After scouring YouTube for every possible Eternal gameplay, it really seems to be the 7/10 sequel to the 6/10 prequel like I predicted it to be. Some thoughts:
- Cutscenes are skippable this time around
- Weak Spot system lets you reduce the threat potential of enemies without outright killing them, which allows the game to throw more enemies at once at you without it being overwhelming, since you can weaken the enemies to keep the odds in your favor
- Pistol has been removed, good riddance
- Combat Shotgun is useful again, the useless Triple Shot has been replaced with a Full Auto mod for huge burst DPS at the expense of all your ammo, and the useless Explosive Shot can now fire three shots before having to reload on top of being more useful to trigger Weak Spots on enemies and making Cacos swallow them
- Rocket Launcher is now nowhere as OP by virtue of having a slower projectile speed and there being more enemies capable of dodging projectiles, so you actually need to lead that shit
- Plasma Rifle now makes enemies explode on death which is useful for CC'ing groups of lesser enemies, on top of being able to make the shields of Shieldguys explode as a kind of Weak Spot, meaning it's worth using now
- Plasma Rifle's overpowered Stun Bomb has been repurposed as an equipment item with a much longer cooldown, and is replaced with a microwave beam mod that can stunlock only a single enemy
- Super Shotgun doesn't seem to be anywhere as OP as it used to be, has a much shorter range and RoF, but has the grappling hook to make up for it
- Chaingun can now put up a shield that blocks all projectiles coming in from the front in order to make it actually worth using despite the movement speed penalty
- Basically some weapons have more specific counters against particular enemies to give you more of a reason to switch weapns
- Chainsaw ammo limit has a maximum of 3 pips and Chainsaw ammo is rarer overall where larger enemies require 3 pips to instakill, meaning you need to be more careful in using it, though it will slowly regenerate fuel up to one pip only to prevent you from being completely without ammo
- Shoulder-mounted grenades are now more useful since they falter enemies on hit and can trigger Weak Spots
- Mancubi's trigger range for their shockwave attack when you get close is now a lot larger and leaves lasting damaging acid on the floor, meaning they're more of an actual threat
- Revenants have their homing missiles back now, meaning they're no longer just Imps with jetpacks, though sadly it didn't seem like their homing missiles posed much of a threat in practice
- Cacodemons fire a burst of three projectiles instead of one to make them an actual threat at range
- Shieldguys are a lot more common, which is good since they were underutilized in nuDoom and good at making you reconsider the situation
- Mid-air dashing means you can be less reliant on ledge grabs to get around the level, and makes dodging from melee enemies like Hell Knights and Pinkies more consistent
- Arenas on the whole seem more constrained and less spacious so you can't easily climb around everywhere as much
- The whole upgrades and RPG shit is unfortunately still in, but at least it's been somewhat streamlined and you don't have to do obnoxious challenges like 'kill four enemies at once with the super shotgun fifty times' to get upgrades
- Instead of having to wait until mid-game to get the rune for Air Control, now any time you find a Rune Point you can pick one of nine Runes in any order
- The new snake-like Whiplash seems to be an interesting hard-to-hit enemy that slithers across the ground and tries to sneak behind you
- You also got those new enemies that can just plop a shield in your face and prevent you from doing a Glory Kill or using your Rocket Launcher without it blowing up in your face
- There are a fuckton of UI customization options to disable all the annoying shit on screen
- Falling into a bottomless pit doesn't insta-kill you and send you back to the nearest checkpoint, but does the Metroid Prime thing of teleporting back where you stood last at the cost of some health
- Blood Punch gives you an actual non-Glory Kill melee attack that's actually useful and rewards Glory Killing better
- Arenas have more interactive elements in the shape of traps you can trigger and other kinds of stuff in order to make them stand out from eachother more, I saw one arena where the floor was damaging and you could only be safe on small platforms
- less boring walking around inbetween arenas, at least now you have platforming to worry about
- Blood Fueled, Savagery and Air Control should still be core abilities however
- The flamethrower-enemies-to-get-armor-back system seems fucking stupid since the only different thing you do is press one button and being close to enemies before shooting them in order to get some armor, which given the fact that the flamethrower recharges via cooldowns essentially makes it a cooldown ability for what amounts to free armor
- The Ice Bomb is a panic button which does have a long cooldown to balance it out, but if I wanted to challenge myself I would never want to use it, so I hope there's some kind of more alternative or aggressive usage for it that isn't a pure panic button, like how instead of the panic button Rage Arts in Tekken 7 you can instead spend your Rage on Rage Drives, so could the Flamethrower and regular Grenade and Ice Bomb share the same resource
- The platforming at hand seems kinda boring
- I wish the platforming was more integrated with the full combat arenas
- I wish instead of waiting for equipment cooldowns before being able to use them again, you can only fill them up by dealing damage or doing Glory Kills
- Dashing into staggered enemies to tackle them to death for health should definitely be a thing as a safer and less rewarding, but faster alternative to Glory Kills
- Missions where you control other demons seems like a boring gimmick to pad out the game length by reusing content from the multiplayer mode
- UI is way too noisy and hard too read color-wise, the one they had in the original announcement was perfect enough, here it seems like everything is vying for your attention, even if you can customize it
- every ammo type pickup from chainsawing enemies doesn't need different colors each, I know when I chainsaw an enemy that I'll get ammo of each type, so showing me this with different colors is superfluous information and overloading my senses
- While some arenas have traps, they can only be used by you and serve no threat to you
But the biggest gripe for me so far is that the enemy design hasn't sufficiently changed the way it wanted to. Rather than aiming at restricting your powerful movement (that now comes with mid-air dashing and grappling hooks!), the majority of used enemies are the ones that just directly try to kill you. Or to use the developers' own 'battle' chess analogy: chess is won by cutting off all escape routes from the king and striking it; not just going directly for the king without boxing him in first. So I saw journalists mindlessly playing on UV probably just running circles in the arena and still getting by despite the increased enemy count. The heavies like Arachnotron and Mancubus are basically interchangeable when it comes to threat priority, as seems to be the case with most of the different types of lighter demons. Doom Eternal really has to pull out the stops with new "OH SHIT, NOT YOU" enemy types whose presence can actually radically change the flow of the battle. Pain Elementals and Archviles did basically that in Doom 2, so id has to really fuck this one up to not make it work. That, and more arena variety that isn't just a different assortiment of platforms, give me the environmental hazards!