Post Script
Does Id’s new fascination with lore belong in its artificial worlds?
The first act of desecration in Doom happened before the first game was even finished, when John Romero and John Carmack threw out the Doom Bible. Id co-founder Tom Hall had slaved over the document, which detailed characters and backstory. He had planned an opening in which a demon burst in on off-duty marines playing cards; only Doomguy would survive. Before long, though, Hall was isolated from his peers and kicked out of the company. Figuratively speaking, his bible was burned.
What the two Johns realised was that Doom didn’t need a story – only a premise. The naturalistic scenes Hall had been pitching for levels paled next to the heightened, abstract realms Romero was building; strange, shapeshifting warrens that defied explanation through lore but compelled players forward.
Long after Romero followed Hall to the exit, Id stuck to those early principles – which is why it’s such a surprise to find Doom Eternal stuffed with lore. It’s a break from the form of 2016’s reboot, which presented a likeable satire of corporate care-speak. It encouraged you to question who was being sacrificed on the altar of your Next Day Delivery, but otherwise fired the Slayer straight ahead through an adventure that was more premise than plot.
The codex pages scattered throughout
Doom Eternal’s levels might not constitute an entire bible when bound together, but could easily fill a gospel or two. They carry an Old Testament tone, too, in declarative passages that concern seraphim and the sorry fates of ancient civilisations. It’s solid stuff, with your own mileage very much depending on your taste for Warhammer.
Most of the words are pushed to the background – while the Doom Slayer manages half a sentence in flashback, he mostly storms silently about his third-person cutscenes, as if his lines have yet to be added in post. But the campaign takes you on a tour of the worlds namechecked in the codex, and constitutes the closest thing the Slayer will ever get to an origin story. It revisits the formative places where the marine of the early games became the godlike figure of later iterations. We’ve been to hell enough times: doesn’t it logically follow that heaven is just another dimension in Doom’s universe?
Given all that backstory, it’s ironic that
Doom Eternal’s environments are more abstract than ever before. Even in the most grounded locale of Earth, invaded in the fashion Id had planned for its original Doom 4, the office blocks are chunky and modular, evoking Duke Nukem 3D and Lego City Undercover. The studio has embraced the nondiegetic, painting the skies with hovering dash tokens and the toxic seas with glowing pick-ups to refill your hazard suit. Breakable walls are marked by luminous green cracks, while bright blue health potions have returned to the streets for the first time since the ’90s. Id has decided that a world doesn’t have to appear real for you to believe in it. That new artificiality lets the studio’s designers play with the limits of their maps, while the writers happily fill out the codex.
Few will object to Doom Eternal’s prose, since so much of it is optional. And there’s an argument to be made that it fits a larger arc; where 2016’s Doom concerned the splicing of science with spirituality, this sequel finds faith overtaking the facts. But there’s a sense that its most satisfying storytelling still lies in the firstperson animations that began in 2016.
A running joke sees the Slayer impatiently thumbing the malfunctioning fire buttons of increasingly large cannons. And in one scene notable for its physical comedy, our objectivedriven hero drags a desk jockey to a keycard terminal by the lanyard around his neck. The sight of the petrified pencil pusher rolling along on the castors of his chair is likely to stick in the memory long after any lore about Sentinels and Wraiths has faded.