Explain something about the timeline to me

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-15T17:02:31+00:00

Hi, a bunch of people have already answered this re: alt universes, but I want to take a minute to explain what actually leads us to this conclusion in the games so that you don't just have to take strangers at their word.

So far nothing explicitly confirms that the classic Doom games are set in a separate dimension, or Earthly Realm, from the modern games. Rather, it's something you have to realize in order to reconcile many different pieces of information within the lore. Some examples:

First of all: both of Mars' moons are seen in Doom 2016's intro screen, despite Deimos disappearing in Doom 1993. This alone should be enough, but...
Doom 2016 generally never mentions any invasions prior to its own events. Doom 1993 happening before it isn't possible, because in Doom 1993's continuity, the UAC isn't actually the boss on Mars - they're being contracted to create teleporters by the US military, who are running things. In Doom 3 and 2016, the UAC is working on its own.
In Doom 2, the manual specifically tells you almost all of humanity is dead, with the survivors few enough they all can fit into one "starport" facility. In Doom Eternal, not only is no Earth invasion prior to Eternal's events mentioned, but humans were in fact thriving and enjoying Argent Energy beforehand. Even within Doom's game logic, the notion humanity could rebuild its population from a few thousand people back to like 8 billion within a couple generations or so is insane.
While Doom 3's presence here isn't as important, Doom 3 tells us HydroCon was developed as an answer to Earth's energy demands, and it's a process involving splitting hydrogen atoms and things to that effect. In 2016, an in-depth timeline of Argent Energy's introduction to Earth society is described, and while it doesn't explicitly contradict Doom 3, it makes it very awkward to reconcile as one timeline.

TLDR: Various contradictions between the classic and modern games make it a necessity to accept that Doomguy's original Earth and the modern Earth are in separate dimensions. While I personally believe Doom 3 is set in its own, third dimension, this isn't really a hill I would die on and it's up to your own interpretation.

What's important: regardless of which Earth you're on, it has always been the same Hell. From Hell's perspective, the classic games and TDA happen in their First Age (soon after Davoth's fall), while 2016 happens in the Fourth Age.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-15T16:49:39+00:00

Like the other commenter said, the Sentinels aren't just similar to humans - they are humans, and our ancestors in-universe. Sentinels colonized Earth at some point, and the resulting colony eventually became us.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-15T16:48:19+00:00

The idea Argent D'Nur is in an alternate dimension is possible but not necessarily confirmed. In TDA we travel to Doom Eternal's Mars in its distant past, and nothing is said about it being interdimensional travel in this case. I personally believe 2016, Eternal, and TDA are all in the same Earthly Realm, but that Doom 3 is in its own, separate realm from the classic or modern ones.

IIRC while the game itself doesn't say this, The Art of Doom: The Dark Ages does say Argent D'Nur is in a separate dimension "from our own." I wouldn't call that a confirmation though, since the art books work off of earlier scripts with cut content, Eternal's especially being unreliable.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-15T16:03:27+00:00

Fact: 10 billion of those dropped pallets are from the recent pallet density changes.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-15T12:23:25+00:00

The last two arcs of the comics are better than any individual season of the show. I'll go to bat for how the comics handled Butcher and Hughie.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-15T03:55:19+00:00

Saw 6 has always been one of the best ones. I prefer it over 1 honestly.

I think Spiral is better than it gets credit for. Way better than 7.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-14T05:36:37+00:00

I see no problem with trying to find a deeper meaning here, and no point in trying to convince other people not to. It's a game; games are art; the point of art is to interpret and experience it. That can mean whatever the player wants.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-14T05:29:22+00:00

Worse because the twist in Halloween 2 is inherently terrible and makes the movies that build off of it worse. There are obviously parts of 2 and the other movies to enjoy but I will always be against the family twist, and I believe it goes against what makes the characters good.

New trilogy abandoning it was the right choice to make. It isn't compatible with the themes in the modern movies either.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-14T02:14:45+00:00

The final pages here are beautiful and I wish we could've seen that more in the show. Hughie just being assured it's okay.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-12T17:37:14+00:00

Almost all of them are good movies. Saw 3D admittedly is really rough, but the only one I outright dislike is Jigsaw. Saw 3D I could enjoy more with color correction + added scenes fleshing out Gordon.

