Generally speaking, the term “woke” is now used by people on the internet that think something is too politically correct, but now it's seemingly being used to brand something one doesn't like.
When DOOM: The Dark Ages had a new gameplay trailer released a few months ago, the gaming community went wild. There was a lot to love like a trio of melee weapons, a cybernetic dragon, and a gigantic mech suit. There were some criticisms of course, like the lack of brutal glory kills, and apparently one of those criticisms is the difficulty sliders.
Difficulty sliders aren't new in the gaming world, but they are new to the DOOM franchise. The idea is simple: you can customize the difficulty of the game to your liking. You can choose how much damage projectiles do, how fast those projectiles move, and more. You can make the game easy, somewhat difficult, or control-breaking soulslike shooter that will send you into fits of rage.
Apparently people don't like that and think it's “woke”. So, the director, Hugo Martin, responded in a new video on X.
“DOOM: The Woke Ages… I’ve heard about this. I’ve seen the videos. Well, here’s the thing about the — first of all, I don’t agree with that. Really when you think about options like the sliders, the policy was it has to be good both for the white belts and the black belts. You know, if we’re gonna allow you to slow the game down, we have to enable you to speed the game up. And that was a really good policy for everything. So everything in the game, you can either make things super hard or super easy. You know, or just find that sweet spot somewhere in the middle.”
Martin even goes on to describe how the best players in their own office slow the game down to make it more difficult.
“What we see with the sliders from our best players in the office is that they do a lot of surprising things. You would think it's just ‘crank everything up’, but that's actually not the case.”
These difficulty sliders are heavily customizable. You can make the projectiles super slow but also have them do massive amounts of damage. This would create a sort of high stakes maze for the player. While the modern DOOM games are known for their speed, slowing DOOM: The Dark Ages down, does not necessarily mean the game will become easy.
“It really enhances that three-dimensional shmup, you know that bullethell experience that is kind of what classic DOOM is. Classic DOOM is a three-dimensional bullethell, weaving between these slow-moving projectiles that hit really hard. And that’s what creates the maze, and that’s what encourages the player to move, is really the projectiles. And that’s what we focused on for this game,” said Martin.
I have to applaud Martin's use of the word bullethell which I will be adding to my vocabulary and tucking away for when the game comes out.
The director even mentioned that the regular difficulty options, ranging from normal to ultra violent, will be part of the game just like the others.
The categories of the difficulty sliders include Damage to Player, Damage to Demons, Enemy Projectile Speed, Enemy Aggression, Parry Window, Daze Duration, Game Speed, and Resource Values. The amount of variety in the sliders seems like it could lead to a very unique experience for every player. You could turn Enemy Aggression really low, but Enemy Projectile Speed and Damage to Player really high to create a high risk, high reward type scenario. You could turn everything related to the difficulty down and the speed all the way up to feel like a god, if you wanted. You could make the experience as difficult or as easy as you prefer.
What the developers tried to do with DOOM: The Dark Ages, is create something more akin to the classic DOOM games that had players weaving between projectiles.
How making a game customizable makes it “woke”, a term that is generally political, is completely unknown to me, but hopefully those who were complaining about the difficulty sliders just didn't understand how they worked or what their purpose is.
Doom: The Dark Ages is the third modern DOOM game. It is a prequel to DOOM (2016), which has also had a sequel, DOOM: ETERNAL in 2020. The original DOOM game had a short lived comic in 1996, but there haven't been any comics for the modern games.
DOOM: The Dark Ages releases May 13. Are you excited to play it? Let us know in the comments!