Now that we’ve told you about how much longer Doom Eternal’s storyline is compared to the original, now it’s time to enlighten you on another aspect that makes the game that much better: difficulty mechanics. To make the game more engaging for everyone, developers completely revamped the difficulty mechanics. In other words, they’ve scalled specific elements of the game so that, no matter what difficulty setting you choose, you’ll still have to engage with all the mechanics and systems necessary to survive.
Gamespot had the chance to sit down with Doom Eternal Director, Hugo Martin, and to put things into perspective, he explained the difficulty mechanics from Doom 2016:
The way enemies behaved changed kind of dramatically from difficulty to difficulty. They actually got more accurate. What was frustrating is that it was kind of like learning a new combat dance… the fireball distance and the way that I learned to dodge it… different rules.”
In Doom Eternal, this has been adjusted so that regardless of your chosen difficulty level – be it easy, hurt me plenty, ultra-violence, or nightmare – the enemies will remain consistent in what they can do. The biggest difference is that the difficulty settings will adjust how frequently demons exercise heavier attacks and the amount of damage they end up to. Martin explained it with a rather witty boxing analogy:
On easy, they’re going to throw a lot of jabs and take turns like, ‘throw your jab, then I’ll throw mine. Now one of us gets to throw a haymaker. On Nightmare, everybody’s throwing haymakers nonstop.
Speaking further on the difficulty, variables within Doom Eternal – we’re talking about ammo, number of enemies, weapon damage, etc. – is tuned so that you’re pushed in the direction of managing your resources. According to Martin, it’s going to make skilled and unskilled players alike “play the game the right way.”
That’s all we have for now, but Doom Eternal launches on March 20, 2020 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One, so be sure to check back frequently for updates. If you want to learn more about the game, check out our most recent story: Doom Eternal Will Take You a Whole Day to Complete if You Play Non-Stop!
