Drew's Out of Office - Battery Powered - June 13 2025
DOOM: Dark Ages
Games I’m Playing – Quake Too – Several years ago I sat down to read Masters of Doom, a book about the formation and evolution of id software. It was a quick read and made my father lament that we didn’t have an Apple II. The book covers everything from the team meeting at Softdisk to the founding of id and development of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, and Quake. I first played Wolf3D in the early 90s when it was available on shareware. It was great as I didn’t have a job or any money… (I didn’t expect that to be repeated in my 40s)! Anyway, according to the book, Quake was originally imagined to be a first person melee game about Thor and his hammer. Due to limitations, complications, and argumentations, that version never happened. What released instead was an incredible shooter with mouselook, a custom Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, and a great single and multiplayer experience. 29 years later we’re at the release of Doom: Dark Ages
DDA is a game about killing demons. Lots of demons. As with the last two DOOM games, you’re the Doom Slayer. Guess what you do… if you guess gardening, you are correct! Anyway, a group of abnormally buff space vikings have found a mcguffin that also tickles the fancy of some demon prince. He and his witch companion are going to stop at nothing to get the mcguffin and they don’t care who knows it. He sulks around in his armor that looks like it was taken from a laudanum induced dream of 1992’s Bram Stoker's Dracula. Now it’s time for the Oblivion Gates to open
“Oblivion Gates are in the Elder Scrolls you fool!”
Indeed they are, but I ask you to tell me the difference. Both the hell portals and oblivion gates are tall and ovular in shape, red with some flame coloration, and a chore to close. Sure seem the same
There’s another dog in this fight called the Sentinels. They are a race of space robots… sentient space robots… organic/mechanical hybrids with energy arms? I’m not sure what they are but they’ve seen fit to affix you, the Doom Slayer, the only thing to have held back the hordes of hell time and again with a restraining bolt. If there was some narrative reason for this after the events of DOOM Eternal, it escapes me. I actually kind of wonder why spend time on backstory in a DOOM game at all. Also, I can’t help but think of how strongly influenced this game is from Warhammer 40K. Space Vikings = Space Wolves, Doom Slayer is any Space Marine, and demon prince is a demon prince. It’s pretty spot on
Story-wise, I feel like DOOM 3 was the pinnacle. It was dark, creepy, and full of tainted cultists and audio logs. The tone of the new DOOM games is also great (2016 and Eternal). It’s kind of like what I would imagine living inside a Gwar album cover would be like except you are an absolute demon murder machine
The art features burly dudes and burly ladies in burly armor that talk with burly voices. You’ve been kitted out with a fur cape and a shield, cause… dark ages? There’s a cross between 40K and a heavy metal vibe here
The environments are varied at points but certainly include a lot of crumbling medieval-adjacent architecture, again mirroring 40K (though 40K is a more gothic cathedral in nature). There are still a lot of statues of burly dudes
For all of those who don’t know 40K or are confused as to what I am referring to, be free. You are living an unencumbered life without the shackles of the grim darkness of the far future
The visual language on screen is generally clear. Projectiles are almost all orange or bright green. This is important as you spend so much time sprinting around so keeping track of imminent danger is paramount. Ammo is also clearly indicated with an orange “god glow” that is distinct from that of projectiles. Enemies also read against dense backgrounds easily with silhouettes and distinct motions
The soundtrack is pure metal music, but kind of unremarkable. When I think back to Doom Eternal I remember there were songs there that were catchy in some way, but that’s lacking here. So DDA music plays a background role rather than creating anything memorable. What happened to the days when you could put your own soundtrack in games. I spent the majority of my time playing Quake with Toad the Wet Sprocket’s Dulcinea playing in the background. Quite the juxtaposition of music only to be “smashed by a shambler”
The sound design itself is excellent. There are the ever present gurgles and grunts of enemies that create a constant sense of danger (present since the original Doom) coupled with the aggro sounds when combat starts. On the PS5, where I’ve been playing, they use the speaker on the controller to play sounds that are affecting you directly, like the click/clack sound when you pick up ammo, speed boost when you sprint, and alerts when a hit is incoming
Each weapon has a distinct firing sound as does each enemy, making sure you know what you’re doing and what’s coming
Now to gameplay. DOOM: Dark Ages is an FPS, so running and shooting is standard, but they’ve decided to add a shield. That shield plays a big part in the feel of the game. You will use it to block, parry, and stun/kill enemies. Blocking is simply done by holding a button down, but parrying requires a timed button press against an incoming attack. Well, not any incoming attack, only green projectiles. When a green projectile is headed towards you, mash that like and subscribe button at the precise time and you’ll send it right back to the progenitor to deal damage
