Hello from id Software! This is Hugo Martin, game director on Doom: The Dark Ages, releasing May 15 on PlayStation 5—it’s right around the corner, I can’t believe it.
If you’ve been following along, you already know that Doom: The Dark Ages is a premium single-player campaign featuring three core pillars of engagement: story, combat, and exploration. I’m guessing you’re reading this because you want to hear something new, something about the game no one else has heard about. Well, I’ve got a good one for you.
We think Doom: The Dark Ages is the best Doom game we’ve ever made (but that’ll be for you to decide). We gave this everything we had, left no feature unpolished: we have 22 levels of incredible FPS single-player combat; tons of gameplay innovations like the Shield Saw, flail, and new crazy guns; and an awesome roller coaster ride of an action story to carry you through to the finish.
AND—we have huge worlds for you to explore.
One of them is totally unique for a Doom game, a space we’ve never been to but a world we’ve wanted to incorporate into the Doom universe for a while: the Cosmic Realm. You will bear witness to the cyclopean architecture of this Lovecraftian dimension as you explore its darkest secrets and battle its most insane enemies.
An unholy union between Hell and the Cosmic Realm has been formed. You’re going to have to experience the story to find out why—but this partnership has given birth to a new host of adversaries for the Slayer to confront.
Enemies like the Cosmic Baron. A twin-bladed brute, he attacks with relentless pressure, and at range he releases a flurry of psionic attacks that can block your projectiles and rip through your precious health. But fear not, because embedded in his attacks are parry windows that a skilled Doom Slayer should be able to exploit, should he or she be brave enough to stand and fight him.
All the strongest foes in Doom: The Dark Ages require this kind of aggression. You’ll weave your way through a maze of projectiles, just like in classic Doom, to then go toe-to-toe with the biggest demons we’ve ever created.
After you’ve dispatched the Cosmic Baron, be careful, because rising above the dark horizon you’ll find the powerful Cacodemon, a hybrid between the two dimensions and newly designed for this game. This floating mass of telepathic terror will immobilize you with his advanced shield attacks and cripple you with his tentacle strikes, should you allow him to get close.
But—you can counter these enemies’ assaults with a new weapon, an ancient tool from dimensions beyond our own: the Reaver Chainshot, a brutal ballistic iron mace of death.
Fire it quickly to unleash a light attack to a single foe, or hold down the trigger to charge its Chaos Sphere and unleash vicious long-range melee strikes, turning your enemies’ insides into demonic pulp. This weapon is unlike anything we’ve ever had in an id game; it brings the Doom: The Dark Ages’ fantastic melee combat to a whole new merciless level of bone-breaking destruction. The sound, the design, the visuals, this weapon is amazing and you’re gonna love using it in battle.
There are so many more secrets to reveal and legends to forge here in this new world we’ve crafted for you. I think you’ll find your time in the Cosmic Realm to be full of intrigue and bloody, bone-crunching mayhem. And it will look amazing on your PlayStation 5, featuring cutting-edge, ludicrous mode graphics powered by the all-new idTech 8.
The innovations in this latest version of idTech allow us to have more content visible on-screen than ever before—bigger spaces with longer views; more enemies to fight; more destruction; better feedback; a better overall gaming experience. We have fully dynamic lighting powered through raytracing, which has allowed us to iterate faster during development and empowered our team to make better art more efficiently. idTech 8 is a purpose-built engine with performance that’s buttery-smooth at 60 fps on PlayStation—this game will play every bit as good as it looks.
And there’s plenty more to talk about, but we wanted to give Sony fans something special as we head into launch. We cannot wait to share this experience with you. It is the biggest and most complete, epic game we have ever made at id and it plays fantastic on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro. There will be more to explore, weapons and abilities to unlock, and demons to crush in Doom: The Dark Ages when it releases on May 15. (You can also start slaying as early as May 13 if you purchase the Premium Edition!*)
From all of us at id—thank you so much for your time and continued support.
*Actual playtime depends on purchase date and applicable time zone differences, subject to possible outages.
