Doom Eternal Review

 Rip and Tear

In 2016 Id Software took their resurrection powers towards one of the most iconic 'Boomer Shooters' of the gaming industry and brought it back to startling vitalisation through one of the most intense, visceral, intuitive and flowing First Person Shooters of all time. DOOM totally rewrote the book on how to capture and conceptualise level design, enemy encounters, battlefield tactics and enemy design. It was a masterpiece of several distinctions, excelling in some many new areas that even the original Doom games had become dated examples of, once again putting the DOOM franchise on top of the pack in terms of quality gaming shooting majesty. And I totally loved that original 'New DOOM' experience in that special sort of way that clings to you more than just any old good game does.

That DOOM came to me at a time where everything in my life felt disorganised and spiralling out of control, and provided me with the perfect encapsulation of the 'power fantasy shooter' to help set my heart back in rhythm whilst in life I worked on everything else. Tight challenge that demands as much for you to put in as you want to get out of it, a cavalier 'screw the story let's just kill demons' attitude that felt like a breath of fresh air in an industry that was starting to drown in it's overbaked over-elaborate narratives for games that don't need them and a light replay value softly calling towards the allure of 'mastery' that kept me hooked long enough to become actually pretty good at the game. Clear the thing on Nightmare, boss through the timetrials and even get a decent way through the game on a few Ultra-Nightmare runs. (essential one life playthroughs were you have to restart the entire game if you fail.) That's not the type of dedication I devote to any old game which turns up.

Which is probably why I didn't feel the need to run out and immediately scoop up the new DOOM Eternal when it hit store shelves back in 2020- not least of all for everything else that was going on that year. 2016 DOOM was pretty much everything I need out of a game like that, the ultimate evolution of arcade-like shooters, elegant in it's apparent 'pick up and play' simplicity and enthralling in it's inherent high skill-ceiling mastery. I scoped out a bit of the new ideas that DOOM Eternal played around with and found myself mildly interested, but that part of my gamer stomach was still truly satisfied with what I had- by the time I finally came around on Eternal it was 2023 on a whim as I was merely collecting titles that would show off the power of my new Current gen console. But be that as it may, this year has been my catching up to where DOOM currently rests. So how has it held up?

Firstly when I describe DOOM 2016 I call it an 'arcade shooter', and I want to describe why I evoke that label. Despite it's grit and gore, DOOM 2016 revolves not around crouching beneath waist high objects, pulling off pot-shots and clenching onto whatever slivers of health you can, but rushing the forces of your enemy, jumping and weaving around projectiles, and damaging and 'glory killing' enemies in visceral hand-to-hand finishers in order to replenish your health and keep the pace of the game going. It mimics the 'constant flow of action' approach that arcade machines would demand in order to keep the attention of a consumer that might have other options around them to draw their attention- that game boasted an experience that never let itself sag, provided everything you needed to push through every fight and demanded your constant attention to keep moving so you don't have an opportunity to cast your eye towards the next game cabinet being installed right next to this one. DOOM Eternal has not lost this heart at all, rather it's solidified and redefined what it means to be an arcade-style shooter in visual style as well as gameplay.

Visually, DOOM Eternal speaks a language much less gritty than it's direct predecessor and much more in line with the colourful floating icons and geographically unorthodox level layouts of yesteryear. 2016 had it's floating shields and green pick-ups strewn about it's levels too, but they were designed in such a manner as to blend into the dark hallways of the Mars Colony or the twisted membrane walls of Hell, they fit the colours and lighting, almost in shame of their video game-like reality. Eternal, on the otherhand, embraces these video-game pick-up items, rendering them in bright colours and luminescence to garishly stand out in any environment they're placed in. New floating platforms adorn these levels with light platforming puzzles, and they'll be covered with spinning fire wheels and procedurally firing turrets with absolutely no sensible narrative context for their existence beyond 'it's a game and this is a game thing'. In some ways DOOM Eternal feels like a whole other art team went to work on it.

Not least of all for the environments you travel through  . Eternal pays a little lip service to the flickering lights and grimy industrial tech corners that 2016 loved so much, but for the most part you'll be dancing around sci-fantasy gleaming silvery towers set in fantastical alien mountaintops or bizarre scarlet forests. There's a distinct drift off into the whimsy of high science fantasy with the direction of Eternal that turns the game into something of a high budget sight-seeing trip in it's later levels rather a grim and foreboding broach into the deepest recesses of hell à la DOOM 2016. Id Software are absolute masters of visual design at this point so each location is a glittering beauty to behold, but whether or not you prefer this approach or the more thematically dire hints of the last game is going to be down to taste rather than objective quality. I felt the consequence of 2016 building in my heart more, but the grandeur of Eternal soundly surpasses it. 

