Doom: The Dark Ages & Revelations – RIP to id Software’s Grandest Performance

With Microsoft recently taking the axe to id Software, I figured it was finally time to play Doom: The Dark Ages. The cuts were not small either. A Texas WARN notice confirmed 136 jobs lost at id, roughly half the studio according to contemporary reporting, while later reports said around two-thirds of the remaining developers who had worked on Doom 2016 were among those laid off. Hugo Martin later pushed back against claims that id had been gutted by saying the studio was still roughly the size it had been when making Doom 2016, but that rather misses the point when decades of experience and institutional knowledge are not interchangeable with raw headcount.

I loved Doom 2016. Eternal, on the other hand, bored me out of my mind, and I especially disliked how seriously id started taking its own increasingly ridiculous lore. Doomguy went from an angry guy who was exceptionally good at killing demons into a self-serious meme soloing supposed creators, gods and whatever cosmic entity the writers could place another rung above the last one.

The Dark Ages immediately felt like a much more interesting direction. The setting has a stronger identity, combat is slower but much higher impact, and it feels designed around giving the player different ways to deal with a situation rather than constantly pushing the same combat rotation. For some reason, I also decided my first playthrough should be on Pandemonium.

Doom: The Dark Ages

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Pandemonium was a terrible first-play idea:

I had not quite appreciated what Pandemonium actually meant before committing to it. It uses the same combat challenge as Nightmare, except Life Sigils restart the current chapter rather than simply reviving you. Run out of them and die again, and the entire campaign run is gone. They explicitly describes it as not recommended for first-time players.

I only properly realised what I had signed myself up for several missions in, by which point stubbornness had taken over and I just stuck with it. That can be a fairly terrible decision when a blind run through one of these missions can take around an hour if you are exploring everything, and some encounters certainly are not first-play friendly. Dying does not mean immediately trying the fight again with what you just learnt. It means replaying the bloody mission.

Still, it gave me a very good test of how well The Dark Ages' combat holds together when the game is actually trying its hardest to flatten you.

Doom finally lets me choose how to fight:

For the most part, the combat holds together brilliantly. The combination of guns, Shield Saw and melee is immensely satisfying, but the biggest improvement over Eternal is that I get to decide how I want to engage.

You can aggressively chain parries, weave melee combos through enemies and sneak shots into every opening. You can constantly push forward with the Shield Saw, or stay further back and play defensively. You can cycle through the entire arsenal if that is what you enjoy too. The important difference is that The Dark Ages does not feel like it is constantly slapping your hand until you perform the same rotation it wants in every encounter.

There are plenty of weapons and upgrades, and they all felt viable enough that I never became trapped into one obvious answer. Even on Pandemonium, where a few bad hits can absolutely kill you, Doomguy still feels like a tank and a destructive force. Higher difficulty makes positioning, target selection and parry timing more important without destroying the fantasy that you are still the most dangerous thing in the arena.

The enemy design supports that nicely. There are still obvious priority targets, but The Dark Ages gives you more freedom over what “priority” actually means. A dangerous enemy firing parryable attacks across the battlefield can be something you desperately want dead, or something you deliberately leave alive because you can exploit it to fuel your own offence.

Komodos and Champions were particularly good examples. They aggressively chase you down, mix close-range attacks with ranged pressure and force you to respond instead of simply unloading into another oversized health bar. Keeping something dangerous alive because you think you can exploit its attacks becomes a genuine high-risk, high-return decision.

There was one enormous exception to my generally positive experience with the encounter design: the Wraith-boosted Ahzrak fight late in the campaign. Having a nasty multiphase encounter at the end of a long Pandemonium mission is already stressful, but having to replay the entire bloody level, including an Atlan section that took me roughly 15 minutes each run, every time I wanted another attempt pushed it into pure irritation. I ended up going through that sequence three times, and it came remarkably close to becoming a save-file-delete moment.

id Tech at ridiculous scale:

Fortunately, replaying these environments is not exactly difficult on the eyes. id Tech is a ridiculous piece of technology, and The Dark Ages repeatedly shows off what it can do with enormous backgrounds, dense environments and absurd amounts of activity without turning the whole thing into a slideshow. Bethesda itself describes these as id's largest and most expansive levels to date.

