Doom Eternal forces you to use your whole arsenal creatively to beat the game. This made it less popular than the predecessor because people don’t like to use more than 10% of what a game offers in the gameplay departement.

Few games actually dare to do this. Take almost any action game. There’s usually a whole array of weapons, gadgets, combos, tech and what have you, but people will pick one or two things and stick with it, and it will work: but they’ll miss out on most of what the game offers.

Take FFXV. People that played it (including me) won’t remember any of the complexity the combat systems offer, because it allowed us to beat the game with mindless buttonmashing. Same with Pokémon: it has deep systems, but the game can be beat by spamming super effective moves.

So, the devs of Doom Eternal knew this. They even had stats from the 2016 game. People did what worked rather than mastering all the systems. So they designed Eternal to make you master them.

But, it turns out, people don’t want to master all these systems. They’d much rather just beat the game. They don’t want to be that Mario speedrunner or @SunhiLegend, they want to find the easiest, most reliable way to progress.

I think that if ID allowed us to shotgun our way through it, it’d be hailed for the upgrade in lore, spectacle and world-building over its predecessor. But it wouldn’t be the same genrepushing game. And while it’s not my fav 2020, I think it deserves GOTY as much as the others.

This is why I think it doesn’t really fit with game pass - or others of this style. People will ”give it a try”, boosting MS stats, but too many will give up when they realize it is too demanding. I think a purchase would motivate more to at least push past the learning phase.