One of the biggest questions left in the aftermath of the Xbox layoffs earlier this month is the state of legendary Doom and Quake studio id Software. Some have claimed the cuts ran so deep that the studio's ability to make new games and support its proprietary idTech engine are in question, while id Software itself published a statement, later echoed using almost identical language by TESO studio ZeniMax Online, that it's merely been reduced to a headcount comparable to what it had a decade ago, when it developed the 2016 Doom reboot—so, basically, everything's fine.

Now studio director Hugo Martin has weighed in, and unsurprisingly he's in the 'all is well' camp. Speaking in a new Slayers Club Live stream, Martin said "reports that we've been nerfed into the ground and gutted and we have 50 people [remaining]" are not true.

"We're the size we were when we made Doom 2016, and idTech is very much alive and well. You have to understand, we have idTech engineers both in Frankfurt and at MachineGames. We collaborate quite a bit. So the idTech is there, the Doom team is here, and we're excited to share with you guys more of what we're working on in the future when it is appropriate and approved."

According to an Aftermath report, id's office in Frankfurt—quite small to begin with—was also cut in half by the Xbox layoffs, being reduced from 12 employees to six.

That statement from Martin was fairly safe and anodyne, obviously intended to calm the nervous crowds without committing to anything specific, and I think the truth is that we're not going to know the true impact of the cuts until we know what id Software gets up to next.

But he had more to say, and Martin's subsequent comments struck me as considerably more tone deaf. "The fact that we made a game that people like and is critically and commercially successful ... that's good for everyone. For the people at the studio, for the people who unfortunately we had to say goodbye to, I think that helps everyone, and we really appreciate your support.

"What matters the most is that the games are good, and I'm so happy that people—it's just a good thing for everybody."

As someone who likes and appreciates it when the games are good, I have to say that I'm not sure that's really the most important thing at all, at least not compared to the long-term health of the industry that makes them—which of course means the people who make them. Technology advances at a sometimes alarming pace, it's true, but the headlong rush to embrace those advances, heedless of any consideration beyond the bottom line, is not going to lead us to a better place—or to better games. Pretending that everything is fine as long as the games are good is a quick way to end up in our list of "25 foolproof ways to get laid off in the videogame industry"—which, yes, includes making an acclaimed and commercially successful game.

Martin isn't the only one looking to reassure gamers that everything is a-okay. Earlier today Bethesda dropped a massive infodump on its plans for the future, including confirmation of a new Fallout game being made by Obsidian, remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and word that Fallout 5 is in pre-production.

One of the major victims of Xbox's "reset" is id Software, which suffered a whopping 136 layoffs—a move one artist likened to reducing it to a "support studio". This is a line that Microsoft itself has tried to counter, both via official studio channels and a statement given to Windows Central last week. More on that in a moment.

One primary concern was that the studio's engine, id Tech, would be scuppered in favour of Unreal Engine. This would be a huge loss. As my fellow PC Gamer writer Wes Fenlon described it, id Tech "runs like a greased-up bat hurtling out of hell at a time when its competition is leaning on AI upscalers to crack 30 frames per second."

Windows Central spoke to Microsoft about that concern, and the site was told "There are dozens of people working on id Tech across multiple locations. Reports that there’s only one person left in Texas are inaccurate."

But now, a comprehensive Game Developer report, speaking to an id Software worker who was laid off, seems to contradict that statement: "They've just gotten rid of all the people who could ever fix, maintain, or change [id Tech], so it's most likely going to end up in the trash can. That's where I just come back to: It completely feels like success is detached from your ability to keep a job, and I think that's basically provable."

They continue: "There were five members of the VFX team, including the lead [that were laid off]. Our technical art and design part department now only has its lead. That's it. All other four of the members of the team were let go. The institutional knowledge [that has been lost] on the id Tech side is immense. [...] I cannot imagine a path forward where they make another game in id Tech."

At the moment, it's Microsoft's word against the laid-off staff's—and to be clear, I am neither surprised nor judgemental that there are developers at id Software who are currently toeing the company line. This is a historically terrible time in the industry to be looking for work, given the sheer volume of talent that has been sloughed out of mainstream studios over the past few years.

If (and I am speaking in hypotheticals, here) Microsoft has ordered these studios to broadcast the message that everything is pretty much fine, I don't resent those studios for doing so. It's not the fault of these studios or their developers to be put in a position where dissent might lose them their work.

But I think it's a little telling that, when a source is allowed to speak anonymously and has nothing left to lose, the picture painted is far more pessimistic. Whether id Software is able to make another game in id Tech will be proven in the years to come—but it's clear there is a stark difference in optimism between the company message and the experiences of those laid off in last week's massacre.

We often talk about Doom—the original 1993 shooter from the young upstarts at id Software—as one of the most influential videogames of all time. But the Washington Post, one of the country's most highly-regarded papers of record, has elevated it to an even higher plateau: It has selected Doom as one of the 25 most influential works of American culture, representing the absolute pinnacle of its era.

The list, assembled to commemorate the 250^th anniversary of the United States of America, covers a remarkable breadth, from Thomas Paine's Common Sense to the Star Spangled Banner, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Levi's jeans, Mickey Mouse, and the recordings of legendary blues man Robert Johnson: One selection marking the highlight of each decade of America's existence, bolstered by a handful of honorable mentions.

And there, for the decade of 1986-1995, is Doom—beating out heavyweight competition including Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and the MTV reality series The Real World.

"In December 1993, Id Software gave away part of its new videogame free over the internet. College networks buckled under the traffic, and bulletin boards lit up, as the game eventually was installed on more computers than Microsoft Windows 95 at the time," Washington Post videogame critic Gene Park wrote.

"Doom was foundational in digital entertainment—a 3D world viewed in first person, self-published, with no gatekeepers and no retail store, as it gave rise to user-generated content years before anyone had a name for it. Programmer John Carmack handed the audience the tools to build their own corners of hell."

Park acknowledged the negative perceptions of Doom over the years in his ode to the game's impact, saying it "was a scapegoat for the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, ground zero of America’s ongoing nightmare." But, he added, "It was people with guns, not a game, that took lives. A grieving nation feared a new form of entertainment it misunderstood. Hearings were held on games and music, a template that would replay after nearly every mass shooting since."

Ultimately, in Park's view, Doom embodies America: "The game’s spirit of sharing and community, along with its pioneering approach to guiding players through abstract environments in 3D space, is rooted in the upbringing of designer John Romero, who is Native American (Yaqui, Cherokee) and Mexican."

Quoting Romero, Park continued, "'A lot of Doom’s design, especially the level design, was really influenced by just that understanding of the environment, the world, and that comes from my dad, my grandma, everybody'— generations, he says, 'where people lived on the land' they believed to be shared."

Romero himself seemed pretty excited about it:

So was his fellow id co-founder Tom Hall:

It's a reflection of the way we perceive time and history, but more recent entries in the list definitely feel more like pop culture fluff than culturally significant works: Keeping Up with the Kardashians was selected for the 2006-2015 decade, for instance. But the Post says it's not meant to be a "best of" list, but rather a series of historical signposts, each defining its time.

"No decade can be summed up any more than a country can be summed up, but if we wrote an autobiography not of words but of works—books, music and art, ideas, dress and culture—these 25 would be among the most momentous," the Post's culture critic Philip Kennicott wrote. "These are not necessarily our proudest moments, but they are defining acts of culture. It is an imperfect list, and incomplete, but then that is America, imperfect and unfinished."

This is the second time Doom has been recognized as a culturally important American work in recent months. In May the Doom soundtrack was added to the country's "national playlist" in the US Library of Congress.

Caught up in the wave of Xbox 'reset' layoffs that occurred last week, id Software has been hit particularly hard. And while official statements given by the studio maintain that it's still of a decent enough size to make the kinds of games it used to, that sentiment's at odds with many of the developers who were laid off.

It's even at odds with some of the devs still working there. id Software producer Andrew Willis, who was a large part of the studio's efforts to unionise back in 2025, has made a series of posts on LinkedIn which are still (understandably) furious, despite the studio's official stance that things aren't all ruined.

"I think the only way to fix the video game industry at this point is for developer owned studios to start rising from these studio closures and layoffs," writes Willis, "We've got to learn from the past, be fiscally responsible, and create an environment of sustainable growth (though growth should be a byproduct of success, not a goal in and of itself)."

A "return to growth" was, after all, mentioned in Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's announcement. "we will return to growth in 2027", Sharma said. Mind, that was also in the same post that announced there'd be another 1,600 layoffs happening by 2027, but hey. It's a pretty standard tag-line for most big businesses—something to keep the shareholders happy.

Either way, Willis remains unimpressed: "It's the only path forward I can see, and these large publishers and monopolies have proven themselves terrible stewards and somehow even worse financial managers. If the people who create the value own that value, good things will follow."

In a follow-up post, Willis adds: "The games industry must change if it is going to create art and franchises that have long term sustainable value—right now it feels like the monopolies that control it are simply trying to extract as much goodwill and value (that took decades to build) as they can with little concern for the diminishing returns it's leading to.

"This is what happens when the people who control it (most ivy league MBAs) do not play games, have never shipped a game, and fundamentally do not understand the industry they manage. You'll never get another WoW or Morrowind in the current climate."

While I'm not wholly convinced that you need to play videogames to be in charge of a company that makes them, I do think you need to be humble enough to delegate or listen to the people who do—and humility is clearly rare within the executive suite.

I also agree with Willis' assessment that you probably wouldn't get another World of Warcraft in this climate—it's something I've spoken to on our MMO column before. But, and this might be proving his point, I think we're getting plenty of games that are at least on-par with the classics from smaller independent studios.

That doesn't mean it's easy, though. Studios like Larian, which is shareholder-free (okay, Tencent has a non-controlling stake, but it's Tencent. Those guys are everywhere), are a bit of an anomaly—Larian itself surviving brushes with bankruptcy in the past. Point being, sticking it to the man is hard bloody work—worth doing, mind, but not a guarantee of safety for anybody.

As reported by Massively OP, senior developers at ZeniMax Online Studios said that the company has returned to its circa 2015-2018 headcount, before it staffed up for the development of canceled MMO Blackbird. The estimate is similar to one recently proffered by id Software in a statement on X, "The Everything App."

Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) Discord moderator Baratron relayed the statement from the Elder Scrolls Online Tavern event in Hesse, Germany, where a number of devs are interacting with fans.

"According to both Jason Barnes (Associate Design Director) and Jessica Folsom (Associate Director of Community Management), ZeniMax Online Studios is now at the same size as it was when they made both Wrothgar and Summerset,” Baratron told the UESP Discord. "Which, as we know, are both highly acclaimed DLCs.

"So while the layoffs are extremely upsetting for everyone involved (of course including players), this is not necessarily the end of new content or the game going into maintenance mode."

For context, ESO's Orsinium (containing the region of Wrothgar) and Summerset DLCs were released in 2015 and 2018 respectively. In id Software's statement last week, it wrote that "The team today is about the size we were when making Doom (2016)." According to WARN Act filings, ZeniMax Online and id Software laid off 213 and 136 employees respectively. ZeniMax also laid off 62 people in 2025 immediately following the cancellation of Blackbird.

I have some sympathy to members of these studios wanting to counter narratives of their decline⁠—see also Outer Worlds 2 director Brandon Adler's harsh words for outsiders who flippantly claim the studio no longer has the same developers who made classics like KotOR 2 or New Vegas. It is also not inherently sinister for two studios with the same parent company to adopt a similar PR line.

At the same time, it doesn't sit right with me. It is an admission of undoing a decade of growth and development at these studios. Even if the headcount is the same on paper, a studio on the upswing is a vastly different environment from one that's just been gutted. The 136 people fired from id and 213 from ZeniMax were brought in for a reason. Game development has changed in the span of 10 years.

Bungie and BioWare probably hit similar headcounts as in their golden ages amid wave after wave of layoffs in the 2020s, and it did not improve their output or efficiency. It did not bring back Halo: Reach or Mass Effect 2.

If this is a PR justification Microsoft would like to exploit in the coming days, I have no interest in indulging it. It carries the tacit implication that those who were laid off did not matter, and beckons to that nasty "lazy devs" rhetoric.

It's a line of thinking that, at its heart, allows for this wanton misery and mismanagement to have been a necessary course correction by the adults in the room. I have no patience for it.

Microsoft's cuts across Xbox studios, totaling 3,200 by later this year, included a massive reduction at id Software. The team lost 136 people (over half of the studio) just a day before its Doom: The Dark Ages expansion released, a bloodletting that had remaining and newly laid-off employees seriously concerned about the studio's capacity to make games and update its proprietary engine, id Tech, going forward.

"Nothing says business success like nuking a team into the dirt and relegating them to support studio size while also throwing out massive technological achievements," one impacted worker said.

Today, the official id Software X account made a statement aimed at assuaging these worries.

"While our studio was impacted, those changes were spread across teams. We still have the crew we need to build the games and tech we're known for. The team today is about the same size we were when making DOOM (2016). We have always had a flat studio where everyone is a maker, and we will remain true to that philosophy moving forward," the post reads.

That bit about the current size of the team matches a Windows Central report that also claims the studio is not being forced to move to Unreal Engine in the immediate future, as employees have openly speculated about. The studio's statement also suggests that it will continue work on id Tech.

"We are focused on supporting each other and the team members impacted. We're going to keep building the great games and tech that have defined us for the past 35 years, and we're looking forward to seeing you at QuakeCon this August."

While it's encouraging to learn that id Software won't immediately join a Fallout assembly line, as is Obsidian's new charge, the statement is unlikely to change a growing impression that Microsoft is an unfit steward of the studio synonymous with PC gaming. Personally, knowing that id Software is the same size it was 10 years ago isn't an encouraging sign for its future—it takes more people and more time to make games of Doom's scale and fidelity than it did in the 2010s, hence why the team had grown to 200-plus for The Dark Ages.

Whatever id makes next, it will now do so with an axe hovering over its neck.

In 1984, an upstart retail company called Costco had just opened its first handful of voluminous warehouse stores on the west coast of the United States when it decided to try an experiment. It installed a hot dog cart in front of its San Diego store and started selling Hebrew Nationals with a drink for $1.50. People, it turned out, liked the hot dogs. The cart became Cafe 150, named for the combo price.

The company sold 245 million of them last year. When the CEO of the company in the 2010s complained to founder Jim Sinegal "we can't sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends," Sinegal, likely then in his 70s, famously shot back: "If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out." A Costco hot dog and a 20 oz soda still costs $1.50.

In 1992, just a year-and-a-half after releasing a cutesy 2D platformer called Commander Keen, a tiny squad of game developers barely out of their teens started a studio called id Software and pioneered the first-person shooter. Then they followed it with Doom, maybe the most important computer game of all time. It was installed on more PCs than Windows. That tiny squad hired more people and then made Quake, maybe the most important 3D computer game of all time.

Decades later, a new generation of people at id dedicated to that legacy defied expectations to make another shooter so good it could proudly stand beside the ones that defined videogames. Then they made an even better one.

On Monday, Microsoft, which owns Xbox, which owns Bethesda, which owns id, laid off 136 developers from the Texas studio, which 12-year art veteran Derek Best described as "nuking a team into the dirt." Neither id Software or Doom were mentioned in CEO Asha Sharma's "Resetting Xbox" announcement. But the studio's new game, released one day after much of the talent behind it were laid off, currently occupies the top banner on Xbox.com.

What does it say about a company when it doesn't understand—or at any real level seem to care about—something it has become the steward of?

Doom, as a series of videogames, has generated hundreds of millions of dollars. But Doom is not just the money it's generated. It's the literally countless mods, maps, and entire games built on its bones; incredible ones are still coming out right now. Doom is the countless people making games today who cut their teeth mapping or had their neural pathways permanently altered the first time they picked up the Super Shotgun. The original game's labyrinthine levels and pulsing music and gory kills were revelatory enough, yet it's literally impossible to overstate its impact on the history of videogames from that moment forward. John Carmack programmed in the network code that enabled multiplayer in one month, in November 1993, and the game came out 10 days later. John Romero called the multiplayer deathmatch, and we're still calling it that today.

id Tech, the studio's ever-evolving engine, is not just a modern marvel that runs like a greased-up bat hurtling out of hell at a time when its competition is leaning on AI upscalers to crack 30 frames per second. It is the origin of yet more careers, thanks to its history of open source releases; one of the best indie games of 2025 uses it. It is a creation that any executive with any amount of vision would see as both a point of pride and an invaluable asset. You bought your way to the inner chamber, the very beating heart, of videogame software. Is that not a thing to revere?

Ahhh, but how much money does id Tech make? How much is it really worth? Xbox, its leadership says, is "not healthy," and as a result hard choices have to be made. That's just sensible business, not a short-sighted attempt to maximize shareholder value this quarter by kneecapping an incredible asset.

How else could this have gone? Last year Costco took home $275 billion in revenue (just $6 billion shy of Microsoft), and its former CEO—the one whose life was threatened over the sanctity of the hot dog—bluntly said "we have never been a company that puts the shareholders on top." A few months ago his successor housed a hot dog in a viral Instagram video before declaring: "The hot dog price will not change as long as I'm around."

He also said, through a mouthful of meat, that it's a good hot dog. And it is a good hot dog! But that's not why people love it.

People love the Costco hot dog because it's a symbol for the whole operation: that you're paying the membership dues because the deals are worth it. That they're going to give you a good value for every goddamn cent you give them. It stopped mattering years ago if the hot dogs themselves made money or not.

Costco's founder Jim Sinegal, who declared the buck fifty frank more valuable than a human life? The hot dog cart wasn't even his thing back in 1984. The idea started at a competing warehouse chain, Price Club, which merged with Costco in the '90s. But Sinegal knew what he had and expanded Cafe 150 into the food court, now one of Costco's biggest draws. That's how you treat a legacy.

The people at id Software—or the people who were at id Software as of four days ago—knew how to treat a legacy. They got it so deeply that it was evident from the very first moments of Doom 2016, as PC Gamer's James Davenport wrote in the very first paragraph of his review 10 years ago:

This thing here? It's important.

How does the company that's for decades been synonymous with the PC—much as we now wish it weren't—end up with its hands on the game studio that's synonymous with the PC, and not see it as a priceless asset?

"Xbox has many of the most beloved franchises in entertainment history," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote on Monday. id wasn't mentioned. What does it say about the people in charge that they paid to get their hands on that kind of legacy, and then gave it less respect than a $1.50 hot dog?

John Carmack has reacted to a major round of layoffs at id Software, the studio that he co-founded in 1991. Microsoft is cutting 136 roles (reports indicate over half of its headcount) at the Doom studio, which just released an expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages this week.

"My 'Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand' statement isn't aging well," Carmack wrote on X, "and this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month."

Despite what comes across as disapproval of the layoffs, Carmack stops short of criticizing Microsoft's decision.

"I'm saddened, but I can't muster anger or outrage over it. I don't have access to the books, but I suspect that id Software was a marginal business from Microsoft's perspective. I believe the reports that Minecraft revenues have been carrying several other studios."

Carmack is referring to a recent Bloomberg report that claims profits from Minecraft had been redirected toward less financially successful Xbox studios for the past several years.

"To continue being produced long term, games need to succeed, not just be beloved. Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal. You can't rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn't be your default belief. I don't think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from id games."

He then went on to offer some hypothetical strategies that could have prevented where we're at now, which is the decimation of the team behind the most critically-acclaimed shooters of the generation.

"Could they have gotten more with a different pricing strategy? Could they have created more things for fans to buy? Could they have cost effectively marketed in a way that reached more players that would have loved and bought the games?

"Could they have changed the game designs and broadened the appeal to more players without alienating existing ones? Could they have produced the games at a lower cost, faster or cheaper?

"I really don’t know."

In his own response earlier this week, id Software co-founder John Romero expressed grief for those suddenly out of a job—an ordeal that he can relate to, considering that Xbox cut funding for his studio's next game this time in 2025.

"I know what it feels like to leave id while id goes on. It's a strange and painful thing to step away from a place that holds so much of your work, friendships and history… Romero Games was there a year ago. I know how devastating it is, and my heart's with all of you."

The full scale of Xbox's rash of layoffs is still to be properly tallied up—partially because CEO Asha Sharma is yet to announce a further 1,600 axed roles. One particularly harsh casualty is id Software, which has taken around 136 job losses on the chin. A move that one employee described this week as reducing it to the size of a "support studio".

We're just now learning about the projects that the developer, which had just released a large DLC for Doom: The Dark Ages, was cooking—courtesy of Gamesbeat. The report states that id Software was looking to pitch a Perfect Dark reboot:

"The team was also considering doing a game based on Perfect Dark, the franchise that hasn’t had a new addition since Perfect Dark Zero in 2005 on the Xbox 360 game console … Concept art was in the works."

And, listen—it's not confirmed this pitch hasn't been picked up, or even that it's been impacted the layoffs. But I think we can all take a deeply educated guess that it's unlikely id Software is going to have the resources to make it. It's a studio whose majority of staff has been shown the door, forced off its homegrown game engine and forced to work in Unreal. Chances of it happening are microscopically slim.

Which wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has killed a Perfect Dark reboot in the past five years. Back in 2025, a staggering 9,000 layoffs saw developer The Initiative closed, and their version of the game—which had an impressive gameplay demo in 2024—tossed into Microsoft's growing landfill of shuttered projects.

Another project from the hollowed-out studio that likely won't see the light of day is a John Wick-inspired game dubbed "Fury", says the Gamesbeat report:

"It had elements of sci-fi, noir, and Louisiana and Chicago gangsters. It had a modern, cyberpunk-like feel. It had a concept called Gun Fu, which combined gunplay with martial arts. The game was supposed to feel a lot like a John Wick movie, but it was not formally greenlit for production."

