It takes a shockingly long time forDoom: The Dark Agesto let you do anything. Four minutes and 25 seconds pass before the latest entry inid Software’s long-running first-person shooter series gives you control of the Doom Slayer. That might not sound like much, but when you have the controller in hand, ready to rip and tear, the wait is,ahem, eternal.
Reaching For The Doom Dictionary
The game starts off on the wrong foot, even before the cutscenes begin, with two pages of text that attempt to set the scene, but mostly just leave you wishing you had a glossary ofDoomlore.
“In the age of fire and ruin, when the legions of Hell first set foot on Argent D’Nur, another came… an outsider, his path to their world carved in blood, for the demons could not escape his wrath,” the text reads, before continuing to a second page which is similarly defined by vague language and proper nouns. “The Night Sentinels, desperate and broken, saw in him a weapon. Their gods, ever watchful, saw something more. They bestowed upon him strength beyond mortal flesh, speed beyond thought — a gift now tethered to their will…”
I get that this is talking about the Doom Slayer. But this kind of opening text crawl is theleastmemorable way to introduce characters and narrative ideas. If the goal is to introduce characters in a way that immediately highlights who they are, what their world is, and what they want, action is the way to do that. Not action as in combat; action as in themdoingsomething, not text that gestures vaguely at something they did.
But showing characters in action on its own isn’t enough, and the opening cutscene highlights that by having a whole lot of action that’s rendered nearly incomprehensible by the sheer number of story elements it’s freighted with introducing. It has way too many characters in way too many locations saying way too many Proper Nouns. In that opening cutscene alone, The Dark Ages drops three title cards.
And we’re also introduced to all these characters:
We Should All Know Less About Argent D’Nur
This isjust the opening cutscene.Four-and-a-half minutes into a 15-hour game, and I’ve already got 14 different things to keep track of. It hasn’t gotten any better in the hours I’ve played since, which is a shame because I’m enjoying everything else about the game.
In areview of Doom: The Dark AgesI watched before I played it, the YouTuber Skill Up said that you should probably just skip the cutscenes in Doom: The Dark Ages. I heard that and thought, ‘Okay, but he meansotherpeople can skip them, not me.’ I don’t skip cutscenes. I once watched a friend skip through all of the dialogue in a quest we were playing together inThe Elder Scrolls Online, and it shocked and repelled me. I play games for the story, the world, and the atmosphere. Skipping over all the information that provides context for those elements feels deeply wrong.
And yet, when I hit a cutscene in Doom: The Dark Ages, my eyes slide off the screen. My phone calls out to me like the Ring to Bilbo. I suddenly wonder if I have urgent emails to respond to, if I have a Duolingo lesson to do, if my dog needs to go for a walk. I still haven’t skipped a cutscene. But I have never been this close.
