DOOM BRANDING IS STRONG - Daily Arcade 009

Daily Arcade Gaming Podcast

Doom’s back. Again.

Last week, players had the opportunity to try out a multiplayer beta for the upcoming reboot of the Doom franchise – a game that’s been in the works for many years now after an initial sequel, titled Doom 4, was unceremoniously cancelled late into development. In spite of the fact that over ten years have passed since the launch of the last main title Doom game, gamers eagerly rushed back to the series, thrilled at the chance to play the latest reimagining of the series.

Yet while the new Doom definitely draws inspiration from its predecessors, it’s clear that the upcoming game takes a very different direction in terms of style and tone than previous installments within the series. The violence, monsters, and gore of the upcoming game are rounded, colorful and cartoonish, in spite of the gratuitous use of blood. While this doesn’t necessarily make for a bad game, there’s not much to differentiate the Doom reboot as being distinct and stylistically connected to the games that have come before.

Part of the problem that id Software faces in making their newest Doom game feel like previous games in the series is that there’s not much iconography throughout the series that comfortably sums up the Doom experience. While the Super Mario series sticks mostly to a few reoccurring enemy design choices and the Street Fighter roster features the same costumes in every new game, Doom doesn’t have a powerful, standout set of images that connects its games and clearly lays out the style of the series (except possibly for the severed head of John Romero).

This lack of unique, identifiable imagery that spans all Doom games isn’t actually because of a failure on the part of former teams at id Software – in fact, if anything, it’s a testament to the cultural impact of the series as a whole. The original Doom, and to a lesser extent many of its sequels, has influenced gaming culture so thoroughly that every visual from the game has been replicated, expanded upon and lampooned by generations of game designers.

To this day, first-person shooters set on blood-soaked science fiction space stations are among the most common genres of AAA gaming. Everything that made the original Doom unique has been explored in wave after wave of games that continue to saturate the market, to the point that upon returning to the world of Doom, nothing from the original formula stands out as anything more than a generic space shooter.

It’s possible that this problem – the overabundance of Doom tribute acts – is what led to the cancellation of the original version of Doom 4. Long before the upcoming game was in development, id Software worked on a numbered sequel to the series, which was brought nearly to completion before the project was ultimately scrapped and work began on a series reboot.

In speaking about why Doom 4 was cancelled, id Software’s director, Tim Willits, explained that the series was having an ‘identity crisis’, stating that ‘everyone knows the feeling of Doom, but it’s very hard to articulate’.

Speaking about the cancelled Doom 4, he said, ‘It wasn’t like the art was bad, or the programming was bad. Every game has a soul. Every game has a spirit… [Doom 4] did not have the spirit, it did not have the soul, it didn’t have a personality’.

It’s likely that this desire to push to create a unique personality for the Doom franchise that has led the developers to focus so heavily on a colorful lighting system and stylized visual which, while paying tribute the Doom games of the past, look very different to anything that’s come before. The horned skull monsters of the new game are clearly inspired by the classic Doom aesthetic, but the specific approach that id Software have chosen to take involves a Wind Waker-esque method of distilling the core essence of the franchise and then wrapping it in a brightly colored, tonally distinct shell that can’t be mistaken for any other space shooter.

So why use the Doom name at all? If id Software is moving this far away from the Doom series aesthetic with their new game, and if the gameplay and visual style have been built from the ground up, why not create a new intellectual property and avoid potentially upsetting fans of the original series?

If there’s one thing from the original Doom series that’s not been watered down by hundreds of imitators in the years since its initial release, it’s the name of the series itself. The Doom brand is powerful – strong enough not just to inspire a movie starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, but also capable of withstanding the negative press that the movie generated. Doom’s impact on gaming is so significant that even over twenty years since the original game’s release, players still trust the name to stand for well-built, engaging gameplay. READ FULL ARTICLE BY Matthew Loffhagen HERE: