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DOOM: The Dark Ages

LukeTbk said:
that what layers of management will tend to be in games, lead creatives and programmers
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Lead developers are people that do most of the work, they're not just managers. They give out some tasks and make sure everyone is doing what needs to be done, but for the most part, they're writing software / making art. Source: I've been a development lead and I work with an Art Lead currently who does our most difficult art tasks. They aren't just delegating and brewing coffee all day. They're working directly with the team. If you're getting rid of "layers of management" you get rid of people higher up the stack that are worthless. No point in covering the ass of a company that's too big and stupid for its own good. They fired the main creative who did all of the concept art for DOOM 2016 to current. Literally invented the entire game world.
 
Decko said:
Lead developers are people that do most of the work, they're not just managers. They give out some tasks and make sure everyone is doing what needs to be done, but for the most part, they're writing software / making art. Source: I've been a development lead and I work with an Art Lead currently who does our most difficult art tasks. They aren't just delegating and brewing coffee all day. They're working directly with the team. If you're getting rid of "layers of management" you get rid of people higher up the stack that are worthless. No point in covering the ass of a company that's too big and stupid for its own good. They fired the main creative who did all of the concept art for DOOM 2016 to current. Literally invented the entire game world.
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Sounds like the layers of management are saving themselves, firing the people who do the actual work.
 
Sounds like the entire id tech engine team was laid off. That means all future doom games will likely be on unreal engine. This will be the last ever id tech unreal game. Sad times.
 
Decko said:
Sounds like the entire id tech engine team was laid off. That means all future doom games will likely be on unreal engine. This will be the last ever id tech unreal game. Sad times.
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Yep. I'm guessing it's going to end up like Halo Studios where they contract pretty much everything out.
And they will use Unreal Engine because Microsoft learned their lesson with 343 that it's extremely inefficient to train temporary employees to use a propriatary engine.

Microsoft still haven't learned their lesson tthat you need good FTEs at more than just the top level. For cost or whatever reason they just love contracting everything out. Hopefully the people left at ID can carry things but if it's anything like what happened with 343 the next Doom game will probably be the worst.
 
sharknice said:
Yep. I'm guessing it's going to end up like Halo Studios where they contract pretty much everything out.
And they will use Unreal Engine because Microsoft learned their lesson with 343 that it's extremely inefficient to train temporary employees to use a propriatary engine.

Microsoft still haven't learned their lesson tthat you need good FTEs at more than just the top level. For cost or whatever reason they just love contracting everything out. Hopefully the people left at ID can carry things but if it's anything like what happened with 343 the next Doom game will probably be the worst.
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A big part of why the Doom games play so good is John Carmack's legacy. It can be felt in Valve and COD games as well. There was a lot of optimization with regards to scalability and low input lag in the older quake engines and it has been kept in the newer iterations if id-tech. The engine is just a huge part of a game's identity and I've always felt UE has been significantly worse than id tech in translating player mechanics to in game action.

Personally I wasn't the greatest fan of Doom 2016, even if it was pretty decent. Really like Doom eternal, outside of the platforming sections and really liked Doom the dark ages. I love how id took risks in each iteration and made the games feel different. Shame that they basically dumped half the studio right after finishing the expansion for Doom the dark ages.

Most of the big MS/Xbox mainstream studios have water down their product over the years and each iteration of Forza Motorsports, Halo, Gears of War etc. has gotten worse. Somewhat smaller studios like id, Arkane Lyon etc. have produced games that stand out by being different, and IMO good games, seems to be the ones really getting hammered. Wonder if Doom the dark ages might be the last good from id, with all the layoffs.

On a positive note, the expansion should be available in just over 1 hour. The trailer looked great so really looking forward to having a go at it.
 
I'm not surprised tbh. They've been begged for a decade+ to release their modern engines and engine tools to the public for a 5% cut (similarly to Unreal), but it never happened. If they did - the royalties might have given their veteran coders actual measurable value to MS. Why pay engine programmers millions yearly in salaries for something that already exists and is being given away for free (or 5%) by competitors ?

Competitors engines might be subpar with stutters ? Or smooth as butter with high fidelity visuals? MS don't give a shit either way.
 
