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Doom has been with us for a long time. The original arrived in 1993—32 years ago, if you can believe it—and after a pair of sequels and a long stretch of silence, it returned in 2016 with a powerful reboot that cemented its claim as gaming’s greatest FPS. Now the sixth game in the series, Doom: The Dark Ages, is almost upon us, and with trilogies being a popular thing in popular media, you might reasonably wonder if it represents a conclusion of any sort. The answer, according to id Software creative director Hugo Martin, is a simple no.
“It isn’t designed to be the end of something,” Martin said during a recent preview event.
Which isn’t to suggest developers are looking ahead to the next step in the Doom narrative—”genuinely, sincerely, we’re really just focused on this right now,” he continued—but Doom: The Dark Ages isn’t “a period on the end of a sentence.”
That’s good news for Doom fans, but shouldn’t come as a great shock, and not just because the big-budget videogame business lives and dies on sequels. Doom is not what you’d call a narrative heavyweight: ‘There’s demons and you gotta shoot ’em’ is pretty much the sum total of the story, and while id has loaded up the more recent games with lore, it’s not particularly vital to the experience. I mean, this is the entirety of the game description currently on Steam:
Doom: The Dark Ages is the single-player, action FPS prequel to the critically acclaimed Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal. You are the Doom Slayer, the legendary demon-killing warrior fighting endlessly against Hell. Experience the epic cinematic origin story of the Doom Slayer’s rage in 2025.
That’s it, that’s the whole thing—but it’s also all you really need to know, right? This is Doom. You know what you’re here for, and you know it’s never going to really be over. The irony is that its absentminded handwaving at a plot makes the Doom games very similar in at least one way to another shooter that does lean heavily into narrative: There are always demons, there’s always a man, there’s always guns.
Martin himself doesn’t sound like he’s ready to put a period at the end of the sentence that is his decade as a director at id, either. “I like making Doom games,” he said. “I wouldn’t have a problem doing this for a long time.”
Doom: The Dark Ages is set to come out later this year.
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Kurt Indovina
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