That shift in tone is not exclusive to the visual pick-ups either, DOOM boasted a plethora of killing implements with special alternate firing modes built for the sole purpose of ripping the various demons to shreds- every weapon could theoretically kill anything if you used it enough and situational preference ruled the roost. Of course, that would mean some weapons or power-ups for weapons would see preference over others, but gameplay variety is rarely a detriment to the gameplay cycle. Eternal, naturally, boasts a little more variety in it's guns and a lot more in it's ancillary tools, but the way the game approaches them is distinctly different. I've seem many in the community refer to this as a 'Chess combat' system or 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'. Basically, with the vast variety of Heavy Demons the game throws at you, the player will be specifically told which Demon is weak to which tool and expect you to juggle that knowledge throughout the game. Complex fights can resort to players dancing around the battlefield whilst switching to the correct counter weapon for the confronting demon, leading to a more direct 'answer/response' approach to encounters.

Of course there is still a some sense of freedom to combat encounters in the standard slate of Demons and how you take them down. 2016 introduced the vampire-like mechanic of whittling down an enemy and then Glory Killing them to burst health pick-ups out of them, and Eternal has expanded that into a whole cornucopia of abilities. Your shoulder mounted 'flame blech' flamethrower sets enemies ablaze causing them to drop armour when damaged and your slow recharge chainsaw allows you to quick-execute enemies but shoot out ammunition. There's also cluster grenades and freeze grenades, and certain abilities like the burning hook-shot of the Super Shotgun that allows you to pull yourself towards an enemy whilst setting them on fire with a double barrel surprise waiting for them giving a quick burst of armour. Essentially you have all the tools to pull yourself from the brink of disaster and back to full ammo and health if only you master all the synergies and buffs available to you- it's quite the menagerie of gameplay possibilities.

But it's also a lot. You might hear that quick run through of all the different gameplay options you have and wonder how you're supposed to juggle all that in every encounter, and the honest truth is that in the first two or three levels of the game it is honestly overwhelming. Remembering what buttons correspond to what ability, on top of where you need to flick on the weapon wheel to snap to an energy weapon against shields or a rocket launcher for the big heavies- it's stops feeding into that sense of intuitive flow of DOOM 2016 and begins to feel more like a tense management game. God knows I wasn't expecting to get 'Paper's Please' vibes from my DOOM game! It doesn't help that the game presents no natural solution for introducing these gameplay systems beyond feeding them to you one by and one and dumping a user manual text box everytime you get a new item. There's actually too many new tools for the game to leave you to learn them naturally.

There are a few universal design rules that speak to the player in the base game. Glowing blue shields are best killed by energy weapons and an enemy that glows green before their swing can be interrupted with a shotgun blast- but the game relies on Textboxes more and more as the number of enemy variations and weapon specialties balloons to an unreasonable size. Cacodemons are weak to the Ballista gun. Why? I dunno. Does the game translate this to you in any way intuitively? Not really. Certain Demons can have their mechanical weapons blown off their body with a precision shot, but not the mini-gun toting Tyrant Demon for some reason. For Mancubus enemies you are literally told to destroy their two artillery arms before closing in for the kill, but for the Cybermancubus those appendages are indestructible. There's just a breakdown in tutorial and visual language cohesion that turns combat into more of a memory game as it stretches out.

One of the issues that the team specifically strove to repair for this sequel was the way in which half-way through DOOM 2016 the game kind of runs out of new tricks to throw your way. There's new locales, enemy density ramps up, some bosses litter the final few levels- but there's nothing wholly fresh added to the battlefield. DOOM Eternal, on the otherhand, is constantly throwing new enemies at you every level or so- or new items that require new powerups or just more content that breaks that general gameplay rhythm you were settling into by shoving something new to consider. Personally I never found the 'lack of new tricks' for late game 2016 to be a bother, because that late game was really more about mastery of the challanges you had met and testing your playstyle on increasingly large groups of enemy mobs. DOOM Eternal makes you feel like you're constantly a novice throughout your entire first playthrough and refuses to let you off the hook and give you that space to start becoming a master- you have to wait for the DLC to start that journey.

One of the more controversial changes to the layout of each level has been the structure of how enemies are presented. Before they would largely be scattered around levels in various locations, sometimes ambushing the player when they least suspect it, sometimes blocking progression until you've wiped out a 'gore nest' arena battle. DOOM Eternal bases it's entire game around those arena-style battles and it presents them as ineloquently as possible. Whereas in 2016 you would at least be fed the fiction that 'Unsafe demonic corruption' levels were locking down certain parts of the facility, in Eternal you'll just find giant sod-off energy walls forcing you to jump around the battle arena taking out waves of enemies to progress.

In theory this isn't so much an issue; Gore Nests were some of the best snippets of gameplay in DOOM 2016- highlights of all the skills you had built surviving the level in tense dances driven by flowing instinct and punctuated with splashes of skilful violence. In Eternal it feels like every room is a gore nest, which drag on longer and longer as the game becomes more confidant in throwing enemies at you. By the final levels the arenas you clear are genuinely exhausting as wave after wave of enemies assault you at every turn, dragging out that narrative climax as long as humanely possible. When the DLC starts up these arenas become just frankly too long. I'm talking ten to twenty minute affairs to clear every room in decently large levels, all the while requiring more effort to juggle the games dozens of combat systems and expectations in a depreciating scale of benefit. By DLC 1 I was no longer really enjoying the feeling of clearing a room, but rather basking in the frustration that it took so long and weighing that against how long the game is going to keep me in the proceeding forced areas.