Really is amazing why and how Unreal Engine is so popular and widely used, compared to the significantly better id Tech engine.

Unreal 5 is always laggy and a resource hog, where id Tech is super smooth and runs well even on older systems.
 
If ID tech engine was open to be used by subpar team (and not just really good team that make a lot of actual custom work on it or the actual Doom team), not sure if its reputation would be the same and vice versa if only team at the level of those who made Arc Raiders, Hellblade 2 and Fornite was using Unreal.

Fornite run well with unreal 5 on an XboxS, PS4 or a switch 1. Arc raider seem to run ok on series S
 
LukeTbk said:
If ID tech engine was open to be used by subpar team (and not just really good team that make a lot of actual custom work on it or the actual Doom team), not sure if its reputation would be the same and vice versa if only team at the level of those who made Arc Raiders, Hellblade 2 and Fornite was using Unreal.

Fornite run well with unreal 5 on an XboxS, PS4 or a switch 1. Arc raider seem to run ok on series S
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id-tech 3 was the last time they licensed the engine out a lot and it generally ran quite well. Titanfall used source and also was really smooth and good input. It is rare that we see any version of the unreal engine run really well so it is likely just as much, if not more, an engine issue than just lazy devs.

I played around 90 minutes or so of the DLC and it was buttery smooth, with sharp and precise input. I can't really remember any unreal engine based games that has been even close to the sharpness of input and smoothness as well implemented id-tech engines games. I would say unreal engine games on their best versions feel like mediocre implementations on id-tech.
 
It is probably better out of the box for a fast paced shooter, but not sure if it would hold as a generalist engine, Indiana Jones required a lot of custom work I think even if is not too far of stretch.

Which would make sense, trying to do a game engine for any games and any target like Unreal is a lot, but it would be hard to fully capture correlation and causation, there is a reason you are not making your own engine after all
 
The id Development studio we all loved from back in the day playing Wolf 3D on my Dad's Desktop PC in the Study, to me building my first gaming rig to play the classic Quake 2 CTF has been dead and gone for years. Doom 2016, Eternal and Dark Ages aren't even "id Dev" anymore, MAYBE 2016 was still sort of, but the main group of original Doom 1 and 2 and Quake 1, 2 and 3 developers aren't the same team making Dark Ages. Plus with Carmack gone since Rage 1, it's certainly not the same company anymore.
 
Zorachus said:
Really is amazing why and how Unreal Engine is so popular and widely used, compared to the significantly better id Tech engine.

Unreal 5 is always laggy and a resource hog, where id Tech is super smooth and runs well even on older systems.
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Have you played Indiana Jones? Looks very ugly in some parts with bad graphics and does not perform all that great. Horrific pop in. Wolfenstien and Rage had horrible texture loading that looked extremely lose resolution with lots of LoD issues. The only iD Tech games that didn't have major performance or graphic problems were the Doom games made by iD. Cannot recall how Wolfenstien 2 worked, I think that was better. iD is good at making their games with it, for specific use cases. It is one thing to make a limited engine for a single project, another for supporting developers with a wide variety of design. Even The Dark Ages looks a bit dated from a visual standpoint, though it does run very nicely.

And those were all games owned by Bethesda. I'd assume iD Tech in the hands of random studios would be a dumpster fire. Though I hope it lives on for iD's games. They clearly know how to use it. Even if it does not provide the best visuals iD knows how to use it very well and it would be a shame to see it retired.
 
uOpt said:
Surely the idTech engine will be open sourced now, do it? :)
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I wish, but they likely can't even if they wanted because of 3rd party middleware in the engine

I'm sure it's an absolute behemoth at this point compared to the Carmack born iterations as well
 
As a player of Doom since the original in 1993, I'm really trying to take my time and enjoy this DLC as I feel it's the end of an era. It's truly heartbreaking but I've lived long enough to know that the only thing permanent is change. When id was sold to Zenimax in 2009 it was the beginning of the end. I cranked up the DLC's graphics to Ultra-Nightmare, turned on full Path-Tracing, enabled 6x DLSS and it is such a fitting and beautiful swansong to the saga I've loved for the past 33 years. Godspeed, Doomslayer!
 
