Doom has been with us for a long time. The original arrived in 1993—32 years ago, if you can believe it—and after a pair of sequels and a long stretch of silence, it returned in 2016 with a powerful reboot that cemented its claim as gaming's greatest FPS. Now the sixth game in the series, Doom: The Dark Ages, is almost upon us, and with trilogies being a popular thing in popular media, you might reasonably wonder if it represents a conclusion of any sort. The answer, according to id Software creative director Hugo Martin, is a simple no.
"It isn't designed to be the end of something," Martin said during a recent preview event.
Which isn't to suggest developers are looking ahead to the next step in the Doom narrative—"genuinely, sincerely, we're really just focused on this right now," he continued—but Doom: The Dark Ages isn't "a period on the end of a sentence."
That's it, that's the whole thing—but it's also all you really need to know, right? This is Doom. You know what you're here for, and you know it's never going to really be over. The irony is that its absentminded handwaving at a plot makes the Doom games very similar in at least one way to another shooter that does lean heavily into narrative: There are always demons, there's always a man, there's always guns.
