It’s weird that I’m writing this. I’m hardly qualified, and yet, I think this is a discussion worth having. I assume this conversation hasn’t been had because those who are more qualified to have it are busy stewing in their own eager anticipation for any clip, screen or detail that might give them an idea of what the Doom reboot we’ll be reacquainting ourselves with in the coming weeks will look like.
I’m afraid the anticipation for this game has reached a point where its long-awaited unveiling will only disappoint. Hype has taken down a lot of games, and while that’s definitely an obstacle the next Doom will need to overcome, it’s not the real problem.
The real issue is this series has an identity problem.
Before I can get into that, I’d like to share with you my own perception of what Doom is. Unfortunately, I can’t do that without talking about myself, but I promise to try my best to keep this from reading like a memoir.
Even before I joined Bloody Disgusting, I fancied myself a well-rounded enthusiast of the spooky scary genre. I had to up my game considerably when horror games became a pseudo-career, and in the six years since, I’ve made a concerted effort to try and play as many of them as I can. In my mission to be worthy of a genre I’ve loved my whole life, I tried everything from ambitious indies to often creatively limited AAA titles and even a bunch of more conceptual projects that likely would’ve required 6-12 more months of steady development before they would qualify as video games.
This would eventually lead me to the Doom franchise. The original served as my introduction to its hellishly bombastic world and a singular unnamed marine’s fight against the legions of hell.
It’d be a long time before I would get around to playing Doom 2 for the first time, and that was only because I thought doing so might help me develop a fuller understanding of the chunk of gaming history that I had missed out on. I’m not sure what it is about older video games that disagrees with my frail, sickly body, but 30 minutes with a 90’s era shooter tends to make me motion sick. Since the original two Doom games were more or less guaranteed to leave me feeling like I had just spent hours in a hot car on a bumpy road, I had to move on.
Doom 3 is the only game in the series that I’ve spent a significant amount of time with, and I didn’t actually beat it until a few years ago when I had to review the BFG Edition. The way I played horror games back then was dramatically different from how I experience them today, but the change wasn’t gradual, it was sudden.
That sudden change would happen just a year later, in 20015, with the arrival of Resident Evil 4. That game turned the horror genre upside-down, and at least a small part of the monumental impact it had also affected me.
Because 2004 me wasn’t burdened by what often feels like an endless piling on of responsibilities that starts almost immediately after high school, I was free to really take my time with it. This involved a number of habits that sound like gargantuan wastes of time now, such as investing way too much time into scouring text logs for codes that would grant me access to precious bounties that had been left unguarded inside storage lockers by the very people whose corpses now littered every other room.
Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t develop some form of mild OCD. If I thought there was even the smallest chance I could’ve overlooked something, I wouldn’t hesitate to go well out of my way to see if I indeed had. If left unchecked, the thought that “I might have missed something” would almost always congeal into “I definitely missed something” which I would then need to remedy with completely unnecessary backtracking.
In the decade and change that’s come and gone since, backtracking is now a dirty word to many gamers. It’s become synonymous with lazy game design, just as one might bring up BioShock in an argument for video games as art, or Gone Home as an example of what this medium is capable when it comes to telling meaningful stories, Doom 3 was often brought up for the simple fact that it was lousy with monster closets.
Too many monster closets and not enough flashlights is a shitty legacy, but I could’ve made it so much worse by including that deliciously cheesy film adaptation starring The Rock and that guy from The Lord of the Rings who always looks like he just woke up.
If you’re familiar with the series, you know how much it’s changed since the early 90’s. That’s sort of the core of what I’m trying to get at with this article, which I legitimately believed would be a super quick thing I could knock out in an hour. That was a half dozen paragraphs ago, and now when I close my eyes all I see is the big, blocky Doom logo pressed against the inside of my eyelids.
I’ve tried to explain, as coherently as I’m capable of at 3am, what this series means to me. Even after all that, I can honestly say that I have no idea what I my expectations are for the game Bethesda doesn’t want us to call Doom 4.
The point of this, all of this, is what is Doom to you? I have the sneaking suspicion that my idea of what this series is about, what it aspires to be and where I think it’s headed won’t match up with what someone who grew up playing the classic games in the mid-90’s, or someone who only recently made the plunge with the Doom 3 BFG Edition. More importantly, I have no real idea of what the team at id Software sees when they’re contemplating its future.
I’m sure the enigma that’s kept them busy for what feels like a lifetime will come out, eventually, and it’ll be adored by many. I can’t say whether or not it’ll be “scary”, but I also don’t know if that’s the point. It may even follow Wolfenstein: The New Order and favor bombastic action and violence over nightmarish visuals and constructing effective scares. It may find a balance between the two, if that falls on the path that was chosen for it.
I can name quite a few franchises that came out of the early to mid-90’s, but none of them were ever as amorphous as Doom is now. Resident Evil has endured enough reboots, remakes, remasters and various other course changes to be comparable, but it never lost its core identity even when it was clear Capcom had no idea what they were doing with it.
The timeline of the first three Doom games is an odd one. This series has gone dormant for over a decade twice. That means enough time has gone by between the the last two games and the one we have on the way that each generation will have formed a different idea of what it is, because chances are, you haven’t played classic Doom and modern Doom. There’s no “correct” perception of what Doom is, but there’s only one that matters and it’s not ours.
So tell me, what’s your Doom?
