Opinion: DOOM is Exactly as Violent and Bloody as It Should Be

immortalfrieza

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I'm not really going to even address this so called "controversy" because people like She who shall not be named are just a bunch of trolls screaming out for attention and nothing more and always have been.

My biggest concern with the new DOOM is what else there is to do besides running round corridors shooting anything that moves. I've played all the DOOM games and liked them, but up until 3 there literally wasn't anything else to do but run around shooting things, and that gets REALLY boring after awhile, and there isn't much replayability in it. DOOM 3 was easily the best game in the series precisely because there was atmosphere and attempts to tell a story on the side of just shooting stuff, (having an actual villain helped too) and thus it was much more immersive and interesting a game than DOOM typically is. If they go back to making it just another mindless shooter we've all seen a hundred times by now I doubt I'll be getting it.
 

09philj

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DOOM is violent. Always has been, always will be. Bethesda know what audience they're selling to and what tone classic DOOM had. This calls for full body evisceration of demons with a chainsaw. It's nothing we haven't seen before and done more disturbingly (E.G Bioshock Infinite). The demons should be threatening to the player, but the player must be able to mete out the same threat to them in kind. This is what made DOOM work in 1993 and will make it work again.
 

Hairless Mammoth

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Dynast Brass said:
Hairless Mammoth said:
People are complaining about the violence in Doom again? Number one: The creatures the player fights are hellspawn, not soldiers fighting for an ambiguous agenda that you can shoot in FPSes or innocent civilians you can massacre in sandbox games. (Might I also add that all of those are fictional, since we are talking about video games.) snippadon
NO! No you are NOT allowed to point out that pixels are not people. That would point out how stupid this debate is, and always has been. You would be exposing once again, the reality that this is ALWAYS pandering for attention and approval.

The devs pander to be "cool" and "edgy"
The politicians use it as a boogyman, and in doing so legitimize the pandering of the devs
The media uses it all as clickbait, because their audience is constantly replenished with people too young to remember the last time this happened, or people too angry to care.

Finally, the gamer likes to pretend that we're above it all, but the numbers show we're being whored to because it WORKS.
Very true. It's an endless cycle, where everyone wants some kind of attention. It only dies down after a while and comes back when something catches the moral guardians collective eye.

Though, I just looked up "Doom 2015 criticism" and it does look like the very few taking their perceived moral high ground are doing so just to get more views and followers. From the low profile of this whole non-issue, I think most people are being smart enough to just ignore them. Like I said before, they will soon move on to the next subject to leach off of.
 

vallorn

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People complaining about violence in the game series that gave us this:


Obviously have no idea about the history of gaming. The original DOOM is a masterpiece of coding and many of the innovations they used serve as the groundwork for modern graphics engines. It's nearly universally popular as a "Can I run DOOM on this?" joke where people get the game to run on everything from graphics calculators to weird PC builds.

DOOM isn't just a landmark in the history of gaming, it's a landmark in computer science as well and to diminish that legacy in favour of a "OH NO BLOOD AND GORE! MY FEELS CANNAE TAKE IT!" screaming match is, at best silly, and at worst incompetent and cowardly.

I'm just so happy that there's no regenerating health or anything like that. Let's see if DOOM 4 can be to DOOM what The New Order was to Wolfenstien...
 

CaitSeith

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If the new Doom is being declared too violent, then it definitely is doing something right. XD

Now let's wait and see if the gameplay also is up to par.
 

Ihateregistering1

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If anyone is interested, a whole bunch more gameplay has been released (for some reason I keep getting an error when embedding the video):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljpBwguIqos

The game looks great, and the weapons certainly feel powerful, but I'm really not liking this new focus on melee so much, it makes the protagonist seem too powerful. One thing I liked about Doom 3 was that it really made me feel like I was up against insurmountable odds fighting against these demonic hellspawn as just a grunt. Now our guy is packing power armor that apparently makes him stronger than the creatures he's fighting, to the point where he can literally tear them apart with his bare hands. That kills a lot of the sense of dread for me.

It also looks like they're not getting rid of the randomly teleporting in baddies, which is fine as long as they don't continuously have them teleporting in behind you. That was really annoying in Doom 3.

I'm also not digging that they've gone back to 'your weapons never need reloading', but that might just be me.
 

KoudelkaMorgan

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I'm curious of the kinds of creative liberties they would need to take to adapt new Doom to a Chex Quest reboot lol. I thought the reveal was okay. As most have pointed out, the graphics being one step away from sepia toned garbage was a large negative to me.

Everything else was alright, I imagine I'd just ignore flashing enemies after a while having grown tired of the finishers anyway unless they made it integral.
 

Correal

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As stated before the execution animations will get old fast and the chainsaw looked to be a set auto kill animation in use. Hope it's not that way in the release version or at least some sort of option to disable them. The yellow filter in use though has to go as it ruins the looks of just about everything. I like my colours :)
 

Skatologist

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MarsAtlas said:
... who said it was too violent? Well, other than She Who Shalt Not Be Named And Who Feeds Off Our Negative Energy? It didn't seem bloody enough to me. It was also too dark, needed to be brighter.The executions will get very tiresome as well. They need to come up with a way to do executions while still moving. Maybe lunging at a demon and using its face as a blood slick?
Well bloody =/= violent necessarily so I'm not sure why you're thinking it isn't violent enough. Many people criticized the palette. I was honestly surprised how Hell had looked so...plain.

And here's your daily reminder, it's games like DOOM that make certain people feel the "gamer" label can not apply to them because they don't enjoy FPSs that focus solely/primarily on killing.

