Featured image: “Drinks, Blood, and Vacation!” by WMDiscovery93.
(Spoilers.)
The highly anticipated Doom Eternal, which treads some of the same ground as Doom II: Hell on Earth, released today, and some mad lads have already played through the whole damn thing.
I’ve long been intrigued by Doom and have often wished for a respectable interpretation in another medium such as movie or novel, though most such attempts have been flubs. There was the series of Doom novels by Daffyd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver, which reinterpreted the demonic invasion as an invasion of space aliens, thereby entirely missing the point, and there was also the widely panned movie starring Dwayne Johnson, which reimagined the demons as genetic mutations.
I do understand there is a novelization of Doom III, which I only learned of recently, but aside from it, interpretations of Doom into other media have shied away from the core concept of an invasion from hell—which is to say that they’ve missed the entire point.
Doom Eternal made some waves because of its promise that you might fight angels as well as demons, though the final product, if the cutscene movie posted above is any indication, suggests that the designers ultimately moved away from that idea. In place of God is some being called Khan Maykr, and in place of angels are the Maykr’s servants, who don’t do much except shoot beams of energy out of their heads. The story, too, seems sketchy, suggesting either that this cutscene movie is incomplete or that the game’s creators failed to flesh out all their ideas.
Trying to piece things together (I may have some of this wrong), it appears that Khan Maykr is doing what the UAC did in the first game, using “Argent Energy” to power her world, which would die without it. Argent Energy is created in hell from damned souls, so Khan Maykr lets demons destroy other worlds so she can preserve her own, though the demons cannot enter her own world, and she cannot enter theirs. The world of Argent D’nur formerly worshipped her as a goddess or prophetess, and she ultimately betrayed them, turning three Argentians into “hell priests” who assist her in the invasion of Earth, which is intended to gather more souls to provide her with energy.
Perhaps most interesting to longtime Doom fans, Doom Eternal makes it explicit that the “Slayer” who first appeared in Doom 2016 is in fact the same as the “Doomguy” of the original games. Somehow or other, the Sentinels of Argent found him and made him one of their own, and some continue to oppose him even after the Khan Maykr betrayed them. Doom Eternal not only refers to him as the “Doomguy,” but also uses some of his dialogue from the goofy “Doom comic.”
Perhaps most interesting, at least to me, is that Doom Eternal contains some Easter eggs referencing an obscure bit of lore from the franchise. The original Doom game ended with an image of a rabbit’s head on a stake; this image was meant to indicate that the demons had invaded Earth and therefore set up for Doom II. However, fans quickly got the idea that this was the Doomguy’s pet rabbit, and that he was slaying demons to avenge the rabbit’s death.
This got (semi?)canonical affirmation in the expansion Thy Flesh Consumed, which ended with a brief scene indicating that the dead rabbit was indeed the Doomguy’s pet, and that its name was Daisy.
There were a few small gags making reference to Daisy in Doom 2016, and she apparently appears in some gags in the new Doom Eternal as well.
Everything I’ve heard about the gameplay on this game indicates that it’s superb, but I’m not a gamer myself; I’m a story guy, and from what I’ve seen so far, I do think the story should have been fleshed out in parts. I started exploring Doom Eternal with the question, “What is the Khan Maykr?” and having sat through a cut-scene video of the game, I find I’m still asking the same question.
The game’s ending, too, seems anticlimactic to me. Although it looks like an epic boss fight, that’s pretty much it: The Slayer himself has personally gained nothing from all this hardship despite warnings and promises from other characters. It almost makes me think the Slayer should have had a love interest—but since that isn’t right for the character, it makes me think he should have had something else to to care about, maybe a pet or mascot character.
interestingly, because of a delay, Doom Eternal ended up releasing on the same day as Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This coincidence led to a lot of fan art depicting the Doomslayer with Isabelle, a fan-favorite character from Animal Crossing.
To me, images like this just look right, as if this is what Doom is missing. The protagonist of Doom needs something personal to fight for, perhaps something to protect or avenge. Daisy could have served this purpose, and that may be why the brief image of a rabbit so captured fans’ imaginations in the first place.
There is, I understand, a “hidden” bunny in each level of Doom Eternal, a nod to the fan-created lore, but of course that isn’t anything quite like a fully developed character.
This isn’t a serious criticism of the game, but I think the Doom reboot may have missed an opportunity by failing to make Daisy the rabbit the cute mascot sidekick of this franchise.
