Why I won't be buying the Dark Ages

I worked as a technical director, composer/producer and programmer for a long-enough time to have a clear understanding of what actually went down.

Realistically, everyone had a portion of the fault, but the way these differences were resolved is (at least in my opinion) indicative of on-going issues with the Id Software senior management. Specifically, while I fully expect Hugo Martin to be both a creative leader in his area of expertise, and had little resources to prevent this from happening, this could have been handled much more gracefully. I do not believe that he wanted to part ways with one of the main reasons why Doom (2016) was a success. I do understand that sometimes you are not allowed to be perfectly frank with the people that you manage, and it can result in things festering quietly.

While I'd be happy to give him the benefit of the doubt, and say that "well, maybe there are other things that went down that we cannot talk about", you cannot have that right, and throw the people you worked with under the bus. His reddit post alone can do an incredible amount of damage to Mick's credibility as an artist. The fact that this post was not taken down and that there have been half-hearted attempts at refuting Mick's latest Medium post… tells me that there's not much room for doubt. He may not be wholly culpable, but his public behaviour disqualifies him from being an efficient manager.

That is to say, that management is itself quite a complex task. It's not as easy as asking the person whether they have done something. It requires you to be able to genuinely appreciate the work of the people that are in your charge, but also to hold them up to good standards. You empower and encourage them to do their best work. Sounds like a cliche. I wish it were. Realistically, you have people who meddle too much, too little, that want things done a certain way out of pure ego, and lately… the so-called getting-things-done managers. Think of the abusive conductor played by J. K. Simmons in Whiplash. Not a great human being to be around, but they get results. They produce the best out of the people that they work with, reducing them to their most basic function, and squeezing every last ounce of potential out of them. I worked with someone like this, and found that while their department, indeed, produced work that was always on time, and never under-developed, this only lasted for a short burst.

Inevitably, the getting-things-done managers end up alienating their own. Their work does not degrade slowly. Their teams are lynch-pinnned on few talented individuals, and those cannot thrive in hostile environments for long. Very quickly, a project or two later, their teams go from "the best of the best" to a collection of three catastrophic problems.

1. The benign, talented last-minute-replacement that can't figure out what they need to do and how.
2. The maliciously compliant fed up old team members, that nominally produce good work, but leave nasty surprises.
3. The honest-to-god noobs that would ordinarily not even be considered, if the team population didn't degrade this far.

Mick Gordon's departure and the fact that neither Andrew Hulshult nor David Levy (both extremely talented individuals), did not return to work on the Dark Ages, without the soundtrack pivoting to a different style, should tell you everything you need to know. Music is only one prominent example.

So does that make Hugo Martin a terrible person? The implied answer is usually no. However, the problem runs deeper than that. Anyone who has made even one of the series of blunders that lead to the situation boiling over would have been fired or demoted. Realistically, the inciting issue was the fact that the OST was promised, without there being enough of an understanding on the scope of work, the number of tracks and an agreement between the parties. Who exactly was responsible for the contract being in place? Who exactly thought that assigning Mr Mossholder the task of writing and mixing tracks was a good idea?¹ In any normal company heads would roll. Furthermore, if there is, as Bethesda claims, evidence to refute Mr Gordon's complaints, offering six figures for a permanent gag, and not releasing the evidence raises more suspicion.

Whoever happened to do the PR for Bethesda, good job! I can name a number of people that have been turned off future Doom titles thanks to your competence. And if I had my suspicions from some off-hand comments that Hugo is a kind of person whose hand I would not shake, you have eliminated all doubt.

So this mishandling exposed to me, for lack of a better term, the trajectory and the current position of the studio. It is about to crash hard. The Dark Ages is only the beginning.

And consider the impact of having a good game director. Miyazaki distilled the best ideas from Dark Souls 2 into Elden Ring, with a shocking number of overlaps between those two specific games and no other souls-borne title. Consider the polish of the original Dead Space, the diegetic HUD, the tentacle, the fact that the game is one of very few that got delivered on time. Think back to the thoughtful feedback-driven design process of Valve. Those games were not shaped by just the visions of these people. It was their vision filtered though the collective of talented individuals that had been enabled to do their best work, not their egos that created those experiences.

So the game is poor quality compared to what it could be, due to inefficient management, it's still good, right?

This is probably a more important aspect of this decision.

