Dean Takahashi's Doom Eternal gameplay preview
235This is Dean GamesBeat. I'm reposting this video with a longer description. On top of that, I have added a voice over for the video that will convey what I was thinking as I played this particular scene.
I'm sorry this video is annoying people. I took the video down to try to defuse some of the social media storm, with the intention of reposting with more context that would help people understand it better.
I originally inserted this video into two stories that I wrote, but didn't link to them.
The stories include an interview with id Software's Hugo Martin, creative director of the game. https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/21/doom-eternal-dev-the-best-game-weve-ever-made/
And I also wrote a hands-on description of my gameplay session.
https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/21/doom-eternal-hands-on-customizable-combat-on-the-run/
These stories were published at the same time as the video was, but most people came into this directly from YouTube.
I also did an interview (one hour and 45 minutes) with Seth at Tasty Loot Gaming, who had his own reaction video to my gameplay. I asked him if he wanted to have a conversation and he said yes. Our interview is posted here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPro-N5vKwE&feature=youtu.be
I do enjoy games. I've covered games for 23 years as a beat, and I have covered tech for longer. I am not a game reviewer, primarily, and this preview has no score. I write a half-dozen game reviews a year and am part of a team of four people with others who do a lot more reviews. My main job is covering the business and technology of games. I cover game investments and acquisitions, AR/VR, esports, mobile games, influencers, and the core PC and console business. Posting videos on YouTube is perhaps 1% of my job. My favorite games include The Last of Us, Halo, Red Dead Redemption 2, Grand Theft Auto V, and God of War. I played and finished Doom 2016. That ending was hard.
I went to a preview that id Software held in San Francisco, where I was allowed to play the game for up to three hours, from the very beginning. The rule was that I could capture no more than a half hour of gameplay and run no more than 15 minutes of it. The video you see happens to be the section of the game, about 2.5 hours into it, where I was stuck when I was allowed to start recording video.
This is not a trolling video where I deliberately played bad in order to rile people up. I could have used B-roll from the developer, but I thought that my own gameplay would at least illustrate one point, which was that the gameplay involves puzzles and clever design that you have to figure out. This is a compliment to the game developers. Playing with a game controller, I enjoyed this section of the game, and I thought the game was great. As you can see, it wasn't totally obvious to me that the general rule of Doom Eternal -- always keep moving, as Martin put it -- applied here as well.
I was slow to figure things out. I came at this level fresh in the gameplay session, and there was nothing like it in the earlier part of the game. I did not shoot much from afar at the spider-like enemy because I knew my weapon would be ineffective at that range. (I didn't have the sniping and slo-mo ability you've seen in other videos, as far as I knew). I closed in on the Arachnotron so that I could recover some health through a glory kill (if you melee an enemy that is stunned, you get health back). For that purpose, using the shotgun up close was the ideal, ammo-efficient solution.
I looked at the map to try to figure out what to do. I knew that I had to get up high to the upper platforms that led to the next level. I saw the gray areas of the map where I had not traversed yet, but they fooled me. I kept looking to the right because I figured the area on the left was not going to get me high enough, and I thought there must be something I was missing that could get me much higher, like the slanted pillar.
I could not see around the corner to the left. There was a fire chain there, which I had not seen before in the game, and it was presumably put there to fool me into thinking that I could not cross it. I also knew that the round platform in the lava would sink into the lava. I had already wasted some health getting burned in the lava, and I didn't want to die in the lava. I tried and failed. I fortunately had earned an extra life in prior gameplay. I used that life and tried again to go through the burning chain in the lava. I was losing health fast, but I remembered Hugo's comment about how I should always be moving. So I ran to the corner for the last gray section of the map. And I was surprised to find something the map did not tell me: the booster that would send me high to get up to the platform. Once I got to the top of the platform, I was on safe ground. That's where the play session ended and where I ended the video.
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