In fact, DOOM Eternal's DLC seems predicated on the ideal that 'challenge and fun are perfectly linked'. I'm a lover of challenging experiences, mind you, The FromSoft games are my catnip, my typical DOOM difficulty level is Nightmare- I understand how challenge can be exciting and rewarding: I just don't see that equation bore out to it's fullest in 'The Ancient Gods' DLC. These levels are sadistically long and packed with endless rooms filthy with enemy waves and deeply frustrating enemy buffing hazards and heavy demon combinations to the point where every fight is resplendent with constant weapon switching to meet every demon with it's exact weakness. It's a strong spine for gameplay pushed beyond it's threshold into a repetitive chore, like what you would expect from a mod developer who is so deeply religiously devoted to a single game they can't understand how other people might find a single hour long boss fight with the same core mechanic flooded with nothing interesting except for 'trash mob' spam tedious because they just love doing the same thing over and over and why wouldn't anyone else? (That may or may not be directed at the final boss of The Ancient Gods.)

One honest surprise I had going into DOOM Eternal was how seriously is actually took itself from a story standpoint, especially considering how 2016 seemed to spurn the face of unwelcome narrative exposition with gusto. You start Eternal with a giant flying space fortress you've gained out of nowhere, embarking on a war against hell priests you never knew existed until just now and fighting through the deluges of broken sci-fi medieval societies illustrated with vomits of operatic speech. At first I was so assaulted by the haphazardly flung narrative and lore content that I instinctively assumed this was another sly jab at overstuffed narratives from the development team, but as the game carried on and objectives weren't getting any simpler or more neatly explained I realised that "No, DOOM Eternal has just adopted one of the most overstuffed narratives a title like this could hope for."

Eternal wants you to actively engage with it's narrative but does not quite know how to present to you a world wherein the typically hands-off story of DOOM is suddenly a lot more tied to the core experience. Eternal just throws you into the middle of a vast invasion of earth, on what feels like chapter 10 of a 30 chapter novel, expecting you to make up the difference by reading the dozens of lore text pages scattered haphazardly around each level and constructed to drip-feed the setting, characters, factions and lore as though extracted from a wikia article. Seriously, the way DOOM presents it's narrative is by literally telling you everything in small chunks from level to level in giant walls of (optional) text that are full of just enough overly verbose 'in universe poetry talk' that by level five I was basically scanning them quickly for pertinent snippets and then jumping back to the actually important action.

You can just skip past them, but the narrative cutscenes you'll be subjected to across your adventure clearly lie very heavily on the belief you're going to study all the text to figure out who everyone is, why they're talking to each other like that and why that big weapon they just announced is significant and you should care about stopping it. It's as if Dark Souls presented it's narrative exactly the way it does, but then peppered cutscenes full of situational characters and events that reference the more esoteric material as though you've already been formally introduced to all of it. Even a basic introduction paragraph at the onset of Eternal explaining where the Fortress of DOOM came from would have worked to set players in the mindset they needed to be in more.

By the time you've reached the Ancient Gods DLC you might be quite surprised to discover how the big invasion plotline of the main game has been soundly trumped in scope by what appears to be the actual finale to the DOOM narrative, for seemingly good. Whereas most franchises build themselves up for a trilogy, it appears that Id honestly looked at what they did with DOOM Eternal and realised they threw absolutely every single errant idea the team ever had at the wall with this one and there was nowhere new to push the franchise further. It almost feels intrinsically abrupt for Eternal's DLC to suddenly introduce the universe's God and Devil and place you against them in a final climatic showdown- like if Wolfenstein: New Colossus just dropped a 'Let's kill Hitler!' DLC in lieu of the third conclusion game they're presumably mid brain storming.

Then again, I guess the promise of a climatic finale is the only thing pushing people through the utterly painful DLC missions that feel constructed by one of those people who min-max overpowered builds they use to steamroll endgame content in MMOs and then turns around and demands the game produces new content specially to challenge their build because that mathematically constructed uber class they no-lifed had an easy time with the content- all other players be damned. Ancient Gods has that level of almost experimental-feeling challenge, wherein you're on minute twenty five of a single combat encounter thinking 'did any real thought go into this encounter beyond: what's the biggest mob I can fit into this arena'? The amount of waves that end in Tyrant + 'Doom Hunter' would suggest otherwise. 