One could easily make the argument that Doom the Dark Ages is an incredibly creative game. It went from a fast-paced shooting-focused all-offence style of gameplay to a stand-and-fight paradigm, created a lot of depth. And it is certainly true. It is also true that the game is in a setting that would easily allow a talented game director to create a new IP. If one needed to look for a way to use the catalogue of IP already available to Bethesda, a Hexen or Heretic remake would have done us just as much good.

If anything, connecting the two universes and having some overlap between these characters would have allowed more creative freedom and an opportunity to tell different stories with a different protagonist.

And this is where I should again come back to the previous two games. There's an interesting discrepancy between the creative constraints under which music was made, and the end product.

For one, Mick reportedly had issues with incorporating guitars into the soundtrack, citing the fact that they wanted to avoid comparisons to heavy metal a genre, that in Mick's own words had become a joke. And indeed, the soundtrack is much more industrial. The problem as I see it, is that this constraint was largely based on misconceptions.

• Firstly, nobody expected high art from Doom, most were happy it wasn't Call of Dooty.
• Secondly, heavy metal had been part of the cycle of associations for prospective buyers. Doom 3 famously had work done by Chris Vrenna, a standalone theme that I enjoy very much.
• Thirdly, the fact that heavy metal is "no longer cool" pales in comparison with the "quality" of writing. The health drops are disappearing blue blobs, for crying out loud!

The constraints, as far as I can tell were loosened for the next game. It largely lead to both streamlining of the more realistic elements in favour of gameplay. This is why we had more cartoon-ey and colourful drops, a doubling down on the nonsensical elements, all for a fun combat loop.

The cracks started to show at this level already. It is true that one does not need lore justification for goofy mechanics, such as a shoulder-mounted flamethrower providing you with armour. To be quite honest, it makes about as much sense as a hell-grenade that restores it. But the problem is that the latter had been incorporated in a sensible way.

A clever writer would have found that there is this miracle form of energy known as Argent. What they would have done is they'd said: "Well, the armour is actually just an active shield that uses a type of argent", and therefore maybe would have come up with an argent projector. Maybe he would have looped it back to the argent filters, and connected it to hell. This is not far fetched given the "lore" that we are already given, it just relies on what's known as a Miracle exception. Assuming you want your story to be grounded.

The reason I specifically take issue with the flame belch, is because of the fact that the game also has an ice bomb. The effects of those two are not mutually exclusive and there are no interesting interactions, implied by the positions of these things on the typical elemental scale. There is an implied connection between these mechanics.

The number of similar missed opportunities for grounded lore is large. The fact that it stood out (at least to me) is indicator that maybe this side needed a bit more work. I would argue that for a game like 2016 and Eternal the codex was completely superfluous. I do not need to know how Samuel Hayden ended up in a robot body. I do not need to hear Olivia Pierce's sob story. Hugo Martin and his superior, Marty Stratton are both well-aware of the fact that nobody reads the codices of games. Unlike the Witcher 2, or Cyberpunk, where the solution was to put good stories and interesting ideas into the codices, the best result was the fact that the obviously evil cult was obviously evil and kinda like scientology. Compare this to the graceful way in which Ultrakill explains the style meter and score. The fact that a few independent developers managed a better job than a team of professional writers calls into question what was going on in the background.

The problem isn't the lack of a lore explanation or a neat way of tying things together. The problem is the quality of said lore, the quality of writing, and having reading, an activity that is quite slow even in speed readers in a fast paced game.

To explain this point better, let me give you my understanding of Carmack's famous quote. The main attraction in a game is the gameplay. An extremely minimal plot allows one to have incredible flexibility. Pacing and other considerations for traditional linear media are simply not there, and thus the most effective means of conveying the plot is being pertinent to the experience of the player. The existence of Half Life doesn't prove Carmack wrong, Half Life tells the story in the environment, in the main plot and in the way the player's attention is subtly directed.

The new games have a scarcity of plot where it counts and an overabundance of it where it wouldn't matter. In 2016, the problem is at its most egregious. A simple act of opening shutters forces you into a cutscene (that should have been a simple interaction). It stops your progress dead in its tracks to say "Hello, I am Vega, a sentient intelligence assigned to Mars. After running diagnostics on the praetor suit I … " and drones on for a healthy amount of time, where I, as a player, would rather be ripping and tearing. I understand that one needed a tutorial to know that the challenges that appear in their UI will award weapon upgrade points (patented Id Software creativity here). Dark Souls is famous for cutting these sections out. While this does make it somewhat obtuse, the pacing is much improved. The frustration of having to backtrack to a specific spot from the nearest save location is not as great despite having a greater consequence for the player, precisely because of the lack of exposition dumps. Less is more, because the player is engaged. They could ask questions. They could build theories. They get to use their imagination.