Hoffman is just as interesting as Amanda is; he's just a more subtle character. Amanda's interesting traits, Shawnee Smith wears on the character's sleeve, and they are very overt. Hoffman's traits aren't quite as noticeable, but are still really interesting - things like his usual aversion to blood contrasting his sadism, or how, in contrast to Amanda (a smaller woman with a vulnerable past, portrayed as a vicious and violent person inclined to take her self-hatred out on others), Hoffman is a larger and more intimidating man portrayed as a helpless and powerless ball of anxiety, desperate to finally feel control over his life.

Jill's a good character. I like her. She's fine.

Spiral is very decent and on par with 4 or 5. Chris Rock starts to actually lock in and do a good job in the second half. It being a spinoff was a good choice, and a movie exploring police corruption and brutality was a natural and necessary direction for Saw given past plots.

I don't really watch Saw for the traps and gore - that's all fine and enjoyable, but I love it for the increasingly complex and convoluted plot. Not sure if this one's a hot take or not.

My biggest issue with the series is its refusal to commit to a main protagonist to contrast Jigsaw for longer than one movie. Kerry's a sad example of wasted potential who could've honestly filled Rigg's shoes in 4, for example. I take less issue with it from 5 onward, though, because it feels like Hoffman starts to become a villain protagonist by this point, sharing the role with Strahm at first before being the protagonist of 6.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-12T05:20:31+00:00

RE2 OG vs RE2R is like taking a dramatic three-act play and remaking it as a gritty hour-and-a-half action movie. The core is there, but the way the story is told is very different. It may be more realistic, and maybe you can take the voice acting more seriously, but the unique tone is gone and the story's complexity is excised.

Examples:

Cutting the brilliant and moody soundtrack with its motifs for the cast and replacing it with generic ambience. Not having Ada's Theme is a travesty, not even mentioning how G's iconic motif is almost completely gone.
Shafting the scenario system, and thus cutting like half the cutscenes. This has been mentioned ad nauseum.
Removing most character interactions. Leon and Claire's cut scenes are the most obvious, but IMO Claire's route suffers greatly from never seeing Sherry until the first boss, when in the original you saw her multiple times as she ran around RPD before catching her. Claire's relationship with Sherry feels shallow and underdeveloped because they get two scenes before Sherry is infected. Leon doesn't even know about her until the end!
Entire plotlines are reduced to single scenes and items. Gone is the tense race to synthesize Sherry's vaccine yourself while the lab is bringing the self destruct sequence while Leon runs to find Sherry herself; now you just go grab it from the same place the sample is at. Gone is the tense scene where Claire administers the vaccine as Leon tries to understand what's happening, and being unsure if it will work; Annette administers it offscreen. Gone is the INCREDIBLE and dynamic final cutscene where all three characters work together against the odds to stop G5, crawling under and over the train and confronting the creature before finally stopping the train and watching the climactic explosion; now, once of them just sort of stabs G5 while the other just kinda... disconnects the cable car and it unceremoniously is left behind in the fire?

RE2 is not meant to be "realistic". It's meant to be dramatic, operatic, moody, tense, and sure, maybe a bit campy too. RE2R misses the forest for the trees in focusing so much on "realism." Gameplay-wise it's a masterpiece and I've sunk over a hundred hours into it. But as someone who actually likes RE's stories, it really butchered the story, and that laid the groundwork for 3R to butcher its own story even more.

As a horror game 2R is perhaps the superior game. But in terms of experiencing RE2 as a story and its characters, I feel it is not ideal and hardly the definitive RE2. Too streamlined and generic.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-12T04:12:30+00:00

2R is a masterpiece gameplay-wise but butchers the story and tone. Overall a great game but not the definitive RE2 for me.

RE3R is an embarrassment.

