Thursday, July 21, 2011

Deconstruction: DOOM - Part IV: Story

Lest I be thought a fanboy, DOOM must have its flaws exposed.  Some lessons are best learned from failure than from success.

Although, this part will be short, because there is so little to say on the subject of DOOM's story, mostly because there hardly is one at all:

DOOM does not have a strong story.  Including Thy Flesh Consumed, there are five places where story can be found in DOOM:  at the end of each of the four episodes, and in the manual.  Each in-game story sequence is no more than a screen of text and a picture -- the latter of which isn't even in the first episode.

If you didn't bother to read the story in the manual, you didn't know what the point of the game was, and rarely did the level design make enough sense to enhance or even allude to the story.  The occasional UAC crate meant nothing to a player who didn't already know about the UAC from the manual.

And in multiplayer, of course, the story is non-existent anyway.

But the fault of DOOM isn't that it didn't have enough story, since plenty of other more successful games have had less; it's that it didn't utilize what it had.  As discussed before, the motif of DOOM was plastered in every nook and cranny of the levels, but the plot was entirely missing.

DOOM:  The story of a man who battles demons, then kills a cute fluffy bunny.
The map screen between levels showing your progress was the closest thing to intriguing modern storytelling that DOOM offers.  It shows you your progress in a satisfying way:  a big blood-splatter bullet hole on every building you've passed through showed you what you'd accomplished and how far you still had to go.  If you watched closely in The Shores of Hell, you even got to see the Tower of Babel being built.

The problem with the map screen was that it was inconsistent with the actual level design.  Now, DOOM has some of the most fantastic level design both for its time and today, and thankfully id decided not to cater the level design to the story.  But the reverse could have happened:  a simple change on the map screen would have helped tie the story and gameplay together.  All that was needed was drawing the buildings to the approximate shape of the levels.

Of course, DOOM was made in an era where story and gameplay were segregated completely.  Did you know there is an actual plot to Super Mario Bros. besides rescuing the Princess?  Read the instructions and you will be horrified!

Well, DOOM wasn't a trendsetter in every regard.  Thankfully other games came along that mixed story and gameplay together, even in the FPS genre.

In a game like DOOM, story isn't the most important thing, but they could have raised the importance, or at least the cohesion between story and gameplay, with small changes.

Read Part V: Pickups

1 comment:

  1. Supposedly the demons killed the space marines pet bunny. He didn't kill his only bunny. In the picture he is just holding it up the way that he found it. That's what i read somewhere anyways.

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