I finally got around to playing Doom Eternal and yeah, the story is completely fucking retarded. Doom 2016 felt like Halo CE, where the main story is a pretty basic sci-fi plot about killing aliens/demons. Doom Eternal felt like the later Halo games where the story just goes off the rails with different factions of ancient aliens influencing humanity's evolution. The structure doesn't help the story much either, because it's literally just Doomguy getting teleported to new POI's that we're told are important to basically go on fetch quests, whereas 2016's progression is a lot more logical.
It's honestly just bizarre to me why they took a complete 180 with Eternal. 2016 was a really straightforward no-frills shooter where pumping bullets into demons and punching their heads off is front and center. It's certainly not a realistic game, but it definitely felt immersive, and the environments believable, like they are real locations that were actually used and lived-in at some point. Eternal on the other hand felt like a theme park ride, where you're sorta just being shuffled to these different setpieces that are very obviously designed as video game levels. This isn't helped by the obviously video-gamey interactive elements, like the punchable objects and the breakable walls, which just makes the environment feel very manufactured. There's nothing inherently wrong with this sort of design, but it's just sort of jarring going from the fairly immersive world of Doom 2016 to the very not-immersive Doom Eternal.