Additionally, you can take your shield and throw it like Captain America. At first it just stuns enemies for a moment, but you can upgrade it to do more things, like outright kill weaker enemies and bounce between them like a pinball hitting obnoxious bumpers. It can also be thrown to break open certain locks, stick to green goo and allow you to jump to it (I don’t get it either), and open doors. It’s clearly the most useful shield every developed
There are 13 total guns in DDA, with many being an alternate of an existing one. Like the Machine Gun has an alternate mode where it fires a precise high damage shot, at the cost of a lot more ammo. There are standard DOOM weapons with the Plasma Gun (I always used to call this The Melter), Super Shotgun (just double barrelled), and the BFG (which stands for Ballistic Force Crossbow). It also has some new guns like the Chainshot, Pulverizer, and Ravager. Each gun has its own purpose and degree of usefulness (the Plasma Gun doesn't feel as good as it has in past iterations)
Melee weapons include a gauntlet, for punching; flail, for swinging; and mace, for smashing. It’s pretty self explanatory. You can use melee to cover great distances quickly and when an enemy is killed, it sends a shockwave killing nearby enemies as well
The upgrade system mentioned above plays into all the guns, melee weapons, and the shield. Players find gold and gems and trade those at alters that were 100% def not inspired by Warhammer 40K at all, to enhance their accouterments
The pace of the game is fast, but in the face of slowness. What I mean is everything happens quickly and you’re expected to be quick, but your actual movement feels weighed down. It’s crazy to me how fast you’re going while simultaneously feeling like the character is so heavy. That makes movement a little restrictive (playing on PC probably would have helped)
Then there are the game systems. The first several areas of the game constantly introduce a new mechanic. Here’s how to parry; here’s how to smash stunned enemies, here’s how to parry, jump, and throw your fur cap back to look super intimidating. It feels overly complex for a series that has traditionally been -> get gun, blow up demon. The excess is pronounced at higher difficulty as you’re dealing with so many enemies and projectiles on the screen, that the fights become a sort of speed chess, rather than run/gun. These systems also inhibit some of the flow of the earlier games
On that note, they also took out glory kills. What are glory kills, I hear some of you asking. Since DOOM 2016 the design team brilliantly added this state where an enemy became staggered and glowed orange. You would hit a button and do something absolutely horrific to that enemy (relax, they’re demons and they had it coming). In this version, however, that’s been replaced with a simple button press/kill that allows you to cover a long distance quickly and regain some health. But those glory kills were fun and losing them loses some of the reboot DNA
Let's talk about the checkpoint system. Checkpoints happen after crossing invisible lines and after large combat scenarios, but not all the time. While this might seem normal, it’s a nuisance
“Why? Just be thankful you don’t have to do the whole level over”
I am thankful for that, however there’s a flaw here. You see when you finish combat, you’re likely depleted of resources (ammo, health, armor), and that puts you in a bind. I played on Nightmare, which is one of the higher difficulty levels, and that meant I died a lot. But instead of getting right back to the frenetic combat, I would have to run around to find health and ammo before trying again. That’s a problem. If you look at the design of a game like Super Meat Boy the team knew quick repetition was key. That should have been implemented here, either with health refills or a checkpoint just before you entered a new combat area (so if you wanted to wander off you still could)
I’m not sure if I really enjoy DOOM: Dark Ages. It’s got some aspects that are enjoyable, but it’s also laden with too many gameplay mechanics that keep it from having the flow of 2016 and Eternal. It lost some of the brilliant simplicity of those games. It’s like someone felt they should mess with the formula that worked before when it didn’t really need messing with. There’s always room for tweaks but this is too much
What really has confused me about this game, in the overall tone and feel, is why wasn’t this a Quake reboot? It seems primed for it, especially knowing the original mission of Quake was to be melee heavy. This game could have been the realization of that without carrying the weight of the prior DOOM games. With Quake being dormant since the late 2000s, this was a real chance to bring it back and have John Romero utter, “My god, there it is. Bask in its glory”
Charging Up
Op-Ed - Stagflation - When I was working at Take-Two back in the 2000s it was just after the launch of the 360. The PS2 was at the end of its life and the end of the year brought about the overpriced PS3 and the revolutionary Wii (aptly codenamed “The Revolution” within Nintendo). Publishers were launching a slew of titles of varying quality. There were the movie tie-in titles that demanded a licensing fee and were rarely interesting game experiences. Then there were the kids' titles which followed a similar pattern. From a business perspective, however, they almost certainly made money. This was also a time when a lot of AA games were being released. Games like Psychonauts, Space Marine, Titan Quest, and quirky things like Earth Defense Force 2017, etc. By the end of the 2000s, however, AA seemed to mostly be on its way out with publishers switching their attention to AAA franchises. 15 years later, AA is back and with gusto
