Anyone still remember Doom Eternal? No? Well, this must be a perfect time to write about its story and storytelling, obviously the most important part of the fast-paced retro FPS game.

In early 2020, Eternal was the absolute most hyped item in the gaming landscape. You really couldn’t go a day without hearing something about Eternal and how it was going to change the world and be the next coming of Jesus himself as he descends from the heavens with a pair of sunglasses and a loaded shotgun. But in retrospect the game seems to have as much lasting notoriety as a silent fart in a well ventilated room, and I think I have an inkling on why that is.

Yeah, it’s the story. The story sucks and it’s gotten across in an even worse fashion. Doom has never really been a terribly story-focused franchise. In the original game, the context was all hidden away in the manual and in a few choice paragraphs of purple prose between episodes, resulting from John Romero misplacing the script for his next D&D campaign during development, talking about the how badass the things the Doomguy just did are. You know, the actions you played through moments earlier.

So why talk about the story in a Doom game? Well, while Doom Eternal’s cutscenes have a total runtime about equal to an average animated YouTube comedy sketch, the backbone of what it tries to get across is so phenomenally bad, that even 4 years after launch (yes it really has been that long), the experience continues to occasionally piss me off during an otherwise perfectly fine day. I think the best way to explain the many, many shortcomings within Eternal is to compare it to 2016.

In case you’ve forgotten what 2016’s intro was like, because the game’s over 8 years old and we’ve all gone senile, here’s a recap in text. You wake up in a rock coffin, a gravestone if you will, and are immediately assaulted by zombies. Once you’ve dispatched all the zombies in the room, you’ve given a short hologram scene showing a (by this point) unnamed woman examining your terribly uncomfortable bed along with some sort of digging crew, pondering about how you shouldn’t be let out. The room over, you find your suit and a computer screen explaining that shit’s fucked, but we don’t really know precisely how fucked shit is until you go and fix the antenna array for the shifuck-o-meter the next block over.

All of this takes about 5 minutes (and even that’s a pretty generous estimate) and sets up several things: you’ve been fished out from somewhere that isn’t here, there’s an invasion going on, some sort of antagonist is trying to impede your progress, and to understand what’s happening, you have to use the facility’s analytics. The intro manages to raise questions as a way to keep you hooked, and the specifics of any of the people involved hardly matters immediately, since the goals are extremely clear: kill the nasty things and find a way to stop more nasty things from showing up.

Should be a pretty easy thing to top. Hell, 2016 even ends with a clear as day sequel hook with a portal leading directly to an invaded earth, with the screams of the damned ringing out and stopping just short of showing the giant cock that our planet has been fucked with. Cool, next up is doing the same thing but in our own cities and possibly even helping people? Sign me up. Thus, Eternal obviously starts with Doomguy pretending to be a 90s movie hacker in a space castle in orbit around the Earth.

What? Where are we? How did we get here? What is this place even? Who knows, Eternal never bothers to answer any of these questions. Before you’ve even managed to internalise the first set of questions, the intro cinematic ends and Doomguy teleports to… somewhere. According to a wiki it’s on earth, but I don’t think it’s ever specified in the game, and mostly looks like the Hell environments you see in the previous game and later in Eternal. Perhaps it’s Detroit.

You meet a Hell Priest and kill him. What the fuck is a Hell Priest? It’s a Priest from Hell. That’s about all you get. Minutes after that you’re sent off to Hell to meet some guy who’s dressed like Doomguy and he gives you a big blue battery. Who’s that guy? No idea, he never comes up again. A bit later on you go to some science lab to find Samuel Hayden’s mangled robotic corpse, the character who kinda sorta acted as an antagonist in Doom 2016 (being the inventor of the hell energy that caused the invasion in the first place). Dr. Hayden left to save earth at the end of Doom 2016. How did he end up here and why is he so mang– Can you stop asking these questions? I’m trying to get through this blogpost. The game constantly assaults you with nonsense names dropped like they’re supposed to mean something, with no further explanation ever provided. “You must journey to Korewa Nandesuka and meet Baron Whofuckingcares and he will give you the great artefact of Muro Lusikkar” and you go there and do that and it feels like precisely nothing has been moved forward.

So what about player goals, what’s the main point of the game? Liberating earth I guess, but it’s not really clear how we do that and indeed, how it even happened by the end of the game where earth has ostensibly been liberated. The game pretends to have some sort of arc as King Novak (another character with no introduction who appears precisely twice) calls Doomguy a cunt at the start of the game, and at the end of the game phones Doomguy as he’s chilling in his space castle to tell him that he was actually a pretty alright cunt all along.

While Doom 2016 too did have backstory to Hell and back, all of it was hidden away in a bunch of codecs and optional materials in the game’s ten gazillion submenus. I never read most of them, because research is for nerds and pausing the game is for pussies. The backstory and world themselves also never became internal to the gameplay or level-to-level progression where your current goal is always along the lines of “destroy the demon spawner tower” or “kill the really mean demon cuz he’s really mean and also a demon”. It’s extra fluff for the players who do find themselves intrigued by the game and want to immerse themselves into the world further, but doesn’t hurt the players who just want to play the game.

Contrary to popular belief, even a baseline plot does add to a game. A basic explanation of what the current location is and why you’re there goes a long way to establish a solid backbone, even for the kind of gamer who doesn’t really care about the story and just wants to get on with the gameplay. Eternal completely misses both of these strengths and crams as much of it as possible directly into the main story path, while cutting the rest. As a result the game’s overall plot is both always in the way and utterly incomprehensible. At the end, all you’re really left with is mostly a bunch of disconnected plotlines and names related to Hell lore without understanding what they mean or how they fit into any other part, like watching a random episode of a soap opera on TV.

In the years since Eternal’s release (and even before that), we’ve heard horror stories of id Software’s management and the terrific rush to release. I think the plot isn’t the only part that shows what a rush the development was, the combat ends up being rather repetitive by the end and the game barely tutorialises most of the gameplay mechanics, opting to send in a fax that pops up and pauses the game in its tracks while the company heads are laying on a beach in the caribbean, sipping margaritas. Through all of these goofs, it’s easy to forget one of Doom 2016’s greatest achievements, which was its breakneck pacing while breaking necks, and its breezy story that laid out a nice clean plate for all the gameplay meat and potatoes to be contextualised in, and the complete lack of that inside Eternal. And I wouldn’t review a restaurant that just catapulted a bunch of food onto my face without a plate very highly.