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more beautiful than ever in the hour I spent with Veilguard, but I'm left wondering if Dragon Age has shed its RPG heritage
Here, let me relieve you. After spending about an hour watching some very tired BioWare developers navigate the opening of the next Dragon Age at this year's Summer Game Fest, I can assure you that the weird, hero-shooter tone of that companion reveal trailer doesn't carry into the game itself.
No sir, Dragon Age: The Veil guard (née Dreadwolf) doesn't have much time for japes at all. Things are grim. Dark. Fraught,
Imperial mint
The demo I was shown opened on Rook and Varric being faced with a choice. They were looking for Neve, and to find her, they needed to interrogate a bar owner. To do that, they had to get through her squad of hooded goons. The two options on either side of the dialogue wheel? Fight through the thugs, or persuade your quarry to come along quietly.
A quick aside: For the first time in the series, Veilguard lets you customise your character's body type, sliding a cursor across a triangle that can make your character stocky and chubby or tall and muscular or anything in between, and you can pick from one of six backstories for them. If you're nostalgic, you can choose to affiliate your Rook with the Grey Wardens or Antivan Crows, which you'll recognise from all the way back in Origins.
Following a quick, cinematic fight cutscene and a Telltale-style 'Varric will remember that you hate diplomacy and love decking people' pop-up, we were on our way, chatting all the while.
Readers who are actually just me will be glad to hear that BioWare seems to have resisted the Mass Effect: Andromeda proclivity for gratingly quippy dialogue in this one, at least. Varric makes some jokes, sure, but people spoke mostly like (dramatic, fantasy) people in my time in Minrathous.
Man, Minrathous. Maybe it's just the Baar-Dau-pilled quarter of my brain that goes ape for any kind of floating fortress, but BioWare's art and tech teams really knocked it out the park with this one. Minrathous looks incredible. It's dark and spiky and vertiginous and awe-inspiring in all the right ways. It reminded me a lot of depictions of Valyria before the Fall, from the Song of Ice and Fire series: the dark heart of a dystopian magical empire, its skyline dominated by a magically suspended palace in the shape of a saw-toothed crescent
It's the kind of place—drunk on pride and power—that's destined for a fall. And oh, look, here it is. Solas' ritual to unVeil everyone is already underway, and demons have begun pouring into the lavishly rendered streets in level-appropriate droves.
Time for Rook and co to get to work, and do you know what that looks like more than anything, at least to me? Mass Effect. Specifically, Mass Effect 2 and 3, right down to particular enemies having blue and orange bars on top of their normal health bars representing barriers and armour respectively, and which you can whittle down quickly using the right abilities (or nailing a shot to a vital part with your bow, if you've got one).
Heck, the Rogue even has Arkham-esque parries
There's even the classic Mass Effect ability wheel: Rook's powers and cooldowns arrayed along the bottom and those of her companions on either side of the screen, with time pausing as you use it
Dragon Age has become more and more cinematic and action-y as the series has progressed, of course, but what I saw in my brief time at SGF really has me wondering if the last nubs of its Infinity Engine roots have finally been sanded away. At no point did the overhead tactical view—a series mainstay that let you pretend you were playing an old-school Baldur's Gate if you squinted—make an appearance.
Heck, the Rogue even has Arkham-esque parries, and it looks like everyone will have to hammer dodge to evade ranged attacks. Time was we'd let a D20 handle all that for us. You kids don't know what we've lost.
You might think I'm some embittered THAC0 lover upset at the onward march of time. You'd be right. But wait! Note that I haven't called anything I saw in my time with Veilguard 'bad'. It was actually all quite dazzling: Slickly animated and, at times, even reasonably challenging for our presumably quite experienced demo-er. It just didn't seem very Dragon Age, the series that kept some—I stress some—of its RPG roots even while Shepard went full third-person shooter and BioWare went about its doomed work on Anthem.