The backgrounds, map design and environmental storytelling have an immense sense of scale while still holding up when you stop and actually look at them. I did that quite a few times during the campaign. Giant fortresses stretch into the distance, armies and machinery operate far outside the playable space, and entire landscapes make it feel as though Doomguy is moving through a war rather than a collection of combat arenas connected by corridors.

Space Marine 2 is probably the only other recent shooter I have played that gave me a similar level of environmental detail and spectacle, and even that has the advantage of decades of established 40K designs to draw from. The Dark Ages builds much more of its own visual identity and looks fucking fantastic doing it.

The huge maps do come with annoyances. Hunting secrets can turn into constantly checking suspicious ledges, spinning around to inspect architecture from another angle and reopening the map because an area that looked completely inaccessible apparently had some route you walked past 20 minutes ago. Most of it is intuitive enough, but there were definitely missions where I reached the end and thought, where the hell did I miss that?

The map itself is highly accessible and extremely useful, so this never became a serious problem, but having to consult it so frequently can interrupt the flow.

Let me play the bloody single-player game how I want:

That accessibility extends far beyond the map. The Dark Ages might have one of the most customisable difficulty systems I have seen in a game, with individual control over things such as enemy damage and aggression, parry timing and resource behaviour alongside the normal presets. idSoft also allows those gameplay modifiers to be changed independently on the standard difficulties.

Massive respect to id for the mindset behind that. It treats itself like a single-player game that you bought and should therefore be able to enjoy however the fuck you want. It does not punish you for changing those settings or act as though there is some morally correct way of playing Doom.

Pandemonium was the punishment I chose. Someone wanting an easier parry window, different resource balance or a completely different level of enemy aggression can create that experience for themselves. More games could do with remembering who the settings menu is actually for.

A dark fantasy Doom that actually interested me:

The story surprised me almost as much as the combat. It is still carrying baggage from being a prequel to the godawful mess Eternal eventually wrote itself into, but taken on its own, The Dark Ages is genuinely interesting. It really does feel like someone made a giant dark-fantasy epic and dropped Doom into the middle of it.

The Sentinels, Hell, the Maykrs and especially the wider Cosmic Realm give the campaign far more texture than I expected. The Old Ones and their civilisation were probably the most fascinating experiment of the lot. Their architecture, lore and whole Lovecraftian cosmic aesthetic are some of my favourite material in the game.

Unfortunately, they are also one of its biggest wasted opportunities. There is enormous build-up around this ancient civilisation and the forces surrounding it, with some genuinely chef-kiss map design and lore concepts, but they never make enough of an impact on the actual campaign to justify how interesting the setup is. The game opens this door onto something stranger than most of Doom's established cosmology and then barely has enough time to walk through it.

They also suffer from the obvious prequel curse. All this supposedly monumental cosmic shit has to somehow disappear neatly enough that nobody in Eternal behaves as though any of it exists. Lmao.

Doomguy is finally allowed to lose again:

Doomguy himself benefits enormously from the change in tone because id finally stopped writing him like an invincible meme. He is still Doomguy doing Doomguy things, but he is allowed to exist inside the world rather than standing above it.

He gets captured. He gets his arse handed to him. He gets injured. He gets killed. He needs help. He struggles, improves and grows. None of that suddenly makes him weak, it makes the ridiculous things he eventually accomplishes feel more meaningful because something is actually capable of pushing back.

That was one of my biggest problems with Eternal. If Doomguy can effortlessly solo the supposed creator of everything, gods and whatever else the script invents next, there stops being much tension in continually telling me how powerful he is. The Dark Ages lets him remain an absurdly destructive force while remembering that a character becomes considerably more interesting when victory is not guaranteed by the premise.

