izigame.me

Doomed by the Dark Ages of Optimization
⭐☆☆☆☆
(Note: I have about 2 hours in but steam is showing a lot less because I switched to offline mode due to crashing)
AAA gaming in 2025 has officially gone to Hell, and not in the fun, shotgun-in-each-hand kind of way. I'm so tired of fighting the game before I can even fight in the game. Trying to play DOOM: The Dark Ages feels less like ripping and tearing and more like begging and praying that the game doesn't turn my PC into molten slag.
Look, I just want to enjoy a video game. I shouldn’t have to run tech support for an hour just to squeeze out a stuttery 45fps. I have good hardware. Like, stupidly good hardware. Most people would assume a 4090 and a 7900X would tear through a DOOM title considering that it's the original universal game that runs on everything. But nope. What used to be "plug and play" is now "tweak and pray." Owning high-end hardware doesn’t mean much when every new release tries to turn your rig into a sacrificial offering.
That said, if you've ever wanted to watch your GPU burst into flames while rendering a torch-lit corridor at 17fps, DOOM: The Dark Ages has you covered. Forget demons, your real enemy is the graphics settings menu, which might as well be the final boss. Every AAA game now needs DLSS and Frame Gen just to hit a desired framerate that's even close to what my monitor supports. It’s absurd—especially when the last two DOOM games were optimized so well. So who at id thought baking ray tracing into the engine permanently was a good idea? Whoever it was, they deserve to be trapped in a mirrored lava room where every surface reflects their mistakes.
I booted it up on “Ultra Nightmare” thinking it was a challenge mode—not realizing it was describing the optimization. There’s literally a preset called that. Bold choice. You can’t turn off ray tracing either. Even on “Low” settings I'm barely hitting 60fps natively, which also changes almost nothing visually, you’re stuck with ray tracing so aggressive it might as well be tracing your soul. The whole game looks like a demonic funhouse with RTX on cocaine. It’s like they cooked ray tracing into the engine with a Hellforge and now it’s fused at the molecular level.
It’s almost poetic. A game set in the Dark Ages ends up representing them in terms of modern tech. What’s next? A $70 "Performance Pass" that lets you turn off bloom?
But besides that how's the game actually play? Well, yes, the game is metal as hell. But look, we need to talk about the elephant in the blood-soaked throne room: they removed Glory Kills. Gone. Axed. The very mechanic that made DOOM 2016 and Eternal feel so visceral, so kinetic, so alive—ripped out like a Revenant’s spine. Glory Kills weren’t just for flair; they were the heart of the loop. The brutal ballet of staggering a demon, charging in with a spine-shattering finisher, and getting a reward for your aggression? That was pure game play genius. It kept the tempo fast, rewarded skill, and let you control the chaos. Now? You just charge and parry like you're playing some weird version of first person Sekiro. It sucks the fun of getting to see all of those gory and bloody finishers right out of the combat. For a game all about ripping and tearing, it’s wild how much less satisfying it feels to, well... rip and tear.
It's also missing a fundamental that made the first two Doom reentries an amazing audio experience. Mick Gordan. Let's not forget the real hellish saga behind the scenes. Remember the Mick Gordon debacle during DOOM Eternal? The man who gave us the iconic, pulse-pounding soundtrack was subjected to a development process that was, frankly, infernal. Gordon worked for months without pay, was excluded from key decisions, and was blindsided by the announcement of the official soundtrack before he even had a contract. When he finally did get to work on the OST, he was given a mere 29 days to complete it, only to find out that id Software had been working on an alternative version for six months without his knowledge. The final product included a mix of his tracks and poorly edited versions of his in-game music, leading to a public fallout that saw Gordon distancing himself from the project entirely. It's a stark reminder that the demons aren't just in the game—they're in the boardrooms too.
But wait! There's more! DRM: Kernel-level anti-cheat in a single-player game. Fantastic. Just what I needed! An angry daemon scanning my background processes while I try to rip and tear. Apparently, RGB lighting software is more dangerous than a baron of Hell now. My BIOS hasn’t been this insulted since I let Windows auto-update during a firmware flash.
I miss when you could just... buy a game from a respected company and expect it to be pretty good. We had that era. Now it's rolling dice with the odds against you while everyone points and laughs at you for pre-ordering a game in 2025.
Well I'm glad I did, because now I can warn some of you reading this to please stay away from this game. At least until they fix it 8 months from now when it's 75% off (Gotta love that)
At the end of the day, DOOM: The Dark Ages probably a genuinely fun game buried alive under the smoldering rubble of modern PC gaming sins. It doesn’t feel like I’m playing a shooter—it feels like I’m participating in an interpretive dance about the death of optimization.
If you listen closely while your PC wheezes, you can hear Carmack somewhere in the distance… screaming in binary.
Final Verdict:
DRM+RTX/10
They promised Rip and Tear — Instead I got Lag and Despair.