Digital Foundry: Doom: The Dark Ages - The New idTech Engine Explained + Gameplay Impressions

Kataploom said:
Are so many people having problems with saturated colors in this game? I'm LOVING them since Doom 2016, that alongside the very game-y sound effects and the heavy gameplay focus basically transports me to back in the day when I played Duke Nukem on N64, this is really something that keeps me engaged to these games.


But they can still work on Halo using it and it would help a lot in that development and to build the public business infrastructure.

BTW, this makes me think that maybe general purpose engines are not the future but those aiming to specific genres like it was before, games complexity has grown too much to trust in a god engine, see how is UE struggling to keep on par with engines like IdTech, Decima, CryEngine and even Ubisoft engine in terms of performance, which ultimately affects player experience, and they're well beyond in terms of pipeline streamlining because their focus is to make a god engine that works for everything and everyone.
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not sure if problems... but it's schlocky scifi and arcadey
Doom 2016 was not that at all.

Game about avoiding rockets, particles and jumping around would be much better in 3rd person. Like... REturnal
edit: and the "game speed" is such a tryhard cheap setting. i can already see all the tryahrd streamers enabling it to max.... because they are good players you know?! Only idiots play at 100%....
 
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Kataploom said:
Are so many people having problems with saturated colors in this game? I'm LOVING them since Doom 2016, that alongside the very game-y sound effects and the heavy gameplay focus basically transports me to back in the day when I played Duke Nukem on N64, this is really something that keeps me engaged to these games.
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Personally agree. Plus, DOOM was inspired by stuff like D&D and Evil Dead. The classic games were saturated to hell and back lol. I can understand why that may be a turn off to some, though.
 
DanielG165 said:
Personally agree. Plus, DOOM was inspired by stuff like D&D and Evil Dead. The classic games were saturated to hell and back lol. I can understand why that may be a turn off to some, though.
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I don't see where you are taking this from. DN3d and blood was evil dead inspired. not doom
The original doom and quake games were gritty.
Colorful monsters sprites in doom were result of tech at the time and design to stand out.

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"AND THEN YOU GET ON A DRAGON AND ITS JET POWERED AND YOU HAVE LASER WINGS AND YOU SHOOT LASERS !!!!!!!!!!!"
It's like a joke from guardians of the galaxy....

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Digital-Aftertaste said:
Easier to license most likely and more people know how to use it compared to Id Tech, also their main focus is more content; cosmetics, maps, weapons, etc. especially after the SlipSpace engine disaster. They need something that will lower dev cost and time... Therefore we get the overused bloat-engine.
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Licence? MS own Id tech.
 
Game looks great.
I hope that they can get the pathtracing to perform better than in Indy though, especially that last open map boat level was REALLY bad (on a 4090, 1440P DLSS Q +FG, had like 70-80 FPS which feels ass with that FG latency).
 
Man, I big time agree with John on the music here. Mick Gordon is sorely missed. It's a damn shame they couldn't reconcile with each other.

As someone in the YouTube comments mentioned, Mick isn't just a talented composer, he's also very technical, and was critical in implementing the audio middleware for the first two games. When you have so much sound and music battling for aural real estate, it's crucial that the music and sound effects share different parts of the spectrum, and have perfect in-game mixing. It seems pretty clear that Dark Ages just doesn't have that level of care in its audio design.

And even beyond the technical aspects, the music I've heard from Dark Ages simply isn't as good as the other two games. It lacks the raw power and grittiness of Mick's soundtracks. Damn shame, really, since the music is like 50% of my enjoyment in modern DOOM games.
 
Mister Wolf said:
I wonder why Unreal didn't just go the same route as Id and make Lumen only work on GPUs that support hardware RT acceleration. Id's solution seems far more stable.
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Lumen has both a software version and a hardware version. Hardware version requires GPUs that support hardware RT.

On consoles, only one UE5 game currently supports hardware RT, Silent Hill 2's Pro's Quality mode.

UE5's Lumen is software based like Cry Engine's realtime GI. Same goes for Bathesda's realtime GI solution.

Unreal Engine 5 games are pushing more than just Lumen and Nanite. They are pushing a lot of other settings that hit the GPU hard. And consoles are weak. Ive had no trouble running these games on PC aside from the stutter fest thats SH2 due to Bloober's incompetence.

Regardless, UE5 received a massive CPU performance boost in UE5.4, and a significant boost to hardware Lumen performance in UE5.5 which now costs the same as what Software Lumen cost in UE5.1. Expect more games to ship with hardware Lumen going forward, and more consistent 60 fps modes on consoles, but these consoles are not magically going to run next gen games at high resolutions and 60 fps while pushing industry leading visuals.
 
Seems gameplay will be quite different from Eternals dependence on constantly juggling cooldowns on every ability. I really liked Doom Eternal, probably the best FPS I played in many years (2016 is also up there). That said, I really like that id keeps changing up the gameplay quite radically between each entry and this seems to deviate a lot in many aspects.
Low key one of my most anticipated titles of the year.
 
