Doom: The Dark Ages won't end with the Slayer in a coffin waiting for the start of Doom 2016: 'That would mean that we couldn't tell any more medieval stories' - Related to mean, 'i, guns, are, bidding

Doom: The Dark Ages won't end with the Slayer in a coffin waiting for the start of Doom 2016: 'That would mean that we couldn't tell any more medieval stories'

Talking to Doom: The Dark Ages game director Hugo Martin and producer Marty Stratton for the cover story of PC Gamer's upcoming print issue 408 (396 in the US), I had to ask what they thought about "the prequel problem."

Doom 2016 begins with the Slayer locked in a coffin with all his friends long-dead, and Doom Eternal goes into greater detail sketching out how heroically tragic the Slayer's Night Sentinel buddies were. Won't this story wind up being a big 'ole Halo Reach-style bummer?

But Stratton and Martin were willing to reveal a surprising detail about The Dark Ages' ending: It won't conclude with the Slayer locked in that coffin, and may leave the door open for future prequel stories.

"Not yet," Martin unveiled of the Slayer getting locked away. "I mean, that would end the Dark Ages, the medieval chapter of the Doom saga. This is kind of like the Chronicles of the Slayer.

So if we took it all the way to that point, then that would mean that we couldn't tell any more medieval stories. And I'm not announcing projects or anything other than to just say it's improved to leave it open."

Martin may not have committed to announcing Doom: The Darker Ages, but he made it clear that id at the very least has follow-up story DLC planned along the lines of Doom Eternal's The Ancient Gods: "We do have a DLC and things like that, so it won't⁠—I'm not giving away spoilers⁠—but it doesn't end with him [in the coffin]."

"The story is that they collapsed a building on top of him and then put him inside of that sarcophagus that we find him in at the beginning of 2016," mentioned Martin. "And this game doesn't end that way."

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Whether or not id wants to do another full-fat Doom sequel in this era of the timeline, we wouldn't be playing that game until the 2030s given modern development lead times.

But the studio sounds committed to this vision of medieval, dark fantasy-infused Doom as more than just a one-off. Now that I know how The Dark Ages doesn't end, it actually really opens up the possibilities and stakes of its story.

Doom: The Dark Ages will release on May 15, but before that, you can check out my full interview with Martin and Stratton in issue 408/396 of PC Gamer's print magazine, coming soon. We also discussed the game's arsenal and how it follows up Eternal's infamous Marauder.

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'I think only the shotguns are the same,' says Doom: The Dark Ages director, otherwise the guns are brand-new or significantly transformed

Speaking to Doom: The Dark Ages game director Hugo Martin and producer Marty Stratton for our Doom cover story in the upcoming issue 408 (396 in the US) of PC Gamer's print magazine, the two had plenty to say about the FPS' arsenal.

"I think only the shotguns are the same," Martin showcased of the guns in The Dark Ages. "The plasma is so different, so the rest are brand new. That was by design, really making sure that we were giving you new tools to master."

"You got to have your classics, it's a Doom game," Martin continued. "You got to have a plasma rifle. You got to have the shotguns. But then what else can we make? So we started every gun from scratch." Here's a breakdown of the guns we talked about or that I've otherwise clocked in The Dark Ages' trailers:

Shotgun : Strongly resembles the one in Eternal.

: Strongly resembles the one in Eternal. Super Shotgun : Why mess with a classic? Though the "meat hook" grapple has been replaced with the Slayer's new shield charge.

: Why mess with a classic? Though the "meat hook" grapple has been replaced with the Slayer's new shield charge. The Skullcrusher : Like a chaingun, but way more close range. Crucially, looks dope as hell.

Like a chaingun, but way more close range. Crucially, looks dope as hell. The Railspike: Pins enemies to walls like the crossbow in Half-Life. Kinda has me giddy.

Pins enemies to walls like the crossbow in Half-Life. Kinda has me giddy. Rocket Launcher: Looks a lot like the one in Doom Eternal, yet to be seen how it mixes things up.

Looks a lot like the one in Doom Eternal, yet to be seen how it mixes things up. The Accelerator: "That's the new Plasma," stated Martin. "It's basically an SMG plasma rifle. So it's short range, high rate of fire, and it's very fun."

There may be some more arsenal surprises as well, though Doom: The Dark Ages' guns will also be supplemented by the new shield and three melee weapons, making for a different core gameplay from Doom 2016 or Eternal.

There are also the vehicles. We'll get a flying dragon whose levels Martin compared to Halo, with the Slayer hopping off to do on-foot sections before getting back in the air. The Pacific Rim-looking Doomguy mech, "the Atlan," will have levels that are just all-Atlan.

I mostly wanted to bring up the vehicles because, in concept art for the mech's chaingun, the mock view model displays a little man popping out of a hatch and waving at the camera like the Slayer's got a crew in there. I need to be clear that, if this displays up in gameplay, The Dark Ages is game of the year. I don't make the rules.

Back to the main arsenal, Martin pointed to Doom Eternal's Heavy Cannon, a scoped battle rifle-type deal, as an example of something id wanted to leave behind when making The Dark Ages: "To put that back in players hands at the start of Dark Ages, I mean, it's going to start feeling like a DLC, because they've already mastered that tool."

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"I think by giving players a whole new tool kit to discover, learn, and master, that's going to ensure that we can have a real, balanced experience," Martin stated. "And we don't have to immediately start jacking up the difficulty because we're giving you a tool that you already mastered in the previous game."

All I know is that I really want to get my hands on that Railspike gun and start pinning dudes to walls. We don't have long to wait: Doom: The Dark Ages will release on March 15. You can read my full interview with Martin and Stratton in the upcoming issue 408/396 of PC Gamer's print magazine.

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The Resident Evil movie reboot bidding war is over, and the winner is… Sony, who did every one of those other pretty terrible Resident Evil movies

Sony has won the bidding war for the Resident Evil movie reboot—the same studio that released the first (bad) six Resident Evil live action movies, plus the Jovovich-less (and still bad) reboot Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City in 2021.

Some things never change, I guess. Maybe the eighth time will be the charm?

As we reported in January, the new Resident Evil reboot (coming just four years after the first reboot) is being written and directed by horror's new hotness, Zach Cregger, and the project was being shopped around between multiple studios. , Sony came out on top, keeping it out of the eagerly clawing hands of Warner Bros and Netflix.

It's not hard to understand why Sony would want to hang onto those Resident Evil rights: despite not a single one of its Resident Evil films scoring above 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, the series has been monstrously successful financially, collectively earning over $[website] billion at the box office.

But will this second reboot be good? All signs point to: we have literally no way of knowing. The script hasn't even been written, but Cregger's 2022 horror film Barbarian was good, so maybe?

The film is also being produced under Sony's Columbia Pictures label this time around, not Screen Gems as the earlier RE films were. This may indicate a larger budget than the RE franchise has historically had: Columbia is the same label as the Spider-Man Universe films like Venom, Kraven, and, uh, Morbius. Those movies aren't good, but they were expensive! So that's… something.

We'll have to wait a while to see how this all pans out. Despite not having a script or a cast, the Resident Evil reboot already has a release date: September 18, 2026.

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