“Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.”
John D. Carmack, Lead Programmer of Doom
This quote in reference to Doom is somewhat famous in the games industry, and often used to devalue the importance of good writing in games. The major mistake people make when they hear it is assuming that because the narrative is unimportant, no effort must go into its construction or presentation.
The narrative presentation of Doom 2016 is downright elegant in its simplicity. It works almost entirely with concepts and environments that don’t need explanations. Hell, demons, evil corporations, space stations, all these elements can be simply construed with minimal explanation and environmental storytelling, ensuring nothing stands in the way of gameplay. Doom 2016 HAS a lot of interesting lore, but it exists only to add extra depth or clarity to what is already easily understood.
Indeed, the lore and narrative being secondary to the gameplay was actively baked into the game via fantastic characterization. The player character never speaks and ignores anything that doesn't directly assist his desire to shoot demons.
For a game like Doom where the entire appeal lies in mechanics and not narrative, it's a brilliant way to have your cake and eat it too. Doom 2016's writers and designers understood that just because the story is “unimportant,” it can still greatly improve the game. Indeed, they actively used the story’s unimportance to influence the player's experience, define the protagonist's personality, and enhance the specific "go fast and kill everything" power fantasy first coined by Doom.
Then came Doom 2016’s sequel: Doom Eternal. This time, the writers took a very different approach. The story began to take itself seriously. Too seriously, in fact.
Not only did the lore documents become required reading to understand Doom Eternal’s narrative, but that lore began actively interrupting gameplay instead of sticking to the background. On one particularly egregious occasion, the came became a full-blown walking simulator, demanding the player march down a series of empty corridors while collecting and reading pages of expository information.
This, however, is only a symptom of Doom Eternal’s true problem. Unlike its predecessors, Doom Eternal abandons its narrative reliance on preestablished concepts to introduce new locations like “Argent'Dnur;” a full-blown fantasy world with dragons, knights, and buckets of unintuitive and dense lore.
Unlike Hell, Earth, and Heaven, "Argent'Dnur" has no ties to the widespread theology or simple sci-fi that defined Doom as a franchise for almost 30 years. This perhaps would be acceptable if the game's narrative was well-written enough to warrant the player's attention, but it absolutely isn't. It's convoluted, melodramatic, and operating on a cosmic scale completely detached from moment-to-moment gameplay.
While Doom 2016 proved even an unimportant story can enhance the player’s experience if written well, Doom Eternal proves that an unimportant story can absolutely detract from the player’s experience if written poorly.
Last of my gripes is the presentation of the "Makyrs" and "Urdak," Doom’s rendition of angels and heaven respectively. Stylistically and visually both fit in great with what came before, however those goofy fantasy names stand in stark, immersion-shattering contrast to Doom's classically straightforward conventions. It would be akin to calling demons "Brekyrs" and hell "Domak."
When building on a franchise as old and established as Doom, you don't want your new additions to feel tacked-on from the names alone.
Since “Urdak” is presented antagonistically, I understand the desire to not offend those of a religious persuasion, but there exist MUCH better options than grafting Tolkien names into a universe otherwise devoid of them. Call the angels "seraphs" hailing from "Elysium," for example. Those are easy synonyms JUST archaic enough not to ruffle feathers, while still being tied directly to the heaven-and-hell theology.
Building off this change, a lot of Doom Eternal's world-building problems could have been avoided had Argent D'Nur been swapped out for Purgatory. Narratively the role of Argent D'Nur exists as a place where angels enlisted/enslaved the player character in a crusade against demons.
Purgatory meanwhile was supposedly a realm between heaven and hell where people toiled to earn redemption. What better form of redemptive toil could Purgatory offer than that of a crusade? Plus, since this would parallel the recruitment tactics used during real-life crusades, Argent D'Nur's gothic knight aesthetic would continue to fit well.
While some of Doom Eternal's narrative problems remain simply too deep-rooted to fix, this single change would have allowed the narrative to remain both thematically coherent and far more intuitive, allowing for less overall interruptions to gameplay.
Secret!