As someone with many hundreds of hours in Dragon Age: Origins, the most traditional RPG in the series, it's a change in mechanical emphasis that has me sceptical, a scepticism that isn't helped by BioWare's recent track record. I'm very curious to see more, but right now BioWare's fantasy RPG seems thoroughly, gorgeously fantasy, yet I'm wondering if the RPG is just hiding, or if it's gone for good
The main character, Rook, is rather against that sort of thing. So are their demo companions: magical detective Neve, scout Harding (from Dragon Age: Inquisition), and Varric (basically the series protagonist at this point). Off you go on a quest to guard the Veil.
It's precisely the kind of tense, race-against-the-clock plot you expect from a Dragon Age game, in other words. Strange, then, that once the demo was over, I kept finding myself thinking about Mass Effect, and about the possibility that Dragon Age—the last Baldur's Gates-ian holdout at a BioWare increasingly determined to make cinematic, third-person action games—had left the last vestiges of its TTRPG-inspired past behind. For More Info (https://www.pcgamer.com/games/dragon-age/with-veilguard-dragon-age-becomes-what-it-was-probably-always-destined-to-be-a-mass-effect-game/)
Steam Next Fest gives us our best chance ever to check out all the city builders headed our way.
A Roman city seen from above
(Image credit: Abylight Games)
The city builder genre has never been healthier, and not only are there more new city builders coming out than ever before, but there's an amazing diversity on display: urban builders, survival builders, strategy builders, roguelikes, puzzle games, and even cozy, no-stress city builders.
Best of all you can play so many of these upcoming city builders this week during Steam Next Fest. In fact, there are so many free city builder demos that you can actually play three new ones every single day for the next week and not run out. Amazing! To help all of you aspiring mayors out, I've collected a heaping truckload of city builder demos below you can play this week.
Strategy city builder Citadelum takes you back to Ancient Rome to grow your settlement from a tiny camp to a city so resplendent it would please the gods. That's no exaggeration: towering gods will visit your city to walk the streets and help, or perhaps hinder, your efforts.
Airborne Empire
I've already put a few hours into Airbone Empire, so you've got some catching up to do. The sequel to Airborne Kingdom features a bigger world to explore, lots of aerial combat, and so many quests the lead designer jokingly worried the game was almost too big.
Beyond These Stars
Why not build a city in space? Beyond These Stars takes place on the back of a giant space whale slowly swimming through the void. Build supply chains, encounter alien societies, and travel the galaxy while carefully balancing the ecosystem of the gentle giant you're living on.
Kaiserpunk
Kaiserpunk blends city building with grand strategy in an alt-history setting where World War 1 and 2 are basically just one big, unending conflict. Grow and manage your city's production chains and the supply lines that keep your armies stocked during the greater global conflict.
Ark of Charon
Another city builder where you're expanding atop a living creature, the settlement you construct in Ark of Charon serves as a mobile fortress. The walking tree you build on is the sapling of a sacred World Tree which is traveling through a perilous realm. Gather, build, and keep the sapling safe from relentless attacks.
Goblin Camp
You've heard of Dwarf Fortress, but now it's time for the goblins to do some building. Construct and manage a thriving settlement, survive harsh winters, and protect your tribe from disasters both natural and supernatural in Goblin Camp.
Super Fantasy Kingdom
I love how city building can crossover into so many different genres, and that includes roguelikes. Build your city while engaging in some frenetic Vampire Survivors-like action as you battle mobs of monsters swarming your castle in Super Fantasy Kingdom.
More city builder demos
Those seven city builders are just the start, though. There are even more city builder demos to try this week during Steam Next Fest. Lots more!
Gourdlets
The adorable and stress-free sandbox builder is back with a new demo. Create a little island town and watch your blobby little citizens move in and enjoy it.
Hollywood Animal
An unusual entry, for sure: you're managing a show business empire but also building Hollywood itself and guiding it through "decades of creative achievements" as well as "tough choices and unpleasant compromises."
