After 30 years of guns and gore this franchise is turning to story

Sydney Morning Herald

13-05-2025

Anyone who hasn't thought about the video game series Doom since the mid-1990s might be surprised to see the latest trailers for Doom: The Dark Ages, which is launching next week.
id Software's seminal shooter series has maintained its guns, its gore and its blend of sci-fi and satanic vibes that helped propel it to massive success decades ago. But it also has knights, shields, a massive pilotable mech and what appears to be an epic and cinematic tech-horror-fantasy storyline.
It's not the only legacy franchise to have ballooned from an all-action gameplay experience to something that – at least in part – is presented like a Hollywood blockbuster. Look at recent Tomb Raiders, Final Fantasies, Sonics, Zeldas and even Street Fighters. And especially look at the recently delayed Grand Theft Auto 6, which is shaping up to be one of the biggest and most expensive games of all time, despite the series' humble beginnings.
It's not that there's no longer a market for more focused and exclusively playable experiences; those are furnished in essentially all genres by smaller-scale games generally by smaller teams, and sold at a lower price. Or players simply return to the originals; all the old Doom games are available, packaged with new maps and running in high resolution, on current platforms.
But new games in these massive tent-pole franchises operate on a different level, as marquee releases for major corporations, costing many years and millions of dollars to make, and being sold for more than $100 a copy. Each one needs to be different from the last. And, importantly, bigger.
The world of Doom was reset in 2016, with a new game that emphasised brutality and heavy metal music but also brought back a lot of 'video gaminess' that had been shed in the dour 2000s. Yet through that game and its sequel, 2020's Doom Eternal, director Hugo Martin has built an entire narrative framework linking the superhuman demon-fighting protagonist (referred to as The Slayer) to earlier games, and charting his path through hell and back via several dimensions and centuries of warfare.
Just as in Marvel movies, progressing the plot has become almost as integral as the action and spectacle, and in The Dark Ages, Martin is embracing on-screen storytelling in a way Doom never has before.
'As much as we like [ Doom Eternal ], there's never an intention to just create the same experience but with new weapons. As a trilogy, we think that it's going to be much more satisfying for players to be able to play each game and know that each one kind of stands on its own, as its own unique experience,' Martin said.