tl;dr Dark Ages doesn’t have anything left that made Doom 2016 fun for me
I had a real sense that The Dark Ages wasn’t going to be my game. Am I the only one tired of games just piling on completely new feature sets and complicated feature sets to remember, level over level?
I enjoyed Doom 2016 because for a large portion of the game, the mechanics were simple enough that you could get into flow state even at the higher difficulties. I couldn’t make it halfway through Eternal before I was annoyed at having to switch strategy every 5 seconds.
Dark Ages looks more like an Action RPG than Doom. Not to mention the constant tutorial interruptions. Can we go back to ammo, health and maybe grenades for once in a AAA game? It always feels like AAA means complicated game mechanics, rather than letting a simple gameplay loop speak for itself in a AAA environment with all the other benefits that come with it.
Last thing to add, the intro level of Dark Ages looked incredibly bland, like it was a midpoint level of one of the other games. The game just sort of assumes that the other games have been played and that you enjoyed them and starts from there, rather than standing on its own.