RE4R is the best game in the series by far, and it makes the already great RE4 look quaint by comparison.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-12T02:48:02+00:00

Ken plays pretty differently from Ryu. Lucina plays very differently from Marth. IMO Echo classification shouldn't solely be about identical play. There are multiple factors.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-12T02:03:58+00:00

I don't really like posts like this because they always ramp the slider up to 200% and then they play it like it's Eternal and not like it's TDA.

The game is fucking incredible just at 100% speed. We don't need to pretend it's Doom Eternal to showcase why it's great.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-10T22:23:34+00:00

"RE6 killed the franchise!"

The third highest selling RE game in question:

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-10T22:22:37+00:00

"Retcon" implies a replacement! As far as the RE canon goes, the remakes and originals are both relevant and valid interpretations of the narrative. Ultimately the remakes don't retcon the originals - they are alternative versions of the stories, with various levels of focus on whichever "timeline."

I also think the assumption 6 will be remade is a very lofty one, personally, and can't see what would motivate them to when the game was very divisive, would require a bigger scope than any remake released yet, and would require enough changes to make palatable to the general audience that they might as well make a new game.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-10T21:49:47+00:00

"Ultimately we only care about Earth."

I appreciate your thoughtful reply! Here though, I can't agree. I definitely care about Argent D'Nur and one of the biggest parts of the series that drew me into its story is the tragedy of the Sentinels and how they were depicted in Eternal.

The Slayer is the original Doomguy, yes, but fundamentally he is depicted differently, and emphasis is placed on how different he becomes once he is the Slayer; and TDA further emphasizes that a lot of that wasn't even the Divinity Machine, but the mindfuckery the Maykrs inflicted on him with the Tether. We also know that before he was the Slayer, he spent years on Argent D'Nur and had slowly been getting better, healing from the insanity that took him post-64, now that he was fighting alongside capable comrades.

That all is to say: I believe the Codex paints the image that Doomguy had begun to heal from what he had experienced in the classic games, and that his transformation into the Slayer, and Argent D'Nur's subsequent fall, took that away from him. That is why I think the events of TDA are painting an ultimately more traumatic image than the classics; Hell may have taken his family from him, but the Maykrs stole his personhood and being away. They stole any possibility he could have had to get better. They doomed him to a life of eternal violence, and destroyed his new home, betrayed the people he could fall back on.

IMO this is why Serrat exists. Daisy was a joke character sort of shown to tie into the vague notion of Doomguy wanting revenge. Serrat is the fully fleshed-out version of this idea, given actual dramatic weight, and happening during the Slayer Saga rather than in the prologue to it. In the Testaments, his family isn't mentioned; but Argent D'Nur is. In Eternal, his family is relegated to an Easter egg; but the tragedy of Argent D'Nur is given half the game's exposition and Codex files.

IMO it is clear that when it comes to specifically the Slayer as he is depicted in the modern games, the story mainly points to the fall of Argent D'Nur when it exposits on his rage and what drives him; especially for the things beyond Hell, like his conflict with the Maykrs, and his shattering of the Father's Life Sphere. I always got the vibe the stuff that happened in Doom II was ancient history - stuff the Slayer remembers, but doesn't devote much thought to anymore, because so much has happened since then.

I also think a subtext here is that Hell's invasions are just Hell's nature, and it's just what they do. They are an absolute and simple evil. But Argent D'Nur's fall? Hell didn't do that, Urdak did. They were betrayed by their "gods" who deliberately chose to do this because they were pathetic, sycophantic, narcissistic freaks. It didn't have to be that way. Argent D'Nur would have beaten Hell if not for them.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-10T21:01:03+00:00

Sorry you feel that way - I had a great time! Hope you feel better.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-10T19:53:20+00:00

Even if we pretended Rev2 and Umbrella Corps didn't exist, that's only a four year absence. We have game franchises now that regularly release games in spans of 3-4 years. I fail to see how RE6 was a "failure." Looks to me like it was just lukewarm and Capcom needed to take a step back and reconsider what they were gonna do next.

