DF Weekly: Doom: The Dark Ages pushes current-gen tech hard – and it looks phenomenal
January is usually a muted month for the games industry – but not so this year. CES 2025 was innovative, dynamic and exciting on a number of levels, game releases are actually happening and the excitement for the year ahead is palpable. Microsoft’s Developer_Direct just added to the hype, delivering four very different, very impressive looking games. We discuss all of them in the latest edition of DF Direct Weekly, but I’m going to focus on Doom: The Dark Ages in this particular blog. It looks fantastic!
The latest idTech has been enhanced, updated and revamped for the current generation, while the potential for the PC version is sky high – my colleagues saw the game running with path traced lighting during Nvidia’s CES 2025 editor’s day. Developer_Direct wasn’t hosting the top-end experience with footage that looked much more along the lines of the console feature set – but it still looked spectacular. What we’re seeing here is id Software delivering its first game of the generation that truly taps into the potential of the hardware.
What does that actually mean though? The scale and scope of the Dark Ages is like nothing we’ve seen before from the developer. Levels are larger, traversal is swift, detail is immense. id’s Marty Stratton describes an “enormous increase in overall world detail and player immersion feedback compared to Doom Eternal/idTech7” in very simple terms: “more AI, more geometry, more gore, more destruction.”
0:00:00 Introduction0:00:56 News 1: Developer Direct 2025 – Doom: The Dark Ages0:17:36 Ninja Gaiden 40:22:54 Clair Obscur: Expedition 330:27:55 South of Midnight0:32:38 News 2: RTX 5090 review reaction1:14:39 News 3: Radeon 9070 cards arriving in March1:27:53 News 4: Sony cancels Bluepoint and Bend Studios live service games1:36:27 Supporter Q1: Could the Switch 2 pack unanticipated custom hardware?1:42:18 Supporter Q2: Will GTA 6 cost $100 US?1:48:11 Supporter Q3: Should the PS5 Pro be supported with new games for longer than the PS5?
That’s a pretty good summary of much of the game content seen at Developer_Direct, but there’s more. The new Doom sees id get to grips with the complex problem facing swift traversal over a detail-rich, AI-heavy game world. Stratton tells us that the new idTech features “ultra-fast proprietary continuous sector streaming technology to support the largest levels we’ve ever created and provides almost non-existent level-load times”. And id being id, we’re also expecting this traversal to occur with none of the hitching and stuttering we’ve seen across this generation as developers struggle to cope with channeling so much data through the hardware.
