DOOM: The Dark Ages Developers Like to Revisit Classic DOOM For Inspiration

DOOM: The Dark Ages director Hugo Martin compares it to an artist visiting a museum to study a Norman Rockwell painting repeatedly.

While DOOM: The Dark Ages is slowly creeping up on its May 13 release date, director Hugo Martin has revealed that the development team at id Software went all the way back to the original DOOM from 1993 for inspiration. Speaking to Edge Magazine (via GamesRadar), Martin compared revisiting the original DOOM to a painter going to a museum to study a Norman Rockwell painting.

“It’s like a classic piece of art,” said Martin. “It’s like a painter going to a museum and studying the Norman Rockwell painting he’s already studied 50 times. Every time you look at it, you learn something new.”

Martin compares the combat difficulty in DOOM: The Dark Ages with that of the original DOOM. For context, in the classic shooter, difficulty revolved more around players being able to skilfully dodge enemy projectiles. “The projectiles start to collect in the world, and they create this maze that the player has to weave through,” said Martin.

According to him, DOOM: The Dark Ages will place more of an emphasis on a horizontal battlefield when compared to DOOM Eternal‘s verticality. This is another area where DOOM: The Dark Ages takes inspiration from DOOM, since the original shooter didn’t really have the capacity to feature 3-dimmensional levels; enemies and players were on the same 2D plane, and as such, gameplay was less about twitch reflex-based aiming.

“In Eternal, there’s a lot of activity along the [vertical] Y-axis,” Martin said, “but [here] it felt better to focus the threats and the targets along the horizon line. It’s a movement shooter still, but the movement is more about what’s happening along the X-axis.”

Earlier this month, Martin had spoken about how DOOM: The Dark Ages taking on medieval fantasy tropes allowed the developers to get darker and more sinister with the kinds of weapons they can give players. According to Martin, some of the weapons in the game were seemingly inspired by classical torture devices.

“Part of the reason we chose the fantasy genre is that we could get more dark and sinister with the tool kit,” said Martin. “When you think medieval, dark fantasy, you think torture devices, ropes, chains, and spikes.”

He also spoke about id Software’s ambitions for DOOM: The Dark Ages, referring to the game’s levels as some of the largest the studio had ever made. Martin did confirm, however, that the size of the game’s levels fall into the sweet spot of taking most players around an hour to finish. This was done in an effort to maintain good pacing for the upcoming shooter.

“I don’t know that you want to play a single DOOM level for two hours,” he said. “You want them to be nice, contained experiences, so around an hour is about the sweet spot. But if you’re a completionist, you could certainly extend that.”

DOOM: The Dark Ages is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details on the upcoming shooter, here are 15 new things we’ve learned.