HiGame

After a whopping eight years in development, Bethesda has finally given a date for the next iteration of Doom. On May 13, players will finally suit up as, erm, Anonymous Space Marine, to take on the forces of Hell and/or an evil corporation. It’s all a bit vague, you see. All of Bethesda’s trailers have been heavy on action, extremely short on gameplay, and today’s launch trailer is no different.

Today’s launch trailer builds on the E3 gameplay trailer that came out last year. Both show a game that’s exceedingly heavy on action and apparent combos — tearing off limbs, gouging out eyes, being ripped in half by a Cyberdemon — you know, the usual events of an Anonymous Space Marine’s life.

If the gameplay trailers are anything to go by, Bethesda’s Doom is a different beast than the brooding, jump-scare, darkfest that was Doom 3. id’s 2004 shooter may have sold well, but as someone who loved both Doom and Doom 2, I couldn’t get into it. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 debuted within months of each other, but the contrast between the two couldn’t have been larger.

Half-Life 2 was one of the first FPS games to successfully integrate object manipulation and physics into the game engine (we shall not speak of Trespasser). Doom 3, in contrast, relied on static environments and a number of already-tired tropes in the genre. Enemies that spawned behind you or leapt out from hidden closets in rooms you’d thought you cleared might have been cutting edge in 1993 and 1994, but they were already worn thin ten years later.



As for this new Doom, it looks a fair bit like the Brutal Doom mod for the modern game. I’ve actually spent a fair bit of time playing Brutal Doom this year, and it’s a hilariously fun way to replay the original maps. Scavenged weapons, grenades, mouselook, fatalities, and many of the other tweaks collectively update the classic Doom, while simultaneously remaining true to the original title in a way Doom 3 never managed. The mod effort to implement Doom’s shareware levels in Doom 3’s engine were much closer to the original game, in my personal opinion.

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