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Fancy ripping and tearing through sour-faced demons alongside a friend for a spot of co-op hyperviolence? Or, maybe duke it out against other players in multiplayer? I’m sorry to report that DOOM The Dark Ages doesn’t offer either multiplayer or co-op.
It’s a purely single player FPS focused on delivering a weighty campaign. In this guide, we’ll walk you through why DOOM The Dark Ages doesn’t feature any multiplayer component.
Can you play DOOM The Dark Ages in co-op or multiplayer?
No, as we found out when reviewing The Dark Ages, id Software’s latest demon-felling FPS is designed from the ground up for the lone wolf single player. That’s unlike DOOM (2016) and DOOM Eternal, which both had multiplayer modes.
As DOOM The Dark Ages director, Hugo Martin, explained earlier this year, id Software decided to side-step multiplayer right from the beginning of development to focus on the campaign. The decision to go all in on the campaign at the expense of multiplayer reflects the fact that most players are drawn to DOOM for the single-player campaign.
Devoting resources to a multiplayer component would have prevented id Software from incorporating all its ideas, notably the Atlan mech and cyberdragon. Martin notes, “That’s why we were able to put the dragon and the Atlan in. I mean, these are things we wanted to do in the game for, like, multiple games now, but couldn’t, because we had a multiplayer component – which we loved – but really, it was meant to just focus on the single player campaign and just level up that experience for players.”
While the omission of multiplayer might come as a bad surprise for veteran players of the reboot, it’s refreshing to see a developer eschew the profit-driven trappings of a live-service multiplayer component. And, having hit the credits for our review, I’m happy to say the campaign is a good crack, not to say longer than the toehr entries in the DOOM series reboot. You also won’t be lacking for things to do post-credits with challenges, trophies, and tougher difficulties to get through.
About the Author
DOOM: The Dark Ages
- Platform(s): PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X
- Genre(s): Action, First-Person Shooter
