2016 had the perfect balance between story and gameplay to me, in that the player character expressed flagrant disregard for any narrative elements. This was doom 1 af.
Just keep moving and turn the bad guys into chunks. Need nothing more.
I fucking hated the loop in eternal. I get that the developers wanted you to play in a specific way, they partially achieved this through arbitrary mechanics like ammo scarcity. I can appreciate that it’s a good game, but I didn’t get on with it.
The art style went full Hollywood horror, and the exposition was kinda dialed up to eleven by contrast to its direct predecessor. Very much disliked that you couldn’t crouch (definitely more of a me issue, though I think sliding is a missed opportunity in Eternal’s movement repertoire).
2016’s PvP was imperfect but still fun and much appreciated. Snapmap was super underrated and has many sick community made levels.
The later games are a phenomenal technical showcase; the absolute posterchild for the Vulkan gfx API, but it’s not very ‘doom’ in spirit to me any more
fair enough, it’s still in stark contrast to all of eternal’s exposition, which was pretty hard to watch (the Colosseum scenes especially).
That’s not to say the story isn’t good or interesting,