Decko said:
https://www.videogameschronicle.com...support-studio-size-as-136-layoffs-confirmed/
ID software is effectively no more.
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The article points the finger primarily at Asha Sharma, Microsoft's new executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft Gaming who was just appointed this year. However, she admits to not being a gamer and has only recently started in an attempt to learn and understand the industry. Furthermore, in her layoff letter to Xbox employees she patronizes them by stating she knows how painful losing their job is yet she's receiving an estimated annual salary of $10 million and earned $19 million from Instacart's IPO in 2023. Realistically, I don't see her turning the Xbox division around and, if her previous lengthy list of employment is any indicator, she'll take the money and jump ship to another tech company when things go south.
 
piratepress said:
The article points the finger primarily at Asha Sharma, Microsoft's new executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft Gaming who was just appointed this year. However, she admits to not being a gamer and has only recently started in an attempt to learn and understand the industry. Furthermore, in her layoff letter to Xbox employees she patronizes them by stating she knows how painful losing their job is yet she's receiving an estimated annual salary of $10 million and earned $19 million from Instacart's IPO in 2023. Realistically, I don't see her turning the Xbox division around and, if her previous lengthy list of employment is any indicator, she'll take the money and jump ship to another tech company when things go south.
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F that biatch.
 
piratepress said:
The article points the finger primarily at Asha Sharma, Microsoft's new executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft Gaming who was just appointed this year. However, she admits to not being a gamer and has only recently started in an attempt to learn and understand the industry. Furthermore, in her layoff letter to Xbox employees she patronizes them by stating she knows how painful losing their job is yet she's receiving an estimated annual salary of $10 million and earned $19 million from Instacart's IPO in 2023. Realistically, I don't see her turning the Xbox division around and, if her previous lengthy list of employment is any indicator, she'll take the money and jump ship to another tech company when things go south.
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She has pretty much already killed of the Xbox console as the value in consoles are exclusives. Most of the studios that could produce the type of exclusives that make the Xbox console interesting have essentially been closed down or reduce to a tiny workforce. Main reason to get a game from the windows store was cross buy with the console, but that is pretty pointless if the console has nothing to offer over steam on PC. Pretty sure Gabe Newell and Sony are celebrating right now as there will be little to no competition in the PC and home console market respectively.
 
Rev. Night said:
I'm not really liking the spear compared to the shield . No way to block all the spammy shit coming your way
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I agree. Took me almost 9 hours to finish the DLC. But there are still some post game fights, will try those later.

Decko said:
https://www.videogameschronicle.com...support-studio-size-as-136-layoffs-confirmed/
ID software is effectively no more.
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If true that is a huge disappointment. Even though this might not be the iD of the 90s/early 2000s, they have still done a decent job at making decent games. And they were not that big. They should have kept them around for another FPS game that isn't Doom or some legacy IP. I think they could have pulled it off.
 
So does this mean any plans of a next generation Quake game are not happening now?

We're still looking forward to this team that was making the last three Doom games to make an all new fresh take on Quake.
 
Flogger23m said:
Have you played Indiana Jones? Looks very ugly in some parts with bad graphics and does not perform all that great. Horrific pop in.
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I played part of it, then got bored. From what I've seen (got to the Vatican, played part of it) the shadows are the worst part of it. I thought it mostly looked good except for the shadows without path tracing. They have low res and high res shadows and the game switches when you get close. Low res and high res look very different, so it's not just bad pop-in but you also get part of a shadow in high res and the other part in low res. It doesn't just switch all at once. You get progressive shadow pop-in as you move around.

