You may have forgotten, but Doom (2016) and Doom: Eternal did have multiplayer features, though you may have overlooked them in your feast of demon dismemberment. But for The Dark Ages (here’s our preview), id Software has decided to do away with anything that doesn’t entirely serve the fun of being the Doom Slayer itself. This was confirmed by Doom: The Dark Ages executive producer Marty Stratton in a Q&A session (thanks, Gamingbolt).
“We wanted to basically free ourselves to create things like the Atlan and the mech experience and the dragon experience. Those are both almost like mini-games within the game. We know that our campaigns are to a great extent what people come to the modern DOOM games to play, so we decided to put all of our efforts behind that and really create the biggest and best DOOM game we’ve ever made.”
From the same Q&A session, Eurogamer expanded on that information with the words of the game’s director Hugo Martin:
“That’s why we were able to put the dragon and the Atlan [mech] in,” he said. “I mean, these are things we wanted to do in the game for, like, multiple games now, but couldn’t, because we had a multiplayer component – which we loved – but really, it was meant to just focus on the single player campaign and just level up that experience for players.”
Do you think sacrificing multiplayer in Doom to improve those single player sections was a good decision?