Sounds awesome, and I figure if anyone could've pulled it off, it would've been id Software, progenitors of Doom—shooter experts in their own right. Will it ever see the light of day? Well, Microsoft would have to restore an estimated 3/4ths of its staff, first. I legitimately can't think of a game that a studio who has lost that much talent could even make. When your co-founder's mourning their own former studio, you're probably in trouble.

The scale of Microsoft's brutal Xbox layoffs become clearer by the day. Among the studios that Xbox hasn't decided to dump from its portfolio entirely, we now know one of the outfits hit hardest by CEO Asha Sharma's "Xbox reset" was id Software.

The Doom studio, which just released a massive expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages this week, will lose 136 roles, according to WARN notices. It's a substantial downsizing that, according to laid-off VFX artist Derek Best (as spotted by VGC), has diminished the PC gaming institution to a "support studio size" overnight.

"I'm still in shock at how brutal the layoff cuts were," Best wrote on LinkedIn. "Collectively decades of knowledge was wiped out of the studio. The VFX team was eliminated down to one single artist with no lead or producer. The engine programmer responsible for the massive gains in VFX pipeline improvements (like all the particle editor work) was let go as well.

"Great job Microsoft. Nothing says business success like nuking a team into the dirt and relegating them to support studio size while also throwing out massive technological achievements."

It's a particularly painful pill to swallow around these parts, not just because the modern Doom series is the greatest singleplayer FPS effort happening at a large scale, but because the story of id Software is integral to PC gaming itself.

In a follow-up comment, Best says the "engine team was decimated," which could indicate Microsoft will no longer invest in idTech, the studio's in-house engine with roots in just about every FPS worth talking about.

"Writing on the wall is getting relegated to support studio size and moving to Unreal, based on internal email and the roles you can see clearly got impacted," Best wrote.

Todd Boyce, a lead VFX artist at id, also chimed in on the same thread.

"This is what insanity and despicable corporate greed looks like. What a complete disregard for people who spent months working unpaid overtime to make the DLC, and for an engine that has consistently been the industry standard for performance. It is pretty insulting how it was done, when it was done, and what it will do to the id brand and those who are still employed (for now.)"

PC Gamer has reached out to Bethesda for comment on id's future and will update if a reply comes in.

New CEO Asha Sharma hit the reset button on Xbox yesterday, taking out 1,600 jobs at once with another 1,600 cuts still to come before the end of the year. Very few studios escaped the scythe: even id Software's legendary name did not save it, and it quickly became clear the studio had been swept up in the bloodletting.

Now, anonymous sources tell Game Developer that the losses at id amount to around half the studio, and that the QA department in particular has been heavily affected. Meanwhile, id co-founder John Romero has taken to social media to express his grief at the cuts.

"I'm so sorry for everyone at id Software affected by these layoffs," wrote Romero. "I know what it feels like to leave id while id goes on. It's a strange and painful thing to step away from a place that holds so much of your work, friendships and history." Romero, famously, was forced to resign from id in the mid-'90s after clashing with fellow co-founder John Carmack (they're on better terms now).

Romero, for his part, is pretty chuffed with how id's current devs have continued the studio's legacy. "Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein are not easy names to carry on, especially in today's industry," he wrote. "The last few games showed real care, skill and respect for what those worlds mean to people."

Touching on an issue with particular salience in the wake of Sony's announcement that it will be ditching physical PlayStation discs in 2028, Romero professed hope that someone is doing the work to preserve "the company's ongoing legacy (the work, code, assets, stories and the people behind them).

"id's history is critically important to the history of games. I've preserved id's complete early history from our start at Softdisk through to August 6, 1996, including materials and assets that, as far as I know, id itself no longer has." In a follow-up post, Romero added that "For those asking, it's in my will to donate everything to the Strong Museum of Play, including all digital assets."

Regardless, Romero's heart goes out to the studio's current and (now) former devs: "I'm thinking of everyone at id today, and everyone else affected by yesterday's layoffs. Romero Games was there a year ago. I know how devastating it is, and my heart's with all of you."

Today's Xbox layoffs may have hit Bethesda and ZeniMax particularly hard, as reports of "significant" cuts have begun to surface and the Bethesda Game Workers Union says that "many" employees at Bethesda Game Studios have been let go.

Today's announcement of major layoffs at Xbox and the spinoff of four studios—Compulsion Games, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Undead Labs—also included word from CEO Asha Sharma that company is "making reductions across other units, and in some cases, shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects. These changes vary in size across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and Xbox Game Studios."

Details on studio-specific cuts haven't been announced, but Bloomberg's Jason Schreier said on Bluesky that ZeniMax Media, the parent of id Software, Bethesda Softworks, ZeniMax Online Studios, and others, "will be impacted significantly by the reorganization," although he added that Bethesda will not be pared down to just Fallout and The Elder Scrolls teams, as some reports have claimed: "The publisher will also still work on Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake."

But some of the studios responsible for those games are also reportedly being hit hard: "Studios in the Bethesda organization like id Software (Doom) and ZeniMax Online Studios (Elder Scrolls Online) are not shutting down but are cutting a significant number of staff this morning, per sources," Schreier added in a subsequent post.

A separate statement from the Bethesda Game Workers Union, the "wall to wall" union that formed in 2024, also indicated that the cuts run deep.

In what is becoming a stressful annual routine, Microsoft has decided to lay off thousands, including MANY of us at Bethesda Games Studios. With over 10k developers already cut from previous rounds, those at the top have deemed that insufficient in fixing their mistakes.

— @bethesdaunion.bsky.social (@bethesdaunion.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T16:29:42.450Z

"In what is becoming a stressful annual routine, Microsoft has decided to lay off thousands, including MANY of us at Bethesda Games Studios," the union wrote on Bluesky. "With over 10k developers already cut from previous rounds, those at the top have deemed that insufficient in fixing their mistakes.

"Today we say goodbye to many of our friends and colleagues and to hundreds more across Xbox, including folks that have worked at Bethesda Games Studios for decades. When will this cycle of cuts in pursuit of ever-greater profits end?"

I've reached out to Bethesda and the Bethesda Game Workers Union for more information and will update if I receive a reply.

The 30^th anniversary of Quake recently passed by—June 22, 2026 was the day—and of course there were acknowledgements, salutes, and celebrations a-plenty, as you'd expect for such a groundbreaking, influential, and enduring game. But it also got a couple of the driving forces behind it reflecting on those days rather more deeply, and as sometimes happens when youthful memories come to the surface, they got pretty deep into their feelings.

Quake co-designer Sandy Petersen, who joined id Software in 1993, got the ball rolling, writing bluntly on X that "Quake ruined id Software." He said Quake "is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design," and credited everyone on the development team for doing "a brilliant job, fulfilling tasks just right." But, he added, the workload was intense, "and I think it broke us spiritually."

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Petersen then ran through a list of everyone who left id "within a couple years of finishing Quake," including John Romero, Shawn Green, Dave Taylor, Mike Abrash, American McGee, and of course Petersen himself. All of them went on to have long and fruitful careers in game development, "so plainly we didn't depart because of some kind of talent issue," Petersen wrote. "We were all highly competent, just a little burnt out after the labor of Quake."

"Id Software was never the same after," Petersen wrote. "In my opinion (only an opinion), the only other truly great game that id produced was Quake 3, and it was not at the level of the pre-Quake games."

Despite clearly being a bit melancholy about the whole thing, Petersen said Quake was "absolutely" worth the cost it extracted from id: "Games are more important than game companies, and Quake is an iconic titan of the gaming world." But, he added, "man alive it seems like the company could have had its act together better and kept that dream team."

Sandy Petersen is pretty famous for having his recollections repeatedly (but respectfully) knifed by John Romero, but in this instance his reminiscences were met with agreement, mostly, from the other John of the original id Software squad: Carmack.

In response to Petersen's missive, Carmack said Quake was "overly ambitious technically," and that the studio "could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times."

"I pushed everyone too hard," Carmack wrote. "I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.

"On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better."

Carmack said he doesn't think having elevated expectations for Quake level designers was a mistake (and credited Romero with setting that bar high right from the studio's early days), but acknowledged that "we should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier." But, he continued, "there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t."

And then, simply and directly, he apologized: "Sorry, Sandy."

The dissolution of id Software under somewhat acrimonious circumstances has been well documented over the subsequent years: American McGee, for instance, was reportedly fired by Carmack for sub-par performance on Quake, although Petersen later suggested that McGee was actually done dirty by another employee. Petersen also pointed a finger at Carmack's "intensity" in particular in a separate post, writing that Carmack "decided we all needed to be in the same big room together. He’d read about this way of “focusing” the team and it did. But we also had nowhere we could decompress or hide out."

It didn't take long for the other other John—Romero—to enter the convo with his own thoughts on the matter, which aren't too far removed from Carmack's: He echoed the in-hindsight belief that they should have stuck with a Doom++ game while ironing out the fully-3D Quake engine, and that everyone at id was "pushing ourselves past what was reasonable because that was how id had always worked." He also gave particular credit to McGee for being "really good" at building Quake levels, a notably pointed comment given how McGee's time at id ended.

"There are a hundred things we could have done differently, but we did the best we could do at the time with what we knew. Having a media circus around us certainly didn’t help," Romero wrote. "id still goes on, and so does Wolf, Doom, and Quake. Maybe that was what we came together to do. That is more than enough for any game dev, any team, any lifetime really."

Taken altogether, it's a really interesting conversation about one of the most storied game studios in history. But I love a happy ending, and so what really lands for me is how it all wraps up: With an understanding that everyone was younger then, the world was a different place, and as Romero put it, we did the best we could. Following Carmack's apology, Petersen said he didn't blame him for how it all worked out and told Romero he "did an incredible job" on Quake, and Romero thanked Petersen for getting them talking: "It really was a hell of a game."

I had forgotten about Quake Champions, the free-to-play take on Quake 3 Arena that first arrived on Steam in 2017. But it's still around, it's still got, well, a handful of players, and today it got a surprisingly beefy update to mark the 30th anniversary of Quake, including a free battle pass for everyone.

The battle pass is the most obvious hook here: Befitting the big birthday of id Software's OG 3D shooter, the season 30 battle pass includes a number of cosmetic rewards from 1996 and QuakeCons gone by, plus previously exclusive skins and the new Disintegrator rocket launcher and Goroth's Earth Magic podium.

Functionally, though, I think the update is the bigger deal. Despite its age and relatively small player numbers—it typically peaks at a few hundred concurrent players on Steam these days—the patch makes some significant changes, including an overhaul to the network code aimed at reducing packet loss and lag compensation, and improving projectile predictions. The amount of lag compensation will now vary based on your ping, problems with hit validation for high-ping players have been fixed, and the 160 ms ping limit required to connect to games has been removed completely.

A range of other fixes, optimizations, and tweaks have been made across the board, and a new "Random Champion Select" option has been added that lets players play as locked champions—when randomly selected—in practice, quick play, and ranked modes.

Universal weapon shaders have been added, characters and maps have been tweaked up in a range of ways, Quake 30th anniversary banners have been added everywhere—this is a sizable update by any measure, and particularly so for a shooter we included in our list of "eight 'dead games' that are still very much alive" two years ago.

That hasn't gone unnoticed by players on Reddit. "I don't know how [Quake Champions developer] syncerror convinced them to let him keep updating this game for so long but I'm grateful for his efforts," redditor Fob0bqAd34 wrote. "When we got that battlepass some months back (or maybe it was last summer?) with a ton of the old weapon skins in one pass I thought that was going to be it. Hopefully he gets to keep quietly ticking away in the Sharma era as well."

The patch notes for the Quake Champions 30th anniversary update are below.

• Game Client Updates
  • Fixed the collision bug that pushed players out of the map, through the map geometry collision layer
  • Fixed being able to damage a respawning player by attacking their death location with a gauntlet
  • Raw Mouse Input fixes & optimizations • NVIDIA Reflex fixes & latency markers added
  • Code optimizations and cleanup for the damage summation markers code
  • Code optimizations and cleanup for the special movement input code
  • Fixed Heavy Machinegun shader not applying when attempting to customize its shader prior to selecting any other weapons in Customization
  • Fixed the wrong champion medals being awarded after meeting the qualifications for a medal and then changing champions
  • Fixed an issue where you could see a static player doll in the map when a spectator enters Freefly cam mode
  • Fixed spectators not being able to exit Freefly cam mode after entering it
  • Fixed a crash in the camera manager when switching to a player that is currently dead
  • Added caching optimizations to improve performance when referencing user setting values
  • Reduced RAM size requirements for Texture Quality levels
  • Quality Settings will no longer be lowered for hardware that is too new to appear in our internal CPU & GPU databases
  • Removed the fullscreen UI popup that would occur after a match when reaching Level 2, announcing that a new mode (Slipgate) has been unlocked
  • Fixed several cases of game crashes
• Threaded Input
• This option is enabled by default as it has tested to improve performance under most conditions – however, this option is not recommended for Linux users and may not be ideal for mice using polling rates of 4Khz or greater.
  • Added Threaded Input setting - Enables moving the input to a dedicated thread that runs at above normal priority. This has some benefit regardless of input mode but greatly reduces Raw Mouse Input latency
• Sound UpdatesBroken Persistent Sounds
  • Fixed sounds that would remain persistent in the world after they should have ended
• Pain Sounds
  • Fixed missing pain sounds
  • Fixed the incorrect pain sound playing when exactly 25 or 50 hp
  • Restored pain sounds between 75 and 100 hp
  • Added Acid & Fire panic sounds when a damage-over-time effect has been applied
• Death Sounds
  • Death Sound radius extended to 35m to match other character sounds
• Weapon Sounds
  • The volume of the RUTHLESS water railgun shot sound was reduced
• Item Updates
  • Power-ups dropped from dead players will now have a minimum duration of 3 seconds remaining • Dropped Power-ups no longer pop up vertically before dropping
  • Dropped items now fall at the normal rate of gravity
  • Fixed in-game Lore drops, in addition to being able to unlock a readable lore item, it grants an in-game bonus to those who discover them
  • Fixed dropped items (weapons, powerups, flags, etc.) from being able to land on a player’s head and remain floating in the air
• Bot AI Updates
  • Fixed Doom Slayer Bots so that they can now use their Berserk ability
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bots so they can no longer run backwards during Bull Rush
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bots so they can no longer accidentally cancel their abilities early
  • Fixed Strogg Bots so that they can now use their Drone Strike ability
• Armor Feedback
• To provide players better feedback regarding how their combat encounter is going, we have integrated the armor hit beep system from Quake 4 and expanded upon it further. This new feedback will provide unique hit beeps when dealing damage to an opponent with armor, as well as provide visual feedback when that armor has depleted.
• Armor Hit Beeps
  • You will now hear a unique hit beep when you hit an opponent who has armor
  • AUDIO Settings: Added ARMOR BEEP STYLE - includes OFF, Q4 and QC options Armor Break FX
  • You will now see special fx when the damage you deal depletes your opponent’s armor
  • HUD Settings: Added ARMOR BREAK FX Armor Break Sound
  • You will now hear a special sound effect when the damage you deal depletes your opponent’s armor
  • AUDIO Settings: Added ARMOR BREAK SOUND - includes OFF, POWER DOWN, ENERGY RELEASE, SHIELD PUNCH, and METAL TINK options
• Additional Hit Beep Options
  • Added HITBEEP styles – includes:
    • Mid-Tone (popularized in Quake 3)
    • High-Tone (from Quake 4)
    • Damage-Based (from Quake Live)
    • Additive Damage (introduced in QC)
• Teamplay FeaturesTeammate Death POIs
• Teammate Death POIs have been added to assist in teamplay. These not just help you know when a teammate has fallen but can act as a sign of danger. Whether you choose to rush into that combat zone for revenge or heed its warning to find a new path is up to you.
  • Show a Point of Interest markers at the position a teammate dies
  • HUD Settings: Added TEAMMATE DEATH POI
• Drop Commands
  • Now available in team modes are the Drop Weapon and Drop Power-Up commands. Each command will drop the item if available and trigger a message in team chat
  • Drop Weapon will drop the weapon with the current ammo count if you own below the weapon’s starting ammo amount
• Say Commands
  • Added 6 Say Commands: Yes, No, Hi, Bye, Thanks, Sorry.
  • Available in all game modes, issuing these commands will print a chat message and generate a local in-world VO message that everyone can hear
• Show Vanity Customizations Toggle
  • Enabled by default, this new setting allows you to toggle off the in-game armor shaders, vanity items, vanity weapons (including their custom fx and sounds), and weapon shaders. This can be toggled on the fly in a match. You will still see all vanity in the Match Lobby and the Pre and Post Match Podium scenes to show off your style, but during gameplay all vanity will be removed
• Weapon Zoom Toggle
  • Activating the toggle will keep the weapon zoomed in until you either untoggle or change weapons
  • CONTROLS Settings: Added ZOOM TOGGLE
• Hidden Weapon Position
  • New Hidden option sets the weapon and hands to be invisible and centered
  • Added a Gauntlet icon to the ammo HUD, so that the gauntlet weapon selection is always visible
• Weapon, Ammo, & Knockback Updates
  • Starting Weapons now upgrade instantly without weapon switch downtime
  • Weapon Pickups will now always add the starting ammo count to your current ammo count
  • Knockback is now applied immediately instead of queuing and applied in delayed batches
  • Knockback cap adjusted from 120 to 132, resolving the rocket jump penalty accrued in the prior update
• Champion Specific Weapon Loadouts
  • Weapons are now equipped per Champion in Customization
  • Added an optional Equip on All Champions button
• Random Champion Select
• The Random Champion, selected in the Champion Roster, will make a random selection from all champions. This option allows players to play locked champions (albeit random) on Practice, Quick Play, and Ranked
  • In Duel, it selects one champion at random that will be used for the entirety of the match
  • In Sac Tourney, CTF Tourney, and TDM Tourney, selects a champion during the pick phase, ensuring that it is a unique selection within the team
  • In Duel Rounds, makes a random selection during the pick phase, ensuring that it is a unique selection within the squad
  • In all other modes, it picks a Mystery Champion that cycles at random with each respawn, with ability cooldown retained
• Universal Weapon Shaders
• All weapons that currently have shader support now support 23 universal shaders, which have been made available for free to all players, instead of needing to own different sets of basic weapon shaders for every individual vanity weapon
• Basic weapon shaders
  • Red, Pink, Orange, Yellow, Lime, Green, Teal, Blue, Purple, White, Grey, Charcoal, and Black Basic Shaders Camo weapon shaders
  • Grasslands, Forest, and Snow Camo Shaders Patterned weapon shaders
  • Blue and Brown Patterned Shaders Mastery weapon shaders
  • Ithagnal, Cthalha, Goroth, Volkerh, and Master Shaders
• UI Player HUD Updates
  • Buff & Debuff player info HUD (such as Quad, Protection) shows a remaining duration number when duration is 5 seconds & below (and shows decimal durations when duration is 3 seconds & below)
• Pre & Post Game
  • Fixed the Drag/Move Player hit detection of the bottom right pillar in the Custom Game 4v4 Lobby
  • Fixed a the Add-Bot [+] UI elements appearing on top of the Settings UI when passing Party-Leadership to a player actively in the Settings menu
  • Added new tips to the map loading screens
  • Fixed the persistent menu blur bug when leaving the Battle Report after a match
• Champion Updates All Champions
  • Changing champion mid-game no longer resets the ability cooldown
• Anarki
  • Disabled weapon switch during ability usage, while still allowing you to queue the switch, which will execute after the Injection completes
  • Fixed the Anarki hoverboard sounds' Teammate Volume support
• Athena
  • Grappling Hook: Fixes & updates to pull speed acceleration
• BJ Blazkowicz
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Increased Walk Speed from 160 to 280 ups (for silent walking)
  • Fixed BJ Blazkowicz’s SUMMERTIME outfit attachments when combined with the GOLDEN CROWN
• Clutch
  • Starting armor reduced from 100 to 75
• Barrier
  • Barrier: Breakable shield, increased duration that degrades as it receives damage, with a maximum of 200 dmg received before breaking
  • Barrier: Both duration and damage soak share the same energy pool. For example, while the shield can withstand a maximum of 200 dmg before breaking, if half of its duration expires before taking damage only 100 dmg is needed to burn through the shield’s remaining energy
  • Barrier: Shield sound now alters pitch as duration depletes
  • Barrier: Fixed incorrect movement settings during ability usage, including move speed 300 instead of 320 and max speed of 750 instead of 600
  • Mining Laser: Duration is now 3 seconds, instead of the remaining time from Shield duration
• Dodge
  • No Dodge Passive while the Shield is active • Spawns with 1 of 3 dashes available
  • Reduced stamina regen from 0.33 to 0.3
  • Improved the responsiveness & accuracy of the Dodge Stamina UI
  • Added a 10ms delay between executing dodges to address small issues when rapidly executing dodges
  • Updated the Air-Dodge passive title & description to Dodge Jump, to fully encompass both Air-Dodge and Ground-Dodge mechanics
• Death Knight
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Fixed the "bayonet" bug that would leave the sword extended outward while holding a weapon
  • Fixed Death Knight’s Humiliation vanity not staying equipped
• Flame Strike
  • Fixed the splash damage from the fireball projectiles, they will now always add the flame dot
• Charring Passive
  • Fire Dot - Increased from 6 dmg x 5 sec (30 dmg max) to 9 dmg x 5 sec (45 dmg max)
• Doom Slayer
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 700 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
• Berserk
  • Improved enemy visibility in Berserk, making them appear solid white (with an enemy outline colored arrow)
  • Duration reduced from 5 to 3 sec (to reduce the distance he can run away when using berserk passively)
  • Duration restored in full when he lands a punch, resetting the remaining berserk time to 3 seconds (to encourage offensive usage)
  • Added a sound effect when a punch lands, to help it feel more visceral and for punches to feel like they are making contact
  • Added magnetism, trails, and new pickup sounds for blood punch bubbles
  • Fixed a bug with the weapon drop and hand raise that resulted in being stuck without fists or a weapon during or after ability usage
  • Blood Punch sound added when earning a kill with Berserk
• Eisen
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 700 ups
  • Max Extra AP reduced from 175 to 150 ap
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Improved Eisen armor decay rate from 1pt every second to every 2 sec
• Sentry Turret
  • Added Damage Summation audio support for hitbeeps from turrets
  • Added Overhead Health Bars for both friendly and enemy turrets; health bars on enemy turrets are visible when the turret is either below full health or when it has obtained any armor upgrades
  • Decreased the turret’s max health from 120 to 100 hp
  • Increased the turret’s starting health from 120 to 125 hp
  • Starting Armor 0 ap, Max Armor 50 ap, Max Extra Armor 75 ap. Armor is granted via the updated Repair passive
  • Improved Turret armor decay rate from 1pt every second to every 2 secs
  • Damaged health now regens back up to 100 hp, healing 5 pts every 1 sec when it does not receive any further damage for 5 seconds
  • Reduced activation delay from 2.0 to 1.5 sec
  • Added an a health and armor info status indicator above the ability info to show when you have an active turret deployed and how healthy it is • Fixed turrets from eternally bouncing on jumppads
  • Throwing a turret into a kill zone will now grant 80% of your cooldown back, as it isn't exactly fair that we destroy the turret and you lose your cooldown just because we decided the turret was placed in an unallowed location. We grant 80% instead of 100% to discourage spam and exploitation
• Repair Passive
  • Removed the armor regen passive, in favor of a new Turret Repair passive
  • Eisen can now deny Light Armor pickups when at max armor by standing near the pickup for 2.5 sec. Any armor Eisen picks up will also be applied towards the deployed turret to "upgrade" the turret's stack
• Salvage Passive
  • Shards will now grant 5%, Light Armors 10%, and Heavy Armors 10% cooldown reduction
• Galena
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Improved the fitting of the QPL SEASON 3 BELT with Galena’s ACOLYTE Outfit
• Unholy Totem
  • Hitbeeps will now play when damaging enemy totems
  • Damage Numbers will now appear when damaging enemy totems
  • Added Overhead Health Bars, Enemy Arrows, and Owner Names for friendly totems
  • Added Overhead Enemy Arrows for enemy totems, when targeted Owner Names, and when damaged Hit Beeps and Health Bars
  • Totems now receive Quad Damage, Protection, and Spawn Protection FX to show when they will deal or can receive more damage
  • Added fire SFX to totems when 3 totems are deployed
  • Totems you own will now appear solid through walls, to differentiate them from totems belonging to a teammate Galena
  • Friendly totems will now appear yellow through walls when 3 overcharged totems are deployed
  • Enemy totems will now have a visible SFX ring around them that is visible in any lighting quality setting
  • Starting Health increased from 60 to 75, Max health increased from 60 to 75
  • Damaged health now regens back up to 75 hp, healing 5 pts every 1 sec when it does not receive any further damage for 5 seconds
  • Throwing a totem into a kill zone will now grant 80% of your cooldown back, as it isn't exactly fair that we destroy the totem and you lose your cooldown just because we decided the totem was placed in an unallowed location. We grant 80% instead of 100% to discourage spam and exploitation
  • Fixed applying the Super Shotgun's close range bonus damage towards totems; damage was capped at 80 dmg with the Super Shotgun but you can now deal 120 dmg
  • Slightly increased the totem's weapon collision mesh, so that close range shotgun pellets don't miss when expected to hit
• Keel
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 600 to 800 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
• Grenade Swarm
  • Fixed grenades sometimes explode 3 times instead of once
• Reinforced Passive
  • Improved self-damage reduction from 60 to 67%
  • Improved splash damage reduction from 20 to 33%
• Stockpile Passive
  • Improved ammo box cooldown reduction from 10 to 20%
• Nyx
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 750 to 1000 ups
• Ranger
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Ranger Gladiator outfit renamed to BRAWLER to avoid having two armor sets with the same name (Strogg's GLADIATOR, which is based off of the Q2/Q4 Strogg Gladiator enemy). BP art for new reward added
• Dire Orb
  • Velocity reduced from 1000 ups to 900 ups
  • Shoot Delay after throwing increased from 0.4 to 0.5 sec
  • Shoot Delay after teleporting increased from 0.4 to 0.5 sec
  • The orb now has 75 pts of health and can be destroyed when shot, triggering the orb to explode. The explosion can be triggered by anyone: Ranger, teammates, or enemies
  • The orb’s damage output is now based on it’s time in flight, gaining damage over time & distance
• Scalebearer
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 600 to 800 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
  • Fixed an IK animation crash in the Scalebearer’s animation set when trying to reach a target position during weapon-aiming that was unreachable
• Bull Rush
  • Fixed the Scalebearer sensitivity bug, where sometimes the default rotation limits are not restored
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bull Rush sometimes passing through the enemy target with a collision (especially at high ping)
• Slash
  • No changes.
• Sorlag
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
• Strogg
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Will no longer drop Stroyent when he commits suicide
  • Fixed Golden Crown power-up shaders • Fixed Golden Crown crash behaviors that would occur when cloaking & decloaking
• Drone Strike
  • Drone: Fixed Peeker’s camera view angles from updating if its Strogg owner's body enters a teleporter domain
  • Fixed Peeker’s drone flight sounds persisting after death
• Visor
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap Piercing Sight
  • Piercing Sight now exposes the enemy’s health and armor information
  • Increased the volume of Visor’s third-person ability VO and reduced how much the occlusion muffles its volume
• Game Mode UpdatesLobbies/Queues
  • In a ranked match, when a player disconnects from the lobby/match, the leaver still gets the existing forfeit loss, but now loses SR. The remaining opponent now also gets a forfeit win persisted to their profile
  • Added Unholy Trinity TDM to the Bot Practice queue
  • Added support for disabling the Score Limit, by setting Score Limit 0 in Custom Game
• Matches
  • Fixed the max warmup time bug, which would allow warmup to go on forever, instead of being capped to 120 sec
  • Fixed the Auto-Abort system, to properly end matches when no enemies remain in game
  • Anti-Griefing system will now exit the current match and send you back to the main menu, instead of closing the game application
• Duel
  • Dead player bodies will now hide at the minimum respawn time (3 seconds) -- so that it doesn't convey when an opponent chooses to respawn. This also allows you to use the Hide Dead Bodies option without being penalized
• 2v2 TDM
  • Dead player bodies will now hide at the minimum respawn time (3 seconds) -- so that it doesn't convey when an opponent chooses to respawn. This also allows you to use the Hide Dead Bodies option without being penalized. Instagib • IG Matches in Quick Play now last for 10 minutes with no score limit
• Sacrifice
  • Active Abilities are now canceled on Soul Pickup, just like we do in CTF during flag pickups • Added an Announcer VO countdown from 10 to 1 as the point reaches 90-99% captured
• Clan Arena
  • Added First-Person Spectating while dead to replace the third-person spectating
• Slipgate
  • Added First-Person Spectating while dead to replace the third-person spectating
• Unholy Trinity
  • UHT Matches in Quick Play now last for 10 minutes with no score limit
• Spectating
  • Fixed spectators having a delay changing the spectator player, when the followed player dies and has entered the death HUD UI
• Map UpdatesAll Maps
  • Quake 30th Anniversary Banners added
• Blood Covenant
  • Removed an unused out-of-bounds jumppad
• Blood Run
  • Added a teleporter from the Tri-bolt mid-level to the Super Nailgun / Power-Up room
  • Fixed a hole in the wall mesh near a statue
  • Fixed the position of an out-of-bounds breakable urn, placing it back into the map
• Church of Azathoth
  • Fixed missing game mode flags for items in the disabled obelisk area
  • Fixed the position of an out-of-bound breakable urn
  • Removed the out of bounds jumppad
• Citadel
  • Removed out of bounds fireplace reference inside the central jumppad Deep Embrace
  • Recreated ocean mesh from scratch for performance optimizations
  • Fixed three small holes in the map mesh
• Insomnia
  • Fixed holes in the window frame mesh near HMG
• Ruins of Sarnath
  • Swapped the SG spawn and SG player-spawn locations (so that you don't have to turn around to pick up the Super Shotgun)
  • Fixed three small holes in the map mesh
• Tower of Koth
  • The smaller version of Tower of Koth will now be used in DM, TDM, IG, i9, and UHT
  • The larger version of Tower of Koth has now added the support beam above the central mid-level teleporter that was introduced in the smaller version of Tower of Koth

