Tag 2 appreciation post

  I ain't afraid to say it. But, tag 2 IS a masterpiece. A flawed, yet misunderstood masterpiece that is. 

When I think of Passion and Ambition, I think of The Ancient Gods Part 2. It's clear that ID weren't afraid to take risks with eternal, and were willing to go full on balls to the walls with tag 2. And honestly, i cant help but applaud ID for being THIS experimental with doom. And honestly, tag 2 (and the entirety of eternal) is the most ambitious doom game we've ever seen to date. 

There's just soo much character and personality with tag 2, just this one single dlc. From the environments to the new demon types (even if they're just reskins of older types from the previous eternal campaign cough cough cursed prowler cough cough). Still the effort, passion, and creativity was there!..it just needed more time in the oven to be fully realized. 

I feel as though the pacing and difficulty got mixed up in TAG2. Whilst I at least understand the decision to tone down the difficulty from TAG1, the way I would have hoped they'd have pursued this would have been to maintain a higher level of engagement through persistent but relatively low challenge. Both the ARC Complex and Cultist Base ML's spring to mind - neither are soul crushingly difficult but both require a higher level of player engagement than a typical base campaign mission. A more frequent but less gruelling challenge may have made it far less controversial of a DLC.

I mean, it sounds (going from the pre-release conversations in the Bethesda streams with Hugo and Josh) and even looks like the maps were originally designed with high capacity demon encounters. It seems as though it was decided that this approach was too exhausting for the general audience, which is fine, but that's where the lower intensity approach would come in. There doesn't need to be incidental double Armored Barons and Tyrants everywhere, but at least some more mid tier heavies to keep us more occupied, more often? What we got was so much open spaces with minimal demons, very frequently. A fully upgraded Slayer can easily manage more standard heavy demons with enough familiarity of gameplay mechanics, you know what I mean? Equipment cycling in DLC2 should probably be an expectation by this stage of a playthrough.

I guess this is a long winded way of saying that a few more heavy demons outside of the main arenas, with perhaps a couple of extra compensatory BFG Cells and other pickups would have gone a long way. To have more demons to cycle the sentinel hammer with would have been a net positive IMO. Great to encourage (or even mandate) it's use, whilst adding more meat to those who don't need it, regardless of difficulty. Of course, all of this got addressed in subtle ways in update 6.66, I just wish there was a fair bit more, especially in Immora.

Speaking of which, in Immora, there's a double Pain Elemental fight with many shotgun shells and Stone Imps? As well as the Mancubus and Hell Knights in the area before? I think we needed much more moments like this sprinkled throughout almost every area of each level. As it stands, the pace breakers feel unwarranted because the general engagement is already low outside of the main arena fights.

For context, I am a base campaign UN player but not exceptionally skilled, I'm also a console scrub.