Doom: The Dark Ages update 2 is upon us, complete with a proper horde mode and oh, no big deal, a massive set of rebalances across the entire campaign. There's also a massive set of quality-of-life tweaks, including the long-demanded option to turn down that slow-motion effect on parries and melee strikes.
The headliner here is the Ripatorium, an "endless arena mode" that lets you put your skills to whatever kind of test you want. While Ripatorium previously appeared in Doom Eternal, it's vastly expanded here, letting you fully craft the challenges you want to take on. You can set a time limit, the number of waves you want to face, and the number and types of demons that will spawn.
"We are giving you the controls to create your own encounter, allowing players to take on the role of lead combat designer inside of Doom: The Dark Ages," as director Hugo Martin explains in the announcement video. Martin adds that "we'd like to expand on the Ripatorium more in future updates," so it seems we can expect more from the mode as further updates come through.
The big list of balance tweaks in the update notes includes speedier weapon swapping, universal weapon swap interrupts for blocking, and – addressing my own biggest pet peeve from The Dark Ages – the life sigil activations have been tweaked to "smooth out the experience." Hopefully that means it won't be quite so annoying to use an extra life.
"Probably most important of all," Marty adds, "we added a slow-mo adjustment slider to the game. Every melee and shield animation impact can be adjusted now to whatever feels right for you." The Dark Age's combat has a very particular pace that certainly hasn't hit for everyone, and the slow-motion effect is a big part of the reason why. Given the popularity of slow-mo removal mods for the game, this option will likely be very much appreciated.
If you want an idea of the scale of this patch, check out the update notes linked above and scroll down to the "combat encounter updates," where you'll find a big list of extremely specific encounter tweaks across darn near every level in the game. It seems id Software is more than committed to making sure The Dark Ages is all that it can be – and judging by those weapon nerfs, the devs want it to be as tough as possible, too.
As the appropriately named RandoDude124 says on Reddit, "This ain’t an update… This be a BUFFET!!!" We're certainly all feasting today.
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