Mind the Gap

After a satisfying day of work, it’s always nice to just finally fall over and hit the hay


Unless the “hay” looks like this…then it hits *you*

Now that we’ve finally made it to April, I can kind of take a small breather, having successfully done my tour of duty of hyper-productivity by posting everyday throughout March. The upside to doing so was staying incredibly active, and pushing myself to consistently write at a moment’s notice, in a respectable effort in continuing to hone my craft. The downside, as always is the case with this kind of content output, ends up being a wavering quality over time, I fear (though there was this recent banger I was particularly fond of.) Even as I type this now, I feel quite spent, both physically and mentally, lamenting the serious lack of gaming I’ve been so distant from during the process of trying to keep on top of putting the thoughts out there. I honestly probably should have taken the day off.


Though those ironically end up being more work
than relaxation by the end

Which is why this post is a short one, in any case. To that point, reading about early hands on with Doom: The Dark Ages isn’t really lighting my fire of interests involving the title, which is of deep concern to me, as I am a long time fan of the series quite eager to wet my whistle with the blood of the demonically fallen once again. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised by how reports are indicating how The Dark Ages are unfolding…as when you ratchet the bar up so much with rambunctious acrobatics and high-energy complexity that Eternal’s verticality represented, the only place you have left to go is downward. I’ve noticed when games want to pair down, after some mixed feedback of being “too much”, they usually kick to the curb some of the more interesting design dynamics in favor of novelty, and The Dark Ages sounds like it may be a victim of very much the same thing from reading early impressions, where the big focus seems to be on a far more stripped down, spread out, boots on the ground approach of the moment to moment gameplay.


Imagine this, but you know, lots of fire, too

I can’t help but feel the sidestepping approach of design, both literally and figuratively, in moving aside from a want of progress in favor of a more toned down dynamic within the Doom series feels like such a betrayal of where we went with Eternal’s focuses. One of the leads on the project (Hugo Martin) even said during the pre-hype phase of the release of the 2016 follow up went down the way it did was due to feeling like Doom 2016 was a bit too repetitive due to the lack of variety (and god damn do I wish I knew what interview that was [EDIT: Found it, check out around 5:30 for the critique), and now we seem to be inching closer back to that reality. Even though they’re very separate game series, I feel as if Mario has had similar hill and valley’s in it’s library, and when one title almost gets too ambitious with it’s jumping mechanics, the immediate followup ends up being this neutered novelty turning it’s back on diverse design choices to draw in a greater number of the lowest common denominators after negative feedback whines about the demanding action of the games pretense.

The customer is not always right, but second hand opinions on gameplay loop feels aren’t always, either.

~Pashford