〰️
Secret! 〰️
Doom Eternal: Why Good Writing Matters
“Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.”
John D. Carmack, Lead Programmer of Doom
This quote in reference to Doom is somewhat famous in the games industry, and often used to devalue the importance of good writing in games. The major mistake is assuming that just because the narrative is unimportant, it needn’t be told well.
The narrative presentation of Doom 2016 is downright elegant in its simplicity. It works almost entirely with concepts and environments that don’t need explanations. Hell, demons, evil corporations, space stations, all these elements can be simply construed with minimal explanation and environmental storytelling, ensuring nothing stands in the way of gameplay. Doom 2016 HAS a lot of interesting lore, but it exists only to add extra depth or clarity to what is already easily understood.
Indeed, the lore and narrative being secondary to the gameplay was actively baked into the game via fantastic characterization. The player character never speaks and ignores anything that doesn't directly assist his desire to shoot demons.
For a game like Doom where the entire appeal lies in mechanics and not narrative, it's a brilliant way to have your cake and eat it too. Doom 2016's writers and designers understood that just because the story is “unimportant,” it can still greatly improve the game. Indeed, they actively used the story’s unimportance to influence the player's experience, define the protagonist's personality, and enhance the specific "go fast and kill everything" power fantasy first coined by Doom.
Then came Doom 2016’s sequel: Doom Eternal. This time, the writers took a very different approach. The story began to take itself seriously. Too seriously, in fact.
Not only did the lore documents become required reading to understand Doom Eternal’s narrative, but that lore began actively interrupting gameplay instead of sticking to the background. On one particularly egregious occasion, the came became a full-blown walking simulator, demanding the player march down a series of empty corridors while collecting and reading pages of expository information.
This, however, is only a symptom of Doom Eternal’s true problem. Unlike its predecessors, Doom Eternal abandons its narrative reliance on preestablished concepts to introduce locations like Argent'Dnur; a full-blown fantasy world with dragons, knights, and buckets of unintuitive and dense lore.
Unlike Hell, Earth, and Heaven, "Argent'Dnur" has no ties to the widespread theology or simple sci-fi that defined Doom as a franchise for almost 30 years. This perhaps would be acceptable if the game's narrative was well-written enough to warrant the player's attention, but it absolutely isn't. It's convoluted, melodramatic, and operating on a cosmic scale completely detached from moment-to-moment gameplay.
While Doom 2016 proved even an unimportant story can enhance the player’s experience if written well, Doom Eternal proves that an unimportant story can absolutely detract from the player’s experience if written poorly.
Last of my gripes is the presentation of the "Makyrs" and "Urdak," Doom’s rendition of angels and heaven respectively. Stylistically and visually both fit in great with what came before, however those goofy fantasy names stand in stark, immersion-shattering contrast to Doom's classically straightforward conventions. It would be akin to calling demons "Brekyrs" and hell "Domak."
When building on a franchise as old and established as Doom, you don't want your new additions to feel tacked-on from the names alone.
Since “Urdak” is presented antagonistically, I understand the desire to not offend those of a religious persuasion, but there exist MUCH better options than grafting Tolkien names into a universe otherwise devoid of them. Call the angels "seraphs" hailing from "Elysium," for example. Those are easy synonyms JUST archaic enough not to ruffle feathers, while still being tied directly to the heaven-and-hell theology.
Building off this change, a lot of Doom Eternal's world-building problems could have been avoided had Argent D'Nur been swapped out for Purgatory. Narratively the role of Argent D'Nur exists as a place where angels enlisted/enslaved the player character in a crusade against demons.
Purgatory meanwhile was supposedly a realm between heaven and hell where people toiled to earn redemption. What better form of redemptive toil could Purgatory offer than that of a crusade? Plus, since this would parallel the recruitment tactics used during real-life crusades, Argent D'Nur's gothic knight aesthetic would continue to fit well.
While some of Doom Eternal's narrative problems remain simply too deep-rooted to fix, this single change would have allowed the narrative to remain both thematically coherent and far more intuitive, allowing for less overall interruptions to gameplay.