Technotopia
A city builder card game where you're an AI trying to build and balance the perfect futuristic society. "Build districts, meet the needs of diverse communities and maintain the delicate balance between factions vying for control over you!"
Republic of Pirates
Pirates can't spend all their time at sea, right? Establish and grow a pirate settlement with a resource-based economy, while engaging in real-time naval combat with your rivals and exploring the Caribbean.
Pax Augusta
A strategy city builder set in Ancient Rome. "Build flourishing cities and look after your citizens. Earn gold with production and trade of goods and build impressive monuments."
Humanica
A survival city builder set in ancient times, where you manage and grow a small Stone Age tribe while battling against other settlements. "Experience the journey from sticks and stones to iron tools and windmills!"
Lunar City Builder
Build and manage a city on the moon while meeting the needs of your moon-citizens. Plus, you can walk around inside the city yourself, visit shops, and talk to every single person living there.
There's still so much we don't know about Outlaws, but I saw moments of greatness.
I went into my Summer Game Fest demo of Star Wars Outlaws hoping to answer one big question: What's it like to wander around in the first open world Star Wars game? That debut gameplay trailer from last year instantly sold me on the fun of sneaking through gangster hideouts, breaking into a shootout, then riding off into the sunset on a speeder. Ubisoft has made a lot of noise about Outlaws' wide open frontiers on unfamiliar worlds, but curiously, that's not what it was interested in showing off this weekend.
Instead, what I played were three disconnected missions that showed off three things you'll be doing a lot of in Outlaws: climbing and shooting, sneaking and shooting, and flying and shooting. I had fun in all three, though not as much as I imagined.
You've likely played the Ubisoft games that make up Star Wars Outlaws before. Kay's dog-shaped alien that can remotely activate traps and distract guards is 1:1 Watch Dogs. Her ability to blindfire and trigger a mark-and-execute is straight out of the Splinter Cell vault, and throttling the speed of Kay's spaceship is a lot like raising the Jackdaw's sails in Assassin's Creed 4. Ubisoft has always been good at recycling the parts of its games that work, but in what I've seen of Outlaws, these adopted mechanics have been dulled.
Like so many pieces of media with "Star Wars" on the cover these days, Outlaws feels a bit basic. Kay Vess' singular weapon is a blaster with two modes: red for kill, and blue for depleting shields. Stealth is forgiving, with sparse guards in the spaces I skulked through and lots of leeway to break line-of-sight when things go south. When it was time for a shootout, Stormtroopers were so bad at their job that they shot anywhere but at me (OK, maybe that's just Ubisoft sticking to the lore). As I spelunked through the cavernous remains of a galactic cruiser, dutifully spamming A to shimmy between yellow-painted ledges, I felt like I was playing Ubi's best approximation of Uncharted, and kinda missed the cool wallrunning and double jumping of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.
So maybe no one pillar of Outlaws will knock my socks off, but it would be very Ubisoft to make a handful of so-so systems that don't really sing until you experience them all together.
Again, we weren't allowed to roam the open world and create our own mischief—we were largely locked to one style of play in each mission, but there were a few glimpses of the Outlaws I'm still excited to play. The third mission I played started with the stealthy infiltration of an Empire ship before devolving into a huge shootout on the tarmac. Then, the same fight moved to space as heavy aim assist guided my lasers to a squadron of pursuing TIE fighters. I expected the demo to end after the tutorial for clearing gang notoriety, but as a pleasant surprise, I was directed to land on the nearest planet. Landing on planets basically amounts to a loading screen, but a fairly seamless one: Kay's ship never stops moving, and the surface of the planet is obscured by cloud cover until it's loaded. I briefly explored one of Outlaws' cities. I spotted shops, side quest givers, and played a few rounds of galactic blackjack (it has a proper name I can't remember).
