Doom Eternal is at its best when it is screaming at you to move faster. As it thrusts the tools to single-handedly eviscerate the rampaging spawn of hell into your clenched, blood-drenched fists – an array of finely-tuned weapons designed to deliver mass-demon-destruction. When you’re up to your ankles in viscera, blasting chunks of flesh from foe while the hum of the chainsaw warms your trigger fingers. As it sets its hyper-kinetic action to a cacophonic soundscape of blood, bullets, and heavy fucking metal.
Doom Eternal screams at you to move faster and to fight harder and you can do nothing but obey. Not because you have become subservient to the altar of id Software, but because the cadence of Doom’s combat has demanded nothing less of you for more than three decades.
Fast Facts: Doom Eternal
(Image credit: Bethesda)
Release date: March 20, 2020 Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One Developer: id Software Publisher: Bethesda
Much like its predecessors, Doom Eternal is a hammer-horror pantomime in which you are made an active participant. It is an elaborate and self-indulgent production, its violence so over the top that you can’t help but smile as it spills out over the stage and under your feet. It’s an utterly ridiculous and strangely endearing showing, warping your suspension of disbelief so extensively that you’ll wonder whether you’ve crossed over to another dimension – to a world where the first-person shooter followed the archaic directions first outlined by Doom in 1993 without question instead of turning toward the teachings of Half-Life.
The problem with this stage show is that the screaming has to stop sometime. The director is hoarse and is begging you to enjoy an intermission from the action. The bullet casings need to be collected, they tell you; the buckets of blood need to be refilled, the gore mopped up, and the guitars tuned back down to D. The cast of cannon fodder needs to take a breather as the next hellish stage is reset somewhere out of sight. You were moving too fast, and there’s still a little story left to shout into your face.
Doom Eternal is at its worst when it makes you slow down; it struggles to settle in silence.
Feeling a need for speed
(Image credit: Bethesda)
I can count the number of first-person shooters that can function competently as platformers on one hand, and Doom Eternal is not among them. Developer id Software has found itself caught, by attempting to straddle the line between inducing nostalgia and embracing evolution it has disrupted the conditions in which Doom (2016) was able to so effortlessly thrive.
Doom Eternal routinely breaks the pace of its action by forcing you to stiffly navigate towering spaces at regular intervals. You’ll do this by swinging imprecisely between monkey bars, scaling bland craggy walls, bouncing off of unstable platforms, dashing between spacious maws of death, and double-jumping to ledges with slippery collision detection. Doom’s movement systems are tightly refined, designed to keep your crosshairs focused on fast-moving enemies amongst a backdrop of colourful chaos. These systems struggle when you’re pushed to slowly and methodically scale the environment with little room for error to reach the next combat arena.
It’s levels like Doom Hunter Base, Super Gore Nest, and Mars Core that make up the bulk of the mid-game that are hit hardest by this design decision. These spaces are larger and more ambitious than anything the studio has committed to before with Doom, and they struggle to maintain momentum.
(Image credit: Bethesda)
“As a prerequisite to progression, platforming only serves to introduce points of friction in an otherwise frictionless experience.”
First-person platforming just about works for Doom when it is an optional extravagance – when you’re off exploring for the myriad of optional collectable scattered throughout each of the missions – but as a prerequisite to progression they only serve to introduce points of friction in an otherwise frictionless experience.
By the time underwater sections were introduced – slowing you down even further, with the added annoyance of mitigating radioactive damage thrown in for good measure – it starts to become difficult to resist the urge to put the controller down and walk away entirely. That all said, it’s difficult to indulge in these tendencies when you’re faced with the prospect of coming across another sensationally-realised vista or the opportunity to shove the Super Shotgun double-barrel deep into the throat of a Baron of Hell.
That’s where Doom Eternal feels right, revelling in ultra-violence across some impossibly beautiful environments. The game has built on the core loop that helped propel its predecessor from mere revival-project to genuine revolution, its central gimmick always working to keep players moving and – critically – engaging with enemies.
