Doom: The Dark Agesis great — in part, because it’s really easy to walk away from.
We often compliment games by saying that they seduce us into, ‘Just one more turn.’ Then that ‘one more turn,’ ends up becoming a one hundred more turns and, by the time we think to check the time, it’s four in the morning.
Thereissomething special about a game that gets you so invested in its gameplay loop or world or story or all three that it sucks the hours away like precious drops of Capri Sun from the bottom of the pouch. My wife lovesBaldur’s Gate 3more than any other game she’s ever played and the fact that it managed to make the hour hand on the clock shift from six to 11 in the blink of an eye definitely has something to do with that.
The Beauty Of Level-Based Games
But there’s also something about a game that is made to be enjoyed in smaller pieces, here and there, rather than forevermore. While playing Doom: The Dark Ages, I’ve been surprised to find that it makes it as easy to quit playing between levels as it does to keep going. At each mission complete screen, the game tells you what percentage of the level you uncovered during that playthrough. From there, you can press the back button, and that will take you to the title screen. More often than not, I’ve pressed this thinking it meant I would exit the mission rundown, only to be booted to the main menu instead.
The ease of quitting out of Doom is just a byproduct of its discrete, level-based design — another aspect I find extremely refreshing. Two of my favorite games this year areKingdom Come: Deliverance 2andClair Obscur: Expedition 33. Both games are fantastic, but they’re also a little more overwhelming to come back to, because their design is more open-ended. That makes it easy to keep playing, but more difficult to return. Doom’s classic mission-based structure is more digestible.
Doom: The Dark Ages Is Confident
Still, its decision to shunt you to the main menu is an interesting design choice because most games want you to keep playing without thinking too much about it. Roguelikes feed you new upgrades so that you have something new to try each run. Discovering a tower in anUbisoftgame uncovers a bunch of other objectives to go find on the map. Multiplayer shooters dole out new skins with every XP milestone so you keep pursuing the battle pass.
This isn’t just true of games, it’s true ofeverything. Netflix starts the next episode a few seconds into the credits. Most of your subscriptions are set to auto-pay by default, so you need to opt out, but passively continue to opt in. Spotify keeps endlessly playing similar music once you finish the album or playlist you were listening to. We live in a subscription-driven time so, instead of needing to choose to punch quarters into the machine like in the arcade days, everything is designed to make choice irrelevant.
This makes sense for free-to-play titles that profit thanks to passively-consumed ads. But premium console titles don’t need to keep you on the hook like that. Doom: The Dark Ages shows confidence in its own design, and so far, I think it’s warranted. I’ve seen the title screen God knows how many times now and I keep jumping back in right away.