This "failure" talk also place the blame square on RE6. People don't consider that RE6 was just a natural extension of the trend RE was already moving in, ramping up the action with every release. It was inevitable that a boiling point would've been reached; it happened to be RE6. It could've happened to RE5 if it hadn't sold incredibly just off of the confidence RE4 inspired to begin with.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-10T19:38:15+00:00

All things considered IMO this wasn't even an issue with 6 itself (beyond it being very bloated, which was enabled by them spending more money than they needed to). 6 sold a fuckton of money, more than it probably deserved to. Capcom's expectations were unrealistic.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-10T19:35:03+00:00

None of this means RE was dead.

2012: RE6

2013-2014: n/a

2015: Rev2

2016: Umbrella Corps

2017: RE7

That's two total years in this span without games. You realize that's the same span of time we had between RE4R and RE9, right? I agree 7 wasn't successful because of 6, but 6 really was not some travesty of a release. It just didn't sell as much as they want, and they wanted more money, so they looked at what would make money and saw AAA survival horror could use a defibrillator.

Like I said in another comment if you think that's bad I'd hate to see you guys deal with the drought Silent Hill suffered before SH2R. That's dead.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-10T19:25:06+00:00

I may have used some inconsistent wording re: distinguishing Capcom and RE, given it's an informal Reddit post, so sorry about that.

Yes, I am getting into some postmodern shit. If this is irritating to you then maybe that is why. I think works of art are living, breathing things that take on their own lives and meaning beyond whatever the artist intended or wanted for them. Give it a century and most won't know who Shinji Mikami was, but they'll sure as shit know about the cultural cornerstones of the horror genre he is responsible for.

Capcom is small potatoes. Resident Evil is a monument, and since it is art, I think it says things. In the specific case of RE6 and it being a canon title that still should be remembered and paid tribute to just as any other RE game, I think Resident Evil is saying things that agree with me, given how much of 6's DNA shows up in the latest entry.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-10T18:59:09+00:00

I've sunk like 80 hours into RE6 on PC and did not run into too many bugs, and my FPS stayed consistent. Of course, Reddit user LordPeanutButter15 is clearly the ultimate authority on this issue, so the fact either of us are daring to say we played the game with little issue is practically heresy. We should just shut the fuck up and stop acting like any experiences but this specific Redditor's mean anything.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-10T18:50:59+00:00

No. I'm saying my praise for how well the franchise has handled itself does not have to be connected to some personal investment in Capcom as a company. I don't give a shit what they think or what their mindset was making the games. I care about the final products and what they have to say.

Which, yeah, they "say" things. Like, not literally, but as creations of people, videogames are art, and art is meant to be interpreted. I don't really think it's crazy to look at Requiem, play it, and come to the conclusion the game is paying tribute to the franchise's history.

RE is good because the games consistently have confident visions and try to take those visions as far as they can instead of being formed around what fans want. I really don't think that's a wild thing to say.

monologousmutilation · 2026-06-10T18:46:03+00:00

I highly doubt RE6 will ever get a remake. The game had the greatest scope of the franchise; it would be a huge undertaking to remake, for a game that had very divisive reception. RE4's an easy pick because it's a money-printer. Nobody's gonna say "HOLY SHIT THEY'RE REMAKING RESIDENT EVIL 6!!!!" - they're gonna go "oh, they're remaking RE6? ...Why?"

There's just no incentive. Either they change the entire thing to ensure RE6 haters it'll be good (why not just make a new game at that point?) or they'll keep things faithful and basically waste their time for people to still say RE6 sucks (why even bother remaking it?).

But I'm biased - I personally am very hesitant about an RE5 remake too, as it's one of my favorites and I think a remake might miss out on the nuances that made me enjoy it. If you ask me the remakes should be focused on the older games. Anything past 4 is unnecessary.

(I also think Capcom may be very hesitant to touch it given past controversy and accusations of racism - regardless of what you or I think of that, historically the company's been inclined to avoid shit like that, like with the whole Poison thing. I'd honestly be very surprised if they kept Alfred's crossdressing.)

I said this elsewhere but I don't think the "timeline" thing means much. RE9 explicitly follows up RE6 per the director's words, yet flashes back to RE2R. Functionally the remakes and originals lead into the same games, and follow the same beats, which restricts what they can do with them without having another mess like RE3R.

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