If there's one thing I respect in this fallen world anymore, it's commitment to a bit. Jim's Music Dungeon on YouTube is Knee Deep in the Bit, having taken hundreds of classic metal songs and made them sound like Doom level music⁠—and he isn't slowing down.

His Doom midi cover of Schism by Tool definitely has my favorite image gag of the lot, with a godmode Doomguy superimposed over Lateralus' signature psychedelic cover art of a skinless muscle dude just chilling out. Also, the long runtime and repeated prog riffs make this one feel particularly well-suited for in-game use.

The tasty irony of it all is that Doom's own iconic soundtrack was, itself, basically just classic metal music remixed in the Doom soundfont. Some of them sample from a number of sources, but others are basically just 1:1 midi recreations. Take the track "Sign of Evil," for example, which is pretty much "Starless" by King Crimson. No shade to Doom composer Robert Prince, it was sick as hell. The '90s could be so beautiful.

Back to Jim "Aku" Brimstone and his Music Dungeon: his first Doom soundfont experiment appears to have been a cover of Nirvana's "Something in the Way" in 2023. It was cleverly titled "Doomguy in the Way," though Jim appears to have abandoned such puns in the titles for discovery's sake, leaving that work to frequent cover artist collaborator Reddo.

Jim's made so many of these, it's hard to pick favorites. I love his recent Master of Puppets treatment, which sounds extremely similar to At Doom's Gate⁠—the song is listed as a likely sample source used by Robert Prince on the Doom Wiki. As a big fan of Iron Maiden, I gotta shout out Jim's covers of the band, including the self-titled "Iron Maiden."

If you dig what Jim's got going on, you can subscribe to keep up on YouTube and also check out his other music on Bandcamp or Patreon.

We all know Doom was so popular, so monumental, that it changed videogames forever. As a society, we're still obsessed with installing Doom on increasingly improbable devices, from pregnancy tests to vapes. But sometimes I run into an old factoid about Doom, some detail from its heyday that I'd forgotten, that still puts it in perspective.

Like this one: back in 1995, Doom was installed on more PCs than Windows.

I was reminded of this bit of trivia by re-reading an old PC Gamer magazine interview with John Carmack, published in November 2008, where the id Software programmer was reflecting on the benefits of open source and shareware. "We look back at the early days when the original Doom was shareware, and Microsoft did a study at the time that said there were more copies of Doom installed on computers than there were Windows 3.1. It's hard to characterise what exact value that is, to have people aware of your game but not paying you, but I certainly don't think it's been bad. Maybe we could have monetised it better than we would have thought of as a young company."

More users than Windows sounds like it should be a gargantuan number, but you have to remember this anecdote predated the launch of Windows 95, in August 95, which is when the operating system truly took off. Personal computers weren't rare in the early '90s, but according to articles about the history of Windows, Microsoft sold only about 10 million copies of Windows 3.0 between 1990 and 1992, and an additional three million of Windows 3.1 within its first three months.

In a 1996 interview, id Software president Jay Wilbur said that the shareware version of Doom had been downloaded 20 million times. That seems like an easy slam dunk comparison—Doom, which ran on DOS, was way bigger than Windows!

In the early '90s, being installed on more computers than the most popular operating system of the day was unheard of. As Carmack alluded to, those installs didn't all mean sales, though—Doom's first episode was free, thanks to the very successful shareware model id used. But clearly it was a detail that stuck with people in the tech industry at the time.

People like Valve founder Gabe Newell, who offered more details on the Doom/Windows ratio in a 2013 interview than Carmack did in 2008. Newell said that in the early 1990s, Microsoft (where he worked at the time) had very little insight into how many people were actually using Windows or its other software or what they thought of it, so it commissioned "a really large study" rather than relying on retail reseller data to guess.

"They'd actually go out into the real world and see what people were actually doing. This was the first time Microsoft had done it, to look at 10,000 people's machines and figure out what they were actually using PCs for. Well, it turns out they were actually using them for porn and videogames, and that part of the study was immediately ignored. But the good news was that if you extrapolated those numbers, Windows was actually being used in 30 million people's PCs in the United States.

"But the thing that was really striking to me, at the time, was that Windows was the number two product. Most of you probably know what the number one product was. Yeah, it was Doom."

The rest of Newell's talk is interesting if you're into the sales machinations of the early software industry, and how that ultimately informed the "direct to consumer" model of Steam that we now take for granted. But the bit that sticks out to me is that, at least according to his memory of the study, Doom was installed on more than 30 million PCs. He doesn't cite the year, but he references the "early 1990s," which suggests to me the study was conducted before the release of Windows 95.

30 million is a significantly bigger number than the 20 million number Wilbur cited in 1996. And that's from after the launch of Windows 95! It seems there's no doubt that Doom exceeded Windows' popularity. But by how much?

Could boxed retail sales and people passing around copies of the game on floppy disks or across office and college LANs have made up for another 10 million that id Software couldn't account for? How many times was Doom pirated?

Newell also specifically referenced 30 million Windows users in the United States, while another popularly quoted figure about Doom's success, this one from a September 1995 interview with Wilbur, highlighted the game being on "at least 15 million computers worldwide."

Those numbers from Wilbur are the ones you'll see on Wikipedia, which suggests to me we really don't know how many people installed, much less played, the shareware version of Doom. The anecdote that it was more popular than Windows 3.1 has been passed around in articles for years, but seemingly without anyone focusing on the significance of Newell's reference to 30 million Windows users. Was his memory of the study way off, or were we undercounting Doom's popularity all these years?

I've reached out to Newell and id co-founder John Romero to see if either of them remember the survey's findings in more detail, because it sure seems like we've got an unaccounted-for 10 million players or so.

No wonder Bill Gates was so excited about the Windows 95 port of Doom he cut a promo with a trench coat and shotgun.

The United States Library of Congress got a little cooler today by inducting the soundtrack of the original Doom into its National Recording Registry. The Doom soundtrack, by composer Bobby Prince, is one of 25 recordings now designated as "audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time based on their cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage."

"Music and recorded sound are essential, wonderful parts of our daily lives and our national heritage. The National Recording Registry works to preserve our national playlist for generations to come," acting Librarian of Congress Robert R. Newlen said. "The Library of Congress is proud to select these audio treasures and will work to preserve them with our partners in the recording industry."

Other recordings in the 2026 crop of inductees include the Taylor Swift album 1989, Mambo No. 5 by Pérez Prado and His Orchestra (that's the original, not the Lou Bega version), Feliz Navidid by José Feliciano, Weezer's Blue Album, The Devil Went Down to Georgia (Charlie Daniels Band) and Midnight Train to Georgia (Gladys Knight and the Pips), and The Fight of the Century: Ali vs. Frazier, a broadcast recording of the famous boxing match between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, which saw Ali take his first professional loss.

It's the proverbial mixed bag, in other words, although frankly that's just the Weezer talking—otherwise it's a solid list all around. (I'm not a huge fan of I Feel For You either, but it's fine to the extent that I get why other people would like it.) What we're really here for, though, is the rip-and-tear aural experience of Doom, and the Library has some very nice things to say about it:

Originally released in 1993, the videogame Doom brought a heavy metal energy to MS-DOS systems across the globe, while at the same time pioneering the ever-popular first-person shooter genre. Key to Doom’s popularity was the adrenaline-fueled soundtrack created by freelance video game music composer Bobby Prince. Prince, a lifelong musician and practicing lawyer, was fascinated by the MIDI technology that rose in prominence in the mid-1980s as a means for instrument control and composition, an interest that led to his earliest work composing videogames.

For Doom, Prince took inspiration from a pile of CDs loaned by the game's chief designer, John Romero, including seminal works by Alice in Chains, Pantera and Metallica. Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers, Prince composed the perfect riff-shredding accompaniment for the game’s demon-slaying journey to hell and back. Taking advantage of his knowledge of MIDI, Prince even worked to ensure that the sound effects he created could cut through the music by assigning them to different MIDI frequencies. The Doom soundtrack would go on to inspire countless remixes and lay the foundation for future generations of game composers.

Prince is sometimes criticized for cleaving a little too closely to his inspirations. This, for instance, is Them Bones from the great Alice in Chains album Dirt:

And this is Bye Bye American Pie, heard in Barrels o' Fun—a Doom 2 map, to be precise, but the point remains.

Still, there's no denying that the Doom OST slaps, and that Prince's work helped make Doom one of the most intense and foundational videogames of all time. It is not, however, the first videogame to have its music committed to the Library of Congress for eternal posterity: That honor goes to the Super Mario Bros. theme, which got the nod in 2023. The Minecraft soundtrack is in there too.

Today is the 10^th anniversary of Doom—not the 1993 classic that changed the world, but the 2016 reboot that proved to be far better than I'd dared to hope. We celebrated the big birthday by confirming with Doom co-creator John Romero that Doom Guy was not intentionally rocking a sexy tummy window, but had in fact had his shirt torn open by the legions of Hell. Why did we do this? Because we're PC Gamer and we do whatever the hell we want, that's why.

Others have apparently chosen to mark the memorable moment in more conventional ways—such as Doom overlord Bethesda Softworks, which has marked that great shooter down to just $2/£1.59/€2 on Steam, 90% off the regular price. Doom is, to be clear, well worth that regular price—as a stand-up, balls-out, rip-and-tear killfest, there are very few better—so for $2, it's an absolute steal.

"The most striking thing about the new Doom, to me, is how refreshing it is to play a game so rooted in the design sensibilities of 1994. These ideas don't feel old," PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon wrote in 2016, when we awarded Doom our Best Comeback GOTY award.

"From the moment your character throws an exposition-delivering monitor into the wall, Doom signals that this is a game of pure adrenaline, and that the new ways aren't necessarily the best ways. And it's absolutely right. Nobody makes games like the original Doom anymore, but after Doom 2016 it's hard to remember why."

It really is that good, and you're probably not going to find a better $2 shooter today than this one. But what if you already own it? I have good news for you there, too: It's all on sale.

• Doom + Doom 2 - $4/£3.19/€4 (60% off)
• Doom 3 - $4/£3.19/€4 (60% off)
• Doom 64 - $2/£1.59/€2 (60% off)
• Doom Eternal - $10/£8.74/€10 (75% off)
• Doom: The Dark Ages - $23.09/£23.09/€26.39 (67% off)

Those are pretty good deals across the board, but the simple fact is that there's one can't-miss deal among them, and that's the 2016 reboot—which is also, you may have noticed, the cheapest of the bunch. Trust me, if you don't have it, you want to get it. You also don't want to horse around about it too much, because the sale (on all of them) ends in just a couple days, on May 15.

Where your average modder looks at a videogame and asks themselves "what could I add to this experience," Isowulf creator LoGeKyl approached the classic Wolfenstein 3D with a slightly different perspective: "What if this was an entirely different, and worse, game entirely?"

I say "worse" not to diminish the quality of LoGeKyl's work in the slightest, but because the pitch—"A faithful re-creation of the original Wolfenstein 3D… but viewed from an isometric perspective" makes me imagine an alternate version of the '90s where id Software followed up the 2D Commander Keen platformers with some sort of top-down puzzle-action game that was a lot closer to the original 1980s Castle Wolfenstein. Without putting the "3D" in Wolf3D, would id have ever made Doom, giving us the gift of the first-person shooter? Surely not!

With that pessimistic prognosticating out of the way, I have to say LoGeKyl's mod is still quite cool, especially as it was directly inspired by his love for the early days of id Software. "What made Wolfenstein 3D special to me was that it was one of the first times I realized that people made games," he writes on Isowulf's ModDB page. "The credits were right there: John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall. (Wait—aren’t these the same names I saw on Commander Keen!?) From that moment on, making games was all I ever wanted to do."

LoGeKyl writes that he listens to audiobook versions of Masters of Doom or Romero's autobiography Doom Guy whenever he's getting ready to start a new project, and for this one he wanted to explore how well Wolfenstein 3D's design would work in another form, with the camera pulled out and tilted to make a sort of shooter-Diablo.

"As it turns out, John Romero and Tom Hall’s original design still holds up, even from a completely different perspective. I figured I’d have to tweak movement speeds, enemy AI, maybe switch from hit-scan to projectiles—but nope. It all just works."

His only addition, graphics-wise, was a sprite of B.J. Blazkowicz, since the first-person game naturally didn't include one beyond his character portrait. While the mod debuted about six months ago, it's been updated to include all of the original game's episodes, saving and loading, and rebindable keys.

If we hurled Isowulf backwards in time and it swapped places with the original Wolfenstein 3D, I do wonder if the FPS—like life—would, uh, still find a way. Perhaps it would've taken a little longer. But if Isowulf had basically done Diablo before Diablo… maybe Blizzard North would've gone and invented the first real-time first-person shooter instead? Frag a while, and listen.

I believe that Doomguy, the protagonist of seminal FPS series Doom, may have a more whimsical reputation than he deserves. The culprit? His belly, which is readily visible in Don Punchatz's cover art for the 1993 classic. Doomguy did not go into battle wearing a jaunty little cutoff tee, nor did he have a uniform purpose-stitched to display his impeccable abs, but I believe he may have left this impression on untold thousands (millions?) of gamers.