And this is not to say that this couldn't have been done more gracefully. Due to budgetary constraints, most of the lore of e.g. Ultrakill has to exist within the codex. Most of it has to be read during what is an even faster paced game. Same with the first two serious Sams.

The plot of Doom Eternal is also quite a fascinating beast. It is in many ways doubling down on all the things that didn't exactly work in 2016, and yet somehow in the background enough not to annoy the player. With that said, the constraints put on the Music department during 2016 seem laughable given the tonal whiplash of what Eternal has accomplished.

Noah Caldwell Gervais, a game critic whom I hold in high regard put this best.

In Eternal this tonal state is something that I can get over. I do not like it, but thankfully I am not directly involved in it. The Dark Ages doubled down on misunderstanding the reason why 2016's minimal bare bones plot worked: the joke was that the Doom Slayer, just as much as the Doom Player did not take the plot seriously and were very much interested in the gameplay. The fact that the cutscenes can be skipped is evidence to some recognition of this fact in Eternal, but the continuation of that and a more prominent role it plays in the Dark Ages simply tell me that it's going to get worse.

In other words, The Dark Ages is the Season 6 of Game Of Thrones, it is The Last Jedi. It is a point of irreversible downturn in quality. As such, I'd like to have the memory of when things were good.

I live in a country with a considerable amount of bi-directional immigration. The sheer fact that I came back here after studying in the UK for five years is considered a blunder, even though technically speaking it made economic sense.

As of late I see a worrying trend among the online communities; instead of being welcoming of the idea of immigration, both to and fro your countries, one is being politically riled up against immigration and immigrants. The former I can understand. The latter, I find rather funny but also worrying.

While I have not been in a position of an immigrant, I've had several key factors in common with them, especially as regards lacking support structures and being far away from friends and family. To put it mildly, the comparison between demons and immigrants to me seemed benign when the game came out. After all, the immigrants that I knew were people who had to go through a complicated vetting process, and were always at the risk of being deported. That latter risk is important to note, because in all fairness, coming from a poorer country to a richer one requires a considerable capital investment. It's not worth the risk for most legal immigrants to even attempt to do anything.

Over the years, however, I've seen a consistent attempt at using "anti-woke" to justify the refusal to engage with problems that (I was hoping) we as a civilisation have surpassed. We went from institutional racism being the villain, and overall individual racism being low, to individual racism surprisingly being the norm again.

As such, the off-hand comments about pathological liar Steven Seagal, and the overall structure of the screenplay for Doom Eternal, seems to suggest that the writers behind it and potentially the next instalment do not really have a problem with politicising games. As long as the politics in it agrees with their own.

Games are not apolitical. There are much more egregious examples of politically dubious messaging in e.g. Soldier of Fortune. There are much more harmful stereotypes that are have been propagated in the past, with the famous scene from Enemy at the Gates, which was amplified by its recreation in Call Of Duty 1⁶, and now immortalised in the minds of Millenials. The reason, however, why I don't view these as the problem is that the politics of someone are extremely difficult to influence.

Gay propaganda doesn't work. We know this because there have been countless attempts at "straightening the queer" and straight propaganda doesn't work either. There is a slight preference towards teaching people how to be more kind, as opposed to more selfish, but games about violence regardless of messaging are in a somewhat difficult position to teach you about morals.

What I find baffling is that Psychoshock (Prey) very clearly is an example of graceful ways of messaging one's political affiliation. They don't just talk about mercy, they encourage you to be merciful extremely effectively. Realistically Doom is about killing demons, and the off-hand comments from the game's director, are extremely unlikely to change one's opinion on the problems related to immigration of individuals that refuse to adapt to the destination country's way of life. Simply put, I see demons, not proxies for Indian immigrants in Yerevan, or myself in London.

Incidentally, if you did encounter me in the UK, I would very much doubt you'd be able to tell that I was not a local without looking at my passport. As such, while I could choose to get offended at the joke, all I'd rather do is laugh and move on. A game is a game is a game.