I've been playing Doom since '99 and loved every release and various ports, so I dove into this day one, and had an absolutely miserable experience. I don't know what happened but Dark Ages just felt creatively disjointed, like they had a bunch of ideas and were like "wouldn't it be cool if you could do this and this?" and didn't ask themselves if it's gonna work in the end product.
The mech and dragon sections were an absolute chore, the levels were too big and empty for their own good, finding secrets didn't feel good or exciting and can't say I was expecting turret sections in a 2025 game, much less a Doom game. The shield should've been a tool and not the main focus of the entire combat. The difficulty was laughable and the difficulty sliders a very lazy excuse for the devs not to balance the game properly themselves, now when you say it's easy you get people coming up to you and saying "well you should have played the game at 200% speed with 500% enemy damage and two fingers up your butt" which completely misses the point.
The guns mostly felt useless and bloating the roster by having two copies of the same type of weapon, often visually similar/near identical, felt lazy again.
I think, of the three "reboot" games, 2016 is still my favorite, it was a simple, to-the-point experience with great pacing. Eternal was fun too, especially on the first playthrough when you felt like it's pushing you to break out of your usual FPS mold, but on repeated playthroughs I started noticing I'm exhausted by the game which didn't happen in 2016. Dark Ages is just bleh. I think it should have been a Year Zero DLC for Eternal or something, because as a short DLC it could have worked. Otherwise it's too much of a departure from the Doom formula and I can't stand behind the arguments that it's good that each of the games feel different. 2016 set the foundation, Eternal built on that foundation, Dark Ages burned the blueprints and went rogue.
EDIT: oh yeah and the story was absolutely horrible, and not in the fun bad way.
@Telin Yeah you can continue playing once you go offline, but each time I lose progress like this I completely lose my will to keep playing and have to come back to the game in a few months when I've cooled down. There's unfortunately no way to start playing BC games offline since it connects you automatically (at least I'm not aware of a way to do it) so either I'd have to play it on my 360 without BC benefits or stick with these random disconnects that force me to replay big chunks of the game. At least this is like the only BC game I have that does this.
The Live connection in backwards compatible titles has always been pretty shaky, I basically can't play Star Ocean: The Last Hope because every time I get disconnected from XBL the game treats it as a profile change and kicks me to the main menu, there are of course no checkpoints so it's easy to lose hours of progress because of that.
Comments 3
Re: Talking Point: One Year Later, What Do You Think Of DOOM: The Dark Ages?
I've been playing Doom since '99 and loved every release and various ports, so I dove into this day one, and had an absolutely miserable experience. I don't know what happened but Dark Ages just felt creatively disjointed, like they had a bunch of ideas and were like "wouldn't it be cool if you could do this and this?" and didn't ask themselves if it's gonna work in the end product.
The mech and dragon sections were an absolute chore, the levels were too big and empty for their own good, finding secrets didn't feel good or exciting and can't say I was expecting turret sections in a 2025 game, much less a Doom game. The shield should've been a tool and not the main focus of the entire combat. The difficulty was laughable and the difficulty sliders a very lazy excuse for the devs not to balance the game properly themselves, now when you say it's easy you get people coming up to you and saying "well you should have played the game at 200% speed with 500% enemy damage and two fingers up your butt" which completely misses the point.
The guns mostly felt useless and bloating the roster by having two copies of the same type of weapon, often visually similar/near identical, felt lazy again.
I think, of the three "reboot" games, 2016 is still my favorite, it was a simple, to-the-point experience with great pacing. Eternal was fun too, especially on the first playthrough when you felt like it's pushing you to break out of your usual FPS mold, but on repeated playthroughs I started noticing I'm exhausted by the game which didn't happen in 2016. Dark Ages is just bleh. I think it should have been a Year Zero DLC for Eternal or something, because as a short DLC it could have worked. Otherwise it's too much of a departure from the Doom formula and I can't stand behind the arguments that it's good that each of the games feel different. 2016 set the foundation, Eternal built on that foundation, Dark Ages burned the blueprints and went rogue.
EDIT: oh yeah and the story was absolutely horrible, and not in the fun bad way.
Re: Xbox Continues To 'Actively Investigate' Issue With Backwards Compatible 360 Titles
@Telin
Yeah you can continue playing once you go offline, but each time I lose progress like this I completely lose my will to keep playing and have to come back to the game in a few months when I've cooled down.
There's unfortunately no way to start playing BC games offline since it connects you automatically (at least I'm not aware of a way to do it) so either I'd have to play it on my 360 without BC benefits or stick with these random disconnects that force me to replay big chunks of the game. At least this is like the only BC game I have that does this.
Re: Xbox Continues To 'Actively Investigate' Issue With Backwards Compatible 360 Titles
The Live connection in backwards compatible titles has always been pretty shaky, I basically can't play Star Ocean: The Last Hope because every time I get disconnected from XBL the game treats it as a profile change and kicks me to the main menu, there are of course no checkpoints so it's easy to lose hours of progress because of that.