Whatever the in-universe explanation for the tummy window on Doomguy's outfit, it has become a persistent feature of his design in both fan and official works. When his OG outfit is replicated in the HD era, you always see the abs: Doomguy's classic skin in Quake Live has it, as does the equivalent skin in Doom Eternal

This arresting fan art by user Dalia and Sam on Artstation takes it as inspiration for a full-on, early 2000s, low-rise midriff take on the reboot Doom Slayer armor. Even the brown paneling over the belly on the Doom Eternal Slayer armor is clearly evoking the tummy window

Dozens of us

Take a gander at this 2021 Doomworld forum thread on the subject. "His undershirt is ripped (presumably) exposing his six pack, right? Yeah, we all definitely realized that," user Terraformer9x wrote in the introductory post.

"Wearing a belly shirt leaves Doomguy open for tickles," quipped out_of_service further down the thread. Many commenters wondered how the exposed skin plays with the Martian atmosphere and sub-zero temperatures.

LastSpaceMarine took a moral stand against the tummy window being anything but a deliberate aspect of Doomguy's outfit, in-universe. "I refuse to accept that the shirt is ripped," they wrote in 2021. "As far as I'm concerned, it's an intentional ab window. Doomguy just wanted to look hot while he kills demons."

I got on this beat via the 2007 mod, Classic Doom 3, a recreation of Doom 1 Episode 1, Knee Deep in the Dead, in Doom 3. YouTuber DarthVR recently uploaded a longplay of the project, to give you an idea of what it looks like. The mod begins with a heinously, deliciously amateur voice-acted cutscene setting the stage⁠—let me tell you, never in my life have I been more amenable to Doom programmer John Carmack's famous assertion that story in a game is equivalent to story in a porno.

Anyway, you can see Doomguy suit up in an id Tech 4 recreation of his classic outfit, and his tummy is out, matching Don Punchatz's iconic artwork. I immediately assumed the author shared the same misapprehension I did for many years: That the Doomguy's shirt was always like that, like a saucy little cutoff tee is the official uniform of the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC)'s paramilitary wing.

"Casualties have been up since they instituted the hunky cheesecake uniform," these far future jarheads might grumble to each other. Clearly, I am not a smart man.

The thought has since occurred to me that this was just a tongue-in-cheek visual allusion rather than a painstaking 3D recreation of Doomguy, but we press on. Before any action, before any demon might have had the chance to expose Doomguy's belly to the world, this fanmade Doomguy was both sun's out, guns out and hellspawn free, tummy for thee.

When I told my colleagues the horrible truth—that I'd long known there was solid evidence that Doomguy's shirt had actually been torn in battle— I found out I was most definitely not alone in thinking he was just feelin' himself for all those years.

"This is news to me, also," wrote PCG senior editor Robin Valentine. "Could it be… Doomguy was never as slutty as I hoped?" News writer Lincoln Carpenter chimed in with: "Dude didn't just want to show off his ab work?" It's an astute observation: Doomguy has an incredible, some might say anabolic physique.

Whether Doomguy is natty or not is a question for another day (I think he's juicing): I'm here to talk about his shirt (or lack thereof). To prove I'm not insane, I've embedded a close-up of my McFarlane Toys Doom Slayer (Classic Doomguy Skin) action figure above. You can clearly see frayed edges where the shirt was ripped, yet viewed from far away, it almost looks like a window to the abs—so perfectly does it frame them, it must have been tailored.

Window to the soul

To confirm this unsexy revelation, I got in touch with the man who would know best: John Romero, id Software co-founder, programmer, and designer. In his memoir, Doom Guy, Romero described the day a model was brought in to pose as reference for Punchatz⁠—there was no mention of the shirt situation, though. I had to ask: Was the torn shirt a visual design priority for id, or an artistic flourish from Punchatz?

"As you can see from the Doom box cover," Romero wrote, "Doomguy's shirt was torn by demons. His armor is still there, but the shirt below is shredded. This was all Don's idea. In the game you are fully clothed."

That last part was a bit of a bombshell for me, and something that was brought up as a point of discussion in that old Doomworld thread. I'm sure I'd seen, but never really noticed, that the in-game Doomguy sprite had a fully intact shirt.

Another bit of evidence on Romero's side is the 1996 Doom comic, in which Doomguy's midriff remains chastely covered while he yells. "I'VE GOT A HANDFUL OF VERTEBRAE AND A HANDFUL OF MAD!"

Subsequent generations of game and fan artists turned not to Doomguy's in-game model, but Don Punchatz' art as a primary inspiration to bring Doomguy to life in different art styles or with modern graphics.

I can't blame them⁠—Punchatz' art is iconic for a reason⁠—but Doom's cover shows a single moment in the Doomguy's crusade, one where his shirt happened to get torn in a particularly playful and sexy way. Now that moment is part of his identity in perpetuity.

But let it be known: Doomguy did not show up to the Martian hellbreach dressed like he was going to utterly dominate a beach volleyball tournament, he showed up ready for business. I'm sorry if this news is a disappointment.

Ever since Godzilla first battled Mechagodzilla all the way back in 1974, it's been clear to everyone that nothing exists which cannot be made cooler by the inclusion of giant robots. This axiom is self-evident, so there's no need to ask a question like, "Would Doom be cooler if you could pilot a mech in it?" Thankfully, someone did anyway.

The proof is in the pudding, the pudding in this case being Redxone's MechDoomer: Rebooted—a souped-up take on a mod which gleefully jams Doom and MechWarrior together. It adjusts the UI, adds "mech-assault styled movement," and gives you a full suite of customizable weapon slots so you can stomp a round in the legendary FPS Battletech style.

The new 1.0 release features a whopping 28 mechs you can pilot, all of which are split among light, medium, heavy, and assault classes. The iconic Atlas is included alongside stuff like the Crab and Kit Fox, and it's impressive just how different the game looks through the lens of a swaying cockpit.

Some third-person gameplay is shown in the release trailer, and while the low-poly mechs are a little uncanny in Doom's sprite-filled labyrinths, seeing a Tarantula squash a horde of demons by goomba-stomping them into a torrent of gore is a joyous sight indeed. The description states the scale of these bots is "fully customizable," making the mod "compatible with all sorts of different level geometry."

Since you can, as Redxone clarified on the Doomworld forums, exit your mech "whenever you please," it seems like it should play nice with a variety of other mods. A post on X from the team behind the Halo Doom mod reveals the two are compatible, along with "almost any weapon and monster mod you like to normally run." As always, it's never too late to warp Doom beyond recognition before your next playthrough.

Here at PCG towers, we've recently been sorting through some of our old treasure hoard of magazine issues, including interviews with many of the industry's leading figures. One that recently jumped out to me was a 2008 interview with John Carmack, at which time he was still at id Software, around the launch of Quake Live: a browser-based remake of Quake III: Arena. And as Carmack makes clear, despite id's lineage of genre-defining games, including the likes of Doom and Wolfenstein, Quake Arena was his baby.

"It was never really a secret that Quake Arena was my favourite id Software game," says Carmack. "Of all the games that we’ve made, Quake Arena was always the one that I looked at as a pure game.

"While it had its noteworthy graphical advancements for the day, it really was about the gameplay. It was at a turning point in maturing for the gaming industry, where you had to start throwing in everything including the kitchen sink, and Quake Arena wasn’t our most successful title. But I do look back at it and think Quake Arena as a game stands the test of time."

Carmack says the idea for Quake Live came from "looking at how the PC market has changed," and again I'll emphasise this interview is from 2008, adding "there are still things that the PC does better than consoles." There is "the whole idea of PCs being everywhere, and having a game that you can play just about anywhere."

Elsewhere in the interview Carmack mentions that most of the games he plays himself are not technical showcases and makes the point that, even though id's work is known for technical wizardry, what does it for him personally is putting square pegs in square holes.

"That’s one of the aspects of engineering that’s always appealed to me," says Carmack. "Trying to do the right thing in the right place. You don’t try and push something where it no longer belongs. You look for opportunities in all the things that you have available."

Quake Live was a pretty pioneering idea for the time, launching as essentially a free-to-play browser plugin that offered everything the original game had, plus more. But id struggled to make the game profitable and eventually launched subscriptions to support it before, much further down the line, making it a paid title on Steam and leaving the browser version behind.

Carmack has previously said that Quake Arena was probably his own swansong as a designer, adding that his skills "probably tapped out a decade ago. I don’t have anything to say about design beyond the Quake III level." Which is a little bit like Michelangelo finishing up David, putting down his chisel, and saying I got nothing to tell you about sculpture. Even these days you can pick up Quake Arena, get the headphones on and, as Carmack says: "It’s pure play on it."

Doom the movie has a rating of 18% on Rotten Tomatoes, which puts it on the same tier as Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and the Assassin's Creed movie. Which is unfair. Assassin's Creed was terrible because it thought it was clever, drily dumping conspiracy theory-history with a straight face, while Doom was gleefully dumb, the kind of action-horror movie where people say "motherfucker" then do something cool—one of those ideal four-beer shout-at-the-screen experiences.

The way the doomed marines are introduced is a classic of the form. You're used to this kind of scene from Aliens (Bishop playing stabscotch) and Predator (Blaine insisting that chewing tobacco will make you "a goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus"), though I have a soft spot for the one in Top Secret! where the French Resistance are introduced holding increasingly ridiculous weapons, including a straight-up cannon.

Doom's not as over-the-top as that, but it's close. Sarge (Dwayne Johnson when he was still being credited as The Rock) is introduced shirtless, because why waste time getting to what we want to see? The group sleazebag Portman is so greasy his hair looks like it repels water, the religious Goat reads a Bible and catches fruit without looking—someone has to catch something without looking up in these scenes so you know they're cool—and Duke plays a Futuretronics Galaxian 2 to remind you videogames exist.

This scene tells you exactly the kind of movie you're about to watch—one that's so indebted to Aliens it's still paying off the loan, but willing to have more fun with the form than any of the Alien movies since.

While Mac and Destroyer play baseball with fruit, the Kid cleans up and watches wide-eyed so you know he's at the bottom of the heap. The Kid could not be more doomed if he was only one tour away from retirement and also about to get married. Finally there's Reaper (Karl Urban unaware he's auditioning for Dredd), who cleans his weapons conscientiously because he's thoughtful and has hidden depths.

This crew gets sent to Mars to investigate an archaeological dig base where bad stuff has happened. Doom the movie explains the monstrous demons with some hasty ancient-alien-experiment pseudoscience rather than having them be just plain demons, which helps differentiate it from Event Horizon, but did anger the kind of fans who care about the Doom lore that apparently exists. I guess if you grew up in America during the Satanic Panic the rebel yell of Doom's pentagrams must be meaningful in the same way anything that made your parents mad is. I didn't and so the fact Doom the movie, like Doom the books, uses Christian ideas as a metaphor but is actually about aliens is fine by me. Your mileage may vary.

On Mars the marines meet "Pinky" Pinzerowski, a technician whose lower body is mechanical because of a teleporter accident (Dexter Fletcher with a better American accent than the one he had in Press Gang) and they also meet Doctor Samantha Grimm, in the role of the beautiful scientist this era of movies loved (Rosamund Pike from Gone Girl and Pride & Prejudice, being more convincing than Denise Richards was as Dr Christmas Jones in The World is Not Enough).

For a second we're supposed to think Doctor Grimm is Reaper's ex-wife—his real name is John Grimm, that's why they call him Reaper, lol—but actually she's his estranged twin sister. Their parents were among the first scientists on Mars, and when they died she wanted to follow in their footsteps while he wanted to get as far away as possible. That's the kind of traumatic backstory that marks him out as Real Protagonist Material.

What follows is a pacey, blessedly sun-two-hours spent running around in corridors that is interspersed with an oddly romantic autopsy, a Big Fucking Gun, a monster being attacked with a computer monitor that looks real VGA-ass for what's supposed to be year 2046, a sewer level, scientists named after id's founders being murdered—it manages some genuinely shocking deaths, there's a real "no one is safe" feel toward the end—and finally, an extended first-person sequence that's astonishing just for existing.

For a little over four minutes you the viewer are Doomguy as he rips and tears through a bunch of baddies. It's like a haunted house train-ride complete with zombies who pop up just to cackle—only you've got a machine gun, ho ho ho. The movie honestly could have ended here, but instead it throws in a bareknuckle boss fight and a real "movie's over, fuck off" finale so you know it's never going to get a sequel.

The 2019 reboot, Doom: Annihilation, ends on a cliffhanger because for some reason they thought they'd get a sequel, and again I'm thankful the 2005 version was more self-aware than the average videogame movie. Doom: Annihilation also tried to have it both ways with demons who were simultaneously ancient aliens and also from a Hell dimension, but the imps look so lame throwing fireballs it's obvious why the previous version ditched that idea.

Sure, 2005's Doom was as dumb as rocks who flunked out of rock school, but that's what I want from a Doom movie. That and some kickass music, which Clint Mansell's score totally delivered.

I've had one eye on ambitious Doom 2 mod Trench Foot for a while, though it was, admittedly, my weaker eye that requires me to wear corrective lenses. I had assumed Trench Foot was a total conversion set in the First World War, but it turns out it's much weirder than that. It basically combines World War One chic with medieval religious zealotry and a gothic ostentation that wouldn't look out of place in Warhammer 40,000.

Notionally, Trench Foot has you play as a master Templar of the one true faith known as the Canonicate, on a mission to wage "apocalyptic holy war" on the heretics who cower in the sprawling trenchworks of the wartorn nation of Cretu. With 14 unique weapons to wield and 15 enemy types to blast into ludicrous gibs, Trench Foot sounds utterly preposterous in the best way.

Unfortunately, the mod has hit numerous stumbling blocks over the course of its development. Some of these were design hurdles typical to mod making, but others were external factors such as the Doom modding's sudden sourceport shift from GZDoom to UZDoom. Developer TrenchWork has addressed these issues on several occasions. But the project has finally borne some fruit, albeit not what fans were likely expecting.

Out of the blue, TrenchWork has released a three-episode mini-campaign called Butcher's Summit, which acts as a prequel to the events that will ultimately be portrayed in the mod. Playing as a knight in the Templar order, you're tasked with eliminating a heretic surface-to-air battery dug deep into the peaks of a vast mountain range. With three maps spanning an estimated two-hour run time, the prequel features multiple weapons and "over 40 new monsters", which sounds like a lot more than was initially planned for the full mod.

In an article revealing the mini-episode, Trench Foot lead L0kken explained what's gone on. "It's no secret that the development of [Trench Foot] Chapter 1 has had its ups and downs," he writes. "During one of those slower phases of development, I decided to use the free time to begin work on a new project. I wanted to make something with a smaller scope that wouldn't require the efforts of the whole team to complete."

I took a very quick Tour of Trench Foot's opening level, and my initial impressions are that it's pretty tasty. The mod throws into the action almost immediately, with you pushing through a quasi-World War One frontline as you fight through axe-wielding cultists and deadly suicide bombers with revolvers, rifles, and your own mighty fist. The levels are large and open for a Doom-based game, with moody battlefields wreathed with fog and dusted by snow.

It seems impressive even at a fleeting glance, but L0kken is nonetheless keen to stress that Butcher's Summit "does not represent" how Chapter 1 will play. "I made a few decisions to keep the project as simple and expedient as possible," L0kken points out, adding that they opted for "A single difficulty option and kept cinematic moments to a minimum, prioritising gameplay and exploration."

Regardless, I reckon Trench Foot's prequel episode is well worth trying. You can download Butcher's Summit over on ModDB. While the mod is based upon Doom 2, it's also wholly standalone, enabling you to launch it straight from the file with no additional tinkering required.

Humble is back with yet another bundle, and this one's a doozy, the kind that makes me wish I could erase my memory so I could experience the joy of playing these games for the first time again. Sci-fi Shooters 2.0 loads a second clip of FPS action into its discount rifle, featuring some of the best games in the genre from the last decade.

Sci-fi Shooters 2.0 is a two-tiered bundle, and there's good reasons to shoot for either of them. Paying the minimum price of $14 (£12.51) will net you four games, namely Doom Eternal. Prey: Digital Deluxe Edition, Black Mesa, and FPS roguelite Battle Shapers.

I'm not hugely familiar with Battle Shapers, but the other three games are, in my opinion, must-play experiences. Doom Eternal is still the best single-player FPS you can play today, a spellbinding iteration of id Software's 2016 Doom reboot that rewards mastery of its rich combat system in a manner unlike anything I've played before or since. Even last year's Doom: The Dark Ages, which I enjoyed very much, cannot compete with the ferocious pace and intensity of Eternal's combat.

Then there's Prey, which isn't really a shooter even if it technically qualifies as one. It is, however, an incredible game, a spiritual successor to System Shock with some of the richest creative problem solving you'll encounter this side of Deus Ex. While its initial reviews weren't as effusive as those for Arkane's more fantastical Dishonored 2, its reputation has grown substantially over time, and I believe it to be one of the best games ever made.

Finally in this tier is Black Mesa, Crowbar Collective's brilliant remake of Half-Life. While it is superb throughout, it is particularly worth playing for its expansive reimagining of Xen. Arguably too expansive in some areas, but it's still an incredible creation from what was initially a group of enthusiast modders.

$14 is a downright steal for these three games. But if you up your payment to $20 (£17.89) you'll also get Nightdive's remasters of System Shock 2 and Star Wars: Dark Forces, alongside the cooperative multiplayer FPS Starship Troopers: Extermination.

While Dark Forces and System Shock 2 are a little harder to go back to today, they are still hugely important games in the PC's history, and much more accessible thanks to Nightdive's work. Extermination, meanwhile, may have had its thunder stolen by Helldivers 2, but its larger scale teamwork has its own appeal, and the game has come on leaps and bounds since it launched in 2024.

You can, of course, pay even more for the Bundle if you want, but that's the maximum number of games you'll get. Part of your payment goes to support two environmental charities—One Tree Planted and Cool Effect. The former is dedicated to global reforestation, while the latter aims to reduce the carbon pollution at the root of climate change. The bundle has another 18 days to run, so there's plenty of time to expand your sci-fi shooting horizons yet.

While id Software's rebooted Doom got me reaching for my Super Shotgun with suitably psychotic glee, I never warmed to Doom: Eternal. I know that for many gamers, it delivered the hyperfast bullet ballet they'd always wanted, but for me, it simply felt that far too much of Doom's DNA had been sacrificed in order to deliver it.

Rather than always ripping and tearing with wild abandon, you were always dodging and pirouetting with forced necessity. What happened to being knee deep in the dead? In Eternal, you were always soaring over them.

Therefore, when id Software recalibrated the rebooted series with Doom: The Dark Ages, moving back towards gameplay that prioritised getting stuck into the demonic hordes rather than constantly running away from them, I was overjoyed. A more grounded (literally) take on the classic FPS formula that, to me at least, felt far more like a spiritual successor to the legendary 1993 original.

And now, thanks to id Software's 35th anniversary celebrations, Doom: The Dark Ages is over two-thirds off. I definitely rate this FPS, to the point that I'd personally recommend picking it up over Eternal, so I thought I would bring the discount to the wider PC gaming community's attention. The details can be found below, as well as information on additional discounts to both other games in the rebooted Doom series.

It's not only Doom: The Dark Ages that has been discounted in the id Software 35th anniversary celebrations, either. Both the rebooted Doom and Doom: Eternal are heavily price-slashed too, making it easier than ever to jump into the Doom Slayer's beastly shoes.

Prefer OG Doom? Then check out Sigil and Sigil II

Like the idea of some new Doom but would prefer new content for the original FPS experience? Then be sure to check out John Romero's recently released Sigil and Sigil II expansions. These new episodes deliver tons of deliciously devious Doom levels to fight through, and they come from the Doom design master himself. You can get both for free, but I'd recommend paying for the versions that come with the suitably excellent soundtracks by Buckethead and Thorr. Rip and tear my friends, rip and tear.

Founded on February 1, 1991, id Software is responsible for the creation of Doom, Quake, and it picked up the mantle of the Wolfenstein series with Wolfenstein 3D. To celebrate the company's 35-year anniversary, and a day late, John Carmack has posted a video to X reflecting on how things have changed.

"Every day that I sit down to my AI research work, doing petaflops of tensor calculations, I've got above me a reminder of the old days at the dawn of id software."

Behind him sits a sequence of three posters from Nick Derington's 'Ode to id'. This series of pictures recaps moments from Doom and Wolfenstein 3D and is placed in glass frames, above the three monitors Carmack presumably uses every day.

"We had 16 megahertz CPUs, 640k of RAM, floppy disks, 320 by 200 graphics. It was an age of constraints. And code, art, and design had to work closely together to find the very best corner of this tight little box that we were working within. I think we did a pretty good job back then, and I'm grateful that the legacy lives on to this day. Thank you all for playing"

What Carmack is referring to with these PCs are the standard MS-DOS rigs they were using during the development of Wolfenstein 3D. Carmack and the team moved over to higher-specced NeXT workstations—from the company founded by Steve Jobs—for the development of Doom, and he said in 2016, "using the NeXT was an eye-opener, and it was quickly clear to me that it had a lot of tangible advantages for us."

Doom itself has become a standard for testing hardware, with it running with a motherboard BIOS, a pregnancy test, and within Doom itself. This isn't purely because it's easy to run, but also because it's iconic in playstyle and look: that merging of code, art, and design Carmack was talking about.

Nowadays, John Carmack runs AI research company Keen, which led a $20 million investment round in 2022. In that same year, Carmack said the goal of Keen was "AGI or bust, by way of Mad Science!" At the time, Carmack was also a consultant on VR over at Meta, but since appears to have stepped down and away from games on a professional level.

