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Doom: The Dark Ages has just about everything you’d expect in a Doom game. It’s got demons, it’s got guns, it’s got a huge guy who loves to rip and tear. The one thing it doesn’t have is multiplayer: Studio chief Marty Stratton said id Software decided to forego a multiplayer component so it could focus on making the “biggest and best” Doom campaign possible.
Multiplayer holds a prominent place in real life Doom lore: The original game was famously banned from numerous university networks in the US almost immediately after its release because the number of people rushing to try their hands at deathmatch was overwhelming the systems. And it was great! A lot of people went to a lot of trouble hauling their PCs all over the countryside so they could spend a night exchanging gunfire and trash-talk with friends.
But it was also a very different world then, one without the countless assortment of multiplayer shooter options we can choose from today. So while it’s a little surprising as a matter of principle (or perhaps just nostalgia) that Doom: The Dark Ages doesn’t have any multiplayer at all, it’s also understandable.
“It’s campaign only,” Stratton said at a recent preview event. “We made that decision really from the jump. [We] wanted to basically free ourselves to create things like the Atlan and, you know, the mech experience and the dragon experience. Those are both almost like mini games within the game.
“We know our campaigns are, to a great extent, what people come to the modern Doom games to play. So [we] decided to put all of our efforts behind that and really create the biggest and best Doom game we’ve ever made.”
Well, it’s been coming for a while. “Deathmatch doesn’t belong to Doom anymore,” we wrote in 2020, following the release of Doom Eternal. “If we’re honest, it hasn’t for a long time. It’s been decades since students drilled holes in their dorm walls to run LAN cables between their machines, desperate to participate in the bloody murder that was taking over PC gaming.”
id Software tried to find a new way with Doom Eternal, which eschewed classic deathmatch combat in favor of a newfangled “Battlemode” that pits the Doomslayer against two human-controlled enemies, but it never really caught on: I tried it a few times back then, and it was interesting and kinda fun, and I forgot about it almost immediately. So as much as it feels odd to a gaming oldster like me, cutting deathmatch completely is probably the right move: Pouring resources into chasing a multiplayer crowd that’s already got its hands full with other things just doesn’t make sense.
Doom: The Dark Ages is set to launch on May 14.
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Kurt Indovina
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