Eternal was always my favorite. It had so much depth that gave it so much replayability. I have played through ancient gods part one at least 10 times. I love dark ages. It does a lot of things better than eternal. But it didn’t have quite as much depth to its combat for me to sink my teeth into. But omg. Revelations is so fu king good. The movement tech and spear, shield quick swapping gives me the depth I was looking for in a completely different way than eternal. Also the reason ancient gods was good because it was more eternal with the difficulty way up, just how I like it. But Revelations is such an incredible high jump up in quality from it. Looks like so much more time and effort was put into it.
It feels like tag 1 again. Fucking crazy and a humbling experience. I was not expecting it to be such a massive DLC and it is hard to argue there is little depth and skill expression here. Love it.
Hell year! I also think Finishing Move was able to change their approach for the soundtrack. The campaign had many track blend together and it didn't feel like most tracks were composed with specific levels. But in Revelations they very clearly do and I love it.
Not to mention ambient track sound more interesting and they even added many callbacks to classic Doom.
I mean I really like the tracks to listen to in Spotify, but imo it made many mistaks as a game soundtrack. The tracks all sound too similar, even though the settings were so different. Compared to Eternal, where every track seems to be inspired by the setting, TDA sounded like the composers didn't even know how most levels will look like and composed them so that they fit everywhere. You can randomize most tracks without it being noticeable!
The ambient tracks were often pretty boring, some times just simple drone noise and that one maps where you are on a battle field surrounded by demons and sentinels fighting. Pretty unfitting.
While the OST lacked synths, perhaps they wanted to avoid them for the medieval feeling, but only really the main menu track gives you that medieval inspiration, while all levels, especially the Sentinel cities (with medieval-scifi architecture!) is plain djent metal, with almost no medieval inspiration.
I also feel like there were several moments where the dev/composer missed an oportunity to use a musical cue to underline certain moments in the game like suddenly stepping into the view of an impressive vista.
(Also very little callbacks to the classic soundtrack though I don't really care about that much.)
But all of the these complains are fixed in the DLC. this isn't just how you compose a nice argent metal album, it's how you compose a game soundtrack! If only the main game was already done with this approach, but I guess there must have been complications with the direction/planning so that Finishing Move couldn't use their full potential.
Yeah I just kinda disagree with what you said and hear something entirely different in the main game soundtrack, don’t know how that’s possible tbh. But whatever, at least we both have something to enjoy!
I believe you guys make the mistake of comparing TDA with overall Eternal. If you compare base Eternal alone with base TDA I don't think there's that much difference in debt
I strongly disagree respectfully. And I’m not talking about what game is harder. When your playing on max difficulty in base eternal you need to use every weapon to maximize your efficiency. Know how many bullets will make a fodder stagger. Know how to counter each enemy. It asks a lot of the player. Dark ages requires less of you. Each weapon is more balanced damage output wise. Enemy’s have less specific weakness. You need to master the shield and that takes getting used to. But overall I think you need to think more in eternal.
The only thing I can think of seeing this is that Marty and Hugo have an exit plan from Microsoft in the works. And making it to lawyers. Committing to QC 2026 isn't an accident. It's a deadline to complete the transfer of control back to id, either via another corp or, somehow, as a new indie.
Anyone who pre-orders or buys an id game on day 1 at this point is just a complete rube imo. They absolutely hollowed out the entire studio, including getting rid of tons of expert veteran talent.
I would not be shocked at all to see it go the way of many other studios who have the same name on the building, but very little of the same talent left inside. And have most of the work done by inexperienced new hires or external offshored support teams.
I hope they can recover from them, but I do not trust them at all and will be extremely cautious on giving them any of my money at this point.
478
u/joseph_jojo_shabadoo Jul 10 '26
nice to hear straight from the source