aka "the enclave continuing to get their shit kicked in"

Tesla Cannon is fun and op as shit but that's about it. Another 1-2 hours of things for you to shoot topped off by another meaningless decision that makes no impact on your actual forced status as a hero in the game. I'll always find it amusing tho that the only reason this DLC exists is because fo3's launch ending was just THAT massively disliked by people lol. I can't imagine how much shit BGS would've gotten if they tried making people pay for a better ending nowadays LMAO.

My favorite FPS of all time and my second-favorite game of all time (and that's only because of nostalgia).

I was so hyped for this game. Doom 2016 managed to be even better then I envisioned (and I never lost faith in the team mind you, despite the MP reception, I was still there for the campaign from day one), and I couldn't wait for what id was going to do next. It was all I would ever think about from when it was announced all the way to when it released. I would follow every piece of news, every interview, every analysis of footage, it was the reason I even built a PC. I had fucking dreams about playing this game. A game with that amount of anticipation has some big shoes to fill. How can it even come close to what I expected?

Somehow, it did.

My bias is insane, I'm aware, but I don't care. DOOM Eternal is FPS perfection, and my favorite id Software game from their entire 30-year-long run. Any issues I have are so minor to the point where it just doesn't matter. It takes everything 2016 did right, tweaked and trimmed the fat, and changed the rules just enough that it demands more from the player, while also not getting in the way of what 2016 did well, which was raw combat, creating one of the most challenging and engaging shooters I've ever played.

It really bugs me when people call Eternal's combat and enemy design "square peg in square hole", because yes, while the game does tell you outright certain methods on how to eliminate certain enemies or weak spots, those are not the only way to handle them. There's tons of ways to handle enemies or specific weak points, from frags/stickys in cacodemon mouths, arbalest rounds, lock-on rocket volleys, and much more. I could go on with all the ways to take on enemies in this game. Anyone who says this game has no playstyle variation clearly hasn't tried experimenting with their tools or really tried to understand just what the game was trying to get them to do. You have 9+ weapons in your arsenal, and like the classic duology, the game expects you to use them all. All of the new additions, from the enemies, weapon mods, armor abilities like dashing/bloodpunch, and much more all come together to create a game so good that it honestly makes it's predecessor hard to get back into. Not that it's bad, but these additions just make me wish they were there earlier, yknow?

The atmosphere and visuals are just the icing on the cake. I know not everyone is a fan of the current direction of this series, and how it seems to want to do more then just orange and red-tinted techbases on mars and hell, but to that I say that this series is 30 years old, and it should be allowed to evolve and push itself to new places. I don't see anyone complaining that Sonic isn't in green hill and nothing else in terms of location variety (quite the opposite actually), and the same goes for story. I will admit this game does have a problem with having things told instead of shown to the player, and with certain things really being left to the imagination creating a lack of connection to the events going on in front of you (something I believe the next game will address), but I love how much this game pushes the story of the doomguy forward not just towards being a silent, big-muscled killing machine, but a human who genuinely has lost himself in his never-ending quest to save the people he loves, and will stop at nothing until it is complete.

My only other issue is really how this game just feels... incomplete post-launch. Not that there isn't enough content to satisfy most people as it is, and I can't blame the team for this as this game did release right at the start of the 2020 pandemic so it really put a wrench in their free post-launch and paid dlc plans, but it always feels like they wanted to do more but just wern't able given the circumstances. It'll always burn me a bit how we only got 5 out of 10 master versions of campaign levels, and only 1 DLC master level, on top of things like Horde not being the best replacement for 2016 Arcade imo. Really, all of this would be negated if we had actual modding and level design tools, but with id and Bethesda putting more future efforts towards idtech7, maybe it's not a pipe dream.

I don't know what else to say. What are you even doing if you haven't played this.

Nostalgia can be weird.

Like how sometimes I can forget how good a game really is in the case of NV, sometimes, while rare, I'll go back to something and wonder, "what the fuck was I thinking?"

I can't say I totally loathe fallout 3 but it's easily the weakest fallout game I've played. I wanted to like it more like I did when I was a kid but I just can't anymore. And it isn't even because of "Todd evil, obsidian good" like so many people like to boil it down to (even tho NV is the better game), but it's just so barebones and nothing of a game that it's so hard to come back to and have fun with. Maybe in 2015 I would've said this is the better BGS fallout bc it didn't have 4s dialog system but even with that it isn't enough to save this game for me.

