. Zoomers have more sophisticated tastes. They want more complexity. Normal deathmatch is no longer a thing. Now we need extraction shooters. We need tons and tons of recoil for a high "skill ceiling." We need mechanics on top of mechanics in doom now. Everything has to feel like an RPG. And everything feels complicated. And I hate it. I miss how we can't just have simple FPS games any more. Everything has to be complex, everything has to have a motif, a gimmick, and it isn't fun. Games in the 2020s kinda suck at times. And it's not even just the nostalgia for the past in this case. because this is the grandaddy of all FPS franchises just about. And they're messing up.
Oh well, at least old games still exist and are fun.
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