#divinity machine

The Divinity Machine serves one major purpose in the lore of Doom Eternal: it explains why the gameplay changed. That’s it. That is literally its function. It is there to justify why... well, basically, why the Doom Slayer is strong enough to perform Glory Kills, I guess. Which is a question nobody ever asked.

Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal make a big fuss about the Doom Slayer being able to slaughter demons en masse. The humans worship him as a godlike figure. Scientists seek to understand the nature of this ability. What makes the Doom Slayer so special? The answer, Eternal explains, is the Divinity Machine.

But Doom Eternal also asserts that the Doom Slayer is the same character as the original 1991 Doom Marine, who was already slaughtering demons en masse long before he ever wound up on Argent D’Nur. The Divinity Machine didn’t make him a whirlwind force of violence that Hell itself fears. He already was, long beforhe ever met the Sentinels.

The Divinity Machine took the fierce unstoppable FPS protagonist Doom Marine and it made him into the fierce unstoppable FPS protagonist Doom Slayer. This is a completely lateral move. I’m not saying that the Divinity Machine empowering the Slayer is bad, but that it’s unnecessary. 2016 literally just went, “Because he’s the Doomguy,” and audiences fully accepted that explanation without question.

The Divinity Machine didn’t even make a lot of sense within the lore. Its job is to try and identify the prophesied Doom Slayer (because of course there’s a prophecy now, everyone loves prophecies apparently) among the Argent population so that the Maykrs can nip him in the bud before he becomes a problem. But then what it actually does is give the Doom Slayer god-power and possibly immortality.

Even the codex is very confused about how that happened. The Divinity Machine’s job is to try and explain how the Slayer’s power upgrade happened, and even then, the actual explanation is, “I dunno, it just did.”

The last thing the Divinity Machine does is set up the next game’s intrigue. A mysterious figure, Samur Maykr, uses the Machine to empower Doomguy. This is implied to be Seraphim, the Maykr that stole the Father from the heavenly Urdak, who is also implied to be the Doom Slayer’s old alien-robot frenemy from 2016, Samuel Hayden.

Yeah, he’s basically Doom Lucifer.

They seem to be setting up a point of context surrounding the idea that Seraphim created the Doom Slayer, putting him in a position of either power, influence, or both for the next game’s conflict. But. Like I said. That’s kinda stupid?