It was the only moment of my hour-long demo where I stopped thinking about all the other games that Outlaws reminded me of and clicked with the experience Ubi is selling: coming and going as I please, taking on odd jobs, playing all sides with local gangs. For a few fleeting minutes, I disappeared into the fantasy of being a gun-for-hire in frontier space. All that was missing was the freedom to speed off toward the next job.
I do wonder about that open world. We're under three months from release and we've only seen Outlaws in the context of linear missions. Basic cover shooting and climbing is fun and all, but Outlaws' success will be measured, at least in part, by how it makes its sandboxes matter. In past eras of Ubisoft, crafting a meaty sandbox meant cramming climbable towers, chests, and collectibles into every corner. More recently, it's meant overloading the map with optional fetch quests. And what of exploration itself? I hope Outlaws adopts the "exploration mode" in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora that made tracking down people and places so engaging.
Star Wars Outlaws is due out August 30, and once again, Ubi is skipping Steam at first. You'll find it on Ubisoft Connect and the Epic Games Store.
Wanna avoid spoilers? You best avoid using YouTube for two entire weeks.
I was a little hard on Life is Strange earlier this week, but it is still a game I overall liked—which is why it's a shame to see Square Enix shooting itself in the foot with a publishing decision which, on the face of it, doesn't make a lick of sense.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure is a direct sequel to the first game in the series, following Maxine Caulfield as she gains the ability to walk between parallel universes to solve the mystery of yet another dead best friend. The poor gal just can't catch a break.
The game has, naturally, a Deluxe Edition and an Ultimate Edition. We can all probably agree that these are annoying inclusions, especially for a narrative-driven game, but at the very least the absence of a couple of outfits isn't going to have a major impact on the story.
The base edition of the game costs around $50, the Deluxe edition is $60, and the Ultimate edition sits at a whopping $80—curiously enough, the only difference for those of us paying in pounds sterling is a £5 'discount' on the Ultimate edition. The base game still costs £50 and £60 for us, which isn't how conversion rates work, but maybe we live in a parallel universe where the GBP is suffering even more than it is already.
The real kicker—aside from a side quest about rescuing a cat—is that the Ultimate edition will offer early access to the game's first episodes an entire two weeks before release (thanks, Eurogamer), a decision which is, quite frankly, unfathomable.
I don't think paid early access is great under most circumstances, but I get why it exists. If you like something, you might be willing to play it early—supply, meet demand. But that's typically in multiplayer titles, or games where story is an afterthought, and it's usually only a handful of days—not two weeks.
In the case of Life is Strange: Double Exposure, however, the story is the entire point, and big time spoilers will naturally spread across the internet like wildfire shortly after the game goes live. As if to twist the knife further, the game's Steam page reads: "Don't miss your chance to join the conversation around this unforgettable supernatural murder mystery!"—FOMO is alive and well, it seems.
Some fans are, understandably, pissed: "There's pretty much 0 moderation [on YouTube] and people will ruthlessly put the exact spoiler in the title and thumbnail, so you are screwed simply by the algorithm," writes 68ideal in the game's subreddit.
"I don't think there's anybody out there who thinks it's a good move," writes another would-be player: "The problem is there's also people who are willing to cave and buy it anyway which shows companies like Square Enix they can get away with using early access as an upgrade incentive."
Otherwise, negative community sentiment doesn't appear to have grown into a tidal wave ala the Helldivers 2 PSN controversy—over on Twitter, nostalgia, excitement, and demands that Chloe Price be brought out of hiding (alas, I'm getting major bay over bae hints from the trailer) abound. Still, it's early days, and I can't help but wonder if we'll see more frustration once the spoilerific YouTube thumbnails hit. Life is Strange: Double Exposure releases October 29—unless you pay an extra $30 of course, in which case you'll get it October 15.
