A couple of days before the Xbox Developer Direct 2025, I was invited to an online private event with executive producer Marty Stratton and game director Hugo Martin. After watching the video that appeared in the show, I also had the chance to go even deeper into the Doom Slayer’s new bloody journey in a Q&🦹A with Stratton and Martin.
Back To Basics — But Heavier Than Ever
“The feel of the game is a return to form,” eಌxplains Martin. It seems like the days of jumping around and doing acrobatics from Doom Eternal are long gone. Now the Doom Slayer feels much heavier and tankier, even making a sound after each footstep — the director mentions Batman, specifically ♎versions of the caped crusader from Year One and The Dark Knight, as a direct influence.

Doom: The Dark Ages Might Be The Most Metal Thing I've Ever Seen
You ha🦩ve a gun which uses the skulls of yo🍒ur enemies as bullets!!!
Howe♕ver, this doesn’t mean that the character will necessarily feel slow — the Doom Slayer can sprint for the first time! The Dark Ages aims to be its own thing, as both Martin and Stratton say innovating new concepts is the philosophy behind each modern entry in th🍌e series.
The Dark Ages’ setting is a mix of classic sci-fi elements with a medieval twist. Wꦚorking as a prequel set hundreds of ages ago, you should expect a more “brutal” feeling when looking at the new arsenal available. “Torture devices” is something Martin wants you to keep in mind when thinking about each new weapon.
Within the new additions, there’s the machine gun that breaks skulls to create its bullets, a deadly rail spike launcher🀅 that will impale creatures to ෴walls, and three melee weapons — an electrified gauntlet, an iron flail, and the Doom Spiked Mace — that will let you get more up close and personal with your demons.
One weapon that will become key in your journey is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the already-notorious Shield Saw, with multiple options for your battles and exploration. With this shield, you can obviously block basic enemy attacks and projectiles, but also gain a variety of new moves: repelling green projectiles, stunning bigger creatures and killing smaller ones by throwing the shield at them, catapulting yourself at enemieꦍs hit by it, reaching new heights (it seems like our protagonist has a kind of ‘magnetism’ toward the weapon)𓃲, and parrying incoming attacks.
༺“You're going to feel like a 🏅silverback on a hoverboard with a giant sledgehammer.” - Hugo Martin
Doom’s Difficulty Is Up To You
The parry system is something that both Martin and Stratton use as an example of the new accessibility settings in The Dark Ages. For the first time in the series, you’lౠl be able to open a menu and adjust some sliders called Modifiers. These will let you alter the game to your liking, with options like the parry window, the damage you receive or give, and the speed of the projectiles, among other gameplay aspects, all there for fine-tuning.
This feature feels like one that every game should have. The idea behind it is to make the game as easy or hard as you want it to be, and to help you find the id꧑eal speed and control to give you the best e🔜xperience possible.
“‘Accessible’, taken the wrong way, means ‘easy’,” explains Martin. “Challenge matters in games, and it's a part of engagement. It's why people play games. But it's really about making it simplified. Every great product is simple and easy to use, and that actually allows the user to do more with it, typically. As we simplify the control schemes, everything gets easier to use, and then I ✨could ask more of you.”
⛦“I called it like fewer strings on the guitar. Accessibility is really about streamlining the experience, making it more ergonomic, and just simplifying it for the player. You shouldn't be fighting the controls. You should be fighting the bad guysꦑ.” - Hugo Martin
The fan-favorite Glory Kills are back too, but in a completely new fashion. Now, instead of pressing the right stick in front of a dazed enemy to perform a short, scripted animation, you’ll be able to finish creatures by shooting ཧor hitting them with any weapon from any angle. In short, Glory Kills are not synchronized anymore; they are flexible. This means that you won’t lose agency while using them, and the game won’t stop to focus on them, making your finishers more fluid𝔉 than ever before.
“Now you can stagger multiple enemies at once with these weapons of mass destruction, and then move through them,” explains Martin. “It’s like Leonidas in the hot gates scene in [the movie] 300, when he breaks the phalanx and then there's that side shot in dilated time. He's taking out multiple dudes first with a spear, then with a Spartan sword and shield. That was a big source of inspiraᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚtion. I showed that to the team and I wanted the game to feel like that.”
Although killing enemies while on the ground won’t become boring any time soon, The Dark Ages presents two changes of pace in certain missions: an Atlan (mech) and a dragon. The🌱 former will be in more linear sections, letting you fight against gargantuan demons, while the latter will feature a mix of exploration and aeria🐬l combat.
🔯For example, there will be a mission where you’ll fight against enemy ships using your dragon. But at different points after reducing the vehicles’ defenses, you’ll be able to board the ships, dismount your beast, and start killing every creature you see in a more standard experience.
Bothౠ the mech and the dragon will appear multiple times throughout the campaign, and they will have their own sets of abilities and bosses for you to﷽ defeat.
The Biggest Bloody Arenas In The Series
Both the more flexible approach with the dragon and some major set-pieces shown off left a question about how big the levels are going to be. Martin explains that some areas will feel like a “sandbox”: not in the sense of presenting side quests or being able to go from one area to the next one any time you want — this is still Doom, so it will present a classic linear campaign. But you’ll now be able to explore some huge and labyrinthic areas with multiple secrets and rewards to make your character stronger. This is why “exploration” is being labeled as a core experience of The Dark Ages, and you’re going to decide how much time you want to spend on these mission🅷s and how to approach them.
As Martin and Stratton turned their attention to narrative, this was initially the aspect that I cared the least about The Dark Ages. I don’t know about you, but I hardly remembe𓂃r many plot elements from Doom (2016) and Eternal. However, the team seems to be handling this a bit differently than before.
For instance, there will be less focus on reading logs and text, and the game will be packed with cinematics to show what’s𝕴 going on all the time. They want Doom’s storytelling to feel similar to their contemporaries in the genre, skipping dead times where you have to stop and read, instead showing what you need to know.
As a prequel, you’ll meet🎉 the Doom Slayer as he’s with the Sentin🌞els (one of the most powerful beings in the series), learn more about their relationship, and why they are so scared of the protagonist. Plus, The Dark Ages will present a fleshed-out antagonist that will be one of the main cores of the plot: a villain that’s a “real adversary to the Slayer” and “pushes the story forward”.
“You still fee💞l it's still all about power. It's still all about you being the star of that summer blockbuster experience.” - Hugo Martin
Doom: The Dark Ages will let us start killing medieval demons🍬 when it launches on Xbox Seri𒊎es X, PS5, and PC on May 15, 2025.






168澳洲幸运5开奖网: DOOM: The Dark Ages
- Top Critic Avg: 85/100 Critics Rec: 95%
- Released
- May 15, 2025
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Vi♑olence
- Developer(s)
- 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:id Software
- Publisher(s)
- 🐠 𒆙 Bethesda Softworks
- Engine
- id Tech
- Multiplayer
- Online Multiplayꦛer
- Franchise
- DOOM
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