Doom Eternal
The hellish shooter returns with new toys and old friends
It’s called the ‘Meat Hook’: a pair of spikes that sit under the barrel of the shotgun. When fired, it rockets forward on a chain, attaching to demons and letting the player pull themselves to their target. The possibilities of new movement options and combo attacks are already tantalizing in Doom Eternal, and it doesn’t even come out until next year. The sequel to id’s Doom reboot was announced at E3 with a brief teaser, but it was officially revealed in August at QuakeCon with long, unbroken minutes of carnage-filled in-game footage. Throughout the weekend of QuakeCon, at panels and interviews, id Software’s executive producer Marty Stratton and creative director Hugo Martin laid out Eternal’s new features like the Meat Hook and old friends such as the arch-vile, the powerful boss demon capable of resurrecting its dead comrades, who was unseen in 2016’s Doom, but dramatically teased at the end of DoomEternal’s QuakeCon footage. We saw concept art of new locations as well, because not only are we going back to hell in 2019, hell is coming back to Earth.
Hooked
Among the new toys and abilities in Doom Eternal is a retractable knife mounted on the Doom Slayer’s left wrist, shown in the game footage cutting demon heads in half and plucking giant eyeballs from pain elementals. Players will carry a massive ballista that fires high-damage bolts, and will be armed with a shoulder-mounted flamethrower that can cook demons (hands-free) who will drop extra armor shards when they’re killed while on fire. There’s also new dash ability granting the player sudden bursts of speed to dodge attacks or close in for a kill.
The Meat Hook is probably the most exciting new tool, and while it might conjure up thoughts of attaching yourself to spires and ledges and swinging around hell like Spider-Man or Rico Rodriguez, it’s not quite that liberating. As much as it promises a new type of movement for Doom, this grappling hook also comes with limitations: You can only attach the hook to living demons, not architecture.
“You have to put limitations on the player, otherwise you give them nothing to master,” Hugo Martin tells a crowd of Doom fans during a QuakeCon panel.
“The restraint part is super important to us. In general, they say that the best parts of a piece of art is the thing that the artist left out, because they tend to enhance the things that are there. So, with a lot of these systems, the fact that we don’t let you attach to everything, or that dash isn’t instantly rechargeable—you can’t spam dash—there’s what the feature does, and where it stops.
“It’s very challenging when we’re discussing these things internally, because why wouldn’t that Meat Hook attach to everything? Or why wouldn’t you just dash nonstop? But again, we feel like that gap there is where player engagement exists.”
Mass destruction
In the original Doom games, the player could see themselves taking damage not just by glancing at their health percentage displayed in the UI, but by looking at the portrait of Doomguy’s face: The more damage the player took, the more bloody and miserable the space marine’s angry mug appeared. It took a couple of decades, but in DoomEternal the player will finally get to return the favor with a system Martin calls “destructible demons”. While you’re blasting, punching and burning demons, you’ll see the effects of your attacks on the monsters’ bodies. Their flesh will tear, blood will flow, features will degrade, they’ll lose limbs, and their armor will be peeled away.
you’ll see the effects of your attacks on the monsters’ bodies