Let me be very clear right out of the gate, I'm owed absolutely nothing from EA, BioWare or the Dragon Age series. Just because I've played every Dragon Age game to date, and consider the series one of the great videogame events of my life, that doesn't make me entitled to anything—and it's certainly not up to me the direction the next game in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, takes.
However, after watching the new reveal trailer, my personal concerns about this sequel have hit DEFCON 1. I'm worried and deflated, questioning myself if, actually, I'm the problem in this series' roadmap to continued financial success thanks to my expectations and wishes, while also at the same time praying to the Maker right now that this cinematic introduction to The Veilguard is not representative of the actual game.
onal shift
My colleague here at PC Gamer, and fellow Dragon Age fan, Robin Valentine, upon watching the trailer, asked, "Is it just me, or do the newly revealed companions of Dragon Age: The Veilguard look like they're in a hero shooter?" And he's bang right, they absolutely do. In fact, I'd go as far to say they look like something from a battle pass expansion for a Marvel movie tie-in game. Like, what is going on with the trailer's cartoony, Pixar-lite art style? Or the cheesy freeze frame superhero-style intros? Or the nonchalant-at-best, outright-comedy-at-worst, general tone? It is so far removed from anything we've seen to date in Dragon Age cinematic trailers that, if it didn't show me Varric and Scout Harding briefly and have one of them say 'Darkspawn', I'd have no idea this was actually a Dragon Age game. I mean, was that the plan? Did BioWare and EA want to largely wipe the slate clean with this release, recalibrating the series into something else entirely? If so, then this trailer is mission accomplished.
(Image credit: BioWare/EA)
I'm not mis-remembering things, either. Compare with the Dragon Age: Origins - Sacred Ashes trailer, or the Dragon Age: Inquisition - The Hero of Thedas trailer. The difference in art style, music and tone are marked. They're not only darker and more mature, with an art style that is far from cartoony, but the vibes communicate a world consistent within the fiction that has danger and consequences. The threat within the narrative appears very real and serious in these trailers, which in turn gets me invested in the characters and plot of the game. Even the Marilyn Manson Dragon Age: Origins trailer actually showed the game and stayed consistent to its experience, even if the choice of music was a large misstep.
(Image credit: BioWare/EA)
The Veilguard trailer, on the other hand, has a palpable sense of tween, with super hero-style cartoon characters engaging in technicolour feats of zero-threat heroism or hilarity. When new character Bellara, nicknamed 'The Veiljumper', is dragged seemingly back into the Fade seemingly to a horrible doom by a Cthulu-style tentacled uber beast, we get a comical eyes-bulging, mouth-opened shocked face instead of any sense that any of this actually matters. Ha! Ah, I'm sure she'll be alright guys.
Or there's that moment, also played for laughs, when a cartoony glowy eyed skeleton ambushes two unaware warriors from behind. Ha ha! He's behind you! Or the bit where the unamed hero player character is jumped on by 10 guards at once in a pile-on, and then all the guards are crushed by a falling chandelier, but the hero emerges unscathed. Ha ha… ha.
(Image credit: BioWare/EA)
Now look, things change, right? Tastes and styles move with the times, as too do audiences. Thing absolutely should evolve to stay fresh. But, that said, there's also that moment when anything is changed so much that it no longer carries the same identity (or, potentially, quality) as the thing that started it, and feels alien to its heritage. For me, watching The Veilguard trailer, that point feels like it is rapidly approaching.
(Image credit: BioWare/EA)
Hi, it's me, am I the problem?
When I watched the trailer for Baldur's Gate 3, last year's groundbreaking fantasy RPG and PC Gamer's highest-scoring game of all time, despite the huge visual change from Baldur's Gate II and the new cast of characters, I immediately felt like I was home, so spot on was the art style, dialogue, music and tone. Larian Studios understood the brief supremely well, producing a game that felt fresh while also honouring its immense heritage and beloved world, characters and lore. It was a game for those who played Baldur's Gate I and II all those years ago, like me, as well as completely new players.