Embracing aggression
(Image credit: Bethesda)
Glory Kills are still the star of the combat experience. Pumping enemies with enough bullets to reach a damage threshold will make them glow, indicating that you can do some graphic combination of: decapitation / goring / smashing / bashing / slicing / knifing / ripping / tearing (delete as necessary). These melee executions aren’t just for show, they serve as your primary method of retrieving health.
It encourages you to play Doom Eternal the way id wants you to play it. The studio wants you to be moving and shooting as quickly as you can, giving as much aggression back to the hulking monsters as they give to you. To succeed in Doom Eternal – especially once you begin to whip through the difficulty levels – you must get in the face of enemies and never back away from a tough encounter; there’s no faster way to meet your maker than to engage in a half-hearted retreat, with victory earned by engaging with the relentless pace of the action on its own terms – backing off is never an option, carrying through with forward momentum towards piles of ammunition, red barrels, and, yes, fresh enemies to rip and tear through is the key to victory.
If you aren’t in need of health, you’ll find that your Chainsaw can be used to chew through foes and retrieve ammunition, which is always in short supply. Your flame belch, a shoulder-mounted flamethrower, can burn enemies and deliver armour plating when shot, while Glory Kills also charge up your ability to deliver a devastating Blood Punch which eviscerates just about anything within your immediate cone of vision. All in all, it’s a killer cycle that only helps propel Doom Eternal’s core combat to new heights.
Speaking of the core combat, it’s been a long-standing rule that you judge an id shooter on the strength of its shotguns. Unsurprisingly, the studio has taken its penchant for building the best boomsticks in video games and outdone itself. The Super Shotgun is impossible to put away; it screams power with every shot, its weight and staggering punch as satisfying to use the opening hours of the game to the last.
Weapons have always been at the heart of Doom, and Eternal is no slouch in this regard. You’ll also find that each of the firearms can once again be upgraded throughout the game with Weapon Points, earned by completing in-mission objectives and chaos thresholds. Most weapons have two available modifications, each of which can be switched up with a simple button press, and offer an array of utterly ridiculous additional ways to turn demons to pulp. Exploring the environments will also help you earn Sentinel Crystals and Praetor Suit points which can be used to upgrade your armour, improving its utility and resistance, or upgrading your health, armour, and ammo capacities.
A celebration of ultra-violence
(Image credit: Bethesda)
You’ll want to invest in these upgrades and improvements early on, because Doom Eternal isn’t afraid to beat your head against the wall until it’s a pulpy mess. By the late game, Doom Eternal gets brutal, really pushing you to utilise all of your available abilities and weapons to get through its combat arenas in one piece.
For the most part, Doom Eternal casts its action in locked-off combat arenas, pushing you to skirt through them at speed looking for the most violent lines of none-stop navigation. These spaces aren’t as tightly designed as the ones featured in Doom (2016), which I believe is down to the increased verticality – id is desperate to get you utilising its first-person platforming systems, even in the middle of frantic fights – but they are still great to engage enemies in.
That said, Doom Eternal does suffer because of some of its enemy design. The game is structured around escalating encounters – it introduces you to an enemy type on its own, lets you figure out the hook to slaying it, and then continues to throw a litany of them at you once. It’s a potent design that keeps Doom Eternal feeling frantic at all times, with the game’s aggressive and persistent AI ensuring that some of these creatures combine tactics to overwhelm you in some truly terrifying ways.
(Image credit: Bethesda)
Combat arenas are usually a mixture of Heavy Cannon fodder – foes that can be quickly chewed up or smashed down for an easy burst of ammo or health – and larger, more punishing enemies that’ll take a few runs around the arena to drop. This structure maintains momentum, and the relentless pace that the core ethos that the game is built on. Until it makes you slow down.