Turning on path tracing fixes the shadows. Of all the games I've played this one benefits more from max settings more than anything else I've run into in the last 10+ years. It's gorgeous on a 5090 with path tracing enabled. Problem is it's such a memory hog at those settings only a 4090 or 5090 can do it aside from some pro cards. 7900XTX or 3090 will choke on the path tracing and the fastest 16GB cards don't have enough vram to do path tracing without turning a bunch of other settings down. It's very different from DTDA where path tracing mostly just tanks your FPS and doesn't look much better. I tried it on an Intel ARC B580 and it runs fine without path tracing & doesn't look much worse on a mix of medium & high + textures on ultra than it does maxed out except for path tracing, but of course you get that mad shadow popping without path tracing. So basically it's go big or go pop-in.
 
zandor said:
I played part of it, then got bored. From what I've seen (got to the Vatican, played part of it) the shadows are the worst part of it. I thought it mostly looked good except for the shadows without path tracing. They have low res and high res shadows and the game switches when you get close. Low res and high res look very different, so it's not just bad pop-in but you also get part of a shadow in high res and the other part in low res. It doesn't just switch all at once. You get progressive shadow pop-in as you move around.

Turning on path tracing fixes the shadows. Of all the games I've played this one benefits more from max settings more than anything else I've run into in the last 10+ years. It's gorgeous on a 5090 with path tracing enabled. Problem is it's such a memory hog at those settings only a 4090 or 5090 can do it aside from some pro cards. 7900XTX or 3090 will choke on the path tracing and the fastest 16GB cards don't have enough vram to do path tracing without turning a bunch of other settings down. It's very different from DTDA where path tracing mostly just tanks your FPS and doesn't look much better. I tried it on an Intel ARC B580 and it runs fine without path tracing & doesn't look much worse on a mix of medium & high + textures on ultra than it does maxed out except for path tracing, but of course you get that mad shadow popping without path tracing. So basically it's go big or go pop-in.
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There is a bit more to it as well. In the Italian map if you look at a wall, it gets more when you stand still. Detail gets sharper when you move, regardless of upscaling or lack of when I tried it. Very odd. Lots of other odd bluriness in the graphics. Some parts do look good, the Egyptian map looked a good bit better as it avoided certain objects/patterns that seemed to have graphical issues.

Other parts did look decent enough, but other areas looked dated. Engine clear does not work so well with the type of game that was being built. I am sure path tracing looked better, but for the time being 99% of PC gamers can't run it. Ran out of VRAM at 1440 with 16GB, resulting in a crash. If I recall I ran out of VRAM even without path tracing on. The game/engine is a VRAM hog.

Indiana Jones And The Great Circle Screenshot 2025.03.14 - 01.37.27.73.pngIndiana Jones And The Great Circle Screenshot 2025.03.14 - 15.07.43.43.png


Back to the Dark Ages, iD did a good job. Without path tracing I get around 90 frame rates with TAA. A bit low as the game doesn't exactly look stunning but it is very smooth. I think the DLC build is even better, as I had zero micro stutters. I recall when I played it last year there were some. If I recall I may have ray tracing enabled (?) but not path tracing. Path tracing looked more or less the same so it was not worth the performance hit, which would require frame generation and I'd still get less frame rates. At max settings minus path tracing, I am getting 120-130 with DLSS quality.

Motion blur ruined most of my screen shots. I think most of it can be disabled, but the DLC update seemed to have reset my settings.

DOOM The Dark Ages Screenshot 2026.07.07 - 18.15.45.40.png
DOOM The Dark Ages Screenshot 2026.07.07 - 17.16.04.40.png
DOOM The Dark Ages Screenshot 2026.07.07 - 12.58.54.66.png


If you play the DLC and you get the Spear your keys will be unassigned. Go to settings and click default and it will bind them.

The Doom games are far from my favorite, but I am thankful iD was still doing a regular FPS game that is not more action adventure/RPG than shooter. I'd really like to see a studio that knows how to make FPS games make a Crysis 1 or Far Cry 1 like game.
 
Rev. Night said:
I'm not really liking the spear compared to the shield . No way to block all the spammy shit coming your way
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Yeah, i'm dying left and right. I'm trying to use the shield but there isn't one, and then on top of that, the button layouts are different so now that is confusing me. I can run through dark ages on the hardest difficulty, and I can barely make stay alive on medium here.
 
stonewalker said:
Yeah, i'm dying left and right. I'm trying to use the shield but there isn't one, and then on top of that, the button layouts are different so now that is confusing me. I can run through dark ages on the hardest difficulty, and I can barely make stay alive on medium here.
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Yeah, the DLC reportedly is much harder than the base game. You do get the shield back a little ways in to help though :).
 
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