Summary

DOOM Eternal is the culmination of all of Id Software's talents in bringing DOOM back from the dead and on a technical standpoint, both in ambition and achievement, the game rules supreme. It looks gorgeous, it plays brilliantly and there's more combat freedom than ever before. But in the actual meat of the meal, the composition of the canvass- so to speak, Eternal lacks that dignified elegance of it's simpler yet more focused predecessor. Eternal troubles itself so much trying to throw new gadgets in the players hands, new enemies demanding different approaches and a newly centrally imperative plot at you that somewhere along the line that intrinsic pleasure of being the whirlwind of beautiful carnage that is the DOOM Slayer becomes muddied. Not lost, at all. More tarnished and rough, resulting in an ambitious sequel that seems to have piled on too many plates and feels a little clumsy and less masterful than it's father. The DLC, on the otherhand, is just a messy challenge gauntlet of endless ramping difficult lacking a satisfying finale. I enjoyed 'The Ancient Gods' to the degree that I'm glad I beat it, but I would never bring myself to play it again on future Eternal playthroughs. There was achievement in the DLC, but little genuine fun. Overall I guess that leaves me giving DOOM Eternal a respectable B + grade on my arbitrary review scale, which would have been closer to an A- before I played that DLC, which admittedly left a soul taste in my mouth. Still, I absolutely recommend the game for being a prime First Person Shooter with a great flow that many other games could learn from, and a cautionary tale about why sometimes just a little less can mean so much more.

Games with online requirements

 You've been disconnected

The interconnectivity of the world through the power of online is a magical and wonderful tool that has revolutionised the way we live, how our societies intermingle and connect; and how much bizarrely themed Anime we can watch directly from Japan. (I saw one about a school full of gambling addicts! Them Anime makers get real crazy sometimes.) But for all of it's positives, there are some rather big negatives. Not many intrinsic negatives, mind, more circumstantial negatives that have popped up as the world has become more familiar and acclimatised to what the Internet provides us. Exploitation, scams, the very concept of the Metaverse and the addiction to the idea of being hooked to the 'forever online' pipeline and dragging everyone along for the ride.

Look, I know that fundamentally there are going to be games out there that require online connections in order to run; that's just the nature of how certain genres of games have come to be. MMOs, for example, can't exactly bring it's players into a cohesive shared online world if those players aren't sending up-to-date data packets of everything they're doing to the host server; therefore a constant connection is kind of a necessity. Same with competitive multiplayer games and pretty much anything that takes advantage of the fundamental functionality of games to provide a unique online-style of experience to it's player base. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's just the way that things are. But then there are the games that make you scratch your head and wonder.

Such as EA's Sim City. Do you remember when that abomination landed? A city builder game which necessitated an internet connection at all times for a game that largely consists of solitary city planning and late-game infrastructure troubleshooting? Why- so that some minor online gimmick of 'virtual player visitors' could be enabled? No, the real reason was obviously so that this could serve as a kind of hands-on DRM (Digital Rights Management) to ensure that the copies of the game that were being played were legitimate, which is the excuse for a lot of 'Always Online' systems around this time. Of course, not everyone has the kind of constantly secure internet, or even the bandwidth, to facilitate that kind of imposition; and thus the system, once said to be integral to the foundation of the game, was neatly exorcised in an evening. Too late though, the reputation of the franchise was forever tarnished and within a few years Cities: Skylines dropped to totally steal that entire market away from EA whilst they slept. Couldn't have happened to nicer guys.

These days it's a lot rarer to see always online systems. Or at least, it's typically not socially acceptable for a game to potentially drop it's players if they ever disconnect from some theoretical server floating in the company farm. And when such a game does exist, the backlash is loud and unrelenting. Just this year Redfall got spat at for requiring such a connection for a game that, whilst it offered 4 player co-op, fully allowed it's players to engage in an offline single player mode as well. Once again, the developers said it was essential to the heart of the game, only to figure out that there was apparently an off switch, it would just need some time to code in. (Too bad everyone will be done playing the game after one full day, because it wasn't very good.) Think that's the measure? Oh, you ain't heard nothing.

Doom Eternal is a game with Online Only requirements; did you know that? Not to the extent where you'll be kicked out of a single player campaign match for losing connection, but enough that dropping will force you into the menu to inform you of that misfortune. And why? Honestly I haven't the slightest clue. I think it may have something to do with this online persistent levelling functionality that is shared through the account like some sort of free battlepass- but why does that mean it needs to encroach on, and thus interrupt, my offline gaming? The very heart of Doom Eternal is it's single player campaign, and that the team thought it totally fine to potential sabotage the sanctity of that system with online gibberish is galling to say the least.

Elden Ring is another recent game with frustrating online components, but here it makes a lot more sense. Souls games have been messing around with online competitive and cooperative side features for as long as the genre has been fully formed. But in order to maintain that drop-in invasion style of game Elden Ring demands you log into their servers upon the start and remain logged in forever more. Should you drop that means you are kicked back to the main menu and you have to load in from scratch- the one thing worse than actually dying. Playing offline needs you to load into the game fresh from the start detailing you don't want to engage, and one of the routes to a major boss requires the invasion of three other players, forcing online play, and thus online requirements, upon you.