Also, the fur cape and medieval armour are far cooler than the Praetor suit.

Twenty-two missions with some actual variety:

The campaign has 22 chapters, although they obviously differ wildly in size and complexity. What matters more is that id uses those chapters to keep changing the pace. There is traditional combat, exploration, large open battlefields, bosses, Atlan mech sequences and dragon sections rather than having to throw another puzzle room at you every time the shooting needs a break.

The Atlan and dragon gameplay itself is fairly basic and eventually becomes samey, but I still like that they exist. They fit the ridiculous scale of The Dark Ages and remain close enough to its general design philosophy that they do not feel like completely unrelated minigames. Across a 20-plus-hour playthrough, they worked perfectly well as occasional spectacle and pacing changes.

Technically, the actual engine performance gave me almost nothing to complain about. Considering the fidelity, scale and amount happening on screen, it is seriously impressive. The bugs were another matter. Even playing after all the post-launch updates, I still encountered combat behaviour not working correctly, damage occasionally seeming not to register properly and geometry problems. The worst left me stuck near the end of one long mission without any fucking way to get myself free.

Normally that would be an annoying reload. On Pandemonium, where dying sends me back to the beginning of the chapter, every bug becomes considerably more offensive because the game can waste a run for me.

The soundtrack was whatever too. Very little of it stuck with me afterwards, which is a strange place for a Doom soundtrack to end up. The voice acting did not do much for me either, and hearing a giant medieval fantasy civilisation full of modern American accents from a country that did not even exist certainly made my eyes roll a few times.

Despite all of that, The Dark Ages accomplished something Eternal never managed for me. When it ended, I genuinely wanted more of this Doom.

Revelations

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Three months of crunch explains a lot:

We now have the benefit of hindsight with Revelations, and unfortunately the production history explains a lot about the finished DLC. Former id producer Andrew Willis said the majority of it was made in roughly three or four months, including around two months of 12-hour days, occasionally stretching to 17 hours, while the scope continued to grow. People with decades of experience apparently considered it some of the worst crunch they had ever been through.

Then Microsoft laid off 136 people from id right around release, with Willis himself losing his job the day before Revelations came out. After destroying themselves to get the thing finished, a huge chunk of the studio barely got to see it reach players before being shown the door.

Knowing that, a lot of Revelations suddenly makes more sense. The DLC needed its own hook, but id had almost no time to invent, prototype and polish an entirely new combat philosophy. The Chain Spear feels like the brutally practical answer: take the Dark Ages foundation and reintroduce a style of movement id already knew inside out from Eternal. Grappling, air mobility, constant repositioning and arenas built around keeping the player in motion were all familiar territory.

That is my reading of the finished game rather than something id has confirmed, but given the schedule, the incentive is fairly obvious.

For people who wanted The Dark Ages to move more like Eternal, this was probably exactly what they wanted. I did not want more Eternal in my The Dark Ages. I wanted to see where id could take The Dark Ages' own ideas.

Back to flying around arenas again:

I played Revelations on Pandemonium as well, and I used the Chain Spear because it is clearly what the entire DLC is designed around. The maps, new enemies, bosses and traversal all assume you are going to engage with its grapple, dash and movement systems, while the Shield Saw occasionally gets remembered when the environment demands it.

The spear itself is not badly designed. There is plenty of mechanical depth there, and when everything gets going it can be exhilarating. You can grapple into enemies, orbit larger targets, reposition constantly, combine melee attacks with gunfire and turn a crowded arena into absolute chaos.

My problem is that I had already spent more than 20 hours enjoying the fact that The Dark Ages did not play like this anymore.

The base game taught me to stand my ground more often, exploit parries, choose when to push, choose when to back off and use dangerous enemies as resources rather than constantly treating movement itself as the answer. Revelations very quickly dragged me back towards dashing, bunny-hopping and flying around looking for whatever fodder enemy could give me the health or resources I needed next.

More than once I found myself halfway through a fight, air-dashing around trying to locate some poor zombie, thinking, oh great, why am I playing Eternal again?