Boss battles with health bars were a blight on Doom (2016), and while that isn’t so much of a problem here, there are a handful of enemy types that bring play screeching to a halt. For Doom Eternal to work, it has to have you managing your time between multiple enemy types and constantly leaving you on the verge of being totally overwhelmed, constantly asking you to push your understanding of the movement and combat mechanics to the max. And in comes a Marauder (a brand new demon designed for Eternal) or a returning Archvile, Super Heavy enemies that are generally no fun to fight. The Marauder, in particular, only works to slow combat to a crawl. It’s an enemy type designed inherently for one-versus-one encounters, and it doesn’t work in the controlled chaos of the wider combat experience.
Still, that’s a small annoyance in an otherwise blistering FPS. If you can bite your lip and endure some routinely frustrating levels built around platforming, then you’re going to have one hell of a good time with Doom Eternal. It’s a fast, smart, and frantic shooter that seems to find real delight in testing your endurance. It’s an outrageous and ridiculous pantomime where you are bound by blood to the unrelenting cadence of the action.
The federal government is ordering the dissolution of TikTok’s Canadian business after a national security review of the Chinese company behind the social media platform, but stopped short of ordering people to stay off the app.
Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced the government’s “wind up” demand Wednesday, saying it is meant to address “risks” related to ByteDance Ltd.’s establishment of TikTok Technology Canada Inc.
“The decision was based on the information and evidence collected over the course of the review and on the advice of Canada’s security and intelligence community and other government partners,” he said in a statement.
The announcement added that the government is not blocking Canadians’ access to the TikTok application or their ability to create content.
However, it urged people to “adopt good cybersecurity practices and assess the possible risks of using social media platforms and applications, including how their information is likely to be protected, managed, used and shared by foreign actors, as well as to be aware of which country’s laws apply.”
Champagne’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment seeking details about what evidence led to the government’s dissolution demand, how long ByteDance has to comply and why the app is not being banned.
A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement that the shutdown of its Canadian offices will mean the loss of hundreds of well-paying local jobs.
“We will challenge this order in court,” the spokesperson said.
“The TikTok platform will remain available for creators to find an audience, explore new interests and for businesses to thrive.”
The federal Liberals ordered a national security review of TikTok in September 2023, but it was not public knowledge until The Canadian Press reported in March that it was investigating the company.
At the time, it said the review was based on the expansion of a business, which it said constituted the establishment of a new Canadian entity. It declined to provide any further details about what expansion it was reviewing.
A government database showed a notification of new business from TikTok in June 2023. It said Network Sense Ventures Ltd. in Toronto and Vancouver would engage in “marketing, advertising, and content/creator development activities in relation to the use of the TikTok app in Canada.”
Even before the review, ByteDance and TikTok were lightning rod for privacy and safety concerns because Chinese national security laws compel organizations in the country to assist with intelligence gathering.
Such concerns led the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a bill in March designed to ban TikTok unless its China-based owner sells its stake in the business.
Champagne’s office has maintained Canada’s review was not related to the U.S. bill, which has yet to pass.
Canada’s review was carried out through the Investment Canada Act, which allows the government to investigate any foreign investment with potential to might harm national security.
While cabinet can make investors sell parts of the business or shares, Champagne has said the act doesn’t allow him to disclose details of the review.
Wednesday’s dissolution order was made in accordance with the act.
The federal government banned TikTok from its mobile devices in February 2023 following the launch of an investigation into the company by federal and provincial privacy commissioners.
— With files from Anja Karadeglija in Ottawa
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.
LONDON (AP) — Most people have accumulated a pile of data — selfies, emails, videos and more — on their social media and digital accounts over their lifetimes. What happens to it when we die?
It’s wise to draft a will spelling out who inherits your physical assets after you’re gone, but don’t forget to take care of your digital estate too. Friends and family might treasure files and posts you’ve left behind, but they could get lost in digital purgatory after you pass away unless you take some simple steps.
Here’s how you can prepare your digital life for your survivors:
Apple
The iPhone maker lets you nominate a “ legacy contact ” who can access your Apple account’s data after you die. The company says it’s a secure way to give trusted people access to photos, files and messages. To set it up you’ll need an Apple device with a fairly recent operating system — iPhones and iPads need iOS or iPadOS 15.2 and MacBooks needs macOS Monterey 12.1.