In celebration of the 35th anniversary of Doom developer id Software's founding, co-founder John Romero has released a video retrospective on one of id's most unsung games: Catacomb 3-D.

The video featured Romero's own recollections, as well as those of id vets Tom Hall, John Carmack, and Adrian Carmack⁠—no relation on those last two, by the way. I only found that out embarrassingly recently.

id began work on Catacomb 3-D in October 1991, after completing Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter⁠. This was during the studio's brief stint in Madison, Wisconsin after leaving Shreveport, Louisiana, but before settling in Texas for good.

Catacomb 3-D was part of a deal id had with its founders' former employer, Softdisk. Some of id's first games⁠—made in blisteringly fast two-month development cycles until Wolfenstein 3-D⁠—were distributed in Gamer's Edge, a monthly, subscription-based demo disk of games put out by the software company. Similar to shareware, it's a distribution model that sounds like it came from another universe looking back from 2026.

Catacomb 3-D wasn't id's first FPS, but it included major advances over Hovertank One. While the crew continued to hone its art and design, John Carmack was experimenting with texture mapping, an aspect of 3D graphics we take for granted today, but which could only run on expensive Silicon Graphics workstations before games like Catacomb and Ultima Underworld made it work on far less powerful consumer hardware.

Speaking of things we take for granted, "FPS" wasn't even a proper genre at this point: id's early FPSes were often compared to top-down, arcade-style shooters. John Carmack called it "basically a quarter-eater still, put onto the PC" in the video, but also characterized Catacomb as id planting its game design flag.

"It didn't have the overarching story and depth that people felt the PC was better suited for," said Carmack. "And we were still kinda striking out and saying: 'No. Action, fast twitch, that still is a great, viable gaming thing to do.'

"We just had this one, new, super novel new perspective⁠, literally⁠⁠, by putting it in 3D."

Tom Hall noted that id opted for first-person in its early 3D games partly due to technical limitations. "It was very costly to draw large things on-screen⁠—don't want to slow down the game," said Hall. But like other design coups in gaming, this technical constraint resulted in something special.

"We could have done it over the player's shoulder and stuff," said Hall. "But it made it really easy to aim if something's just in the center, and it's very simple, and it's fast to draw. It also increases the player immersion, like 'this is me.'"

Romero revealed that id only made $5,000 on Catacomb 3-D through its Gamer's Edge deal⁠—approaching $12,000 in today's money, but that's still not a great paycheck for two months of work by six people. Commander Keen was more profitable and popular, so id launched into development of Commander Keen 7 at the beginning of 1992, shortly after Catacomb 3-D was completed.

But the team was beginning to realize that they had stumbled on something transformative, that immersion Tom Hall mentioned. Johns Carmack and Romero both point to an incident with Artist Adrian Carmack as a bit of a eureka moment.

"One of my more cherished memories of making Catacomb was Adrian almost falling out of the seat when he turned around right in the face of a troll. This is where we could tell we're starting to get it," said Carmack. "This is the future of gaming, rather than looking at the little sprites moving around on the screen and maybe getting tense. But it was the sense of shock. That was the first moment that locked into my mind that we were really onto something in this new genre and style of play."

"It just automatically sucked you in visually. You couldn't help it," Adrian Carmack recalled. "That's just what your eyes and your mind did.

"That was just one of the craziest things in a videogame I'd ever seen. We definitely knew that we'd found a new game style, a new game type."

id abandoned development on Commander Keen 7 after just two weeks, never to return to the series. "One night, we talked about how Catacomb 3D was just the beginning of a new way to play games, and that the future was 3D," said Romero. "Within an hour, we had decided what our next game would be: Wolfenstein 3-D, the grandfather of first person shooters."

By Romero's reckoning, Catacomb was a critical step on the path to Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake⁠—the FPS genre, as well as 3D graphics and design writ large, as we know them. "This all began with Catacomb 3-D," Romero concluded.

Romero Games is offering a classic-style, PC big box reissue of Catacomb 3-D on its website alongside other goodies like the big box release of Sigil or Romero's game dev memoir, Doom Guy. And after a Microsoft-induced scare, John and Brenda Romero's studio sounds like it's back on track to release its long-awaited next gen FPS.

I know what you're thinking. "How banal, yet another programmer has got Doom running where it doesn't belong." And I get it: you've seen id's formative FPS running on a Lego brick, a PDF, bacteria, 100 pounds of potatoes, a pregnancy test, and even a piano. I don't think I could make up something more ridiculous than what's already been done. And yet, I am still impressed by Doombuds.

Thanks to Sydney-based web developer Arin Sarkisian, Doom now runs on a pair of earbuds. More specifically, it runs on the PineBuds Pro, which Sarkisian explains on his site are "the only earbuds with open source firmware." The buds have a CPU strong enough to run Doom with some minor tweaks—the site notes Sarkisian "cranked [the CPU] up to 300mhz and disabled low power mode," providing "more than enough" juice to run the game, albeit at around 18 fps.

Doom itself also required some tweaking so that the buds' meager RAM could handle the game, but the site explains "there are plenty of optimisations" that can cut down on Doom's required 4 MB of RAM. And while the earbuds can only hold 4 MB of data (Doom is just a bit larger than that), the 1.7 MB Squashware WAD is small enough to fit. The power of id Tech 1, in the palm of my… ear.

If you're itching to try this version of the game, you can play it without any PineBuds of your own. The Doombuds website has an embedded Twitch stream and a virtual queue where anyone can line up to connect to Sarkisian's earbuds remotely and play Doom on them from their browser. Because earbuds don't have a screen, this stream acts as the game's display.

How that exactly works is laid out on the "more info" section on the website, but suffice it to say it's a pretty novel way to experience Doom, even with the low frame rate. If you'd like to run Doom on your own PineBuds, Sarkisian has shared the means to do so on GitHub.

At some point, fan retoolings of classic games are just whole new games in their own right. In 1996, Quake released with 32 levels and 6 deathmatch maps. Today, Quake Brutalist Jam 3 released with a ludicrous 77 maps tributing both id's classic shooter and brutalism, an architectural style defined by moody harshness and concrete.

You can find the project on the Slipseer website alongside an explanatory blog post. "The goal for QBJ3 was to make something uniquely ambitious for the community to build with us. Beginning production in the winter of 2024, the team slow-cooked a total conversion mod in (semi) secret," the announcement reads.

"The community came out in force, producing an unprecedented 77 maps, pushing the limits of the Quake engine to bring the oppressive, gritty, and beautiful aesthetic of brutalism to life."

The first and second Brutalist Jams were already impressive, but this new one is on another level. It comes bearing all sorts of new weapons, enemies, power ups, 3D art assets, which the release announcement posits is a "a complete visual overhaul of Quake's existing roster." It shows off the goods in a trailer that released yesterday and it's barely recognizable as a game from the '90s.

You can find a more detailed look at all the new guns and mechanics in an introduction teaser released in Oct. 2025. If you've ever wanted to dual wield wrenches, now's your chance.

It's a testament to both the resilience and passion of Quake's mapmaking community, and specifically to the growing influence of the Quake Brutalist Jam as its most prominent event. Playing it for yourself will take some tinkering, but don't let that turn you off if you have no experience modding games; detailed instructions are attached in the announcement blog post.

For the last four years, the hottest mapping event in the retro FPS scene has been the Quake Brutalist Jam. Here, mapmakers enthralled by id Software's 1996 shooter have gathered to honour architecture's moodiest style, constructing levels designed to evoke its austere, concrete minimalism.

The first Brutalist Jam occurred in 2022, spawning 35 maps that were bundled together and released as a single mod. A second Brutalist Jam took place the following year, producing 30 more delightfully grey, angular constructions to blast your way through.

Both Jams seemed like impressive achievements at the time. But this year's Brutalist Jam blows both previous events out of the water. After kicking off in October, the Quake Brutalist Jam 3 has received a whopping 75 entries created by the Quake community. For context, the original version of Quake contains 37 maps.

Why has this Jam proved so much more popular than the previous ones? Well, it might be partly down to word of mouth spreading, and the Jam didn't run last year, which likely encouraged people who feared they missed out to take part this year. But on top of that, Quake Brutalist Jam 3 doesn't just use vanilla Quake as its foundation. Instead, it revolves around a set of bespoke features unique to the Jam.

This includes a whole new armour system inspired by Quake Champions, where armour is fully stackable at all times, as well as a redesigned arsenal that includes a pipe-wrench, twin nailguns, and a shotgun with Flak Cannon-style bouncing projectiles. You'll also use these to fight a "new" enemy roster that's exclusive to the Jam. This roster includes some snazzy reskins of vanilla Quake monsters, but there are also completely new enemies for mappers to experiment with.

Arcane DimensionsThe Jam's organiser, who goes by Makkon, provided the final count earlier this week. The 75 maps include 43 "main" maps, 18 new faces maps, and 14 miscellaneous maps. However, it might be a while before we get to play the results, as it's now upon Makkon to join all these maps together in a playable hub.

This is a tradition that harks back to the original Quake, featuring in many other multi-map mod projects like Arcane Dimensions. But creating such a hub for 75 maps is a huge lift. Some members of the community have suggested splitting the Jam into multiple releases. But Makkon is committed to releasing it as a single package, noting, "This is going to be an insane challenge."

If you want to get a sense of what Brutalist Jam 3 might include, you can download the introductory map created by Makkon, designed to showcase the features of the Jam. While made for instructional purposes, it's still a decently sized map, letting you try out the new weapons in a bespoke shooting gallery before battling the new enemies across a more traditional FPS level.

In 2021 PCG reported on a singular scientific experiment: rats named Carmack and Romero had been taught how to 'play' Doom. I use the inverted commas because, cute and cool as it was, the question of whether the rats were really playing Doom in any meaningful way, or just running on a ball for some delicious sugar water, was not conclusively answered.

The project leader Viktor Tóth said at the time he wasn't happy with how they'd implemented the shooting response, and four years later the team is back with a new setup that significantly expands what the rats can do (first spotted by Tom's Hardware). And this time, the rodents are rocking a trigger mechanism.

The first version had the rats suspended in a harness over a ball that rotated when they moved, with that movement mapped to a simplified version of a Doom corridor with an imp at the end. When the rat did the right things, it would get a reward in the form of sweetened water.

The limitations meant that it was a bit of a stretch to say the rats were playing Doom, but as Tóth said you could make a decent argument they were "kinda" playing Doom.

The new setup still maps the rat's real-world movement into a Doom environment, but now allows for more nuanced navigation alongside new inputs and feedback. The rats are now treated to a wraparound AMOLED display that covers more of their field of view (which "maximizes immersion without obstructing whisker space"), and any wall collisions are communicated via gentle puffs of air to the animal's snout.

Most notable of all is a new trigger mechanism that lets the rat fire a gun in Doom, meaning they now not only move around in the game environment but can shoot things.

"The shooting input is a custom-built hand-operated lever," writes Tóth. "Rats pull it with their paws to fire. The lever is held in place by small springs, encased in a 3D-printed housing. It includes a rotary encoder to detect motion and a stepper motor to actuate it."

Everything about the setup is external: sensors, motion tracking, visual feedback, and of course the good old rewards reinforcing correct behaviours. The initial experiment was a Tóth solo project, while this v2 was built in collaboration with electrical engineer Sándor Makra. Akos Blaschek also assisted in documenting the project for open-sourcing and, should you wish to build your own rat VR hardware, here is how to do it.

The results? "The rats successfully learned to navigate the virtual environment and trigger the shooting mechanism," writes Tóth. "Habituation took approximately two weeks per rat. While advanced training wasn't completed due to time constraints, initial data showed promising engagement with the system. Full behavioral validation requires longer training periods."

So perhaps we can forget about the inverted commas, and simply say that rats can now play Doom. The rodent versions of Carmack and Romero have long since gone to the great sugar water dispenser in the sky, but the legacy is clear: they walked, so later rats could run 'n gun.

I didn't think it was possible for Doom to become more accessible than it already is. Id Software's omnipresent FPS is playable on every device imaginable, from pianos to printers to even gut bacteria, while Nightdive released a delicious double-barrelled overhaul of Doom + Doom 2 last year, which exists on top of the fact that you can play vanilla Doom in your browser.

But it turns out I was wrong, terribly wrong, as an entire subculture of Doom modding has just been excavated in a way that might spell actual doom for my career. DoomScroll is a new website that lets users scroll through and play thousands (and I mean thousands) of user-made Doom WADs right in your browser.

DoomScroll is the creation of software engineer James Baicoianu and Internet archivist Jason Scott, who have developed it over several years and released it to celebrate Doom's 32^nd birthday: "Our goal was to make decades of work from one of the most creative communities in gaming history more accessible and visible to everyone," Baicoianu explained in a Bluesky thread. "The community has built so much over the years, and there's no question that Doom has had a lasting influence on the game industry as we know it today."

Baicoianu points out that the DoomScroll archive includes everything from "simplistic maps made by kids just learning how game development works" to "full total conversions with all-new music, textures, and sprites". Presented against a vast wall of Doom sprites and bloody industrial textures, each level is summarised in a small grey box featuring its name, author, description, and a spinning wireframe view of the map.

Clicking on the box brings up a more detailed overview of the WAD displayed on a virtual laptop, with the wireframe overviews now spinning near the bottom of the page. Clicking on these will bring up an interactive automap, with a menu running across the top of the laptop from which you can select to play the WAD. After a few moments, the site launches you into your chosen Doom map from pistol start.

Every year another Doom birthday rolls by and reminds me of the same thing:I never actually launched the project I started five years ago with @textfiles.com Today, I finally fix that.

— @bai.dev (@bai.dev.bsky.social) 2025-12-11T14:33:54.985Z

I tested several maps, all of which worked out of the gate with now-standard Doom KB+M controls. I then very quickly had to stop playing because, good grief, I can see myself losing entire workdays to this. Turns out that Christmas coming early causes you all sorts of organisational problems.

While DoomScroll is brilliant, it isn't perfect. Responding to Jason Scott's own post revealing the project, Doom modder and YouTuber Major Arlene states, "some maps won't work" through DoomScroll due to the "limitations" of the emulator. I tested the WAD Major Arlene mentions (named Army of Darkness), and for me, it wouldn't load at all, simply presenting me with a black screen.

Major Arlene also points out that "not everyone gives permission for their projects to be redistributed outside of where they're originally uploaded". The Doom mapping community has apparently encountered "a lot of problems" with incomplete and improper sourcing of WADS, and DoomScroll currently offers no way for users to check this.

Even so, Major Arlene is enthusiastic about DoomScroll, stating that it is "a fantastic idea". Indeed, even with the teething problems Major Arlene highlights, it's a fantastic way to explore Doom's long history of community creations.

Short of any other wildly ambitious, last-minute surprises, DoomScroll wraps up what has been a fascinating year for the shooter series. This year, of course, brought us Doom: The Dark Ages, another fascinating take on Doom by id Software, which recently received a rework to its wave-based Ripatorium. The Doom modding community also proclaimed the death of popular sourceport GZDoom, as its contributors departed en masse after tensions with its creator came to a head.

Elsewhere, Doom co-creator John Romero is still working on a new FPS, despite his studio having its main project cancelled by Microsoft earlier this year. Fortunately, Romero Games survived the cancellation and salvaged much of that work, transposing it into a new, smaller indie FPS that Romero says "will be new to people the way that going through Elden Ring was a really new experience".

If you haven't heard, Steam is having a Black Friday sale for the first time ever. Yep, despite hosting nonstop sale events all year along, this is the first one formally branded around post-Thanksgiving consumerism.

It's not one of Steam's "big" sales of the year—the kind that takes over the entire store page and gives away stickers—but it does have one standout deal that you should really consider for the FPS enjoyer in your life. Doom: The Dark Ages is on sale at 50% off, marked down to $34.99.

That's a tremendous deal on one of the best (and only) big budget singleplayer shooters in recent years, especially considering it's barely six months old. Is it the best Doom of the modern trilogy? No, but id gave itself a tough act to follow, and The Dark Ages is still gigantic and impressive in different ways than Doom '16 and its 2020 followup, Eternal.

As I wrote in my 80% Doom: The Dark Ages review back in May:

"This is Doom at its most indulgent and deliciously violent, but it's also dumbed down and undeniably the easiest of the trilogy. Maps are uncharacteristically barren, secrets abnormally obvious, and puzzles so simple that they hardly fit the description. Viewed through the lens of loud feedback that insisted Doom Eternal was too complicated, The Dark Ages is an overcorrection."

If you were a big fan of the swings id took with Eternal, you might not glom onto The Dark Ages' deliberately slower combat. Months later, I do understand it better now that I've played through the original Doom for the first time on Steam Deck—The Dark Ages' flat maps and weapon simplicity could be viewed as a throwback, though even so, the aggressiveness of OG Doom's tight quarters and demon density provide the deeper thrills.

This is all to say that The Dark Ages is a much easier recommendation to FPS fans of all tastes at $35. It's a meaty, 22-level campaign stuffed with memorable guns and more cutscenes than you'd probably expect from id. And if you're one of many who lost access to The Dark Ages when Game Pass skyrocketed in price and drove a bunch of people to cancel, here's your shot at an also-inherently-fleeting digital copy.

Doom: The Dark Ages received a whole new mode back in August—the wave-based "Ripatorium" that allows players to build their own demonic encounters. But it seems id Software has had a rethink about the Ripatorium, as The Dark Ages' latest update substantially overhauls how it works.

While update 2.3 is mainly Ripatorium focussed, it's worth briefly going over the adjustments it makes to the campaign and general play. Regarding the former, the update introduces another round of combat encounter tweaks, adding an enemy here, removing another there. On the latter front, it adds an option to adjust TDA's "Brink of Death" feature, which determines how likely you are to survive a near-death situation. Basically, you can now reduce the system's impact on combat, making you more likely to die at low-health.

Onto the main event, update 2.3 introduces "Ripatorium 2.0", which chiefly converts The Dark Ages' arena mode from a purely wave-based affair to a more structured round-based format. Previously, players only had broad control over an encounter, able to select enemies they wanted to fight, dictate number of times enemies would respawn and choose whether or not to set a time limit or to simply toggle endless mode.

With Ripatorium 2.0, players instead face up to five rounds of enemies, with custom settings available for each round. You can still adjust the type of demons you face and number of respawns within each round, with rounds supporting up to 10 waves apiece. But the round structure means you don't just face the same arrangement of enemies over and over, and instead can build a greater sense of progression into a fight.

In addition, the update adds five new music tracks to listen to when eviscerating hellspawn, and adds new encounter presets for players who aren't interested in a custom experience and just want to dive right in. Most interesting to me, though, is passcode sharing. This lets players save encounters they've created with a unique passcode, then share them with friends and other players.

In isolation, passcode sharing is not all that exciting. But id Software is looking to add the best custom encounters as "community-made" presets, encouraging players to share the codes on social media (tagged with @doom). While I'm not all that interested in designing my own Doom encounters, I am interested in playing the best encounters that other people have designed.

In fact, I'd love to see a system that lets players share and rate encounters within the game, kinda like the underrated Snapmap system from Doom 2016. I appreciate this is probably much harder to implement, as The Dark Ages doesn't have much of an online component in the way 2016 did. But it would give the Ripatorium, and TDA more generally, a bit more prominence in the game's post-launch life.

Not that there's anything wrong with releasing a purely singleplayer FPS—in fact, I'd like to see many more of them. But I'm also aware that the modern industry makes that a difficult sell, so I'm in favour of whatever helps justify making singleplayer shooters. Strong player-creation support is one such example, so anything that makes it easier to build a community around the Ripatorium seems like a good idea.

FPS legend John Romero is on record as regretting, and apologizing for, the famous Daikatana magazine ad that stated he was about to make you his bitch. But in recent years, a Photoshop of the ad has taken on a second life as the perfect memey encapsulation of Romero's social media interactions with former id designer Sandy Petersen.

For more than four years, Romero has been politely but pointedly correcting every inaccurate memory and anecdote Petersen's shared on Twitter (now X) from his time working at id Software. Nearly each tweet begins with some variation of "Hi Sandy, hope you're doing well" before nuking the original statement from orbit.

Petersen joined id during the development of Doom in 1993, working on several of the game's levels and designing more for Doom 2. He also worked on Quake before leaving the studio in mid-1997, about a year after Romero's exit. That makes for a good bit of overlap, though of course Romero was with id from the beginning, having co-founded the studio in 1991.

Romero, notably, has talked about having hyperthymesia, which he credits for giving him a vivid memory. I don't know if his recall is perfect, but each time Petersen trots out an id anecdote, Romero seems to have a confident correction locked and loaded in the chamber. It turns out that "John Romero's about to hope you're doing well" is more intimidating than Daikatana ever could be.

Only once in the four-and-a-half year history of these exchanges have I seen Petersen fight back to insist he had part of his memory right. And, y'know, I think with that sort of hit rate I would personally just stop posting forever—though given some of Petersen's other takes, maybe being wrong about the minutia of Doom is a better use of his time.

And now, a short but satisfying history of John Romero Hoping Sandy Petersen Is Doing Well.

2021

Given what a phenomenon Doom was, selling 100,000 copies sure sounded low.

The specificity of distinguishing "skies" from "a skybox" particularly tickles me in this one.

Give Tom Hall credit for the rocket jump!

"I appreciate your interest in Doom" may low key the most savage burn of them all.

(Petersen responded to his original tweet guessing that it was Grenadier models, and that the cacodemon wasn't made. Both seemingly incorrect.)

2022

Damn Sandy, I didn't work at id and even I know that Commander Keen had two different trilogies clearly built on different engines because I played 'em.

The rare follow-up correction.

