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Doom: The Dark Ages gets release date confirmed, will make you feel like an "iron tank" rather than the "fighter jet" acrobatics of Doom EternalBeefier melee and revamped Glory Kills, too.Image credit: Bethesda News by Katharine Castle Managing Editor Published on Jan. 23, 2025 Bethesda and id Software revealed an extensive new gameplay deep dive for Doom: The Dark Ages as part of the Xbox Developer Direct tonight, confirming the game's leaked release date of May 15th 2025 in the process.Set in a sci-fi fantasy medieval war against the demons of hell and acting as a prequel to Doom (2016), the Doom Slayer now has a hefty Shield Saw at his disposal alongside a multitude of new guns and weapons to play with, and tonight we got a glimpse of just how dramatically that shield will affect the game's overall combat flow.DOOM: The Dark Ages | Developer_Direct 2025 (4K) | Coming May 15, 2025. Watch on YouTube"In Doom Eternal you felt like a fighter jet," game director Hugo Martin said. "In Doom: The Dark Ages, you'll be an iron tank. Heavy, strong, but still fast." The more grounded combat system will strike a finer balance between enemy projectiles and player movement than previous games, Martin continued, and classic Doom fans will be pleased to hear that all adds up to make "strafing to aim viable again".In a Q&A for press ahead of tonight's showcase, Martin told Eurogamer "the shield is your multi-tool, you know, it's your Swiss army knife," and its lock-on mechanic is a big part of this. In addition to strafing, it will also let you rocket you across the arena to shield bash enemies - or traverse large chasms as we saw in the showcase trailer."You just feel like a pinball, like you're this wrecking machine" he added, and at one point even likened it to web-slinging from Spider-Man. That's where the speed element comes from, it seems, but as we saw in the trailer, the shield can also block and deflect incoming fire, be thrown like Kratos' axe, and even be used to parry demon melee attacks - all from a single, contextual button press.Don't worry if the word 'parry' makes you break out in a sweat, though, as the showcase revealed there will be extensive difficulty modifiers that players can adjust on the fly to tweak settings such as parry windows, game speed, daze duration and more. Image credit: id SoftwareThe Doom Slayer will have new melee options of his own to follow up those defensive manoeuvres, including an iron flail, an electrified gauntlet, and a spiked mace. Again, these will all be available on one input, and have their own combos and upgrade paths.In the press Q&A, Martin revealed this streamlining of the controls was an important goal for Doom: The Dark Ages. This was partly to make it feel intuitive, as "you shouldn't be fighting the controls, you should be fighting the bad guys", he said, but also so players can "master the control scheme faster, then we can ask more of you sooner."Martin also told Eurogamer that many of The Dark Ages' new weapons were designed to be "more brutalistic" to fit the medieval setting, and that he wanted players to think of them "like torture devices". There's no flamethrower this time, either, so the path to clawing back ammo will be done entirely through the new melee weapons."It's a loop that's made up of three core abilities that the player has, which is guns, shield and melee, and you're basically going to be using one or all of those three non-stop throughout the game. And each of those will give you the resources you need to stay in the fight". Image credit: id SoftwareGlory Kills have also been revamped for The Dark Ages. They're now un-synced and can be executed from any angle without locking you into a short, close-up death sequence. "For 10 years now, we've been trying to solve the problem of what happens when there are multiple demons staggered at the same time," Martin said during the Q&A."By the time you've played one synced glory kill, you turn to the other one and he's already out of his stagger state. The answer [was] it never worked to just leave them in the stagger state longer, that just feels weird." Martin also cited that moving between multiple staggered enemies felt "jarring", which didn't gel with their overarching goal of making The Dark Ages feel "fluid and constantly in control".As a result, the studio lent more on the "physics part" of the engine, so players "could move through [enemies] like Leonidas in the Hot Gates in that scene in 300," which Martin says was "a big source of inspiration" for the new Glory Kill system. Making them un-synced also solved "the problem of repetition" and recycled animation sequences, as seen in Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, he said. Now, "you basically perform combos," Martin explained, "and you feel like you're in total control".On top of the new crop of weapons, The Dark Ages will also let players pilot a "30 storey" Atlan mech to punch giant titans, and fly around on a cybernetic dragon, which breathes fire and has its own mounted gatling gun. Image credit: id Software"They're these pace breakers that happen throughout the game and are woven into the story," executive producer Marty Stratton told Eurogamer. They have their own missions, suite of abilities and mini-bosses to fight. With the dragon, in particular, you'll also using it to explore certain levels, as well as getting on and off it at specific points, with Stratton giving an example of using it to land on a hell galleon, say, then fighting your way through it from the inside before needing to escape again.Levels won't all be linear romps to the finish line, either. In one mission, for example, Martin likens it to a "Doom sandbox", calling it the "largest play space ever in a Doom game" as you bomb around a medieval battlefield pursuing objectives at your own pace. Whether that's representative of a more general open world-style approach remains to be seen, of course. Martin did reveal in the Q&A that "exploration is a huge part of the game", but it's more of "an expanded linear experience" than true open world.Still, together with the mech and dragon sequences, it looks like id Software is pulling out all the stops here when it comes to scale and spectacle, and we'll no doubt find out more when Doom: The Dark Ages releases on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Game Pass on 15th May.
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