Games nowadays don’t play like they used to. Oftentimes players will be treated to bloated plotlines that are impossible to follow, and forced events used as nothing more than a springboard for the poorly executed gameplay sequences that follow. Even the RPG elements used to allure players with an incremental progression system meant to connect them with their onscreen persona, are too complex to add enjoyment to games. Instead these elements often end up slowing the pace of the game with their constant positive feedback loops and frequently imperceptible advantages. The result: a cookie-cutter triple-A experience with a broken, incoherent plot and samey mechanics that pervade a largely timid campaign. That’s why the Bethesda published reboot Doom stood out to me–it dares to do something different. Doom defies the modern approach to gaming, and draws on the past for inspiration–a time when games were games.
My thoughts on story in gaming haven’t really changed over the years: gameplay is king, but if you’ve got a great story to tell, use it to weave the game together, but don’t force it. I’d much rather a game with sound mechanics and tough challenges than a game with all the extraneous elements often found in the contemporary medium. You know the ones I’m talking about, they usually have a crummy story injected as an afterthought.
Where Doom does me proud is in its obvious approach to elevate gameplay over other artistic game elements. That doesn’t mean that the story elements of the game are ever so bad that they feel as if they were shoved in to give the people what they want. No, the plot of the game is clearly not the spectacle of the game, and that’s why id Software wisely chose not to bombard gamers with a barrage of cutscenes. After all, it’s the shooting that drew me into the eerie space game–the shooting, the environment, and lore.
If stories are told in books using words, stories are told in games using moving images and visual elements. Just because the main plot of Doom is not all that great, doesn’t mean that the environments and the lore don’t provide for an intriguing story. I want to make it clear that there is a distinction between the plot of a game and its overall story. The plot is the line of sequential events between characters that drive the game onward, while the story is more of an encompassing term that refers to the imagery, tone, and lore of the game. It is here, the story, where Doom shines.
Though the game doesn’t declare it using ill-placed cutscenes, I instantly knew that my unnamed character was a badass marine with demon-blending abilities and the goal to solve the mystery behind some kind of otherworldly experiment–a show of human bravado–that had gone terribly wrong. The areas that make up UAC facilities on Mars feel foreboding and present a cold, dark future of technological advancement and experimentation with the unknown. The world-building provides a sense of isolation, one that I’d compare to games like those found in the Metroid Prime series: you are a one man army in the company of a former man who has taken the form of an android, a scientist with a twisted curiosity in some distant religion, and of course, countless demons straight out of hell. All other humans have either turned or now paint the halls of the decrepit space station with blood from their dismembered limbs.
Though there may not be dramatic plot points in Doom, the game surely makes up for it with its other audio and visual methods of tingling the senses. And if players want to learn more about the lore–it’s deep–they can choose to pause the game and read up on the backstories of each of the characters and enemies. The lore is well-written and unobtrusive to the sweet murder the game encourages.
Know thyself. Most modern games suffer from an identity crisis. That is, they try to do too many things at once and end up failing at most of them because all balance is lost. Clearly the developers who worked on Doom knew what kind of game it was, and so they made sure that the gameplay and story elements took precedence over the plot. As per its namesake, Doom is all about that feeling of being alone, struggling to survive.
The shooting sequences, even with the various useful suit and weapon upgrades, are tough. Aside from quick details given when acquiring a new tool of destruction, there is no hand holding to be found in Doom. Battles are frequent and blend into another in such a way that doesn’t make it feel like the chore it often becomes in a typical first-person shooter. The structure has been the same for years: Head into a room, shoot a bunch of enemies, walk down a hallway, enter a new room, and repeat. Sometimes an uninvited cutscene is also added to the mix, just to try and break up the mundane cycle with a detached story fragment. In Doom, almost all areas are game, and the isolated arenas are big enough to allow for several creative opportunities to take down the demons. The open space coupled with the verticality of environments, diversity of weapon choices, and creativity of enemy types make for many permutations of blood-splattering delight.
Doom really captures the feeling of urgency and terror by implementing gameplay elements that bribe players to take chances. Glory kills, which are takedowns of weakened enemies, drop precious health items used to replenish your non-regenerating health bar. When in a frantic, near-death combat sequence, which happens often, you are just one more kill away from rejuvenating your vitals–do you risk running into the fray where you could die, or do you sit back and try to re-think your strategy? The call is yours, but the AI in Doom will only permit a precious few unnerving seconds to decide. Few modern games (Bloodborne comes to mind) plunge players into these kinds of high-stake decisions.
The shooter genre has been saturated for years, so it’s no wonder that every FPS is beginning to feel like another. They act like they are trying to compete with movies, play like they are made for distracted children, and complement players with micro achievements like they were attention-hungry puppies. Doom does something that doesn’t make sense; it goes against these norms of many monetarily successful franchises. And that’s why I love it. The game probably won’t sit well in the hands of modern gamers because it caters to the more patient, methodical, and challenge-hungry gamer of yesteryear. But Doom has quenched my thirst for a kind of experience I’ve been looking to get for some time: through and through, Doom is a videogame, and unabashedly so.