And then there's old faithful, Diablo 4. The latest in the Diablo franchise and the first to offer no form of offline character creation whatsoever. Here the excuse is more ephemeral as Offline characters used to be a key part of the Diablo adventure for those that wanted nothing to do with leaderboards or seasons or any of that stuff. Now, however, it's almost as though Blizzard live in constant fear of their players cheating and thus need to be watching them twenty four seven- they're willing to risk the smoothness of gameplay to keep their servers hooked to people's systems, in such a manner that has cost high performance players their hardcore characters. Punishing players is one thing, killing them in a loading screen because the severs are feeling slow today is another altogether.

In an ideal world we'd all boast fantastically consistent internet connections that allow us to link wherever we need for however long- but we're far from that world. Some of us can't manage internet connections like that, can't afford to, or plain just don't want to. The clumsiness of Always Online requirements seems to consistently undermine the potential utilities and more often than not end up riling the fanbase into a frenzy. So why are we still doing this? I think it's one of those pendulum swing issues, that the industry is trying to normalise but the world just isn't as built-up as it looks like on a map. Maybe in the days when the Internet truly is as ubiquitous as we think it is, such concepts can be snuck under the radar until it becomes a way of life. For now, however, I think most of us just want to play a game and not worry about what our modem is up to.

So the Doom Soundtrack situation

 You're tearing me apart, Id!

I've actually been avoiding talking about this because it really didn't seem like my place and had turned into a real mud-slinging battle of 'he said, the other he said'. The last time something like this made headlines in the news it was the whole Bayonetta 3 pay debate debacle and that whole situation turned itself inside out like a slasher movie victim; and I didn't want to be in the middle of that kind of trap story again. But then people didn't stop talking about it, and then Bethesda threw out a statement! Why, you guys could have kept your head down and let Id handle this internally! I mean sure, Bethesda got shame rightful shame for this situation, but just cynically and corporate-mindfully; sometimes ignoring the bubbling drama is just the correct way to go about doing business! In fact, most of the time I'd say things turn out that way! But I guess now the matter is too bloated to rest.

Now first of all, I'm not exactly in the best of moods right now so forgive me if I get a little unfair with my characterisations. Let me preface wherever I'm about to go with the information that everyone is human here and no one person is some demon in human skin that lives only to disadvantage others; now that's out of the way, why did Id Software go out of it's way to screw Mick Gordon? If you're unfamiliar, Mick Gordon is the talented Australian composer behind the incredible DOOM (2016) soundtrack, the upcoming Atomic Heart and, until recently, believed to have worked on DOOM Eternal. I mean he did. He did work on DOOM Eternal. But it seems he less did work on that game, and more 'struggled to bring that game to life in the soundtrack' whilst battling the business deal from hell, from the sounds of things. Of course this is the follow-up to the whole debacle surrounding the DOOM Eternal OST which disappointed some musically intuned fans, stirring up a mud-slinging saga which has somehow persisted to today.

It started with Mick throwing fingers at Marty Stratton who in turn published a damning condemnation of Mick's professionalism and punctuality, throwing his credibility into question and stoking the fires of the more 'unhinged' fans out in the world. (People were legit sending verbose death threats over a video game OST. I have no idea how these people avoid getting institutionalised in daily life.) Now after years of the matter being settled, Mick has risen from the Twitter ashes to point fingers back at Marty for misrepresenting the issue and laying blame where it was not perhaps deserved. Or at the very least, totally dissolving himself of any rightful blame for the failure of the OST. Again, a failure that only seems to have been perceived by the musically attuned. Really does seem like a lot of chaos to stoke over such a niche issue, but them's the breaks.

The original slap by Marty claimed that Mick was unprofessional and couldn't deliver to the timeframe that they expected. He was uncooperative and ghosted them at the most inopportune moments. But Mick dips a little more context into the situation by explaining why it was that the set deadlines proved inopportune for the work on the soundtrack. According to his side of the situation, Mick was tasked with creating music at a crunch-rate in order to match the pace of development. The task before him was to create music that closely matched the gameplay, only to be given a timeframe in which he'd be making that music months before the levels they were for would be built up and worked on. Which is- difficult to say the least. When Mick bought up these issues and proposed a revised schedule that would better benefit the creative process, Stratton became incensed at his, presumably cost effective, schedule being questioned and immediately took to attacking Mick's credibility. For suggesting an improved work schedule. Sounds like a very 'hinged' man to me, I don't see what the problem is. (That's sarcasm, by the way. The man sounds very un-hinged.)

Claims go on to say that Mick wasn't paid for many months of his work, but he persisted anyway, even to the point where, thanks to the bad time scheduling, some of his tracks ended up being unsuitable for the levels they were blindly scored for, wasting months of work. Then, as Doom Eternal started to become more ambitious, the breadth of required soundtracks also expanded, further adding to the man's workload. From how it sounds Mick was just constantly at the receiving end of a kicking machine that didn't value his contribution to the game enough to take any of his concerns and tribulations seriously, resulting in a rough experience. And from the way he tells it, none of these issues are tied to his working competency, but merely unrealistic and ill-thought out expectations running afoul of immutable reality.