For context, fallout 3 was the first fallout I actually beat. Technically I tried NV first, but didn't beat it until much later as it overwhelmed me at first with all it's mechanics. And even with that I didn’t care for NV's story as a kid (tbf I don't think I even got inside the strip as a kid or really explored, I was the kind of person for a while to beeline a main quest).

It's genuinely insane to me to think that fo3 at one point of my life was probably had some of my favorite writing/narratives in a game because holy shit it is so nothing. I think I was just hungry for more narrative-focused shooters after I beat HL2 for the first time and was amused by anything really, regardless of actual quality. People have talked enough about how dumb and bad the relationship with James and the player is but in general I hate how black and white this game is with its decision-making and by extension, it's dialog options. We all make fun of fo4's trees, sure, but I HATE how 90% of 3 boils down to
1) yes!! yippee yay sure thing!
2) sure let's go whatever.
3) I don't care.
4) go fuck yourself you fucking subhuman fucker. Go fucking die in a fire.

Like that's the whole format nearly EVERY conversation in this game is like and it's so LAME. there's no reason to have bad karma either since it basically nerfs you but you'll be tempted to with how just unlikeable every npc is in this game. And even with that none of it matters, you're still forced into the position of "the hero of the wastes" at the end of the day, regardless of even if you decide to poison the water supply. At least they TRIED in fo4 to have flaws to each faction, even if it backfired to the point where Noone really wanted to side with any of them. They only hint at the brotherhood potentially having flaws TWICE with Li's distrust of them and the existence of the outcasts, but the game does NOTHING with either. They're the heroes no matter what with no issues, and so are you inadvertently. It goes without saying but this is the most un-fallout thing a game can do, again at least 4 TRIED with having some grey areas with it's factions. The only real moment in the game that actually feels like it would've belonged in the originals is that second-to-last endslide you see, where you're just shown a massive graveyard with that last "war never changes." That fits perfectly with the themes of the classic games and even NV, but it's so ironic here because we NEVER see anything like that anywhere else in the game. We never see the actual effects and horrors of war except for the actual overworld itself, while the rest of the main quest is just a standard action movie with no time to actually think of how this world is trapped in a cycle of endless violence and conflict. It doesn't matter at all here because you're the good guys and they're the bad guys. Simple as that.

Gameplay can be tolerable in this but even then it has its issues I can't fix. First thing is weapon variety is so piss poor in this game not only compared to NV, but EVEN TO FO4. not including dlcs, there's usually about 1-2 of each weapon type, and that's about it. Playing with extra weapon mods+TTW does fix this a bit (and I would ultimately recommend you play this via that if you are curious), but even with that the mid-to-endgame's ammo economy is so skewed towards energy weapons it isn't even funny. Not to say you can't find bullets, but they're so rare compared to energy weapons+ammo that it feels like you're nerfing yourself if you build small/large guns. And maybe this is a TTW issue, but vendors didn't help either. Most of their inventory, be it in the citadel or rivet city had so little of what I actually needed ammowise that I would run out near-instantly (especially the citadel because you WILL get mostly energy shit). Either that or I would just find shit I wasn't using by this point of the game, being either 10mm or point 32.

The map is interesting but especially nowadays it feels so confusing to navigate and you really gotta go out of your way to find cool side quests (which even then pale in comparison to fo4 or NV's sidequests). NV had this issue too a bit but it's map felt like it had better flow and was easier to navigate if that makes sense. So much of this game especially in the city areas is gonna be you navigating the subway to go place to place if you haven’t discovered it and it can get confusing fast. I will say it is interesting visually and the attention to detail of the real-life DC area is still great all these years later but that's about it.

I'd say play this via TTW so you can mod the shit out of it if you wanted to and were curious but I would not make this your first fallout. Fo4 and NV fill that role perfectly and I really don't see why you would revisit it unless you just really felt like it, ESPECIALLY vanilla. It's the first Bethesda fallout, and hot damn does it feel like it and not in a good way.

People talk about giving this game a remaster but honestly I think I'd rather see a full remake from the ground up. Just take everything this game tried to do and at least make it on par qualitywise with fo4's gameplay. Because as of right now this game for me is only just a LITTLE bit above starfield in terms of enjoyment of BGS' RPGs.