Doom (2016 video game)



Doom (previously titled Doom 4 and otherwise known as DOOM) is a reboot of the Doom series released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on May 13, 2016. It is the third major game released by id Software and published by Bethesda Softworks since their acquisition by ZeniMax Media, following Rage and Doom 3: BFG Edition. Early planning and development began in August 2007, and is still continuing with the release of patches, downloadable content packs, and planned updates. The game features a story detailing the invasion of the UAC Argent facility on Mars by the forces of Hell.

The new Doom has been built on a successor to id Software's id Tech 5 game engine which id Software has dubbed id Tech 6. Gameplay-wise, the game resembles the action-oriented nature of the classic Doom games much more than the horror style of Doom 3, with a heavy emphasis on strong weapons, fast and agile player movement, and quickly paced encounters with large groups of foes. From a graphic and architectural point of view, its advanced designs are aesthetically closer to Doom 3 in some regards, but with many deliberate nods to the original series, particularly with respect to its new enemy designs.

A sequel, Doom Eternal, was announced at E3 2018.

"Samuel Hayden: ''Your affinity for guns is apparent. I'm confident you'll find something useful there as well." ''
 * 100% Completion: Most levels have multiple secrets, a combat rating that goes up the more demons you kill, many collectables and bonuses that can be found with a little bit of exploration.
 * Action Bomb: Lost Souls fly towards the player and detonate on them, kamikaze-style. It's also the method they use to possess weaker willed beings.
 * Possessed Engineers can be turned into this, given they are ambulatory, have a fuel tank embedded in their chest, and they can be shot while moving and thus explode.
 * Affably Evil: Well-Intentioned Extremist Samuel Hayden, who is very polite to the Doomguy and assists him throughout despite their conflicting agendas.
 * An Aesop: A slightly fantastical one that boils down to "Nothing good comes from trying to harness Hell's power to serve humanity". A more mundane interpretation is "Trying to use a corrupting influence for good will only result in letting it corrupt you into evil".
 * Apocalyptic Log: Codex Entries tell the story about how the UAC ended up as a demon-worshipping cult. The demons have their own in the form of the Slayer's Testaments, which tell the story of the Doom Marine's rampage through their realm.
 * Ascended Meme:
 * Not only does the infamous "RIP AND TEAR" from the Doom comic get incorporated into the opening intro, but it's delivered in a manner that replaces the Narm with ominous dread.
 * The achievement for killing the Cyberdemon is called "Shoot it until it dies.", referencing a GamePro Magazine issue that gave that as a joke protip.
 * Ascended Fanfic: The game borrows the Glory Kill mechanic and Ultra-Nightmare difficulty (where dying restarts the entire game) from the popular fanmod Brutal Doom.
 * Attack! Attack! Attack!: The Doomguy's usual modus operandi. See a drone carrying mods? Punch it. Argent filters that could stop a demonic invasion? Punch it. Ugly demons from hell? Punch them!
 * Awesome Yet Impractical: The Chainsaw was apparently designed with this trope in mind. It's an almost guaranteed "I Win" button against any non-boss monster, but it requires some hard to find ammo.
 * Bad Boss: Olivia Pierce sacrificed many of her own employees and was willing to sacrifice all of humanity to become a demon goddess.
 * Samuel Hayden isn't much better. He accepts the blame for letting things get out of hand, and while he does agree with the Doom Slayer that Olivia Pierce must be stopped, but he otherwise is quite happy to write off the deaths of tens of thousands of people who worked under him as "necessary" for the good of humanity.
 * The Berserker: The Glory Kill mechanic and the Berserk rune rewards the player immensely for getting up close and personal and ripping demons limb from limb.
 * BFG: The BFG-9000. A massive plasma cannon that boils enemies alive
 * Big Bad: Olivia Pierce, a scientist-turned-cultist who believes that having the world engulfed by Hell will lead to the next step in human evolution.
 * Big Good: Samuel Hayden, who extracts" Doomguy" from Hell as a safeguard in case things go wrong.
 * God is implied to exist in-game,
 * Big Red Devil: Barons of Hell fit this to a T, being massive, having red skin and goat legs, along with curved horns.
 * Black Comedy: Some elements abound, like how the UAC doesn't even pretend to hide the fact there's a demonic invasion in progress or that Satanic rituals are totally everyday corporate social events. The UAC spokesperson holograms are also hilarious.
 * Bloodier and Gorier: It does a good job surpassing the brutality and bloodshed in the original Doom games.
 * Body Armor as Hit Points: Armor in the game works the same as in old Doom games: any damage you take is done in armor first.