But heads butt into each other during the crazy task of making a game, and one might be able to see scenarios where the bull rush allows an element to slip out of sink. I mean, making sure that doesn't happen would be the job of a competent producer; but let's not start questioning anyone's competency, eh? That never ends well. Where it starts to get vindictive is where Mick tells that after a falling out in which Mick learnt some of his pulled tracks were being used in marketing for the game without him being compensated, apparently Stratton reached out to offer a six figure settlement to encourage Mick not to speak about this situation publicly. Which would seem like a nice way to bow out of this total mess, if one of the conditions wasn't also that Mick had to publicly accept blame for everything that happened, including the poor mixing of the OST that apparently happened after he cut ties with the developers, basically tanking his own reputation in the industry forever more. Stratton basically offered him a retirement settlement; which is actually a little evil, if true. It doesn't matter how much you pay an artist, if they're blacklisted from the industry they love and have to struggle to book new roles from that point forward; you've destroyed that person. Mick really does paint out Stratton as a cartoon super villain in his take of events. 

Furthermore, this is just his take isn't it? As such, Bethesda went out of their way just recently to condemn Mick's statement as 'one sided' and 'incomplete'; whilst just hand-waving the fact that Stratton already provided his side on the matter. Heck, if we now have Mick and Marty's side on the same situations, why then that would make this a... two sided debate, then wouldn't it? But Bethesda haven't exactly made themselves out to be paragons of intelligent thought recently, so this utterly unhelpful and self-sabotaging butting-in to a situation in which they had nothing to add really does just fit their recent MO, doesn't it? Seriously, some one needs to find Bethesda's PR manager and have a real sit down about when exactly it's appropriate to self flagellate oneself on the public square. Which is never. It's never appropriate for a company to do that.

Soundtracks for video games should not be controversial, and I definitely shouldn't know the full name of your senior producer and composer. Mick Gordon is big enough for someone like me to know his work, but the second Stratton starts making headlines you know something had gone sorely wrong. Whether this story blossoms, if Stratton can claw any respectability back for himself, everyone is coming from this embarrassed and covered in egg over a game that was, let me remind everyone, a huge success. Widely loved and adored. I'm not saying that the success of the game in anyway invalidates the struggles that the creator's took to get there, Cyberpunk 2077 demonstrates what happens when you adopt that mentality; but you'd expect controversy this deep to be attached a train wreck like Saints Row or Gotham Knights; not Doom Eternal. Maybe after this is out of everyone's system, we can stop review bombing a frankly fantastic game and get to enjoying the love of the craft; that'd be really nice.

DRM

I want it.

Digital Rights Management, is there any less a sexy combination of words in our entire human lexicon? This is the process that the game industry wants to remind us more-and-more is absolutely essential for the privilege of gaming on home PC. When it comes to consoles, everything is usually handled on the manufacturers side so there isn't too much need to worry, but once you allow players potentially unfettered access to the files of your game, these companies feel it's only a matter of time before the entire industry collapses under the weight of piracy. And so they install special Digital Rights measures to ensure that we use their software exactly how they intend and do absolutely nothing else. In their eyes it's a harmless little counter measure that keeps their bottom line safe and that should be good enough. So if that's the case, why do so many folk shudder when they hear that dreaded 3 letter acronym? Well, I like to think it comes down to execution.

You see, when we explore the world of DRM, perhaps the single most infamous version of it comes in the package known as Denuvo. Denuvo came onto the scene quite a while back, but those who heard it's name knew it well for being the flawless DRM that could hold back game crackers practically indefinitely. This turned out perfect for all those studios who had tried their own home-brew attempts at protecting the copyright of their titles with mixed to terrible results. Now they had the boon of relying on a third party who presumably knew what they were doing. The system seemed to work too. In late 2014 FIFA 15 became the very first title to launch with Denuvo's protection and as such it resisted instant cracking. In fact it wasn't until a month later that a dedicated professional cracking group announced their intentions to test their talents on the Denuvo system. As such, 'Dragon Age: Inquisition' ended up being cracked two weeks after it's launch, which is an eternity in this world. Denuvo themselves seemed unfazed by this development claiming "All games get cracked eventually", they were just in it to protect the launch window.

All in all, this shaped up better than a lot of previous attempts at DRM, including the infamous 'always online' tag that stained many a game in the early to mid 2010's. This was a tactic in which games, even those of single player leanings, would require people to sync their data to an online server in order to prove that their copy of the game was legitimate. The big problem there being the fact that internet service areas are not quite as globe spanning as some like to think they are and that some people were locked out of their games if they couldn't connect. In fact, some games that require this online check to be performed everytime the game logs in, (As if the game is going to suddenly become fraudulent.) still require such checks today, only now they're searching for a verification server that no longer exists, rendering the game unplayable. (Looking at you: 'Tron: Evolution')

Then there are the stories of games that tried a little bit more of a slap-dash method only to have it bite them in the behind later down the line. One of the most infamous DRM stories of this nature hails from Ubisoft in their classic tactical shooter; 'Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2'. (Which is a banger, by-the-by) Back in 2008 that game received a patch that inundated lucky players with a slew of cool gameplay upgrades and tweaks, all for the low, low price of absolutely nothing. It was Ubisoft's little way of giving back to the fans that helped make their game successful, and so they wanted to add in a little way to make sure this update went exclusively to those fans. (And not to the nasty pirates who might have got it.) And so Ubisoft introduced a 'Disk Check' with the update to unsure that the inserted disk was legit. So far so good except... wait, aren't digital game purchases a thing? Yup, Ubisoft managed to patch out a vast number of their player base with an ill thought-out DRM measure and ended up having to work overtime in order to fix it.

This whole debacle is hilarious to sift through after the fact but at the time it was quite the serious and embarrassing blunder. Cutting a huge chunk of the audience off from the game they paid for is a huge nightmare for many a software purist and this sparked concerns about the future of software ownership, concerns which are still alive to this very day. (If Ubisoft could just flick a switch and lock everyone out, what's to stop them from doing that with malicious intent?) But folk needn't have worried because the problem was eventually fixed. "How" you ask? Well it seems that their 'disk check' was so ramshackle that no one really could figure out how to exorcise it from the code, so they ended up having to download a cracked version of their own title and ship that out instead. That little stunt was discovered after Ubisoft forgot to fully remove the cracker's signature from the game credits. (That's a "Whah Whah" Trumpet moment if ever I've seen one.)

Denuvo spelled the end of all that 'wild west nonsense' by, and bear in mind that I'm no software engineer here, implementing a system that constantly checks the validity of game files during play. So that's that, everything has been resolved and we can all bow down to our Denuvo overlords, right? Wrong. For you see this method of DRM actually came at quite the unacceptable price to all us gamers and wannabe-Lemongrabs out there, performance. Yeah, it turns out having another program running on top of your game can prove straining on the system, thus hurting framerate and making some games unbearable. This has been a problem that has plagued Denuvo even as it has risen in popularity amongst developers, encouraging crackers to get even better at removing said software for folk who just want their game to function well. In recent years Denuvo hasn't even been able to last the day against cracking attempts, and this is becoming more and more lauded by the gaming populace.

Denuvo even entered the headlines again recently, in fact, although it wasn't so much for the software itself as it was for the incompetence of the publisher responsible for implementing it; Bethesda. (Oh come on, guys! I want to be positive about you but you're making it so darn hard!) For the recently release of demon slayer simulator; DOOM Eternal, Bethesda wanted to make use of the latest version of Denuvo in order to protect those all important Week One sales. A little wrench was thrown into that equation, however, when Bethesda launched their game with a Denuvo free Exe file in tow, allowing the game to be cracked and repacked within hours. Heck, I stumbled upon a repacked version of the game by accident the day after release, their silliness did this game dirty. Of course, I doubt any of this will significantly hurt DOOM's sales, which is good, but is does make for a funny story on how ineffectual DRM attempts can be.

In the future perhaps the question will come up of how important DRM really is in our everyday world of software management. Whereas Bethesda and Ubisoft may swear down by it until the day they die, other developers like CDPR disagree and in fact take a whole different stance to tackling piracy altogether. At the end of the day, however, they are all just precautionary measures to tackle a theoretical issue. Modern day software piracy hardly costs the modern AAA gaming world anything and although those companies might argue this is due to their hard work, there have been discussions which indicate this might not be the case. For the indie world, however, I'd argue that DRM is a necessity, as they need all the profit they can get. At the end of the day this is moot, publishers will continue to bow to DRM whether it harms their games or not, all we can do is pray that get better at implementing the damn things.

World on Lockdown

Canto Della Verbena

Oh, I tell you stuff that you already know too much on this blog? Well here's a doozy then; the world's on lockdown! (Wait, you knew that too? damn...)The Covid-19 outbreak, which I can now officially refer as an epidemic (Thanks: whoever is in charge of how spooked everyone is!) has resulted in a ludicrous amount of delays and concessions across the whole world. Folk all over are now practising the noble art of social distancing (Nice luck getting as good as me, guys. I've had years of practice) and people are finding themselves being ordered to stay inside in order to keep safe. Those who are forced to leave the sanctity of self isolation early, usually come to stock up on supplies like this is some end of world scenario, and come kitted out with face masks as though this is an airborne contagion which, by-the-by, I'm fairly certain it isn't. The only thing that mask will save you from is if someone infected literally coughs in your face and even then it's still going to get in your eyes. (I'm sorry, I'm just sick of seeing those damn masks everywhere... What is this, Japan?)

As people spend more and more time on the indoors they are forced to partake less in outdoor activities and more with the indoor ones. That means no more going to the movies in order to sit in a dark room with a bevy of potentially infected strangers, (Leading to the delay of several movies and the bombing of every movie who refused to budge) no more huge city-wide events and gatherings like parades and the like (Unless you live in Germany, because apparently they know something we don't) and a lot more video calls into your company whilst you receive some work-from-home time. (Unless they can't facilitate that, in which case you can bet they'll still drag you in, Covid or no.) And just to make matters worse, it seems that even our immortal celebrities aren't immune to the hand of the virus any longer. Tom Hanks was diagnosed with the virus not so long back and England's own Idris Elba received a similar diagnosis. (Good lord. I guess this is real serious now!) In such dark and desperate times I feel it behooves us to just forget about everything else and do what god intended, stay up late and play videogames.