Firstly, what is AA vs AAA? That’s a great question. There are many definitions out there but for our purposes let's say AA is a game with a budget that’s ~¼ or less of the average AAA game. In the modern parlance, that’s roughly at $50M with a team that’s <=100 devs. This could be debated and we’re not going to determine the difference between AA and iii (indie stuff like Hades), but we need to put a marker somewhere
What AA is not is a commentary on quality. AA games can be every bit as good, or better, than a AAA game. It’s purely a budgetary and team size consideration
It should also be noted that there’ve been some studios who have consistently been making AA, like Arkane Austin with Prey in 2017, Obsidian with Outer Worlds in 2019 or DoubleFine with Psychonauts 2 in 2020 (to name a few). But, this revival isn’t from those studios known for such ambitions. The shift towards AA has been accelerating in the past few years and it’s due to factors within the market
The late 2010s and early 2020s were filled with dumb money, and I’m not talking about individual investors (though meme stocks were prevalent). This was from venture capital and institutional investors in the form of publishers. Money was cheap due to interest rates and that meant people were spending hand over fist to acquire studios and invest in as many spin offs as ex-Blizzard or ex-Riot people could create. This mostly turned out to be money not well spent, but it was indicative of change
See, what the VCs want(ed) was returns at silicon valley levels, but in games those returns are largely an illusion (even with casino mechanics). To get the desired returns, that meant there must be a recurring revenue stream which could only come from live services. So a vision was sold of players spending their lives in a single game ecosystem, with all their capital following suit. But those games already existed: Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, etc. Slicing off a piece of those markets would be like entering the colosseum with only a loincloth and your wits
“Where is this going? Aren’t we here to talk about AA? Do you really need to bring VCs, spending, and your tired comments about live services to bear again?!”
I do because it’s part of a bigger picture. You see where money goes, development follows. It’s not 1:1 as several people saw the folly with “blockchain gaming,” whatever the hell that was, but it’s still a major factor. It’s relevant in conjunction with the path publishers were on at that point. Since cutting their own AA games in the late 2000s, there were fewer releases from major publishers than in years before, with higher budgets around tentpole franchises (transmedia, if possible). That left a gap
Single player, co-op, and story based games that weren’t exclusively indie or long established franchises had no home. But a few years ago things started to change. In 2018 Kingdom Come: Deliverance released as a single player game with a budget of ~<$40M and a team of ~<100. It’s made roughly ~$175M lifetime (according to Google AI). Meanwhile It Takes Two, a story based co-op game, was developed for between $5-$7M and has made nearly $300M. Most recently Claire Obscure: Expedition 33 is estimated to have cost $10-$30M and has generated almost $200M in returns (there are some other games here like Astro Bot and Sifu, but couldn’t get good numbers on those)
I bring up the financials as those are the returns that a VC would need to be satisfied (at least with ITT and CO:E33, but instead they invested in another battle royale or extraction shooter). It’s not that there cannot be success in those areas or that devs couldn’t do something interesting, it’s the market is completely saturated
The rise of AA has also come from a 3rd route. That is the expansion of better development tools, such as Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen (It will always feel awkward not to say UE5) or Blender being available for free. Additionally, outsourcing has become easy, good, and something that the CO:E33 team purportedly used to their advantage. These techniques helped keep the cost of development far below what a AAA game currently deals with
I think back to the self-inflicted hype Ubisoft provided for Skull and Bones, claiming it was the first AAAA game. As if to say, this game is so incredible we had to buy an extra vowel like we’re playing The Wheel. What did that mean? Who asked for that? Were graphics at such a level that jaws hit floors? No. They took a brilliantly simple pirate concept from 10 years earlier and then completely overbaked it
What the money side of games often forgets, in pursuit of more money, is gameplay is the most important part. We’re no longer in the age of a graphics race that consistently squeezes more polygons into a smaller space. That doesn’t make the game better. What does, is crisp, clear, and exciting design
The AA market has become the place for that. It combines graphical fidelity that meets the mark and gameplay that exceeds it. It does this not by focusing on buzzwords, but by taking something existing and changing it by ~20%. That 20% makes all the difference and there are clearly a lot of people who want to experience it