 * Body Horror: In addition to being reanimated zombies in all but name, the Possessed are so warped beyond the people they once were that whatever clothing, equipment or even weapons they had on themselves before being transformed are painfully grafted into their bodies.
 * Boom! Headshot!: Shooting in the head will deal extra damage and will cause the enemy's head to pop like a bloated watermelon on death.
 * Boring Yet Practical: The Tactical Scope for the Heavy Assault Rifle and the Gatling Rotor for the Chaingun. Compared to the Micro-Missile Launcher and the Mobile Turret, the former seems rather mundane. However, the scope allows you to use the Assault Rifle as an automatic sniper rifle while the rotor allows you to keep your Chaingun ready to fire at an instant. Both also have a final upgrade that increases their damage when the mods are used, making them extremely powerful to use.
 * Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Required to access certain areas and progress. The player rips a dead guy's arm off to bypass a handprint scanner, and later in the game an entire upper torso of a corpse to bypass a optical scanner.
 * Bottomless Magazines: There's no reload function in the game, as each gun holds all the ammo you have for them. A special perk later on even grants unlimited ammo so long as you have a certain amount of armor.
 * Brain Uploading: Samuel Hayden was diagnosed with brain cancer, and had the healthy parts of his brain installed in a 10 feet tall robot body to cheat death.
 * Continuity Nod: Several are scattered throughout, harkening back to the previous entries in the franchise. Some however are more subtle than others.
 * Convection, Schmonvection: The third mission occurs in a Foundry with vats and flows of molten metal. Doomguy isn't hurt by the heat unless he actually falls into them, although one could assume this is due to his armor.
 * Cool Key: In Hell, you use skulls to open doors. Not just any skulls, or course, special skulls covered with magic runes.
 * Chainsaw Good: The chainsaw will instantly kill any non-boss enemy provided you have enough fuel. Killing anyone with it will also spawn a massive pool of ammo.
 * The Comically Serious: Samuel Hayden. His frequent exasperation and the seriousness he displays to Doomguy's more 'simple-minded' decisions is a source for some hilarity in the game.
 * Cult: The UAC before the game started was being corrupted into one for the demons. They even make mention in messages recorded prior of having religious staff called Maguses on hand to counsel people in their faith.
 * Deal with the Devil: Olivia makes one of these with the Dark Lord who leads the demonic invaders, although it seems unlikely that he is the Devil. Whatever the case she promises to open the portals in exchange for godlike power; it doesn't turn out for her quite the way she expected.
 * Demonic Invaders: The basic premise involves Hell itself invading Mars.
 * Dragged Off to Hell: At the end of the Argent Tower stage, Olivia is actually Dragged Up to Hell. And she takes the entire planet of Mars with her.
 * The Dreaded: Doomguy is this for the demons. After the destruction of Argent D'Nur, Doomguy trashed Hell so badly and ripped so many demons into pieces that he was only stopped by dropping an entire temple on him. The demons view him as their own personal boogeyman and feared him so much they covered the site where he was entombed in runes and fought with unprecedented levels of desperate ferocity to prevent Samuel Hayden and the UAC from retrieving him. Obviously, it didn't work...
 * Evil, Inc.: Again, the UAC, which shows all throughout. Even going so far as to exploit Hell, with predictable consequences.
 * The interesting twist on this, unique to the 2016 version, is that instead of just being a mega-corporation with little in the way of safety regulations or any ethics save what would be good for business and keeping humanity safe at their most moral, they are openly exploiting Hell as both an energy source and as a testing ground for all sorts of things, weapons especially. By contrast, Hell was just an unintended consequences of trying to make teleporters in the classic games and their interests in Hell were at most scholarly in Doom 3 as well as a consequence of making teleporters.
 * Evil Mentor: Subverted with Hayden. He thinks he's this, but Doomguy neither wants nor needs his help, voicelessly telling him to Stop Helping Me! in a Shut UP, Hannibal way. Eventually, Hayden has to "coerce" him by cutting communications off, although even then, Doomguy tends to destroy Hayden's stations rather than disabling them, much to his own annoyance, as he plans to continue using them to gain energy after the events of the game.
 * Fat Bastard: Manucbus demons - muscular, hulking foes in the original games - are obese, hulking foes in this game. And they're incredibly tough.
 * Genre Throwback: Of sorts to the original Doom games, while simultaneously building over what worked in the 1990s and incorporating 2010s-era game design.
 * A recent update allows players to play using the old school centered gun field of view of the original Doom games.
