Why I Hated the Story of DOOM: The Dark Ages

Why I Hated the Story of DOOM: The Dark Ages
Basics
Length	8:28
Date	2024-06-12
Links
YouTube	YouTube
See also	Doom The Dark Ages

This week on Semi-Ramblomatic, Yahtzee follows-up on his Fully Ramblomatic episode on DOOM: The Dark Ages to explain why the story of the game is bad.

Transcript

I return, then, to the subject of DARK: The Doom Ages. That was a typo, but I'm running with it anyway; be ungovernable. I noticed a general response to my review of that game asking me to clarify why I thought the story was bad. I'm collating multiple comments that I saw, so none of you should feel picked on for this.

"Huh, he says the story's bad, but doesn't explain why it's bad! I knew it; he secretly really likes the game and is only saying otherwise in accordance with his instructions from the Elders of Zion."

No, really, the story is bad. I apologise if I didn't make my feelings clear enough on that. Sometimes, it feels like I'm standing in front of a big pile of nails on a train track and I'm pointing and saying "This train track probably shouldn't have all these nails on it." and everyone's going "Why is that? Explain why you hate nails so much." Maybe I should be more mindful that certain things might be less obvious to people who haven't played 100,000,000 bloody video games in their life, so let's take a closer look.

There's a certain faction who—at this point—will say that the problem with the plot of Dark Age: DOOM and that of many boomer shooters along similar lines is that they have a plot at all. "Who the fuck needs a story? It's Doom! Kick-ass marine shoots a load of demons from Hell. Any kind of story element threatens to get in the way of the purity of the experience. After all, the whole modern Doom renaissance started with Doom 2016, which famously opens with the protagonist smashing the fuck out of a monitor because a support character is trying to tell him something story-related and he'd rather just get to the killing."

See, I don't buy that. "The plot doesn't matter" is an argument I frequently hear in response to me criticising the narrative of anything gameplay-centric, and each time, I offer my usual counterargument: "People never say that when the plot is good." The fact is a good plot elevates the material and a bad plot is a missed opportunity. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time would have been merely good if it had only had the innovative time-bending parkour stuff and if we held our noses for the combat, but the fact that it also contains my favorite love story in all of gaming history is what pushes it over the line into all-time classic.

See, core gameplay is important in the moment; it'll sell the game in a well-edited trailer, but the story is what you take away; it's the thing you still think about afterwards and the main thing you remember. I mean, you remembered Doom 2016's intro pretty well, didn't you? And if its intended message was that you're not supposed to care about the story, it was really inconsistent with that, considering later in the same game there's a prolonged sequence where we're forced to stand around in the support character's office like an angry lemon while he gives us a fucking performance review. Doom has always had story. It's not always been front-facing; you had to go to the manual to find the one for the original Doom. Hang on, I'm going to dig it up. Ah, here it is.

Welcome to DOOM, a lightning-fast virtual reality adventure where you're the toughest space trooper ever to suck vacuum.

Fuck does that mean? Surely the vacuum is the thing that sucks! Is this one of those Soviet Russia jokes? Anyway, here's the story page, and there's actually quite a lot of interesting detail here. It transpires that Doom Marine assaulted a superior and was punished with deployment to a space base in the arse end of nowhere, and there's an implication that he spent most of his time there watching porn, demons invaded as a result of teleportation experiments in a slightly Event Horizony kind of way, and there's even an explanation for why you only start the game with a pistol: it's 'cause you were left to secure the perimeter while all the dudes with the cool guns went into the slaughter.

So, Doom has a plot, and Doom 2016 has a plot, one that I rather enjoy. It's a story about an unstoppable silent badass with no motivation in life except to kill demons And as I've said before, this makes him a particularly compelling boomer shooter protagonist because he perfectly reflects the motives the player takes into the game. But there's more to him than that. People always focus on the monitor-smashing in the game's prologue and disregard the actually important character moment: It's the bit right after Mr Doomslayer gets into an elevator and the support character has a second go at appealing to him right before he smashes the monitor again and the title card drops. The dude says something like "Everything we did here was for the betterment of mankind." and the protagonist glances briefly at a ruined corpse slumped against the nearby wall. I love this moment because it's so subtle but it says so much. Were he inclined to speak, I'm sure the Doom Slayer would sardonically reply "Yeah, I'm sure this poor bugger thinks things are going just hunky fucking dory!" Not in that accent.

Doom 2016 is a story about a human race that has gotten so obsessed with expansion and discovery that it started to miss the forest for the trees, and when faced with something so utterly uncomplicated as evil demons from Hell who want to kill them all are all wringing their hands, trying to appreciate the nuances. "Ooh, maybe we can make use of Hell energy! Ooh, maybe we can side with the demons and pursue mutual goals!" And the Doom Slayer an outsider from the past with extensive Hell demon experience marches into the middle and goes "This isn't complicated at all, you idiots. Hell demons are bad, obviously, now stand over there while I kill them all." And for that we cheer. Essentially, it's the story of Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot. Everyone's flapping about, going "Ooh, how are we going to untie this knot? It's so complicated.", then in comes Alexander with his sword—hhwip—there, it's untied. Now stop being such prannies and get back to work.

So, while the Doom Slayer doesn't speak and has no face, they do have a character; one that is defined by their relationship with the rest of humanity. Fate has left them in the unenviable position of being a permanent outsider from his people who must nevertheless be called upon to save them from themselves. Quite tragic, really. This is emphasised by scenes like that wonderful bit in Doom Eternal where he stomps through a room full of normal flimsy humans like a grumpy dad navigating a playroom and everyone's visibly terrified as they mentally go back over their recent lives, trying to recall if they did anything that might warrant a spanking.

So, to bring this all back around to the start, why didn't I like the plot of Doom: The Dark Ages? Well, as established, I enjoyed the Doom Slayer as a character defined by their relationship with and juxtaposition to the rest of humanity, and in The Dark Ages, humanity just isn't around, therefore that definition is gone. Instead, Mr Doomslayer spends all his time knocking around with this race of extremely serious Warhammer 40k characters with whom he fits in a lot better, all with stock very serious warrior personalities. And as such, there aren't any characters I feel like I could root for. Also, the hell demons are represented by a Prince of Darkness-style operatic main villain who's articulate, makes deals with other characters, and generally feels like someone one could reason with. And that, too, undermined the established dynamic where the Hell demons were nothing more than literal manifestations of chaos and the Doom Slayer was the one sane man needed to bring a dose of reality to those trying to see anything more than that. Perhaps it was inevitable that Dark Ages would suffer from classic sequel syndrome wherein all the designers can think to do was expand and embellish upon what has been established; losing sight of the fact that it was the straightforwardness and lack of embellishments that made the original compelling. Roll on the next reboot, I suppose. Maybe next time it'll come back as a dating sim. Don't tell me you've never wondered if Mancubi wouldn't make good cuddlers.