It is also jarring mechanically because the DLC immediately disrupts everything the Shield Saw spent the entire campaign teaching you. The timings, bindings and defensive rhythm are different enough that the spear initially feels counter-intuitive, not because it is especially complicated, but because you have just spent an entire game building completely different muscle memory.

The level design follows the same shift. The maps are still huge, but they rarely gave me the same feeling of scale because so much of that space now feels designed around traversal routes, grapple points, platforming puzzles and large combat arenas. There is more backtracking, more searching for the correct route and more time spent moving through spaces whose main purpose is accommodating the new mechanics.

On Pandemonium, that can become particularly tedious. Fully clearing one of these maps can take close to two hours, and when a run is already that long, every extra bit of traversal and backtracking becomes considerably more noticeable.

The base game occasionally made me think, where the hell did I miss that secret? Revelations more often made me think, do I seriously have to go all the way back over there?

A strong setup that runs out of room:

The story initially looked much more promising. The High Council of Hell was an interesting direction, Doomguy gets absolutely demolished and broken, and the mysterious Architect saves him. After how much I appreciated The Dark Ages allowing Doomguy to get beaten, injured and even killed rather than treating him like an untouchable god, this was exactly the sort of continuation I wanted.

Then the High Council basically disappears.

These supposedly major figures of Hell establish the premise, get built up as the next great threat and then barely matter. Instead, the story increasingly has to bend itself back towards Eternal. The Khan Maykr becomes involved, existing lore needs to be shuffled into place and what looked like an opportunity to properly explore Hell's internal hierarchy becomes another victim of the prequel curse.

The reduced production scope is also much more obvious here than in the base game. The Dark Ages constantly changed pace with giant battlefields, Atlan sequences, dragon sections, bosses and large bespoke set pieces. Revelations falls back much more heavily on arenas, traversal, puzzles, revisited locations and deliberately classic-Doom-style sections.

Those classic levels are a fun novelty by themselves, but together with everything else they contribute to the feeling that id was trying to get as much mileage as possible from mechanics and assets it could realistically finish within an absurd deadline. There is nothing here with the same spectacle as piloting an Atlan through a battlefield or flying the dragon across one of the base game's huge environments.

It still feels like a substantial DLC. It just no longer feels like the same limitless production.

Xal'Goroth deserved considerably more:

The clearest example is probably Xal'Goroth, the secret endgame superboss. The surrounding lore builds this thing up as an apocalyptic cosmic entity capable of ending universes, exactly the sort of payoff I had hoped the Cosmic Realm might eventually deliver.

After all the Old Ones, ancient architecture and suggestions that this civilisation was operating on an entirely different scale to everything else in Doom, I finally unlocked the big secret monstrosity and discovered that visually it is basically a giant Cosmic Pain Elemental.

The actual fight is good. On Pandemonium it was difficult enough that I went back through the maps looking for every remaining Life Sigil I could find before committing to it, and the encounter makes proper use of the spear's movement and positioning. Beating it was satisfying.

But fucking hell, the presentation does not remotely match the lore.

Something supposedly capable of ending universes should feel like the culmination of everything strange and cosmic The Dark Ages had been teasing. Instead, it looks like an enlarged variation of an enemy archetype I had already spent hours fighting.

Once again, knowing the production schedule makes it painfully easy to understand. A completely bespoke cosmic monstrosity with its own model, animations, mechanics and enormous set piece takes serious development time. Turning an existing foundation into a much harder boss is something you can actually finish when most of your DLC is being built in three or four months.

That context makes me sympathise enormously with the people who made Revelations. It does not make the result less disappointing.

There is still plenty here, the Chain Spear has real depth and the combat can absolutely be exhilarating when everything clicks. But I finished The Dark Ages wanting id to push its new combat philosophy, its dark-fantasy world and especially the Cosmic Realm further. Revelations instead feels like a team with nowhere near enough time being forced to retreat towards ideas it already knew it could ship.