I don't like how escalation for escalations' sake fucked with Star Wars and the modern Doom series' setting and characters. ESPECIALLY what Doom Eternal's DLCs did.

Like, easy example first: Starkiller Base in the Force Awakens. By the Force Awakens, the First Order is just a fringe faction, literally melting coins down for metal (which, for that to be worthwhile, a nation has to be insanely poor). Yet for SOME reason they managed to refit an entire planet (and a pretty big one!) into a gigantic version of the Death Star. The first two Death Stars required a massive galaxy-spanning empire to even afford being made, and you're telling me that this fringe faction of Empire remnants made something even bigger that eats and blows up stars? Absolutely bologna.

Another example is the modern Doom series. I've got a bit of an axe to grind with the lore from the Eternal DLCs. Like, the 2016 thing kept it relatively simple: There's a guy called the Doom Slayer. He's the tuffest warrior outta the fallen kingdom of Argent D'Nur, and fought demons in revenge so hard they had to drop a building on him to slow him down. When he wakes up, he finds humanity fuckin' around with Argent energy, and that this guy who used to be human, Samuel Hayden, was the one who fucked up and now came back to Doomguy for help.

Even Eternal had the nerve not to fuck this up too bad. They expanded on Argent D'Nur and introduced the Makyrs as another faction, and that was a reasonable escalation. Plus, little side tangent, the Icon of Sin was a great boss fight that kept the core of the original Icon of Sin fight (balancing shooting the Icon and shooting the demon minions) and expanded on it in a way that felt epic (in an older sense of the term).

But then the DLCs came along with a bunch of revelations that seem shoehorned to make Doomguy, Samuel, and VEGA too special. Samuel was actually a high-ranking Makyr called Samur, which takes away what felt special about the character, at least to me: He was physically an ordinary guy who, through mad intelligence, super tech, and a near death experience became able to fight on par with these fiendish demons. To make him a Makyr, an angelic being all along, sort of mangles things.

And don't even get me started on VEGA! They made VEGA the Father, as in Capital G God, but not really, because Davoth is the REAL Father and ALSO the setting's equivocal of Satan, and ALSO Doomguy was made in his image because Doomguy needed to be even more special. In trying to make things more grandiose and "epic" to appeal to Death Battle powerscalers (my wild guess), they made it kind of the opposite and lost what was so special about these three.

Doomguy felt more compelling not as the baddest warrior who every demon in the universe is afraid of, but as a simple space marine who hates injustice and would shoot his own commanding officer if said officer ordered him to shoot civiilians.

VEGA felt better as an AI (not an LLM, big difference!) that Doomguy felt was his one friend, to the point of going out of his way to back him up. An AI who only recognizes himself as a guy who helps others in a painfully self-sacrificing way being regarded as a friend by Doomguy, to the point of being rescued from his own self-sacrifice.

I preferred Dr. Samuel Hayden to Samur. There's something much more rich about him being a morally gray, yet highly intimidating figure who entered extremely dangerous experiments to attempt to save humanity. That moment where he learned how Argent Energy really was made and felt deep remorse humanized him, and I liked how he wanted to use the Crucible to create Argent Energy without cruelty, regardless of how this would appear to Doomguy.

TL;DR: Don't try to get too grandiose too fast. If you do, you risk losing believability and breaking the rules of your setting, and/or losing what made the characters so entertaining in the first place.