2024

It is really hard to believe that Sandy Petersen would've had to convince the rest of id Software to keep the shotgun.

2025

Tom gets his flowers again.

"Hello again" is when I'd start frantically trying to turn off my phone.

Petersen fired back on this one, insisting Steed "did the animations for Quake, including the fish." He's not credited in the original CD manual for Quake, which only lists Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud as artists. However, he does show up in the credits in later manuals like this one, so perhaps Paul contributed to some of Quake's post-release updates, like its mission packs. Steed unfortunately passed away in 2012.

2026

Here we are again. After a cordial exchange between Carmack, Petersen, and Romero about Quake's 30th anniversary, Petersen goes off on videogame piracy, claiming "70-90% of Doom's players pirated it" and blaming that figure for id Software being "gutted" during Quake's development.

Romero's not having it.

Doom: The Dark Ages is officially Steam Deck verified, which is surprising only in how long it took considering id Software's history delivering shooters that are not just visually impressive, but exceedingly well optimised. The studio has worked minor miracles with handheld ports too, most notably the Nintendo Switch version of 2020's Doom Eternal.

That said, The Dark Ages was the first Doom game to be fully and constantly ray-traced, making it a less obvious candidate for handheld gaming when it launched. While it ran well enough on most PC hardware and could even deliver reasonable framerates on a cheap gaming laptop, as Andy Edser noted in his PC performance analysis, the Steam Deck nonetheless struggled to meet its minimum requirements, and as such performance was underwhelming.

But that's all changed, apparently. Update 2.2 introduces several handheld-centric optimisations and quality-of-life features. This includes general performance improvements and advanced optimisation settings for handheld devices, as well as more performant SFX and VFX when gaming on the go.

The update also adds handheld-specific autodetection, and device specifications for numerous devices including Steam Deck and the newly released Xbox Rog Ally X. I suspect the latter's launch is partly behind Doom: The Dark Ages' extra performance push, given that both id Software and its publisher Bethesda are owned by Microsoft.

Aptly named YouTuber Deck Wizard recently took Doom: TDA for a handheld spin, and id's optimisations certainly seem to deliver a consistently smooth experience—though it is unsurprisingly a lot less shiny than when played on a proper PC.

While update 2.2 is geared mainly toward smoother handheld play, it also folds in a bunch of bugfixes for both the campaign and the wave-based Ripatorium added in August. Primarily, it makes several tweaks to weapon balance, ensuring that damage stats are now registered properly when an enemy receives multiple damage instances in the same frame as its death (The Doom Slayer certainly dishes out the pain in The Dark Ages), while also tweaking the Slayer's shield so that it properly accounts for melee stagger.

Elsewhere, the update adjusts numerous combat encounters across the campaign, and fixes an issue with "Sentinel civilians‘ heads being out of place in Hebeth, Siege – Part 1, and Sentinel Command Station." Given just how many heads end up out of place in Doom: The Dark Ages, id Software should be credited for spotting these ones being incorrectly displaced.

While I'd probably still recommend you play The Dark Ages on a traditional desktop if you can, it's well worth picking up if you're partial to a bit of first-person blasting. While not as strong as 2020's Doom Eternal, it does successfully remix the shooter's fundamentals once again, as Morgan Park noted in his Doom: The Dark Ages review, where he called it"the trilogy's sharpest zag yet—recasting the Slayer from a meaty fighter jet, ducking and dashing past the hordes of Hell, to a stalwart tank, smashing shield-first into the action".

Original story:

40-year games industry veteran Rebecca Heineman has started a GoFundMe to help deal with an aggressive cancer diagnosis, one whose costs are only partially covered by private insurance. Heineman's career extends back to the days of Space Invaders, with credits on at least 71 games including The Bard's Tale 3 and early ports of Doom and Baldur's Gate 2.

Heineman began treatment and diagnostics following PAX West this year, and is set to start chemotherapy for cancer in her lungs and liver. Parts of Heineman's treatment are covered by insurance, but she is also liable for overwhelming bills from out-of-network treatment.

"This is the fight for my life. Please help me," Heineman wrote on the GoFundMe page. "I want to keep creating games and comics and I need your help to beat this cancer."

In 1980, Heineman became the first formal US champion of any videogame, winning a national championship Space Invaders tournament in New York. She then entered the industry as a professional, starting a long and far-reaching career. Mobygames lists 67 games Heineman is credited on, but is also missing at least four of the 43 games listed on Heineman's Wikipedia page, with potentially other omissions as well.

Alongside Brian Fargo, Jay Patel, Chris Wells, and Troy Worrell, Heineman co-founded Interplay, the '80s-'90s megastudio that produced Fallout, Baldur's Gate, The Bard's Tale, Wasteland, and more. Heineman's design credits at Interplay include Dragon Wars and The Bard's Tale 3, but much of her work has been in programming, particularly ports.

Heineman's work on the 3DO version of Doom has gotten a laudatory reappraisal in recent years⁠—not because it's a particularly good port, but because it exists at all despite a nightmare development cycle. Heineman crunched for 10 weeks to make a working version of Doom for the wonky, failed console, all at the behest of a capricious businessman who bit off more than he could chew. Heineman went into detail about the story in a 2015 vlog about the project.

"There's no getting around it, Doom for the 3DO is terrible," Digital Foundry's John Linneman said in a 2017 video about Doom's console versions. "Doom is set to ship in time for Christmas, and the 3DO company is begging for help. Heineman accepts under the impression that much of the game is already done. But in reality, nothing was done." Back in 2015, Heineman dumped the complete archive of 3DO Doom on GitHub, allowing modders and all five 3DO enthusiasts to go crazy with it.

Earlier this year, Gayming Magazine awarded Heineman its Gayming Icon Award, writing that, "As an out and proud trans woman in the games industry, she’s been a trailblazer. Not just behind the scenes, but on the front lines creating some of the most beloved franchises in video game history. Her advocacy for LGBTQ+ inclusion, accessibility, and diversity in tech has inspired countless developers and players."

At the time of writing, Heineman's campaign is sitting at nearly $29,000 of a $50,000 initial funding goal. You can help the campaign by donating directly or sharing her page on GoFundMe.

Back in the days when I used to haunt Newgrounds as a perpetually online teenager, a new episode of Madness would always shoot right to the top of the portal charts. The series, created by animator Krinkels, was a sort-of cultural after-dinner mint for fans of The Matrix.

Madness' fast-paced, hyper-violent shorts involve grey, cross-faced people blasting each other to smithereens. Central to the series' appeal was how its action scenes grew more impressive and elaborate with every passing episode, and it was always fun to see how far Krinkels could push things when a new entry dropped.

I haven't thought about Madness for a long time (though the series hasn't gone away, as I'll get to shortly). But those memories came flooding back when I spied Somewhere in Hell, a Doom 2 mod that goes to impressive lengths to recreate Madness' flashy, bloody action in id Software's shooter sequel.

Somewhere in Hell basically replaces Doom's weapons and enemies with goons and firearms from Krinkels' animations. But what's impressive is how modder Recurracy 2 has infused the mod with the speed and vicious lethality of Krinkels' animations. The legions of monochromatic foes you face move across the maps fast, crossing whole rooms in a matter of seconds to get in your face.

Weapons like the revolver and the double-barrelled shotgun, meanwhile, are imbued with joint-ripping recoil. When bullets connect with your faceless adversaries, they explode like an overstuffed haggis, showering the walls, floor, and the screen itself with gore.

Somewhere in Hell has been in development for a while, but it recently released its 1.0 version, which features 33 weapons and five playable characters. The mod also supports a bunch of custom mechanics like dual wielding weapons, while some of those characters have unique abilities such as a Max-Payne style shoot-dodge.

You can download Somewhere in Hell over on ModDB. If that isn't enough Madness-related action for you, it's worth noting the series has an official game—Madness: Project Nexus. This is a 3D, third-person blend of shooter and beat 'em up that was released back in 2021, and seems to be well-regarded among Madness fans.

The animated series is going strong too. The last episode "Contravention", was released last year, while Krinkels is gearing up to celebrate Madness Day this coming Monday, with twitch streams, interviews, and an art, animation, and music competition for fans with cash prizes. It's weirdly reassuring to see this old corner of the Internet still going strong.

Quake and Quake 2 are, famously, very different shooters. The original is a dark gothic fantasy with a side of HP Lovecraft, while the latter leans hard into industrial sci-fi. I've always thought of them as entirely separate stories, but Quake 2's latest official episodes—the Machine Games-developed Call of The Machine—explicitly connects the two, with the episode's primary antagonist summoning several Shamblers from the first game to attack the player.

This overlap serves as the primary inspiration for Call of the Void, a fanmade Quake 2 episode that takes place after Call of The Machine. This episode throws together Quake 1 and 2's menagerie in much more literal fashion, splicing the roster of both games to create an army of monstrous hybrids.

The episode consists of five "huge" new maps that mix "new and old scenarios from both franchises". Whether this means the maps are inspired by or directly based upon levels from the first two Quake games is unclear. What is clear, weirdly for a Quake game, is the plot. The mod's premise sees your character allying with the race of gods that Quake 1 bosses Chton and Shub-Niggurath descended from, after the Strogg took their remains and, well, Stroggified them (along with all of their minions). It is gloriously stupid and I am 100% here for it.

Naturally, the primary draw here is those hybrid monsters. There are 18 of them in all, plus two new bosses and 11 Prototype hybrids. The mod's creators, Rest in Pixels, break down its bestiary in a post over on ModDB, so I won't spoil too many of the surprises here. But a few examples include Quake 1's zombies spliced with Quake 2 wretched marine prisoners, a Quake 2 parasite with the head of Quake 1's dogs, and a Quake 1 Shambler merged with the Quake 2's rocket-toting Maidens—the latter of which is truly the stuff of nightmares.

Curiously, this isn't the first hybrid FPS conversion on the modders' resume. One of the team, Drugod, was involved in the creation of Bloom, a similar rework that squashes together Doom and Blood in a new 8 map campaign. Bloom has an even larger amalgamated horde than Call of the Void, with more than 50 compound enemies battling alongside 30 original foes from both series.

You can download Call of The Void here. The mod's designed to be fully compatible with Quake 2 Remastered, and along with the new levels and enemies, comes with a custom soundtrack that seems pretty darned great for an accompaniment to a free mod.

At the end of the second episode of Noclip's video series on the history of MachineGames, studio head Jerk Gustafsson dropped a bit of a bombshell: The devs at MachineGames would like to make a direct sequel to 2017's Wolfenstein: The New Colossus.

"We have always seen this as a trilogy," said Gustafsson. "That journey for BJ, even during those first weeks at id, when we mapped out New Order, we still had the plan for at least [BJ], what would happen in the second one and what would happen in the third one.

"I think that's important to say, because⁠—at least I hope⁠—we're not done with Wolfenstein yet. We have a story to tell."

It isn't surprising that MachineGames would return to the series eventually: It's a storied name not only in first person shooters, but also stealth and simulation going back to the Apple 2 original. What I wasn't sure about was the direct continuation of the story and world begun in 2014's Wolfenstein: The New Order.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle definitely scratched a similar itch to the story-centric but mechanically rich new Wolfensteins, but their story felt a little stalled-out in the meantime. Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus ended on an open, but potentially conclusive note, while the 2019 spinoff Youngblood jumped the story forward 20 years and centered on BJ Blazkowicz's twin daughters.

A mainline follow-up would need to be an awkward interquel between Colossus and Youngblood, a continuation of the less-played and poorly-received spinoff, or some kind of timeline switchup/retcon⁠—all challenging maneuvers for such a dramatic, narrative-focused series.

But I trust MachineGames has the chops to pull it off. Whatever form this sequel takes, though, expect to wait a good long while for it: MachineGames only just released Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's story DLC, The Order of Giants.

When remasters of Heretic and Hexen were surprise-released last week, my interest was piqued despite myself. I played both in the '90s and didn't love either of them. Released in 1994 by Raven Software, Heretic was a fantasy take on Doom and it was OK. The following year Hexen offered an RPG take on Doom—by way of Heretic—and it drove me nuts.

The weapons in Heretic were novel enough. I loved the shotgun-adjacent ethereal crossbow a lot, and punching gargoyles in the face with magic bracers was weirdly funny. It was always kinda cool how you could collect items to use later: spamming a hall with a dozen Time Bombs of the Ancients and watching swathes of golems perish felt pretty clever compared to just pointing and shooting at them. But overall the game wasn't different enough from Doom to excite me. Its approach to fantasy was pretty cartoonish, especially compared to what would come later in the form of Hexen.

But playing Heretic in 2025, it's much better than I remember. This might have to do with Nightdive Studios' brilliant handling of the remasters. Whereas the engine powering Doom and Heretic capped out at 35 fps, you can play these new remasters at 120 fps without using a source port. Widescreen support and crisper graphics definitely helps too, as does an almost supernaturally smooth free look (you could look up and down in the original Heretic, but it was super awkward, and there was no good reason to do it). It definitely feels like an indie boomer shooter now, with that '90s sense of indomitable speed. Unlike say, Rise of the Triad, it has aged remarkably well.

Nightdive has also made gameplay tweaks, some of which—honestly, most of which—you probably won't notice if it's been a quarter of a century since you last played these games. Some maps have been tweaked in both Heretic and Hexen, mostly to make them more parseable and less cryptic, and some weapons have been very subtly changed. The ammo capacity of the ethereal crossbow has been decreased, for example, meaning you can't just main it. You can toggle these changes on and off.

But I also think there's another factor that makes me appreciate Heretic more in 2025 than I did in 1994: it's the level design. Heretic's world makes a whole lot more sense, and is a whole lot more sophisticated on an architectural level, than the level design in Doom.

Heretic originally arrived only a matter of weeks after Doom 2's October 1994 release date, but it still manages to better the level design even in that sequel. In fact, Heretic's admirable attempts at creating real-feeling areas—see highlights like E1M4 'The Guard Tower', and E1M5 'The Citadel'— feel like evolutions of Doom 2 highlights like 'Suburbs' and 'Tenements', despite releasing slightly earlier than them. All of these maps tried to simulate a sense of wandering through a hamlet, or a city, full of multi-storey tenements and warehouses, in an engine that couldn't easily pull that off. Heretic's approach felt more true to life.

Heretic is also really good at simulating a wide natural environment in an engine that's much better suited to making hallways and dungeons. My favourite example is E3M3 'The Confluence', which doesn't so much try to create a lifelike river convergence as it does capture a dramatic high fantasy approach to one. Oh, and Raven's early masterpiece has to be E1M6 'The Cathedral', which is among the most colourful and atmospheric Doom engine levels I've played, but with a tomb-like approach to exploration that makes me feel like Indiana Jones.

Heretic did end up getting a proper sequel in 1998, but before that we got Hexen: Beyond Heretic in 1995. Though it's also built in the OG Doom engine, Hexen is no retread of Heretic: it offers up three classes—fighter, cleric and mage—and four weapons for each. Some enemies carry over from Heretic, but the vast majority do not. It's a big, blustering, ambitious attempt to make something akin to an action RPG—or maybe even something like Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss—in an engine that's all about fragging and finding keys. Raven obviously wanted to create a sprawling epic, and it got at least part of that ambition right.

Because jeez does Hexen sprawl. Its biggest diversion from other Doom-engine games is its hub-based level structure. Levels branching from a hub generally hold the key—or a switch—that would open a new route in the main area. It was a cool idea (and this late in the Doom engine's commercial life, Hexen needed at least one cool idea) but it resulted in a horribly obtuse outing. A supernatural reserve of patience was required in a game that often planted switches at the whole other end of the world from the door it opened. Even in the '90s, when the novelty of exploring 3D worlds was still a huge part of the appeal of first-person games, it was an extremely rough trot.

To Nightdive's eternal credit, the studio has done its best to make Hexen suck a whole lot less. You basically always needed to use the map in Hexen, but now the map is heaps more useful, showing the location of important switches and doors even if you haven't visited the location yet. In addition to that, the hub areas now have little signs in the environment that provide a bit more clarity regarding what you've done so far, and what still needs to happen. You can even change your class mid-game, now.

Nightdive could have just re-released Hexen with some cosmetic improvements and left it at that, but instead they've made some small but important alterations that serve to make Hexen… almost fun to play. The truth is that the hub-and-spoke design tends to result in some very dull, very perfunctory-feeling spokes, most of which can't hold a torch to the gorgeous level design found in Heretic.

Though I never loved either of these games in the '90s, I reckon Heretic + Hexen is a brilliant package. Heretic benefits greatly from a cosmetic uplift, and the Nightdive-created levels make it attractive for players who remember the original more vividly. Hexen is a curio, but hell, it sure has a glorious mood, and it's fun to see all the different ways studios were scrambling to squeeze blood out of the Doom engine by the mid '90s (see also: Strife). This is a more ambitious archival project from Nightdive than the recent Doom treatment, for its focus not just on posterity but modern playability.

In a recent episode of Nightdive Studios' Deep Dive podcast, legendary developer John Romero casually revealed a surprising road not taken in both his own career, and gaming history writ large: Looking Glass Studios (System Shock, Thief) founder Paul Neurath asked Romero to co-found the company with him, but Romero had a prior commitment.

Both developers worked for Origin Systems, the foundational PC gaming studio started by Ultima creator Richard Garriott. "I got my job there in 1987,' said Romero. "My first job was porting 2400 AD from the Apple 2 to the Commodore 64." Following the cancellation of this port, Romero was assigned to work on the game Space Rogue with Neurath, an ambitious combo of space sim and RPG that presaged the likes of Wing Commander.

Origin had offices in Austin, Texas and Salem, New Hampshire, but would close its Salem office and relocate staff to Texas in 1989, before the release of Space Rogue. Neurath, reportedly not wanting to leave New England, parted ways with Origin and founded a new game company in its old offices: Blue Sky Productions, which later changed its name to Looking Glass. Romero, for his part, left the company to found a start-up with another Origin coworker called Inside Out Software.

"Paul had asked me before I left if I wanted to start a company with him, and I told him that I'd already promised the week before to found a company with my manager [at Origin]," said Romero. "But he was starting Blue Sky Productions."

As Nightdive VP of business development Larry Kuperman pointed out in the interview, this could have been a major divergence point in gaming history: Romero working on Ultima Underworld and System Shock instead of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein, and Doom. Would the major players of what would become id Software still form their own company together, or would they have found their fortunes elsewhere in the industry?

Instead, Romero would eventually leave Inside Out for Shreveport, Louisiana-based software company Softdisk, where the later founders of id Software would all work together. Looking Glass and id went on to be friendly rivals in the development of early first person, 3D games on PC, codifying design rules, mechanics, and tech that has influenced everything from Half-Life to The Elder Scrolls.

The interview covered a range of topics from Romero's career, including why he thinks indies are the future of game development, the strange origins of the hunting sim, and how Wolfenstein's four-month development was actually leisurely compared to id's previous games.

Doom: The Dark Ages is definitely one of my favourite games from this year, even if it didn't quite match the dizzying heights of Doom Eternal. But with its latest update, id Software's action-packed prequel may have taken two thundering steps toward the quality of its predecessor. Update 2 brings one massive new mode to the game, joined by an array of small but significant adjustments to the prequel's combat system.

That big new feature is named the "Ripatorium", and it's basically an arena mode that allows you to build your own encounters. The mode comes with a detailed 'encounter manager' that lets you adjust the number and type of demons that spawn and the amount of waves those demons will spawn in. You can also specify a time limit for the encounter, or toggle endless mode to keep the fight going until you run out of interest/energy/blood.

For its initial release, the Ripatorium has three different arenas to choose from, and includes a jukebox feature where you can pick which growling metal track you want playing in the background while you run around tearing out hearts. Id also says it would like to "expand upon the Ripatorium more in future updates," so expect more arenas and features to be added over time.

The Ripatorium is accompanied by a substantial combat overhaul that attacks The Dark Ages slower, heavier fighting style at both high and low levels, affecting everything from how major systems work to individual combat scenarios. There's a vast number of changes here. But one that immediately stood out to me was that the Slayer can now interrupt any weapon-swap animation to block incoming attacks. While by no means a deal-breaker, being swiped at by demons while switching weapons was definitely a nuisance when I played The Dark Ages back in May, so I'm glad this has been addressed.

Other improvements include faster weapon-swap speed, a new slider to adjust the slow motion effect of parries & melee attacks, and improvements to the dragon and mech sequences of the campaign. As for those combat encounter tweaks, these primarily affect acts two and three of the game, mainly adding more enemies to late-game fights. Since The Dark Ages' combat plateaued a little early, adding extra spice to those later levels certainly won't go amiss.

The Ripatorium is open for business now. If you haven't picked up The Dark Ages yet (or played it via Game Pass), it's currently available for 25% off on Steam, bringing the price down from a hefty $/£70 to a more reasonable $/£52.

One year after surprise-launching Doom + Doom 2, id Software and Nightdive have done it again—this time with the classic fantasy shooters Heretic and Hexen, which have been bundled together and updated with performance improvements, an "enhanced" soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult, local and online multiplayer, built-in mod support, and more.

The new Heretic + Hexen bundle includes the three originals—Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders, Hexen: Beyond Heretic, and the Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel expansion—along with two all-new episodes "created in collaboration between individuals at id Software + Nightdive Studios," Heretic: Faith Renewed and Hexen: Vestiges of Grandeur. It adds up to 117 campaign maps and 120 deathmatch maps across Heretic and Hexen, which should keep you going for a while.

The definitive re-release of Heretic + Hexen are available on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch!📖 slayersclub.bethesda.net/en-US/articl...

