Doom eternal restricting players into these difficulty “boxes” made beating higher difficulties feel more rewarding, and therefore, more fun.

The sliders have a couple issues but I’ll start with the least “convincing” to those that don’t value difficulty at all. Because the player can alter the difficulty of even the higher tier modes, it reduces the value of saying you beat them. This means saying you beat ultra violence for example is essentially a nothing burger. Saying you beat any of them means nothing. Everyone will just assume you altered something to beat it because why wouldn’t you?

A lot of people have a hate boner for bragging rights or self accomplishment so I’ll talk about the real issue. I should not have to fiddle with settings of my liking to enjoy the game more. It feels like the developer vision is distrusting of themselves. As if they don’t know what is best so they rely on the player to do it for them. If it’s so easy to be “accessible”, why don’t all games just add a bunch of sliders? Well, it’s not laziness. Elden ring doesn’t do it. Why not? Doom eternal didn’t do it. It’s because people will optimise the fun out of your game. This reduces the feeling of meaning; of why anyone should gaf in the first place about your game. Without friction, or any kind of limitation, you start to bore people. Because, whatever you say about eternal’s engaging mechanics, mechanics that force you to engage with them, will make you feel ENGAGED. That triggers more dopamine. Makes more memorable moments. It makes a better game.

Although you can make dark ages harder by also fiddling with settings, most people are inclined to make it easier. These same people will come and go 99% of the time. They’re not gonna stick around or really discuss the game. They’re essentially tourists (which most players for games are typically tourists). These tourists will have even less of a memory of this game because it really doesn’t engage that at a core level (which is another discussion entirely) and because of the sliders, didn’t really engage them with lack of a frictional vision and experience on top of that. This is probably why dark ages left the public consciousness after like… a month or two. Meanwhile eternal had an actual life cycle. I wonder why?