Doom: The Dark Ages has almost everything you’d expect from a Doom game. He’s got demons, he’s got guns, he’s got a substantial guy who loves to rip and tear. The only thing missing is multiplayer: studio head Marty Stratton said that id Software decided to drop the multiplayer component so it could focus on enabling the “biggest and best” Doom campaign.
Multiplayer features prominently in real life Doom: The original game was banned from many US college chains almost immediately after its release as the number of people wanting to try their hand at deathmatches overwhelmed the systems. And it was great! Many people went to great lengths to transport their computers all over the neighborhood so they could spend the night swapping gunplay and trash talk with friends.
But it was also a completely different world back then, lacking the countless multiplayer shooter options we can choose from today. So while it’s a bit surprising (or maybe just nostalgic) in principle that Doom: The Dark Ages doesn’t have multiplayer at all, it’s also understandable.
Well, this has been going on for a while. “Deathmatch no longer belongs to Doom,” we wrote in 2020 after the release of Doom Eternal. “If we’re being honest, this hasn’t happened for a long time. Decades have passed since college students drilled holes in their dorm walls to run LAN cables between their machines, desperate to take part in the bloody murder that has taken over computer gaming.”
id Software tried to find a modern way with Doom Eternal, which abandoned the classic deathmatch combat in favor of a newfangled “battle mode” that pits the Doomslayer against two human-controlled enemies, but it never caught on: I tried it a few times ago it was captivating and kind of comical at the time, but I forgot about it almost immediately. So, while it seems odd to an older gamer like me, cutting out deathmatch altogether is probably the right move: devoting resources to chasing a crowd in multiplayer that already has their hands full of other things just doesn’t make sense.
Doom: The Dark Ages will debut on May 14.