— @nightdivestudios.bsky.social (@nightdivestudios.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-08-07T20:11:16.634Z

Enhancements include support for 4K resolutions, widescreen displays, frame rates of up to 120 fps, controller support, bug fixes, and a "game balance toggle" enabling players to switch between the original or enhanced gameplay. New accessibility options have also been added, including improved legibility, contrast and FX adjustments, and text-to-speech features, and a "Vault" containing concept art and other assets from the original games. You can toggle between the new and original soundtracks too, if you like.

While the announcement of the new Heretic + Hexen bundle was a surprise, it wasn't entirely unexpected. GOG announced earlier today that Heretic, Hexen, and Deathkings "will be unavailable for purchase for about two hours," but added, "don't be alarmed, they'll be back." Suspicions, as they say, were raised:

Heretic + Hexen is available for $15/£13.49/€15 on Steam and GOG, but—this is cool—if you own any of the three original games, you'll be upgraded to the new package for free, and will continue to have access to the originals too.

In a recent appearance on Nightdive Studios' Deep Dive podcast, Doom designer John Romero talked about the ways id Software casually revolutionized PC gaming in the early '90s, all on a blistering release schedule where "taking their time" meant cranking out an all-time classic faster than most hero shooters are able to add a new character.

"We had a technology that no one had yet on the PC, that had been sitting there, ready to be taken advantage of," Romero said of id's early days and the juice behind Commander Keen, its first game. "The PC shipped in August of 1981, and it's September of '90, and in nine years, no one has done what John [Carmack] did in just a few hours at night."

That particular technology, the beginning of Carmack's programming legend, was fast-scrolling 2D graphics for platformers. Though such capability is taken for granted today, PC platformers before Keen weren't able to keep up with the specialized hardware powering console platformers.

Famously, id pitched Nintendo on a port of Super Mario 3, only making Keen after the publisher's rejection. Romero credited this coup, in part, to Carmack reading programmer and future id employee Michael Abrash's book, Power Graphics Programming. In 1991 alone, id released three Commander Keen sequels, Wolfenstein precursor Catacomb 3D, and a host of other games.

"Wolfenstein was the first time that we were able to say, 'We're gonna take as long as it takes to make a game,'" Said Romero. "Before that, it was always two months. We were making games for two months for like, a year and a half. So finally it's like, no more time limit, we do it as well as we can, and it took us⁠—to upload the shareware version of Wolfenstein⁠—it took us four months."

As for why the team decided to take more time on Wolfenstein 3D, Romero said that, "We knew that we were doing something really special, because, well, for one: We'd never seen anything like it. We boiled the essence of the game down to the speed of the player and the movement, and got rid of everything that stopped the player from doing that. The results spoke for themselves."

Romero quipped that this cycle was a "luxury" for the four-person team comprising id at the time, but it's mind boggling when compared to the multi-year development cycles of today. Making games has grown exponentially more complicated in the intervening years, and I don't want to indulge in insufferable, armchair, "devs these days" finger wagging.

But there's no way around it: That id team was built different, inventing technical and design solutions for 3D worlds at a breakneck pace in a hothouse in Shreveport, Louisiana, and that's still an incredible place and time in gaming history to contemplate.

Romero's interview with Nightdive covered a wide range of topics, including the strange birth of the hunting game genre, and why Romero thinks indies are the future of the industry. Though released afterward, the interview was recorded before Microsoft unceremoniously pulled funding for Romero Games' triple-A shooter project, though the studio is still looking for a new publisher.

When Doom: The Dark Ages launched back in May, developers id Software promised that it would add an extra graphics option in a later patch, specifically path tracing. The stompy-stompy shooter uses 'normal' ray tracing for all lighting, shadows, and reflections by default, and now that I've had a few days to explore the new path tracing option in a beta patch, I can say with certainty that it makes a noticeable difference—for better and for worse.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though, so let me back up and explain what the patch is actually bringing to the graphics fore. First of all, there's the aforementioned path tracing. This is still ray tracing, but rather than just being a simple case of one ray per pixel, to find one light source, path tracing samples multiple potential paths back to light sources.

The upshot is that the lighting is far more realistic, and because it gets applied across the entire scene, every single item is correctly lit. The patch also adds the option to enable path-traced shadows and reflections, making them both a lot more accurate.

Finally, the game's standard denoiser (an algorithm used to tidy up a scene after it has been ray traced) can be swapped for a choice of two: Nvidia Ray Reconstruction or an Nvidia 'real-time' denoiser. The former requires DLSS to be enabled so the latter is only for cases where you have a GeForce graphics card but you don't want to use DLSS.

To get an idea of what kind of performance impact these options generate when switched on, I used a GeForce RTX 5070 in a Core Ultra 9 285K platform. An MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk WiFi motherboard was used, using the latest A80 BIOS and Intel 200S Boost enabled, with a set of 48 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5-8400 CUDIMMs.

Path tracing performance impact

To get a baseline of the normal performance, I measured the in-game frame rate of Doom: The Dark Ages in the opening sequence of chapter two. The resolution was set to 1440p, upscaling was disabled, and each of the six quality presets was examined. This was then repeated with DLSS Quality enabled, and all of the path tracing patch options enabled (i.e. path tracing itself, path traced shadows and reflections, and ray reconstruction).

As you can see, the overall performance is hit very hard, with this particular graphics card at least. On the highest quality presets, the impact to the average frame rate is roughly 39%, with the 1% lows falling by 42%.

Worse still is how much the use of all the path tracing options affects the average PC latency. Using the Ultra Nightmare preset and 'standard' ray tracing, Nvidia's Frameview recorded a mean PCL of around 29 milliseconds; enabling path tracing pushes this up to 48 milliseconds.

Generally speaking, once you're above 30 milliseconds, you'll almost certainly notice the lag and you definitely will when the system is taking almost 50 milliseconds to respond. There is a fix for all of this—no prizes for guessing what that is—and I'll come to that in a moment, but for now, let's take a look at seeing what the path tracing fuss is all about.

Path tracing visual benefits

The above screenshots show just how much better the reflections and overall lighting are when using path tracing. You perhaps never noticed this when first playing Doom: The Dark Ages, but the fancier algorithm properly lights your weapon, whereas without path tracing, it's just the same at all times.

Translucent surfaces, such as glass in doorways, now correctly light up other surfaces around them and even shadows correctly 'pass' through glass. Global illumination is also much better, and fine detail that gets lost with normal ray tracing is as clear as daylight with path tracing.

You might think that you won't notice these in motion, so I captured some footage of something else that's new in the patch: built-in performance benchmarks. My normal video capture rig decided to sulk and not play ball, so some of the stuttering you can see is down to the fact that the same rig is being used to run the game and capture the benchmark (Core Ultra 7 265K, RTX 5090, 48 GB DDR5-8000).

Looks pretty good, yes? Now compare the above footage to the one below, where all the path tracing options are enabled. Note that DLSS Quality has been enabled to allow for the use of Nvidia's ray reconstruction.

The graphical improvements are clearly noticeable (as is the performance hit, of course) and while it's perhaps a little overdone in some places, the overall lighting and reflections are superior with path tracing.

However, the camera's motion in the benchmark is relatively slow, and in the middle of a heated battle, you're arguably not going to be actively paying attention to whether or not a door's glass panels are correctly transmitting light. In outdoor areas, you more feel the improvements than spot them, but anywhere there are surfaces that can reflect a lot of light, path tracing will certainly stand out.

Path tracing performance on other GPUs

Whether you'd want to enable the new features will depend heavily on what graphics card you have, though. I only had time to explore a handful of GPUs, but you probably already know what the score is.

The RTX 5090 drops 34% in terms of average frame rate at 4K, but once you move to older generations of GPUs, the performance hit gets considerably larger. For example, the RTX 4080 Super falls by 44% on average at 4K and the Radeon RX 7900 XT by a shocking 64% at 1440p.

And when it comes to the lower-end of the GPU scale, the RX 6750 XT takes a 67% hit to its average frame rate, even at 1080p, and the little RTX 3060 Ti drops...well...pretty much all of its frames. In the case of that particular GPU, a sizeable chunk of the performance drop is down to its 8 GB of VRAM—it's only just enough for 1080p Ultra Nightmare normally, and once you enable path tracing, it's short by three or four GBs of memory.

I did say earlier that there is a fix to the performance hit of path tracing and I have no doubt that you'll have guessed what that is, too. Yes, it's frame generation, and once again, Nvidia's Multi Frame Generation (MFG) works wonders for Doom: The Dark Ages path-traced performance.

More importantly, it doesn't affect the mean PCL, with the RTX 5090 and 5070 getting the same amount of lag with 3x MFG as they do without frame generation. That said, it's still around the 50 millisecond region for the 5070, but the 5090's PCL is a mere 36 milliseconds.

Sadly, upscaling and frame generation aren't magic fixes for every GPU. Even using FSR Balanced, the RX 7900 XT's 1% lows are still awful when using 2x frame generation, and the combination of two generates some pretty horrible-looking blurring on fast-moving edges.

It's not possible to use DLSS upscaling with FSR frame generation in Doom: The Dark Ages, so I had to use FSR for both with the RTX 3060 Ti. Now, you might think 51 fps on average is pretty reasonable, but that's at 1080p with FSR Performance. Oh, and the Low graphics preset. And the lowest possible texture pool. You don't want to see just how bad that all looks, trust me.

To path trace or not, that is the question

So, is it actually worth enabling all of the extra pretty, path-traced graphics options? Sure, if you have the right graphics card. Unfortunately, that's a very narrow range of models, and it's pretty much just Nvidia's better RTX 50-series cards. You can disable some of the path tracing options (eg, reflections) to claw back some of the performance, but then you might as well disable all of them and just enjoy Doom: The Dark Ages at full speed.

Just as with the early days of ray tracing in PC games, we're still a couple of GPU generations away from being able to use path tracing like any other graphics setting. As things currently stand, however, it's very much the preserve of the most expensive graphics cards you can buy.

Over 30 years ago, way back in 1992, developers id Software launched Wolfenstein 3D on PCs. Unbeknownst at the time, it also kick-started an evolutionary tree for a series of game engines that are not just synonymous with id Software's subsequent Doom and Quake franchises, but are also famous for pushing the boundaries of graphics rendering.

Yes, we're talking about id Tech, and with Doom: The Dark Ages, we've now reached version eight. Of course, game engines are more than just about graphics, but it's arguably what made id Tech as famous as it is.

So let's take a journey through each successive version of the evergreen game engine, looking at the first game to use it, what made it stand out from the crowd, and take a quick browse through the work of other developers that licensed id Tech for their own projects.

id Tech 0 | Wolfenstein 3D (1992)

In 1992, id Software's programming duties were handled by just three people: John Carmack (graphics and runtime code), John Romero (tools used to make the game), and Jason Blochowiak (sub-routines). Together, they created what would eventually be called id Tech 0, though at the time, it was simply labelled 'Wolfenstein 3D engine'.

It wasn't the first game that Carmack coded to use 3D graphics, though he chose an unusual method for rendering the three-dimensional world: ray casting. In some ways, ray casting is similar to the ray tracing we see in the very latest games, but due to the limitations of gaming PCs in the 1990s, Carmack was forced to keep it very simple.

In Wolfenstein 3D, the graphics rendering starts with the engine creating the ceiling and floor via a flood fill, as two blocks of colour. Then one ray is cast or 'marched' out for every vertical line of pixels—for a resolution of 1080p, that would be a total of 1920 rays. Of course, in 1992, we're only talking about 320 or so rays!

Each ray traverses a two-dimensional map of the world and travels until it reaches an object, such as a wall or door. From how far the ray has travelled, the object's size is calculated and appropriately scaled, to give the impression of depth. A spot of clever math is also used to correct the perspective of the objects, otherwise, everything would look warped, fisheye lens style.

Once this is all done, the engine then colours and textures the column of pixels, before moving on to the next ray. After all of this has been achieved, objects such as enemies, ammo, and food are rendered in the form of 2D sprites.

We've skipped over a lot of the technical details, but if you're interested in understanding exactly how it all works, then grab a copy of Wolfenstein 3D Game Engine Black Book by Fabien Sanglard.

id Tech 0 would be licensed by a handful of other developers, with the most notable being Apogee Software, which created the Rise of the Triad, a game that we reckon everyone should play at least once.

id Tech 1 | Doom (1993)

For id Software's 1993 follow-up, the seminal Doom, Carmack created an improved rendering algorithm he developed for the SNES version of Wolfenstein 3D. Instead of using ray casting to calculate what should be displayed, Doom's engine (aka id Tech 1) handles all of this through a BSP tree or binary space partitioning tree.

Just like its predecessor, Doom's levels are all 2D maps, and a BSP algorithm is used to split them up into a data structure that makes it super quick to work out if something is visible or not.

Vertical surfaces are rendered first, such as walls and doors, by working through the BSP tree. This is followed by all the horizontal surfaces—ceilings and floors—that don't get rendered during the 'vertical' phase. 2D sprites are handled next, to fill the world with monsters, weapons, and ammo, before the final effect—the game's head-up display.

Just as for Wolfenstein 3D, Fabien Sanglard has written a superb breakdown of the making of Doom and how its engine fundamentally works. If you want to know exactly how BSPs are used in the game, then the Doom Game Engine Black Book is a must-read.

Doom's impact on the world of gaming is hard to overstate—not just in terms of shaping genres and game design, but also in how its engine would be licensed by other developers to create very successful games. Wolfenstein 3D and Doom's engines would only be used in a handful of other games, though the latter would be used to create the fantastic Heretic and its sequel, Hexen.

But things really changed for id Software's next big release.

id Tech 2 | Quake (1996) | Quake 2 (1997)

Given Doom's rampant success, it was always going to be a challenge to come up with something better. Fortunately, 1996's Quake would turn out to be just as influential as its predecessor. This was in no small part due to the new game engine that Carmack and co created, as id Tech 2 sported an entirely new renderer.

Instead of flat maps drawn to mimic three dimensions, then overlaid with 2D pre-rendered sprites, Quake's engine handled everything in true 3D. Just like most games do today, arrays of vertices were used to generate polygonal meshes, where the engine transforms and lights them, before rasterising them into pixels.

Textures are then applied to each polygon in one rendering pass, with pre-rendered lightmaps blended in a second pass.

The result was a world that you could look at and move in any direction, with surfaces no longer constrained to be full vertical or horizontal. Those pre-rendered lightmaps did a great job of giving a sense of realistic lighting and shadowing—for 1996, of course!

1997's Quake 2's engine was more of the same (i.e. still essentially id Tech 2), just with sensible improvements all around, such as using the OpenGL API for rendering, allowing for better graphics and performance on graphics cards that supported it.

But perhaps what made the engine really stand out is the number of other developers who licensed either and used it to create some outstanding games. Hexen 2 and Heretic 2, Malice, SiN, Kingpin, Soldier of Fortune, and Anachronox were all great games in their own right, though the real star has to be Half-Life.

Admittedly, Valve rewrote an awful lot of id Tech 2 for its masterpiece, as well as created its own tools and additional sub-routines, but if it didn't exist in the first place, would Half-Life have been as good as it was?

id Tech 3 | Quake 3 Arena (1999)

With Doom sidelined in favour of Quake, id Software chose a multiplayer focus for 1999's Quake 3 Arena, but that didn't mean Carmack gave up pushing the graphics envelope to new heights.

Quake 3 Arena's engine (they still weren't being labelled as id Tech at this stage) introduced three big improvements for graphics: spline-based curved surfaces, shaders, and a fast inverse square root function.

The first one solved the problem that 3D polygonal games suffered from at the time: how to make a surface look curved instead of angular. This was done by using Bézier patches to tessellate, or split up, a mesh into dozens more smaller triangles, which together give the impression of a curved surface.

Today's graphics cards can handle billions of triangles, but back then, it was a major breakthrough in producing ever-more realistic graphics at a playable frame rate. That said, Quake 3 Arena could still bring the most powerful of gaming rigs to its knees once the resolution and graphics settings were maxed out.

The shader system used in Quake 3 Arena was very much a precursor to the shaders used in today's games. Rather than just applying a base texture and lightmap to a polygon, the engine used small scripts to describe the properties of a surface. In this file, there would be information about textures, blending, volumes, emissivity, and even what audio files should be played if the player interacts with the surface.

And while he didn't invent the technique itself, Carmack's implementation of calculating the inverse square root of a number—that is, one divided by the square root of something—became famous in programming circles for being a masterpiece in optimisation and speed.

But what truly made id Tech 3 stand out was the sheer number of games created with it, and the list reads like a 'Who's Who?' of gaming. The two Star Trek: Elite Force shooters, two Medal of Honor games, the original Call of Duty, the Star Wars Jedi Knight duo, Soldier of Fortune's sequel, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and American McGee's Alice, to name but a few!

For its next big release, though, id Software decided it was time to return to an old classic.

id Tech 4 | Doom 3 (2004)

Doom 3 appeared in 2004, and once again, id Software used a new engine, id Tech 4, to raise the graphics bar to a new level. Texturing was now far more advanced, supporting the use of normal and specular maps to improve the level of fine detail on surfaces.

To make this even better, though, Doom 3's renderer calculated all of the lighting on a per-pixel basis, rather than just colouring a triangle's corner (a vertex) and then interpolating that across the rest of the polygon.

Doom 3 also used stencil buffers for its shadow volumes, and together with the per-pixel lighting, the game's visuals were second to none. However, the game's performance wasn't so great.

The original Doom was all about frantic, fast-paced action, whereas Doom 3 was considerably slower—almost like an action, survival-horror game. But even so, the use of stencil buffers and the lighting algorithm demanded the very latest GPU features, leaving a lot of older hardware unable to run the game, and even with a high-end graphics card, the performance was never great.

id Tech 4 was less popular with other developers, too, and compared to Quake 3 Arena, only a small number of studios used it for their games. Still, it gave us the much-maligned Quake 4, the original Prey, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and the underrated Brink.

Five years after the launch of Doom 3, id Software was acquired by ZeniMax Media, which also owned Bethesda Softworks, and from that point onwards, id Software's engines would only be used by itself and ZeniMax's other studios.

Doom 3's engine would also be the last one that id Software ever released the source code for.

id Tech 5 | Rage (2011)

In 2011, id Software once again introduced a new engine with a new name, and even a new game IP. Rage was powered by id Tech 5 (the older engines were then retrospectively renamed in the same manner), and its main standout rendering feature was a technology called MegaTexture.

Technically known as virtual texturing (pdf warning), the method involves using incredibly large textures, up to 128,000 pixels square, where sections would be sampled to be applied to a polygon mesh. The idea behind this is that the main, massive texture would stay in system memory and only the parts required would be streamed into the GPU's local memory.

The benefit of this is that id Software could make one renderer that would work exactly the same, regardless of the hardware platform. Unfortunately, the reality was a whole heap of bugs and rendering glitches at launch, though when everything did work well, the texture quality was certainly better than many other PC games at that time.

It helped that id Tech 5 was packing a whole raft of other graphics tricks, such as soft shadows, HDR rendering, volumetric lighting, screen space reflections, depth of field, and motion blur. ZeniMax Media had two of its developers use id Tech 5.

MachineGames created the Wolfenstein reboots of The New Order and The Old Blood, and Tango Gameworks made The Evil Within series, albeit heavily rewriting id Tech 5 for the second title.

In 2013, John Carmack left id Software for new ventures, the last of the original team to leave, joining Oculus VR to help develop its virtual reality hardware and software.

id Tech 6 | Doom (2016)

It was a bold move to reboot such a well-known franchise, but that's exactly what id Software did, and in 2016, Doom returned and with one hell of an engine.

While he was still at id Software, John Carmack explored the use of ray tracing and voxels for the next id Tech iteration, but when he left, the developers stuck to a traditional polygonal mesh renderer with standard rasterisation to create id Tech 6.

MegaTextures were still in full use but higher in quality, and along with the entire dictionary of modern rendering techniques, the new Doom not only looked extremely good, but it ran very well, too.

It also had a couple of new tricks up its sleeve, such as temporal anti-aliasing, or TAA. This had already been around for a while, but id Tech 6 added the use of super-sampling of motion data to remove the shimmering and blurring that TAA is well-known for.

While it might sound like id Tech 6 didn't bring anything significant to the world of rendering, Adrian Courrèges' breakdown of the graphics in Doom (2016) shows just how complex and multifaceted everything is behind the scenes.

Sadly, id Tech 6 would only be used two more times, by MachineGames again, for two more Wolfenstein games —The New Colossus and Youngblood. The latter was later patched to support Nvidia's RTX technology, though, as it was an early implementation of ray tracing, the results didn't justify the performance hit.

id Tech 7 | Doom Eternal (2020)

For 2020's Doom Eternal, id Software took id Tech 6 and gave it a thorough overhaul, removing the OpenGL code in favour of Vulkan-only, as well as dropping MegaTextures.

By now, id Tech was running as a heavily multi-threaded engine, and instead of using a primary thread to handle the rendering, multiple threads were tasked to operate in parallel, handling shaders, asset streaming (geometry and textures), and data decompression.

The end result is a game that has vastly more detail than its predecessor and even more accurate lighting and shadows, and countless more particles for explosions and gore. And remarkably, it runs even faster than id Tech 6.

A year after launch, Doom Eternal was updated to support Nvidia's DLSS AI-powered upscaler and frame generation technologies, along with ray-traced reflections, to allow all surfaces to reflect the environment correctly.

Ray tracing would be used exclusively for lighting and shadowing in the only other game to use id Tech 7, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle—MachineGames, once again—and this almost certainly laid the foundation for the next iteration of id Tech.

id Tech 8 | Doom: The Dark Ages (2025)

And so we come to Doom: The Dark Ages and its id Tech 8 engine—a prequel to the 2016 Doom game but with all the graphical enhancements that MachineGames' Indiana Jones offered.