I mean, why not? If you've got the games and the time, now is the perfect time to catch up on all those titles you missed out on back in the day. And because of the constant worldwide production shutdowns that are occurring, next year will be the perfect year to catch up on all those TV shows that you've missed out on over the years (because there's going to be literally nothing on to watch.) Today's collective quarantine may be bad news for the movie going world (and the movie news world, as all the news is just about cancellations) but this is nectar for the gaming world and I'm sure many company's are rubbing their hand together thinking of the record sales days to come. (Except for Obsidian, who have delayed their Switch launch of Outer Worlds for some reason.) 'DOOM Eternal' is likely going to do gang busters when it lands tomorrow and next month's Resident Evil 3 and Final Fantasy 7 practically have themselves a shoe in for healthy sales. (Good thing too. All those games deserve it.)

There have been some instances, however, where the opportunity to swoop in and take advantage of this surprise free-time abundance has been a little too overwhelming to fully exploit. At least, that's the only excuse I can think of to explain the mind-mindbogglingly dumb situation that has affected the NBA 2K20 world. For those who haven't heard, the real-life National Basketball Association has decided to halt it's season early amid cries from uppity players who 'refuse to play in empty stadiums.' (Not that I blame them, I just think it's funny that's where they draw the line. Risk of getting Corona? No that's fine. But empty stadiums? Imma throw a tantrum right here!) Such a situation would encourage basketball fans to take their Basketball time to the digital world instead, maybe even make use of that game's simulated mode to imitate the results that they might have seen if the matches had gone ahead. But that would have been a mistake.

You see, as soon as booting up the simulated match mode, which traditionally reads the stats and match-ups that are planned in the real world, the API apparently enters an infinite loop because whatever third party information source it relies on is currently reading blank. What results is a bunch of buffering, not much loading, and eventually a CTD for the user. (Outstanding programming guys!) Now, immediately this has drawn parallels to WWE 2K20 which famously broke down on January 1st because the developers apparently didn't think to code their game to account for the change in decade, prompting the game's new nickname; Y2K20. There are, to be fair, some key differences here. Namely, that WWE's bug was caused by plain unadulterated incompetence whilst this one is due to a unforeseeable world event, but this does betray how fragile these systems are, doesn't it? Sports games certainly aren't built to last these days.

Since then the bug has been fixed and everything is back to business as usual. 2K have patched the system to work purely off of planned matches going forward until those run out; then, who knows. The majority of the industry, however, are currently thriving in this activity vacuum and I do find that rather encouraging for my favourite pastime. Nioh 2, for example, seems to be tracking pretty well for it's first few days, even though it released as a Playstation timed exclusive again (Sony are really starting to become one-trick ponies these days, huh.) and Ori and the Will of the Wisps in enjoying some attention. Not to say that these titles wouldn't have done well under normal circumstances, but a little more success than usual is never something to scoff at.

I do fear for what this will mean in the near future, however, once all the big titles that have been announced drop and we're left with all the games that should have been announced this year but didn't get their stage. I've mentioned it before, but literally every gaming press event has been cancelled in the last couple of weeks and that's completely shot the marketing cycle for a lot of games. I mean, don't get me wrong, the big hitters will be fine. Sony have their own live show, Microsoft is following suit and Bethesda will probably piggyback off of that since the rumour is that this year will be the big info drop on the long awaited Starfield. (I don't care about Ubisoft.) But the smaller guys haven't really got a recourse, and that saddens me a little. (Don't tell me Soulstorm is going to be delayed! I've waited so long...)


So this is the state of a world in lockdown, general disarray everywhere but a temporary boost to the videogame market. The months to come are surely going to prove trying for everyone as we scrounge to the ends of the earth to find those precious last rolls of toilet paper, but at least we'll have a steady stream of exciting titles to keep us busy in the meanwhile. until then it's important to remember the basics like, don't panic, practise proper basic hygiene, and stop buying 2K products, seriously what the hell is wrong with you people? Here's hoping that everything clears up in the months to come and people stop callously hoarding for no reason. And I'm serious about that, there is literally no reason. What are you hoarding for? Do you really believe this is Armageddon? Because if it is, then don't you think you need a bit more to survive than toilet paper? If the world is literally about to end then here's an idea, just die! If you don't have what it takes to survive in a post apocalyptic hellscape then what's the point of hoarding supplies? To prolong your life just that little bit longer, whilst making yourself a target for folk to come and take it from you? Seriously, what is the endgame for you people? I just feel like no one ever thinks a potential apocalypse through whilst that's literally all that goes through my head everyday. Hmm... I'm rambling? Oh right, I should probably just stop writing now...