The "Doom guy's name is doom guy" thing reminds me of the point I was making back when the game came out:
There's also the doom slayer as a character. Eternal really crystallized something that 2016 had started. In Doom 1 through 3, you were just a guy. Maybe a more stubborn, lucky, skilled, or iron willed guy than average, but still at core just a regular guy. Anyone could have been doomguy. The Doom Slayer is not just a guy. The Doom slayer doesn't save the world because he's just lucky, because he's more experienced, because he was the right man in the right place at the right time. The Slayer saves the world because he's just flat out better than anyone else, because he has super armor and super weapons and VEGA and a doom fortress and superpowers and access to all this stuff that no one else has. In 2016, you could go "eh, they had those elite guards, and they had all these weapons, and they just got sucker punched, if they'd had a bit more time to reorganize, maybe they could have won without you". In Doom Eternal, you are the only person that could possibly save the earth, the best that regular people can do is not die while you do all the work. And there's something....off about that narrative.
Doom Eternal has a problem with characterization, in that it wants to have a detailed backstory and fleshed out setting, while also having the main character being completely one dimensional. Or like, .75 dimensional, because in eternal doomguy had every bit of characterization he had in 2016 removed (
it reminds me a lot of this article talking about the changes in Master Chief's characterization between halo 1 and halo 2).
In 2016, doom guy had a personality, expressed very subtly but it was there, in little moments throughout the game. Like when Hayden starts talking to you, doomguy first ignores him, and then when hayden tries again, going on about the greater benefit to mankind, doomguy glances down to a dead guy, the actual
human cost that Hayden has glossed over in his focus on big picture stuff, and smashes the speaker and refuses to go along with Hayden. Doomguy
cares about the impact of what Hayden is doing, even when it's just happening to some random mook in an elevator that he's never met
.
In Eternal, doomguy meet living, surviving humans, the people that he's fighting to save, that he's always been fighting to save, and just....ignores them. Like they're just part of the scenery or something. The trailer scene, where he just drags a guy over to a keycard scanner by his lanyard and then steals a plasma gun from a guard even though doomguy already has a plasma gun, is just bizarre. Like, I don't expect him to go "oh, random guy, please pretty please give me your card", but something like just holding out his hand for the card and only yanking the guy when he's hesitant to hand it over, something that at least shows that doomguy is aware that, you know, he's dealing with an actual living person here, not just a man shaped lump that happens to have a key on it.
Romeo here is just doubling down on this thing were Doomguy's only personal trait is "badass", and not even a consistent kind of badassness, just whatever sounds the most badass in an exact situation. And I don't understand why they chose this route, because they clearly
can do something else, and given how much story stuff they do elsewhere, clearly want to do something else.