My take on some of Doom Eternal's lore shown so far.

[Torok]

I posted this over on reddit aswell so if you've read it already you don't need to go through it again! Let's go!

 

Let's start from the latest E3 Story Trailer.
Specifically from the narrator.

Bear with me for one hypothesis, let's go ahead and pretend that the voice we hear in the beginning of Doom 2016 belongs to the same narrator in the story trailer for Doom Eternal, let's see where that might bring us.

In Doom 2016 we hear him/her (what's an angel's gender anyway hah, let's go with male) saying this:
"They are rage, brutal, without mercy, but you, you will be worse, rip and tear, until it is done."

In Eternal we have:

"What you interfer with now is bigger than you can imagine. (he sounds high and mighty)

If you continue, you will bring down the heaven's wrath. (menacing)

it is written, it is their/there time to give penance. (prophetical)

You are but one man (confident)

They are no longer your people to save" (he 
sounds angry at this point).

In the Slayer's Testaments we found in Hell in Doom 2016, precisely in the third, we are being told that the Seraphim bestowed upon the Slayer "terrible power and speed".
From all of this we can conclude one thing, the Slayer is "recognized" as a champion of Heaven, he was obviously just as badass before, but now he has the divine official trademark of badassery, his role in the divine plan is probably of keeping hell in check and making sure that what we could pretend is the "balance" of the doom universe is being upheld and preserved.
He would always fight back any invasion of the Hellish armies to our dimension and eventually even take the fight to Hell itself and make sure they don't get any funny ideas for some time (just a few aeons mind you).

Let me give you a piece of reference so that everyone can see where we can go with the Seraphim and the universe Id software is building. 

It all starts from this one Litograph coming bundled with the Collector Edition, it's called 
The gift of Argent Energy

This bad boy can fit so many theories we can literally go mental with it, but let's keep ourselves in check for now and let's focus on the Seraphim AKA Prometheus bestowing fire, here Argent Energy unto what I believe to be the sentinel humanoids, residents of Argent D'Nur or Sentinel Prime or whatever dimension they belong to.

The Seraphim has been appearing on several occasions in the modern Doom lore and he is now coming out to take on the role of what I would say is the mastermind or overseer of the hellish invasion of Earth in Doom Eternal.
Mind you he doesn't actually play an active part in it I think. 
The key word is in the trailer's words:
"It is written, it is there time to give penance."

You know the corrax entries? The Slayer's testaments, the hell scribes, there are sacred or unholy texts out there, hell there are even scribes in the poster who are all there to emphasize the idea of a developed and established destiny of the universe, some quite possibly cyclical religious theme where at some point humans have to be punished for their sins and what not.

The sins of humanity? Having grown so greedy and powerful that they have tapped into what isn't theirs to begin with, argent energy, something divine in nature that doesn't belong with them and that heaven doesn't want to be in the hands of humanity for long either, so they see the invasion of Earth as the natural course of event for the balance to be restored in the Universe and once all has been done and said they might go and give Argent Energy to some other civilization, or anyway I can't see that far, I lack imagination ad the tools.

What have we possibly speculated upon so far?
That the doom slayer's job at this point is over for the foolish heavenly faction who thought he was just doing their biddings, it's now time for Hell to invade and raze humankind, our hero's is now deemed unnecessarily and only an hindrance to the greater plan. Should he continue his interferance he will without a doubt force them to act and punish him for his intervention. 

"They are no longer your people to save".
This phrase is so powerful, especially since we don't know it's context, I've heard and read some people claiming that it ties into him being either the Doomguy, thus having his people being humanity as a race, or as the newly rebooted Doomslayer, meaning his people would specifically mean the Sentinels, of which he wore the crown, which have also since long been corrupted, the marauder (heavy speculations) being one of his former soldiers now turned evil and fueled by rage and anger into fighting his former king (you the doom slayer).
Anyway this phrase does really get into the idea of the Apocalypse where Humanity has to pay the price of their sins and suffer unspeakable pain at the end of demons and forces of evil, where some of them would even steep so low as to worship them in their madness.