But as I watched this trailer for The Veilguard, I didn't get that sense at all. I got a vibe that not only was this going to be a very different experience to what I've played before, but also that this game was clearly not made for me, now the legacy gamer in The Veilguard's roadmap to financial success, but for gamers much, much younger than me, with an affinity for hero shooters and superhero movies. And that's totally cool. There are some really great games and films in those genres! I've enjoyed some myself. But, Dragon Age has never been those things before and, also, whether or not The Veilguard will resonate with gamers who like those things is currently unknown. If Dragon Age adopts their character and tone, shedding some of its own identity in the process, will that be enough to win them over?
Maybe I'm wrong and this trailer is in fact not that representative of The Veilguard's actual gameplay, which we're getting our first taste of very shortly, but right now all I have to go off is this, in my opinion, rather concerning first look. Needless to say, I'll be tuning into that first The Veilguard gameplay reveal tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. PT, hoping to be proven wrong.
Microsoft really brought home the bacon this showcase weekend.
After Microsoft shuttered beloved studios Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks on top of previous layoffs at Activision Blizzard and 343 Industries, it was hard to imagine it would then have maybe the best showcase of 2024's non-denominational summer videogame announcement and marketing week, and yet, here we are. Below are the six biggest reveals from the showcase, arranged in order of which ones I thought of first while making the list.
Doom: The Dark Ages
I mean, it's more Doom: hell yes. We're going back in time to when the Doomguy was just a wee Slayer getting his start in the eternal war of light vs. dark (though not as far back as 1994's Doom).
You can tell it's medieval because Doomguy has a big old House Stark wolf pelt cape now, as well as a rad as hell combination Captain America shield and chainsaw. You can read more about Doom: The Dark Age's first trailer and how it fits into id's wider catalogue in our coverage of the reveal.
Dragon Age: Veilguard
Oh my god, finally. After years of concept art teasers, one development reboot, switching back and forth between live service and single player, and a ton of senior BioWare people leaving to form their own studios, we've finally got a first real look at what the fourth mainline Dragon Age (though you're not supposed to call it Dragon Age 4) is all about.
Varric's back (woohoo) as well as Scout Harding from Inquisition, otherwise it's new faces all the way down for the rest of the crew. They look like fun archetypes, though PCG senior editor Robin Valentine thinks they look like hero shooter characters, and it's gonna be the party banter and campsite/home base approval conversations that tell us whether they're real winners or not.
We've got a bunch of reasons to be nervous about Veilguard, but we'll have a better sense of the Dragon Age sequel we've been waiting a decade for when BioWare shows off an extended gameplay preview of The Veilguard on June 11, and the RPG is currently set for a fall release.
Call of Duty Black Ops 6
The first Call of Duty after Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard showed off the series' trademark sense of tact and gravitas for the horrors of American imperialism in its reveal trailer and subsequent extended look.
The first Call of Duty after Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard showed off the series' trademark sense of tact and gravitas for the horrors of American imperialism in its reveal trailer and subsequent extended look.
Perfect Dark
This wasn't supposed to happen! Perfect Dark was revealed in 2020 only to go silent for years, with the only word being that its project director left and another, bigger studio was brought in to assist on development. Those are not the encouraging signs of a healthy development. And yet.
Perfect Dark's first trailer is a real stunner, promising at minimum a more open-ended, thinking man's FPS along the lines of the original game or MachineGames' Wolfenstein reboot. But I've got my hopes up for the 2020s triple-A answer to Deus Ex I wasn't sure would ever happen.
Flight Sim
Paying homage to the PC's honorable "Dad game" roots, the next entry in the ubiquitous Microsoft Flight Simulator series is coming November 19. We're getting an unprecedented amount of structure in this one—it's more of a "game" if you will, one where you can cater to passengers, take the role of an air ambulance pilot, and even photograph wildlife.
