Gifty

All these years I always hoped they would eventually reconnect with Trent Reznor, but I feel like their creative visions have gradually grown apart to the point that I'm not sure they'd even be a good fit anymore.

E3M2 cause I like to lend people a hand

Ok cool

We will be saved in the end by Bruce Campbell

I've mulled this issue over a lot and have even considered taking it on myself as an outgrowth of my Smooth Doom project. I've concluded that the best solution would be to create 3D meshes from all the original character sculptures and generate all new sprite assets from those, as doing anything like this by hand would require a full-time team the likes of which most mod communities can't support. I also think you can't go much beyond X2 the original asset resolution before things start to look cursed and weird.

It would make me supremely happy if they would cut their losses and just skip multiplayer entirely for Dark Ages and put that extra dev time into campaign polish and more post-game modes and content. It's been clear from the last two games that their heart's just not in it and someone's twisting their arm to slap MP on to comply with some outdated notion of a triple-threat blockbuster all-in-one game. (Full disclosure I did reasonably enjoy D2016's deathmatch and a lot of cool art design was squirreled away in there, but it was clearly an obligatory effort and not something I'd return to over any serious length of time)

Ah, for the class update days of yore...

I'm just glad we've escaped the mire of "hold shift to nauseatingly skew the FOV but not actually move any faster."

The thing about Doom 2 was it was made on a time crunch with basically no rules, so you have really high highs because of the experimental, sky's-the-limit attitude, but you also have really rushed and unpolished stuff padding out the low lows. Doom 1 is maybe less transcendent in exchange for a (relatively) more cohesive and smooth experience. It's really just two different approaches to the same game. (Not that different from the dynamic between D2016 and Doom Eternal, in fact) The sequel paradigm in the mid 90s was more expansion-centric and that can be an alien concept for people unfamiliar with that era. I wouldn't call it any more lazy than the sequel paradigm of today, just different and less expensive. But I don't think it tracks to call 1990s Id Software lazy when any sequel product they released was, in context, just a stopgap between huge technological shifts in which they basically threw out and rewrote the rulebook of first-person game technology every couple of years.

This seems to be part of a separate historical phenomenon of 90s game critics grading sequels on an inverted curve as sort of a matter of principle, because they were so spoiled for original games back then they could afford to be a little prickly towards franchising. Kind of miss that attitude, to be frank. :p

For a company that's built so much of its fame on pushing technological boundaries and always being forward-looking, it would seem unbearably sad in some way to just see them ape the technological aesthetic of their 90s work just because it's familiar and vibey.

"Doom 2 is terrible" seems to be some kind of increasingly self-perpetuating meme argument that is trying to Mandela everyone into thinking it's always been around.

I'm worried we're gonna get a lot more threads like this.

Makes sense that they might be going for a more measuredly-paced, dense combat design considering Deternal sort of pushes the verticality/speed about as far as it could reasonably go without turning into a titanic clusterfuck. If they tried to make the gameplay faster it would totally collapse in on itself. More exploration also sounds like exactly what the doctor ordered, as I loved Deternal's locations but the actual map design was a little barren of real secrets or detours.

New Id software titles are just about the only thing I DO get excited about (and recent gross market consolidation and staff mistreatment is definitely putting a damper even on that), but the commercial industry has been leaning more and more into a release paradigm that just isn't sustainable--something will have to give. Studios physically can not keep up with the level of development churn and personnel turnover that is now considered normal. There just literally won't be any studios left standing if the current rate of exploitation and liquidation continue apace, minus some stronghold studios like Blizzard or Treyarch who can rely on mostly unlimited hires through prestige alone. I sort of scoff whenever people say "games have just gotten SO expensive!" as if this is an unsolvable fact of the universe, when it feels that costs have mostly ballooned out of control due to wastefulness and bullheaded (un)coordination. Games ARE expensive, to be sure, but the industry seems to lack any sense of scale or economy in how it structures projects. Hundreds and hundreds of workers toiling away for months in isolated sub-teams, duplicating labor, doing labor that might get really far along before being axed, doing labor that is good but maybe at odds with the overall project direction... there's no reason things need to be this sprawling, this uncoordinated, this excessive. Smaller teams with better project management and, slipperiest of all, better project vision (think how much production sweat and expense Portal spared itself by taking a definitive stance early in development not to have fully animated, lip-synced, humanoid characters. Think what a disaster it might have been if a man from upstairs had come down and told them to reverse this a month or two before launch) would go a long ways towards controlling costs and producing games that ship functionally and on time. BUT, that won't happen without some kind of industry calamity because people who only understand capitalist ideology can only understand MORE! as the solution to any problem. Planning, craft, vision, foresight, these are all personnel-driven qualities, and as such not quantifiable commodities that business majors will ever trust.