Idea Notebook - "Another Icon of Sin remake"

So this is my new segment that I'm gonna be doing on this blog. Since my brain is an idea machine to the point that I've already come up with more possible projects than any human being could accomplish in their lifetime... I figured I might as well just slap some of these ideas down on the internet. Maybe someone will look at this and be like, "yeah, that's a good idea, maybe I could work on that!"

If nothing else, maybe someone will at least find it interesting.

Anyway, there was a trend going around on the Doomworld forum for a bit that someone should re-work the Icon of Sin boss, because it's kind of gotten a reputation for being under-cooked and not very well designed.

The only one that I ever saw really get some positive attention was the Icon of Sin fight for Brutal Doom. But even then, it kinda took the obvious solution of just making it a giant enemy that you shoot at. (Which, to be fair, was kind of how it was described in the actual game's lore)

Oh, and look at that, that's exactly how it was handled in Doom: Eternal, too.

EDIT: Came back to add that I actually like the Icon of Sin in Doom: Eternal. It did a very good job of testing the skills that the player was expected to learn. I'm just saying in some ways it feels like the obvious solution.

Come on, there's gotta be a better way we can do this. So, what exactly made the Icon of Sin bad to begin with? Well, mostly it had to do with the fact that a lot of its lethality potential was based on which enemies it managed to randomly spawn in. On top of that, the arena you fight him in is just very, very uninteresting. 

I think a much more interesting take on this boss would be to focus on testing the player's skills in resource management and environmental traversal. So here's the idea. The Icon of Sin's brain does not start exposed. You have to go through a gauntlet to activate three switches in order to do so. Each switch is located in a branching path off of the central arena (which gets re-populated with enemies after each switch press). This gauntlet would ideally be pretty forgiving about how much ammo it gives you, less so for health. There'd be plenty in the central arena, but once you're off hunting for one of the switches, it immediately becomes a test of endurance. Margin for error is minimal. 

So anyway, once the icon of sin is vulnerable, that's when it activates the random enemy spawns. Thankfully, however, you won't have to jump on a weird platform to raise you up to brain level so you can kill it with splash damage. Rather, the Icon's hitbox will be a lot closer to the front (but we'd want to bump up his health) So the last phase would be a mad dash to do as much damage as possible before too many enemies spawn in.

Anyway, consider this Doom shower thoughts. I think it would be cool.