It takes a shockingly long time for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Doom: The Dark Ages to let you do anything. Four minutes and 25 seconds pass before the latest entry in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:id Software's long-running first-person shooter series gives you control of the Doom Slayer. That might not sound like much, but when you have the controller in hand, ready to rip and tear, the wait is, ahem, eternal.
Reaching For The Doom Dictionary
The game starts off on the wrong foot, even before the cutscenes begin, with two pages of text that attempt to set the scene, but mostly just leave you wishing you had a glossary of Doom lore.
“You Control The Buttons You Press”: The Doom Twitter Account’s Response ⛄Remains The Gold Standard Defense Of G🐼ame Design
With Dooꦍm: The Dark Ages out, i꧂t's time to revisit an iconic social media moment.
"In the age of fire and ruin, when the legions of Hell first set foot on Ar♓gent D'Nur, another came… an outsider, his path to their world carved in blood, for the demons could not escape his wrath," the text reads, before continuing to a second page which is similarly defined by vague language and proper nouns. "The Night Sentinels, desperate and broken, saw in him a weapon. Their gods, ever watchful, saw something more. They bestowed upon him strength beyond mortal flesh, speed beyond thought — a gift now tethered to their will…"
I get that this is talking about the Doom Slayer. But this kind of opening text crawl is the least memorable way to introduce characters and narrative ideas. If the goal is to introduce characters in a way that immediately highlights who they are, what their world is, and what they want, action is the way to do that. Not action as in combat; action as in them doing something, not text that gestures vaguely at💛 something they did.
But showing characters in action on its own isn't enough, and the opening cutscene highlights that by having a whole lot of action that’s rendered nearly incomprehensible by the sheer number of story elements it's freighted with introducing. It has way too many characters in way too many locations saying way too many Proper Nouns. In that opening cutscene alon🐷e, The Dark Ages drops three title cards.
- Khalim: Planet of Argent D'Nur
- Sentinel Command: Planet of Argent D'Nur
- The Kreed Makyr's Ship: Stationed Above Khalim
Dialogue during this cutscene i൲nclude꧙s these vocab terms:
- Heart of Argent
- Valen
- Atlans
- Sentinel energy reserves
And we're als🌺o introduced to all these characters:
- Hell Priest
- The Witch
- King Novik
- Sentinel Soldier
- Commander Thira
- Bishop Kreed
- The Doom Slayer
We Should All Know Less About Argent D'Nur
This is just the opening cutscene. Four-and-a-half minu𒐪tes into a 15-hour game, and I've already got 14 different things to keep track of. It hasn't gotten any better in the hours I've played since, which ♚is a shame because I'm enjoying everything else about the game.
In a I watched before I played it, the YouTuber Skill Up said that you should probably just skip the cutscenes in Doom: The Dark Ages. I heard that and thought, ‘Okay, but he means other people can skip them, not me.’ I don't skip cutscenes. I once watched a friend skip through all of the dialogue in a quest we were playing together in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Elder Scrolls Online, and it shocked and repelled me. I play games for the story, the world, and the ꦰatmosphere. Skipping over all the information that provides context for those elements feels d🍨eeply wrong.
And yet, when I hit a cutscene in Doom: The Dark Ages, m༺y eyes slide off the screen. My𒅌 phone calls out to me like the Ring to Bilbo. I suddenly wonder if I have urgent emails to respond to, if I have a Duolingo lesson to do, if my dog needs to go for a walk. I still haven't skipped a cutscene. But I have never been this close.
🍷 After The Dark Ages, Doom Eternal Deserves A Second Chance
Eternal's mixture of speed, violence, and difficulty has aged like a fine,꧑ bloody wine.