The music will be glori….. Wait! Where's the metal?! The music was so low so you could barely hear it in that segment where he talk about music. What's that about?! Just a sound settings tweak or they've put less focus on the brutality of the guitars this time?
 
rofif said:
Not feeling it. not at all.
Gameplay is not impressing me.

And graphics are VERY not impressing me.
RT or not, it looks like a last gen game. (or even 2016 looked more impressive in some way)

Looks like a non existent mobile game ad or a fake game from a tv show. It kinda got no style at all?
And tech wise, yeah I saw that "wow it gets dark under the planks"... don't care. Looks last gen and kinda flat
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What hill you trying to die on ? Its youtube compression getting you down, and maybe disabling Motion Blur solves it for you, I think saying it looks fake is a compliment.

Will definitely rent this game pass for 3 months and buy it when it is 15 euros.

More like 2016 is good thing. The Steamdeck version will be garbage!
 
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Looks like it's the antidote to DOOM Eternal, instead of the crazy platforming, jumping, over reliance on glory kills, crazy sci-fi and gods theme, we've now got something that's "wide-linear".
 
Bojji said:
Thanks to RTGI we see return of destruction to games, AC Shadows and this. I like this trend!

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I've been preaching for RTGI and how it enables dynamic physics driven worlds for years each time a thread on here pops up shitting on RT. Glad to see it directly mentioned on a DF video.
 
Good to see some attention paid to destructible environments, it seemed like that was something that got shelved for the PS4 gen.
 
DenchDeckard said:
Decima is great but it's not touching this.

Let's see what Kojima can do with death stranding 2 but this looks pretty bonkers.
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Different engines, different goals. DS2 will look amazing but won't run at 6 billion frames per second with 50 enemies all shooting shit all over the screen.
 
Looks fantastic. I wonder how the mid range pc would stack against a PS5 version of this game.
 
I'm liking alot of what I'm seeing, especially that the encounter design isn't you just being walled off in a space until you kill everything, and more chance to weave between (or parry) enemy projectiles.

Larger environments with more enemies, smaller enemies being easier to kill like older Doom, ray-tracing and virtualized geometry that actually looks performant, and the new glory kill system not taking control away.

I like the increased variety, all that depends is on the execution of each activity.
 
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clarky said:
Different engines, different goals. DS2 will look amazing but won't run at 6 billion frames per second with 50 enemies all shooting shit all over the screen.
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This. And while we are pointing out weaknesses, it seems idtech is super aggressive with LoD. It almost looks like a different game when you aren't up close in first person. Everything takes a MASSIVE hit when you zoom out. Like... look at this abomination that they are circulating in official marketing material:

doom-the-dark-ages-dragon.jpg
 
I am LOVING how more games are utilizing accurate physics-based destruction now. AC Shadows does an amazing job with this, and The Dark Ages looks to have a very similar level of quality to its destructible environments. With the next Battlefield coming, and Control 2 in the works, I think we'll be eating good in this category for a while!
 
viveks86 said:
This. And while we are pointing out weaknesses, it seems idtech is super aggressive with LoD. It almost looks like a different game when you aren't up close in first person. Everything takes a MASSIVE hit when you zoom out. Like... look at this abomination that they are circulating in official marketing material:

doom-the-dark-ages-dragon.jpg
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As you and clarky have both already said, though: different engines, different goals. LOD likely isn't the priority here while players will be jetting around on a massive dragon at high speeds, and engaging aerial opponents directly in their line of sight. This shot doesn't look like an abomination to me at all, honestly.

Plus, as per DF: the LOD whilst on foot is of quality, with virtually zero pop-in nor loss of detail as you're stomping around the different battlefields.
 
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id once again showing why they're the best in the business. Bleeding edge features without sacrificing performance targets - I'm glad there's one developer left still doing the Lord's work.

Everything they're showing looks pretty solid - sans the Dragon non-sense. DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal were very much tapping the first and second games for their designs and presentation. Here, they're definitely going for new spaces visually - we haven't seen a lot of this stuff in DOOM before, outside of fan WADs.
 
DanielG165 said:
As you and clarky have both already said, though: different engines, different goals. LOD likely isn't the priority here while players will be jetting around on a massive dragon at high speeds, and engaging aerial opponents directly in their line of sight. This shot doesn't look like an abomination to me at all, honestly.

Plus, as per DF: the LOD whilst on foot is of quality, with virtually zero pop-in nor loss of detail as you're stomping around the different battlefields.
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Agreed! I'm just pointing out the weakness to show there is no engine that does everything well.

This shot doesn't look like an abomination to me at all, honestly.
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How? Show me one thing in there that looks current gen? Polygonal detail? Lighting? Textures? Shadows? AO? None of that RTGI seems to be at play at a distance so everything looks so flat and last gen. On foot, yes. It looks great, and likely how you spend majority of the time. Though I still find Indy a lot more impressive, which is on the same engine. May be this is way more aggressive to handle the enemy counts and speed of movement. And may be the path traced version will change my mind.
 
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