In the 2000s much of the AA market was clogged with mediocre “filler” games. The death of AA made some sense as studios could focus on bigger budget games, especially as ROI expectations were increasing. But their absence and the influx of unearned capital created a vacuum and one that financiers have continued to say, “doesn’t exist” or “It’s too risky, we only want to bet on home runs.” Well, it seems like home runs are being hit and it’s not by many of the companies that were backed, but by those who see the gap and the opportunity. It’s the spaces in between and AA is now powering the industry’s future
I Hear You, Really
Game Dev - Listening Ears - I’ve worked on some big games in the past. One of those paired me with an individual, who shall remain nameless, who had a particular way of doing things. Now there’s nothing particularly strange about peculiarity, however its narrowness often comes with a cost. For this particular individual, that cost was around allowing title to dictate their view of a person's knowledge
The view this person had was that they were an “artist” and only they and other “artists” could possibly grasp the scope of what they were trying to do. Now, to give a little credence here, there is a level of understanding one gains through getting reps in working in a specific role. I.e. If I were to come over and start commenting on the coding prowess of anyone, that’s probably not something they should take seriously. That doesn’t apply equally, everywhere, however
Opinions are easy and shared readily. Take 5 seconds on any product review and you’ll see what I mean. But, in specialized contexts such as game development, it’s not an open forum where random passersbys are shouting on Reddit about the poor quality of the latest Pixel phone or hot take on the latest news story. No. Everyone in game development is almost certainly one who plays games. Even farther, I’d extend that out to the rest of the company: Marketing, sales, publishing, etc. Most of those people play games, and potentially, a lot of them
So there are some concentric circles to draw around a specific issue. Studios are often split into multi-disciplinary teams. Artists, Designers, Engineers, Producers, Testers may all sit and work together. Few would sit and say, “I will only hear feedback from designers, thank you!” That’s a foolish approach to making things. Nor should an artist ignore feedback from an engineer simply because they write code instead of creating textures
Teams should seek feedback not only internally, but also from other teams. Getting an idea of what is working and isn’t regardless of station or position
“Please. I only take feedback from Directors”
That kind of thinking is stunted and the game will be worse for it
It’s also important to note that sorting through feedback is as important as getting it. That means, as a leader, you need to listen with intent to understand, not to talk (I’ll admit it can be hard to do that at times). An example when doing focus groups is understanding what players are getting at with their feedback. They might say the run speed is too fast. That might be true, but it may be that they’ve identified a separate issue like the accuracy of gunfire. Being attuned to receiving feedback will help determine what it means
“But how? How can I invite all this feedback and be expected to address any of it?”
The answer: clear vision and creative razors. Knowing what the game is and what it isn’t. That can sort the wheat from the chaff. Clarity here is what lets you make good decisions around what is being said. Also, it’s important to dig in and ask follow up questions. To use the example above, “why does the run speed feel too fast?”
“I’m moving so fast I find it difficult to predict where I’ll land when I jump” is extremely different from, “I’m unable to steady my reticule when sprinting”
I got lost in the weeds for a second there and was more focused on how to take feedback than where the source is coming from, but let’s combine them. The above comments can come from anyone, regardless of station. It only matters that they are commenting on their experience and that should be taken into consideration. It may not be something that needs action, but hearing and processing it will make for a better game experience
Of course, they might not be aware of the cost/tradeoffs that would need to be made to bring their idea to light, but it could still be valuable
Title does not dictate knowledge
The best creatives listen to people on and off their teams
Ideas and creativity come from exposure to new things
The particular person I reference above created a hostile, hierarchical, and dismissive environment that pushed back on the challenging of ideas from those unanointed. That’s not the recipe for a good team or one that moves things forward. When working with a team, large or small, and especially if you are leading it, it’s imperative to remember that good ideas can come from anywhere. It doesn't matter what the person's discipline is, what they studied in school, if they went to school, and certainly not their level. What matters is hearing what is said and taking it into account. It could be bad, it could be good, or it could spark something deeper through allowing the idea to breathe
Unless it’s my friend Jeff playing Codenames on your team. Whatever he says will be the wrong answer and, unfortunately, he’ll take the entire team down with him
Excellent article