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Title: New 'Doom: The Dark Ages' Already Adjusted to Add Even More Dangerous
Demons

Link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/05/24/235...

Doom: The Dark Ages just launched on May 15. But it's already received
"difficulty" balance changes "that have made the demons of Hell even more
dangerous than ever," writes Windows Central: According to DOOM's official
website Slayer's Club, these balance adjustments are focused on making the
game harder, as players have been leaving feedback saying it felt too easy
even on Nightmare Mode. As a result, enemies now hit harder, health and armor
item pick-ups drop less often, and certain enemies punish you more severely
for mistiming the parry mechanic. It reached three million players in just
five days, which was seven times faster than 2020's Doom: Eternal," reports
Wccftech (though according to analytics firm Ampere Analysis (via The Game
Business), more than two million of those three million launch players were
playing on Xbox, while only 500K were playing on PS5." "id Software proves
it can still reinvent the wheel," according to one reviewer, "shaking up
numerous aspects of gameplay, exchanging elaborate platforming for brutal on-
the-ground action, as well as the ability to soar on a dragon's back or stomp
around in a giant mech." And the New York Times says the game "effectively
reinvents the hellish shooter with a revamped movement system and deepened
lore" in the medieval goth-themed game... Double jumping and dashing are
ditched and replaced with an emphasis on raw power and slow, strategic melee
combat. Doom Slayer's arsenal features a brand-new tool, the powerful Shield
Saw, which Id Software made a point to showcase across its "Stand and Fight"
trailers and advertisements. Used for absorbing damage at the expense of
speed, the saw also allows players to bash enemies from afar and close the
gap on chasms too wide to jump across. While previous titles allowed players
to quickly worm their way through bullet hell, The Dark Ages expects you to
meet foes head on. "If you were an F-22 fighter jet in Doom Eternal, this
time around we wanted you to feel like an Abrams tank," Hugo Martin, the
game's creative director, has told journalists. And Doom Slayer's beefy
durability and unstoppable nature does make the gameplay a refreshing
experience. The badassery is somehow ratcheted to new heights with the
inclusion of a fully controllable mech, which has only a handful of attacks
at its disposal, and actual dragons. Flight in a Doom game is entirely
surprising and fluid, and the dragons feel relatively easy to maneuver
through tight spots. They can also engage in combat more deliberately with
the use of dodges and mounted cannons... One of my favorite additions is the
skullcrusher pulverizer. Equal parts heinous nutcracker and demonic
woodchipper, the gun lodges skulls into a grinder and sends shards of bones
flying at enemies. The animation is both goofy and satisfying. Another
special Times article notes that Doom's fans "resurrect the original game
over and over again on progressively stranger pieces of hardware: a Mazda
Miata, a NordicTrack treadmill, a French pharmacy sign." But what many hard-
core tech hobbyists want to know is whether you can play it on a pregnancy
test. The answer: positively yes. And for the first time, even New York Times
readers can play Doom within The Times's site [after creating a free
account]... None of this happened by accident, of course. Ports were not
incidental to Doom's development. They were a core consideration. "Doom was
developed in a really unique way that lent a high degree of portability to
its code base," said John Romero, who programmed the game with John Carmack.
(In our interview, he then reminisced about operating systems for the next 14
minutes.) Id had developed Wolfenstein 3D, the Nazi-killing predecessor to
Doom, on PCs. To build Doom, Carmack and Romero used NeXT, the hardware and
software company founded by Steve Jobs after his ouster from Apple in 1985.
NeXT computers were powerful, selling for about $25,000 apiece in today's
dollars. And any game designed on that system would require porting to the
more humdrum PCs encountered by consumers at computer labs or office jobs.
This turned out to be advantageous because Carmack had a special aptitude for
ports. All of Id's founders met as colleagues at Softdisk, which had hired
Carmack because of his ability to spin off multiple versions of a single
game. The group decided to strike out on its own after Carmack created a near-
perfect replica of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 - Nintendo's best-
selling platformer - on a PC. It was a wonder of software engineering that
compensated for limited processing power with clever workarounds. "This is
the thing that everyone has," Romero said of PCs. "The fact that we could
figure out how to make it become a game console was world changing...."
Romero founded a series of game studios after leaving Id in 1996 and is
working on a new first-person shooter, the genre he and Carmack practically
invented. He has no illusions about how it may stack up. "I absolutely accept
that Doom is the best game I'll ever make that has that kind of a reach," he
said. "At some point you make the best thing." Thirty years on, people are
still making it. And in related news, PC Gamer reports... As part of a new
"FPS Fridays" series on Twitch, legendary shooter designer John Romero
streamed New Blood's 2018 hit, Dusk, one of the first and most influential
indie "boomer shooters" in the genre's recent revitalization. The short of
it? Romero seems to have had a blast.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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