For iPhones, go to settings, tap Sign-in & Security and then Legacy Contact. You can name one or more people, and they don’t need an Apple ID or device.
You’ll have to share an access key with your contact. It can be a digital version sent electronically, or you can print a copy or save it as a screenshot or PDF.
Take note that there are some types of files you won’t be able to pass on — including digital rights-protected music, movies and passwords stored in Apple’s password manager. Legacy contacts can only access a deceased user’s account for three years before Apple deletes the account.
Google
Google takes a different approach with its Inactive Account Manager, which allows you to share your data with someone if it notices that you’ve stopped using your account.
When setting it up, you need to decide how long Google should wait — from three to 18 months — before considering your account inactive. Once that time is up, Google can notify up to 10 people.
You can write a message informing them you’ve stopped using the account, and, optionally, include a link to download your data. You can choose what types of data they can access — including emails, photos, calendar entries and YouTube videos.
There’s also an option to automatically delete your account after three months of inactivity, so your contacts will have to download any data before that deadline.
Facebook and Instagram
Some social media platforms can preserve accounts for people who have died so that friends and family can honor their memories.
When users of Facebook or Instagram die, parent company Meta says it can memorialize the account if it gets a “valid request” from a friend or family member. Requests can be submitted through an online form.
The social media company strongly recommends Facebook users add a legacy contact to look after their memorial accounts. Legacy contacts can do things like respond to new friend requests and update pinned posts, but they can’t read private messages or remove or alter previous posts. You can only choose one person, who also has to have a Facebook account.
You can also ask Facebook or Instagram to delete a deceased user’s account if you’re a close family member or an executor. You’ll need to send in documents like a death certificate.
TikTok
The video-sharing platform says that if a user has died, people can submit a request to memorialize the account through the settings menu. Go to the Report a Problem section, then Account and profile, then Manage account, where you can report a deceased user.
Once an account has been memorialized, it will be labeled “Remembering.” No one will be able to log into the account, which prevents anyone from editing the profile or using the account to post new content or send messages.
X
It’s not possible to nominate a legacy contact on Elon Musk’s social media site. But family members or an authorized person can submit a request to deactivate a deceased user’s account.
Passwords
Besides the major online services, you’ll probably have dozens if not hundreds of other digital accounts that your survivors might need to access. You could just write all your login credentials down in a notebook and put it somewhere safe. But making a physical copy presents its own vulnerabilities. What if you lose track of it? What if someone finds it?
Instead, consider a password manager that has an emergency access feature. Password managers are digital vaults that you can use to store all your credentials. Some, like Keeper,Bitwarden and NordPass, allow users to nominate one or more trusted contacts who can access their keys in case of an emergency such as a death.
But there are a few catches: Those contacts also need to use the same password manager and you might have to pay for the service.
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LONDON (AP) — Britain’s competition watchdog said Thursday it’s opening a formal investigation into Google’s partnership with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
The Competition and Markets Authority said it has “sufficient information” to launch an initial probe after it sought input earlier this year on whether the deal would stifle competition.
The CMA has until Dec. 19 to decide whether to approve the deal or escalate its investigation.
“Google is committed to building the most open and innovative AI ecosystem in the world,” the company said. “Anthropic is free to use multiple cloud providers and does, and we don’t demand exclusive tech rights.”
San Francisco-based Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who previously worked at ChatGPT maker OpenAI. The company has focused on increasing the safety and reliability of AI models. Google reportedly agreed last year to make a multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic, which has a popular chatbot named Claude.
Anthropic said it’s cooperating with the regulator and will provide “the complete picture about Google’s investment and our commercial collaboration.”
“We are an independent company and none of our strategic partnerships or investor relationships diminish the independence of our corporate governance or our freedom to partner with others,” it said in a statement.
The U.K. regulator has been scrutinizing a raft of AI deals as investment money floods into the industry to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom. Last month it cleared Anthropic’s $4 billion deal with Amazon and it has also signed off on Microsoft’s deals with two other AI startups, Inflection and Mistral.