Encaen said:
As for you, I'll leave the words of former staff member/EIC right here:

[tweet t=https://twitter.com/SusanArendt/status/610333540660543489]

[tweet t=https://twitter.com/SusanArendt/status/610334074373148672]


Needless to say I don't share your opinion on this. Whether it be the line of "global gaming self censorship", setting back the industry for not enjoying DOOM, bringing back boogiemen like Jack Thompson, or essentially saying "you're allowed to critique this new DOOM, but only if you're a fan of old DOOM", I'm no fan of this piece. That last one seems most ironic since you seem to want to get away from that gamer stereotype, yet when some within the industry don't have your opinion, well obviously they shouldn't be accepted within the industry in your eyes.

Despite criticisms people have levied at the new DOOM so far, some of which were beyond your view of people crying "ze violence!" some of which are also my own, I'm taking the stance of staff member [user]The Wooster[/user] and remaining optimistic for the game.
 

lacktheknack

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People keep talking about the "Controversy around the old DOOM"...

...I'm sorry, WHAT controversy around the old DOOM? I'm pretty sure the mythical Nude Raider made a bigger stink than the original DOOM.
 

teh_Canape

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Skatologist said:
MarsAtlas said:
... who said it was too violent? Well, other than She Who Shalt Not Be Named And Who Feeds Off Our Negative Energy? It didn't seem bloody enough to me. It was also too dark, needed to be brighter.The executions will get very tiresome as well. They need to come up with a way to do executions while still moving. Maybe lunging at a demon and using its face as a blood slick?
Well bloody =/= violent necessarily so I'm not sure why you're thinking it isn't violent enough. Many people criticized the palette. I was honestly surprised how Hell had looked so...plain.
Hell looked very much like more of an alternate dimension (which is what Hell is supposed to be in Doom canon) than, well, hell itself
but yeah it was very off-looking
hell, it was more like the fucking Fade from DA3, though I do wonder who goes around setting up all those chandeliers and carving those hell baron statues
 

Something Amyss

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Anyone remember that episode of the Simpsons where Bart joins a boy band? For some reason, I'm reminded of the promoter trying to stir up controversy by telling everyone the Principal was against it.

lacktheknack said:
People keep talking about the "Controversy around the old DOOM"...

...I'm sorry, WHAT controversy around the old DOOM? I'm pretty sure the mythical Nude Raider made a bigger stink than the original DOOM.
For basically that reason. The controversy surrounding Doom seems largely to be people disproportionately claiming their was controversy around Doom.
 

Ihateregistering1

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Zachary Amaranth said:
lacktheknack said:
People keep talking about the "Controversy around the old DOOM"...

...I'm sorry, WHAT controversy around the old DOOM? I'm pretty sure the mythical Nude Raider made a bigger stink than the original DOOM.
For basically that reason. The controversy surrounding Doom seems largely to be people disproportionately claiming their was controversy around Doom.
Being the old fart that I am, I know when the original Doom came out there really wasn't much controversy besides its use of Satanic symbolism, but that was basically the same people who complained that Magic: The Gathering was Demonic (ie. a really tiny minority). Doom came to the front page a whole lot more when the rumor got spread that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (the Columbine shooters) had created a Doom level of their high school to 'practice' for their massacre, and some rumor got spread that they had written or talked about committing the massacre and said it would be "just like Doom".

From what I've heard, neither story was actually true, but that didn't stop it from sending the usual suspects into a tizzy.
 

ryan_cs

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iseko said:
Graphics look pretty shit. But... Yeuy DOOM. People are still complaining about too much violence?
The graphics look great, it's aesthetics that look pretty shit.

OT: There were people that complained about the violence? Where? (Actually, now that I think about it, I don't want to know.)
 

Infernal Lawyer

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I'm guessing that this video was shown the main stage at E3, which might explain why people who "aren't fans of Doom" might be complaining about it.

Anyway, my feelings are mixed. They're entitled to their opinion, though of course everyone else is entitled to THEIR opinion about their opinion. That and... well, it's not like this is anything new, is it? We've had blood and gore and execution scenes before.

Still, I have to laugh at the guy whining about "people cheering at the sight of bodies being cut in half." Er, even ignoring the fact that it's a GAME... we're talking about motherfucking DEMONS here. Are we REALLY protesting against violence towards the spawn of Satan?
 

Something Amyss

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Ihateregistering1 said:
Being the old fart that I am, I know when the original Doom came out there really wasn't much controversy besides its use of Satanic symbolism, but that was basically the same people who complained that Magic: The Gathering was Demonic (ie. a really tiny minority). Doom came to the front page a whole lot more when the rumor got spread that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (the Columbine shooters) had created a Doom level of their high school to 'practice' for their massacre, and some rumor got spread that they had written or talked about committing the massacre and said it would be "just like Doom".

From what I've heard, neither story was actually true, but that didn't stop it from sending the usual suspects into a tizzy.
Yeah, I played the original Doom when it was new (ish) both on PC and (later) SNES. There were the usual questions of violent video games, but nothing really above and beyond.

One of the Columbine kids did make Doom levels, but there's been no evidence of the levels that resemble the school. It was, far as we can tell, a myth based on the existence of modified Doom levels. But it's an appealing myth, so it persists. Much like the epic controversy of Doom.
 

LetalisK

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Zachary Amaranth said:
For basically that reason. The controversy surrounding Doom seems largely to be people disproportionately claiming their was controversy around Doom.
It's because we take social media, Twitter being the most apparent platform, far too seriously and exaggerate its impact. I feel like most gaming controversies in the past few years can be traced back to this principle.