With ray tracing used all the time, and with no shader-based fallback system for GPUs without ray tracing hardware, id Tech 8 was never going to be as speedy as its predecessor, but it still runs pretty well, all things considered.

We're still learning more about what id Tech 8 has underneath the hood, as id Software has been pretty quiet about its new engine, but we do know that Doom: The Dark Ages will be patched in the near future to support path tracing.

This is a method of ray tracing that produces the most physically accurate lighting, shadows, reflections, and refractions, but as any PC gamer who's tried will tell you, the hardware demands are incredibly high.

Naturally, it will mean that upscaling—and perhaps even frame generation—will be an absolute must, and it also means that id Software will need to ensure id Tech 8's denoiser algorithm is top-notch, too.

The slower pace of Doom: The Dark Ages compared to Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal means that the outright frame rate won't be quite as important as it is in those games, but given id Software's track record of developing extremely performant engines of late, we're pretty confident that path tracing will be worth enabling.

Assuming you have the PC hardware for it, of course!

What's next for id Tech?

With a gap of four to five years between each release of a new id Tech engine, we're obviously not going to see another one until the end of this decade. That's sufficient time to allow for two more generations of new GPUs, and if you compare today's graphics processors to those from 2020, we can maybe judge what id Tech 9 will bring to the table.

AMD and Nvidia's latest chips directly use AI to improve performance and image quality, through upscaling, frame generation, and denoising, but the latter also introduced the concept of neural rendering with the launch of its RTX 50 series.

Five years ago, AMD launched its first ray-tracing capable GPUs—the Radeon RX 6000 series—and Nvidia released its second generation of RTX chips, the 30 series. Back then, there was no frame generation, no AI-based denoising. Neural rendering was still in its infancy of research.

This suggests that by 2030, id Tech 9 could be making use of AI to improve the quality of its graphics, to make them ever more realistic, all while keeping the performance as high as possible. The next Doom or Quake game could be permanently path-traced, perhaps always using upscaling, too.

But whatever we do get, id Software's long history of creating graphically-intensive games means that we can be sure that we'll be in for a visual treat.

Although the id Tech engine is no longer the one to watch for new rendering technologies—everything in Doom: The Dark Ages has been done before—it still sets the bar when it comes to optimised performance.

Now, how many game engines can you say that about?

Finding secret areas and collectible items has become a staple of the Doom series, and that hasn't changed in Doom: The Dark Ages. In fact, there are actually far more to find, with mission challenges sending you in search of hidden areas, as well as the usual trinkets to be on the lookout for.

Below you'll find the Doom: The Dark Ages secrets and collectibles locations for each mission, sorted into chronological order so you won't miss a thing. While some of the rewards are just for fun, like the iconic demon toys, others are valuable resources, especially on higher difficulties: things like rubies, gold, and Demonic Essence to upgrade your stats.

Doom: The Dark Ages secrets and collectibles locations

Almost every level has secrets and collectibles in Doom: The Dark Ages, though there are a few exceptions, such as Barrier Core and From Beyond which don't have secrets. And the missions that do have secrets vary in size quite a bit, with some only having a handful and others having a whole shopping list of things to uncover.

Below are all Doom: The Dark Ages chapters with secrets in order, plus every secret and challenge mission I've found so far. I'll add the other missions once I've uncovered the secrets and collectibles for those:

1. Doom: The Dark Ages Village of Khalim secrets (Chapter 1)
2. Doom: The Dark Ages Hebeth secrets (Chapter 2)
3. Doom: The Dark Ages Sentinel Barracks secrets (Chapter 4)
4. Doom: The Dark Ages The Holy City of Aratum secrets (Chapter 5)
5. Doom: The Dark Ages Siege - Part 1 secrets (Chapter 6)
6. Doom: The Dark Ages Siege - Part 2 secrets (Chapter 7)
7. Doom: The Dark Ages Abyssal Forest secrets (Chapter 8)
8. Doom: The Dark Ages Ancestral Forge secrets (Chapter 9)
9. Doom: The Dark Ages The Forsaken Plains secrets (Chapter 10)
10. Doom: The Dark Ages Hellbreaker secret (Chapter 11)
11. Doom: The Dark Ages Sentinel Command Station secrets (Chapter 12)
12. Doom: The Dark Ages Spire of Nerathul secrets (Chapter 14)
13. Doom: The Dark Ages City of Ry'uul secrets (Chapter 15)

After spending over 20 hours tracking down secrets and collectibles, one thing that stuck out to me is that there are a lot of resources you're missing out on if you're not diligent. For example, many rubies and wraithstones aren't in secret areas but are nonetheless hidden. Likewise, most weapon skins aren't earned from exploring. However, you'll still need to put in the work to find items like these, as many are handed out from activities like gore pillars or mission challenges.

Village of Khalim (Chapter 1)

• 6x Secrets
• 2x Codex entries
• 2x Collectible toys
• 1x Weapon skin

In this opening level, the Doom Slayer is shot down to the Village of Khalim like an ODST to reinforce the Sentinels. Despite it being somewhat of a tutorial mission, easing you into all the new mechanics in The Dark Ages, there's still plenty to find.

Hebeth (Chapter 2)

• 9x Secrets
• 1x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Weapon skin
• 1x Demonic Essence - Health
• 210 Gold

Prince Ahzrak's search for the Heart of Argent leads him to attack the Sentinel's defences, so the Doom Slayer is called to duty once again. As you'd expect from the second mission, it's slightly larger than the debut chapter, but it's still holding back on secrets.

Sentinel Barracks (Chapter 4)

• 6x Secrets
• 1x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Weapon skin
• 1x Demonic Essence - Armour
• 212 Gold
• 2x Ruby
• Rip and Tear challenge: Kill 40 demons (gold)
• Plunderer challenge: Find 150 gold (gold)
• Prize Fighter challenge: Execute a three-hit Melee Combo three times (gold)

Chapter 3, Barrier Core, doesn't have any secrets to find (not even currency), so your next shot comes with Sentinel Barracks, which is much bigger than previous missions. You're also introduced to mission challenges here, which give you additional rewards, on top of those found in the level, if you can beat them.

The Holy City of Aratum (Chapter 5)

• 9x Secrets
• 2x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Weapon skin
• 1x Demonic Essence - Armour
• 1x Demonic Essence - Ammo
• 240 Gold
• 2x Ruby
• Countercult challenge: Dispatch all of the cultist circles (ruby)
• Layover challenge: Dismount the Dragon at two secret landing zones (gold)
• Cat and Mouse challenge: Chase and destroy three hell fighter ships (gold)

With Prince Ahzrak closing in on the Heart of Argent, the Doom Slayer mounts up, treating you to your first dragon-riding mission. Unlike the titan missions, you're free to leave the dragon and explore, so there's heaps to find, including the secret dragon landing zones for the Layover challenge.

Siege - Part 1 (Chapter 6)

• 11x Secrets
• 2x Codex entries
• 2x Collectible toys
• 1x Weapon skin
• 1x Demonic Essence - Armour
• 1x Demonic Essence - Ammo
• 513 Gold
• 4x Ruby
• Immovable Object challenge: Parry ten hellknight attacks (gold)
• Unstoppable Force challenge: Strike demons with the flail 25 times (gold)
• Siege Breaker challenge: Destroy four artillery cannons (Reverent Combat Shotgun weapon skin)

Siege Part 1 is where the treasure hunting gets serious, simply due to how large the map is and how many secrets there are to find. If you track down all the rubies, you'll be well on your way to upgrading your favourite weapons.

Siege - Part 2 (Chapter 7)

• 9x Secrets
• 1x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Demonic Essence - Health
• 183 Gold
• 2x Ruby
• Roundhouse challenge: Hit demons ten times with a fully charged chainshot (gold)
• Exterminator challenge: Kill three or more fodder demons with a single shield throw five times (Reverent Shredder weapon skin)

Ahzrak's demon horde breaches the walls of the Sentinel fortress, leaving the Doom Slayer to fight his way through. In sharp contrast to Siege Part 1, Part 2 is much more streamlined—though there are still plenty of well-hidden secrets to dig up.

Abyssal Forest (Chapter 8)

• 11x Secrets
• 1x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Demonic Essence - Armour
• 250 Gold
• 2x Ruby
• Ghost Buster challenge: Parry revenant projectiles (ruby)
• Knockout challenge: Execute four Dazed demons with shield charge (gold)
• Bone Collector challenge: Collect 100 ammo loot drops from melee striking demons (gold)

The Doom Slayer heads into the woods to find Thira, and as you'd expect from a forest in a Doom game, it's hellishly dark and misty, making finding all the secrets quite a challenge. Luckily, most of the secrets are concentrated in one area in particular, so it's not as hefty a task as it sounds.

Ancestral Forge (Chapter 9)

• 9x Secrets
• 2x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Weapon skin
• 1x Demonic Essence - Health
• 1x Demonic Essence - Ammo
• 230 Gold
• 2x Ruby
• 1x Wraithstone
• Nothing But Nade challenge: Score ten direct hits with the Grenade Launcher weapon (gold)
• Sawed Off challenge: Lock down demons with the shield saw for 20 seconds total (gold)
• Seven Secrets challenge: Discover seven secret areas (Reverent Accelerator weapon skin)

With Thira's help, the Doom Slayer restarts the ancient forge, once again giving you an open area to explore. This mission is also the first time you'll get access to wraithstone, which is required to fully upgrade weapons, making it a particularly important secret to complete.

The Forsaken Plains (Chapter 10)

• 10x Secrets
• 2x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Weapon skin
• 1x Demonic Essence - Health
• 1x Demonic Essence - Armour
• 1x Demonic Essence - Ammo
• 230 Gold
• 3x Ruby
• 1x Wraithstone
• Rocket Man challenge: Cause damage to five or more demons with a single Rocket Launcher shot five times (gold)
• Exterminator challenge: Destroy two gore nests (Reverent Pulverizer weapon skin)
• Fault Line challenge: Affect 25 demons with the ground fissure shield rune (gold)

The Doom Slayer is sent on a one-man mission into hell, where previous Sentinel offensives failed, though you'd expect nothing less from the titular badass. It turns out that demons love hiding secrets for you just as much as the Sentinels, so you've got a shopping list to track down, including more upgrade materials, each type of Demonic Essence, and each type of collectible item.

Hellbreaker (Chapter 11)

• 1x Secrets
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Demonic Essence - Armour
• 85 Gold
• Elusive challenge: Execute a perfect dodge five times (gold)
• Dispersion challenge: Damage three or more demons with a single holy swarm volley five times (gold)
• Crushinator challenge: Damage two or more titans with a single stomp attack (gold)

Besides Barrier Core, Hellbreaker is the shortest mission in Doom: The Dark Ages, though don't underestimate it: the one secret collectible it does have is surprisingly hard to find.

Sentinel Command Station (Chapter 12)

• 9x Secrets
• 1x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Weapon skin
• 1x Demonic Essence - Health
• 177 Gold
• 1x Ruby
• 1x Wraithstone
• Punching Bag challenge: Strike a battleknight with a melee attack ten times (gold)
• Wait for It challenge: Kill 10 demons with explosive barrels (ruby)
• Skeleton Key challenge: Open two secret key doors (gold)

Sentinel Command Station is a very traditional Doom mission, sending you through a facility of twisting corridors and elevators. While its list of secrets and collectibles is rather restrained, it's quite easy to accidentally progress too far ahead and block routes, requiring you to reload a checkpoint or replay the mission to grab everything.

From Beyond (Chapter 13)

• Deft Dragon challenge: Perform a perfect dodge five times (gold)
• Veteran Pursuer challenge: Chase and destroy two hell fighter ships (Reverent Impaler weapon skin)

From Beyond is a nice and quick mission with very little to tick off. In fact, there are no secrets to find in the level itself—but there is the Veteran Pursuer challenge that rewards a unique skin.

Spire of Nerathul (Chapter 14)

• 11x Secrets
• 2x Codex entries
• 2x Collectible toys
• 1x Weapon skin
• 1x Demonic Essence - Health
• 1x Demonic Essence - Ammo
• 359 Gold
• 3x Ruby
• 2x Wraithstone
• Heart Harvester challenge: Kill all leader demons (gold)
• Master Blaster challenge: Damage demons with 250 auto turret shots (gold)
• Expert Stalker challenge: Chase and destroy two hell fighter ships (gold)

Thira and the Kreed are pulled into an unknown dimension, and (to no one's surprise) the Slayer follows in pursuit. Giving you yet another open zone to explore on dragon-back, Spire of Nerathul is one of the most confusing missions in terms of secrets and collectibles. There are lots of landing zones, including hidden ones, making it tricky to track down what you're missing.

City of Ry'uul (Chapter 15)

• 10x Secrets
• 1x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Demonic Essence - Health
• 1x Demonic Essence - Armour
• 182 Gold
• 2x Ruby
• 1x Wraithstone
• Heads Up challenge: Parry cacodemons (gold)
• Face Cracker challenge: Damage 25 demons with the dreadmace (Reverent Super Shotgun weapon skin)
• Torrent challenge: Stun eight or more demons with a single heaven splitter storm three times (gold)

The Cosmic Realm lives up to its name, packed full of mindbending areas, portals, and the like, which can make getting that prized 100% rating quite a challenge. You'll also need to use the dreadmace—my least favourite melee weapon—to complete the Face Cracker challenge.

The Kar'Thul Marshes (Chapter 16)

• 5x Secrets
• 1x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Demonic Essence - Armour
• 1x Demonic Essence - Ammo
• 188 Gold
• 1x Ruby
• 1x Wraithstone
• Hunter challenge: Destroy all five of the wolf statues in the swamps (Reverent Cycler weapon skin)
• Roundup challenge: Kill 20 or more demons with a single BFC shot (gold)

While you're still in the Cosmic Realm tracking down Thira, I found myself preoccupied with finding all the secrets. It's a relatively small mission but it features some of the best secrets in the entire game, including a puzzle cube and an infinitely-looping hallway to wrap your head around.

Temple of Lomarith (Chapter 17)

• 9x Secrets
• 1x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Weapon skin
• 1x Demonic Essence - Ammo
• 194 Gold
• 2x Ruby
• 1x Wraithstone
• Swashbuckler challenge: Collect all three rubies and wraithstones (gold)
• Water Logged challenge: Find three underwater secrets (Reverent Chainshot weapon skin)

Doom: The Dark Ages' seventeenth mission amped up the challenge quite a bit, with some nicely hidden secrets and collectibles that had me searching high and low. Taking place in the Cosmic Realm yet again, you're also treated to some of the best environments of the campaign.

Belly of the Beast (Chapter 18)

• 6x Secrets
• 1x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Demonic Essence - Armour
• 153 Gold
• 1x Ruby
• Swallowed Whole challenge: Complete the optional encounter in the stomach (gold)
• Toe-to-Toe challenge: Parry cosmic baron demons ten times (Reverent Grenade Launcher weapon skin)

Unfortunately, the name of this mission isn't hyperbole: the Slayer is consumed by the Old One. Despite being eaten, your hunt for secrets doesn't end here. In fact, the following two missions are among the largest of the bunch.

Harbor of Souls (Chapter 19)

• 10x Secrets
• 2x Codex entries
• 1x Collectible toys
• 1x Demonic Essence - Health
• 1x Demonic Essence - Ammo
• 294 Gold
• 1x Ruby
• 1x Wraithstone
• Berserker challenge: Kill 75 demons while under the influence of berserk (ruby)
• Dragon Hoard challenge: Smash open three gold chests (gold)
• Executioner challenge: Perform an execution on 25 demons (gold)

Ahzrak has managed to transform himself using Thira's power, making it the Doom Slayer's problem once more. Before stopping him though, you've got a laundry list of secrets to find in this mission, including a bonus ruby for completing the Berserker challenge. Thanks to the Berserk status in this mission, it's also one of the best missions to farm mastery challenges for gold weapon skins.

Resurrection (Chapter 20)

• 12x Secrets
• 2x Codex entries
• 2x Collectible toys
• 1x Weapon skin
• 1x Demonic Essence - Health
• 1x Demonic Essence - Armour
• 1x Demonic Essence - Ammo
• 392 Gold
• 3x Ruby
• 1x Wraithstone
• Cannon Crusher challenge: Destroy three artillery cannons (gold)
• Extreme Prejudice challenge: Disrupt all three of the cultist circles (Reverent Rocket Launcher weapon skin)
• Master Hunter challenge: Chase and destroy the hell fighter ship (gold)

The Doom Slayer sets his sights on the gates of hell, but before bringing justice to his enemies, he's got the most packed secrets list to work through first. This mission has every type of secret and collectible imaginable, even a bonus challenge that rewards an additional weapon skin.

Reckoning (Chapter 22)

• 11x Secrets
• 1x Codex entries
• 2x Collectible toys
• 1x Demonic Essence - Ammo
• 335 Gold
• 3x Ruby
• 1x Wraithstone
• Death Clock challenge: Kill two cosmic baron demons within five seconds of each other (Reverent Ravager weapon skin)
• Thy Flesh Consumed challenge: Kill 25 demons within ten seconds (gold)

Teaming up with the Sentinels to take down Ahzrak once and for all, Doom: The Dark Ages' final mission doesn't skimp out on secrets despite the spectacle. It's busywork, but at least you'll get the last two (and very cute) collectible toys out of it.

Chapter 9 in Doom: The Dark Ages returns you to the more open level design once again, which gives you much more ground to cover. The Ancestral Forge secrets are tricky because you'll need to find a purple key for a few of them, and the wolf statue puzzle from Siege Part 1 reappears.

Don't worry though, I'll guide you through all the Doom: The Dark Ages secrets and collectibles in Ancestral Forge in chronological order, so you won't need to replay the mission.

Doom: The Dark Ages Ancestral Forge secrets and collectibles

There are nine secrets and two collectibles in the Ancestral Forge mission, though there's also a Reverent weapon skin for the Accelerator that you'll unlock through the Seven Secrets challenge along the way.

First things first, you should grab the purple secret key, as you'll need this for various secrets later on. It's a big map, but it's easy enough to find: Head to the ancestral heart objective in the top right corner and clear it out, then break the wooden barricade off to the side. You'll find the key and some gold hidden behind it.

From here, I'll be scouring the map clockwise, since one of the puzzles will bring you back to the top right corner anyhow.

1 - First wolf statue

The first secret is on the path where you first enter the open area, near where you start the objective to activate the ancestral hearts, even before reaching the first Sentinel Shrine. Provided you grab the purple key before doing anything else, like I recommend above, you can enter the locked gate on the right side of the path.

Inside this room, you'll find a wolf statue, which you might recognise from the earlier Siege Part 1 level. As in that mission, you need to break three of these wolf statues to unlock a treasure (in this case, a wraithstone, which I'll go over later).

2 - Life sigil

The next secret is hidden on a crane in the bottom left corner of the map from the Sentinel Shrine. Take the path leading to the left corner and you should see the life sigil above you in the grip of the crane. Shield jump up to the right of the crane, leap across the gap, and then activate the switch to release the claw, dropping the sigil on the ground below.

3 - Gold chest

Continue up the path from the first secret until you reach a spooky tunnel, and immediately turn right to drop down into the glowing blue tunnel with the chest sitting at the end.

4 - Second wolf statue

You can find the second of three wolf statues after beating the combat encounter directly left of the first Sentinel Shrine, between the two ancestral hearts on the left side of the map. As before, break it by throwing your shield and you'll be one step closer to unlocking the treasure.

5 - Ruby and Vagary toy (collectible)

From the ancestral heart console in the top left corner of the map, turn right and jump on the small wooden platform at the base of a tower. Using the purple secret key, enter the building and continue along the platform until you reach an overlook with the ruby and the next secret.

Right next to the ruby you've just grabbed will be a very cute Vagary figurine, ticking off two tasks in one fell swoop.

6 - Ancestral Forge codex entry (collectible)

This next secret is on a wooden platform jutting out perilously into the yellow gas in the top left corner of the map. Look off the cliff edge and you'll see the platform just beneath you with the codex entry on it.

7 - Gold chest

You'll find the next secret area behind a purple key gate that looks like it joins the ancestral heart on the right side of the map to the path where you first entered the open zone at the bottom of the map. It's opposite where you found the first secret (a wolf statue).

8 - Wraithstone

From the previous secret, head to the path in the top right corner of the map, near the ancestral heart, where you'll find the wolf statue shrine and a wraithstone behind a barrier. To lower the barrier, you need to break three wolf statues, two of which you'll have already destroyed. The final wolf statue is to the top left of the shrine, jutting out of the rock face.

9 - Ruby

After activating the three ancestral hearts and progressing with the mission into the next area, continue to the end of the corridor where you'll see a ruby behind a gate and a breakable wall. Bash the wall to reveal a chain that you can break with your shield to lower the gate.

10 - Gold chest

Continue on from the previous secret, leading into a sci-fi-looking room with glowing platforms. Walk straight down the path and drop off the ledge ahead of you, where you'll land on a lift with a switch. Throw your shield at the switch to raise the lift, then jump across the gap ahead of you to grab the chest.

11 - Gold

Directly after the previous secret, continue with the mission and jump onto the next platform where you'll see a locked gate on your right as you pass under the path above you. Walk up to your right, climb up the first wall, then drop off the ledge directly ahead of you to fall behind the gated area and find the gold.

12 - King Novik codex entry and Nightmare Super Shotgun weapon skin (collectibles)

Continue to the next platform from the previous secret, which has a blue switch on it. Before activating it, turn around and throw your shield at the chain holding a small platform to release it. Activate the lift, jump across to the platform you've created, shield jump to the platform on the right, and then finally to the codex.

The fancy Nightware weapon skin for the Super Shotgun is right next to the codex in the entry above. From here, you're safe to wrap up the mission.