 * Gorn: The "Glory Kill" mechanic, which allows you to brutally melee enemies to death upon staggering them. Most weapons, from the chainsaw and shotgun to the BFG, do a good job with gibs as well.
 * Last of His Kind:
 * A Lighter Shade of Grey: Compared to the literal forces of Hell, Samuel Hayden even at his shadiest seems like a paragon of virtue.
 * Magitek: Given how Argent energy is strongly tied to Hell and how much said energy source has become widely used by human civilization, technology has effectively become this.
 * Mega Corp: The Union Aerospace Corporation/UAC is definitely this, having struck metaphorical gold with the "discovery" of Argent energy on Mars.
 * Mook Maker: Gore Nests. Story-wise, these are supposed to act as portals to Hell. Gameplay-wise, however, destroying one (an action that is, unfortunately, mandatory to proceed) summons monsters that you have to fight.
 * Motif: The UAC had a very strong psuedo-religious theme to its employee messages, to the point of coming off as a Path of Inspiration as its most benign.
 * No OSHA Compliance: It's pretty obvious even before the Mars UAC facilities were compromised that their safety record was abysmal.
 * Notice This: When an enemy turns orange, it means you can finish it off with a Glory Attack and gain Health from doing so.
 * One Bullet Clips: Averted, as every gun in the game can hold as much ammo as you're capable of holding. And like the original Doom games, there's no reload whatsoever.
 * Only Sane Man: Surprisingly enough "Doomguy" himself is this, with Samuel Hayden coming in second.
 * Really 700 Years Old:
 * Recycled Premise: This game manages to recycle elements of all the previous Doom games while still maintaining Broad Strokes links to them.
 * For starters, it's implied the hero is possibly the same one from the original games (since the one from Doom 64 was in the first two Doom games as well).
 * The general plot premise is a mix of the original Doom games and Doom 3, with the monsters and setting mostly referencing the classic games, while the plot takes many cues from the third Doom..
 * Retraux: You can play Classic Doom levels by discovering certain secrets, resembling themselves to the point they even resemble how they did on the id Tech 1 engine, with the caveat that the HUD and your player remain modern and the maps were resized in places to make the two contrasting elements work.
 * To a smaller extent, one of the updates added the "gun in the center of the screen" view from the original games as an option foe regular play.
 * Scenery Gorn: By the time you show up, Mars is already in the process of being screwed up by Hell.
 * Sealed Good in a Can: "Doomguy" is definitely this, though makes it very clear that Good Is Not Nice.
 * Serial Escalation: The UAC in this game are taking the stupidty of their predecessors Up To Eleven. Opening a portal to Hell was a unintended consequence of trying to develop teleporters in the original games, that's it. In Doom 3, they did discover Hell, figured out it was dangerous and had a corrupting influence, and had it not been for a traitor burying the truth as much as possible, they would have stopped it way before it got out of hand. In this game, they developed teleporters, discovered Hell, knew it was dangerous and had a corrupting influence, didn't care despite the fact every expedition there had a high body count, and were using it as an energy source the whole time despite the insanely high risks. Compared to the previous incarnations of the UAC, this one was outright begging for a Gone Horribly Wrong scenario.
 * Sincerest Form of Flattery: The game incorporates and builds upon elements from Brutal Doom.
 * Stealth Sequel: It's strongly implied that "Doomguy" is the same character from the original games, albeit following a Broad Strokes rendition of them.
 * Stupid Evil: Okay, let's go over this. The Earth is in the middle of an energy crisis, so the “geniuses” at the UAC discover an energy source on Mars that originates from Hell itself. Not only that, they decide to explore Hell itself (which is infested with demons, of course) while mining its resources and looting its artifacts. On top of that, they knew one of their own scientists, Dr. Olivia Pierce, has started a devil-worshiping cult among members of the organization, and do nothing. Worst of all, after the demons are unleashed and the heroic Space Marine saves humanity from being wiped out, their idiotic CEO Samuel Hayden doesn’t even thank him, and decides to continue research into the project. How dumb can you get?
 * Unstoppable Rage: Doomguy's drive. The Beserker Artifact is also told in Codex Entries to cause this in anyone who consumes it. Bad news for the demons when the Doomguy picks them up.
 * Unwilling Roboticization: The more mechanized demons, such as the Revenants and Cyberdemon are revealed to have gotten that way thanks to UAC experiments, being attempts at weaponizing Hell.
 * Well Intentioned Extremist: The UAC, Samuel Hayden in particular, likes to present itself as this, believing that all its work (including its interest in Hell for Argent energy) is for the good of all mankind.
 * Zombie Apocalypse: Many of the Mooks are demon-possessed corpses.