Bethesda and id Software revealed that Doom: The Dark Ages will be released on May 15, 2025. The announcement, made during Xbox's January 2025 Developer Direct, came alongside a trailer highlighting some of the action game's new features, including the Doom Slayer's weapons, a giant robot players can pilot, and areas with open-ended objectives players can pursue in any order they want, a first for the series.
Game director Hugo Martin said "stand and fight" was the design philosophy guiding their approach to combat, with a little help from Batman and 300. The Slayer in Doom: The Dark Ages wields heavy, close-range weapons and has a shield that blocks and counters -- and also doubles as a throwable buzzsaw -- so the Slayer has to confront enemies directly. Martin said charting a safe course around and through projectiles and knowing when to use the right attack are central to Doom: The Dark Ages, where previous games, such as Doom Eternal, prioritized fancy movement and long-range combat.
id Software included adjustable speed sliders to help players learn projectile patterns by slowing them down or create new challenges by increasing their momentum.
In addition to the shield-saw, the Doom Slayer's new arsenal includes an electrified gauntlet, a heavy flail, and a spiked mace. Doom: The Dark Ages uses a two-button control scheme, which ties the saw to one button and the Slayer's second weapon -- players can only pick one of those options before a mission starts -- to another. Martin said this method makes it easier for players to use adaptable controllers and promised that, despite the pared-down input methods, the game still leaves room for complicated combos and inventive techniques.
Some missions give the Doom Slayer a 30-story tall robot to pilot called the Atlan, which has a set of heavy weaponry built to handle "Titan-sized enemies," and he can occasionally summon a cybernetic dragon and soar across Doom: The Dark Ages' maps. These levels aren't fully open-world, but id Software did divide them into large regions, many of which feature non-linear quests players can complete in whatever order they want before returning to the mission's main objective. Martin said the team wanted to make players feel like "they're really on a battlefield" by letting them explore maze-like locations as they see fit and rewarding their discoveries with power-ups for the Slayer's weapons.
Doom: The Dark Ages' maps include hellscapes typical to the series, in addition to haunted forests, "worlds beyond," and locations from the Doom Slayer's past. The Dark Ages is a prequel to Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal, a decision id Software made partly for the freedom of exploring the Doom Slayer's history and partly to help ease new players into the series. The team treated its story like a "summer blockbuster event" and moved most of it out of Doom's encyclopedic codex and into cutscenes instead.
Finally, id Software said Finishing Move is composing Doom: The Dark Ages' soundtrack. Finishing Move is a music and sound design production company that worked on soundtracks for Halo 2 and The Callisto Protocol, among others. id Software previously worked with Mick Gordon on its earlier games, though a public dispute between Gordon and studio director Marty Stratton after Doom Eternal's release saw the two part ways.