To conclude, we have been proven that the mad lads at Id software have gone a long way to ensure the promise of last year's quakecon. They are and have been building a Doom Universe!
We have a fully fledged Heaven's faction that doesn't fear showing itself as it's backed by a possibly powerful lore in the forms of prophecies and tablets of history such as the litography shown to us. 
We have a goddamn ghost of a Sentinel King which begs us so many questions, weren't we the king? Or did we belong to a different order? The order of the Night Sentinels, who were the wraiths? Were they angelical beings who gave Sentinels access to Argent Energy?
So much food for thought, but it seems all planned out. 

If you want to continue speculating, try and find the similarities between the priest in the litography and the "betrayer" of Argent d'nur, he might be the same character!

It's very late and I'll cal it a night. I hope others can appreciate how much thought they've put into it and how much it works with the little things they gave us in Doom 2016, when even the developers themselves made stuff literally out of air just because it sounded cool but it turns out it works just fine once expanded upon! 

I'm talking about how Hugo Martin describes the Corrax Entry:

"So you walk eternally through the shadow realms, standing against evil where all others falter. May your thirst for retribution never quench, may the blood on your sword never dry, and may we never need you again. Corrax Entry 7:17"

I think it was in the Noclip documentary that he goes on about it saying that there wasn't much thought about it other than the fact that it sounded super cool for the emotion they wanted to inspire us with. A few years later and I'm sure they've gone and expanded upon them! 

I highly suggest you to go and check out the noclip interviews if you enjoyed sitting through this wall of text, cheers!

Edited June 13, 2019 by Torok

[Torok]

It's been a good few years since I last used forums so I'm sorry for formatting and anything, I've been mostly sticking to reddit as it's more populated usually but I'm glad to have found you! 

[bj25x]

Dude, I dig the enthusiasm. It’s funny how they “threw it together at the last minute” with 2016’s lore, but dammit if they didn’t strike gold. It’s awesome stuff. I’m stoked the Eternal collector’s edition comes with an official lore book, I already have mine on order.

 

In one interview at E3, Hugo directly said the answer to whether the Slayer is Doom Guy from the original games will be answered, or at least hinted at.

 

I don’t particularly want Heaven to become the enemy, but if it’s the Seraphim that is talking and who’s pictured on the mural, him/it whatever being rogue from heaven works fine. It’s interesting the Marauder is shown in Sentinel Prime, perhaps tasked by the Seraphim to stop the Slayer? So many questions.... could go a lot of ways, but I can’t wait to find out!

Edited June 14, 2019 by bj25x

[thewormofautumn]

I've a different take.

I don't think the original "rip and tear" voice and the new voice are the same. I think they are different characters. They also sound slightly different in timbre.

 

I think the new voice is actually someone speaking TO the person that turns into the Marauder (king of Argent D'Nur?). I think it's a demonic voice telling him not to interfere in the invasion (my gut is telling me it's Deag Grav talking to the Betrayer)

"They are no longer your people to save" could also be taken to mean the king has given up the right to his people after betraying them to save his son. If it's not the king it could still be the Betrayer, as the Sentinels were protectors of the people of Argent, so he would also be giving up on "his people".

 

The only part I reckon that is directed at the Slayer is "why are you here" at the beginning

Edited June 14, 2019 by thewormofautumn

[Ginsu0311]

I think all of it is directed at the Doomslayer. 

For some reason Heaven doesn't regard Earth the way it did Argent D'Nur, so they don't care to repel the invasion, I think? lol

[igg]

On 6/13/2019 at 6:59 AM, bj25x said:

It’s interesting the Marauder is shown in Sentinel Prime, perhaps tasked by the Seraphim to stop the Slayer? So many questions.... could go a lot of ways, but I can’t wait to find out!

In one of the new trailers we also see the Slayer fighting hordes of demons in Sentinel Prime.