Doom: The Dark Ages' latest update overhauls its customisable arena mode, and id Software wants to add the best player-made slaughter-fests as selectable presets

Doom: The Dark Ages best weapons - Slayer — (Image credit: id Software)

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.

An image of Doom: The Dark Ages' Ripatorium menu, showing various options for spawning monsters, with the mode's passcode generation system highlighted in a green rectangle. — (Image credit: id Software)

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.

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Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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