Gears of War: E-Day
Look, I don't mean to toot my own horn here, but I absolutely called it on PC Gamer's Chat Log podcast that we'd see a new Gears of War at this showcase. Perhaps wisely, Microsoft is eschewing the sequel continuity focused on Marcus Fenix's son that formed the basis of its post-Epic entries in the series, instead returning to Gears' glory days in a prequel about the earliest days of the Locust war.
Yep, that's a young Marcus squaring up with a Locust in somebody's weirdly normal-looking house, and an equally babyfaced Dominic "Dom" Santiago saving his keister. I can only assume this will be another over the shoulder shooter in the style of early Gears, but we don't have much to go on at this point aside from a cutscene trailer, though apparently it was all in-engine, so we know this one's going to be a looker at least.
Doom Guy has a combination chainsaw Captain America shield now.
First revealed at today's Xbox Games Showcase, id Software's follow-up to 2020's Doom Eternal will be a medieval flavored prequel called Doom: The Dark Ages. The brief trailer showed off Doom Guy's new look (complete with furry Game of Thrones cape!), some gameplay snippets, and a planned 2025 release window.
The big takeaway? The Doom Guy (Slayer if you prefer) has a goddamn combo Captain America shield/chainsaw that he can bounce around between enemies. That's already enough to get me through the door, but id is also seriously upping its game when it comes to shooter levels that look like they should be Metalcore album art, with all the colossal fantasy spires and terrain made of giant demon skeletons I've come to expect from the series. We also get a look at an extremely on-brand gun that chews skulls into live ammunition that PC Gamer Global Editor-in-Chief Evan Lahti has labeled "a cerebral slapchop."
(Image credit: id Software)
Doom: The Dark Ages screnshot
(Image credit: id Software)
Doom: The Dark Ages screnshot
(Image credit: id Software)
Doom: The Dark Ages screnshot
(Image credit: id Software)
Doom: The Dark Ages' new environments, showing giant structures and desolate hills
(Image credit: id Software)
We're also getting Doom's first sampling of vehicle combat, strangely enough, with dragon riding shown off in the trailer and a mech suit mentioned in Microsoft's first press release about the game: "Take flight atop the new fierce Mecha Dragon and stand tall in a massive Atlan mech as you beat titanic demons to a pulp."
The reveal was a bit less of a surprise than it might otherwise have been, with its name and general concept having leaked almost two weeks before Microsoft's showcase. Still, id's Doom reboot series has been such a winner, it's hard to undercut the excitement of this announcement.
Doom 2016 was kind of a revelation: it's easy to take the boomer shooter's new lease on life for granted now, but the indie explosion of old school FPSes owes a lot to id's lightning-fast, acrobatic reboot of the series that defined the genre. Doom Eternal was one of those "bigger and better" sequels in almost every way, introducing new mechanics, weapons, and challenging enemies like the infamous Marauder.
The Dark Ages has also been ably set up by the neo Doom series' extensive lore: it's all very lofty and heavy metal, with more of a focus on fun than continuity, but basically: after the events of the '90s Dooms, the Doomguy went down into Hell to keep doing his Doomguy thing, killing demons and whatnot and joining a society of mythic heroes called the Night Sentinels. Things went south with the Sentinels eventually, and the Slayer got locked up in a coffin before getting unleashed in another timeline's Mars just in time to go through a retelling of his first adventure: Doom 2016.
Make sense? Doesn't matter. The important thing is that it's all rad as hell.
The idea of a more medieval Doom also brings to mind one of id's other foundational FPS franchises: Quake. Before it was all Stroggification and Space Marines, Quake's look was defined by the sort of heavy metal, battle axe, Ragnarök chic that's now been co-opted by Dooms Eternal and The Dark Ages. With Doom now taking over that lane, I gotta wonder where Quake fits into any future plans for the studio.
Regardless, more Doom is, well, more Doom, and I can't wait to see where id takes this series next year.
