Doom: The Dark Ages launches on PS5 May 15 – id Software reveals new gameplay details

blog.playstation.com:

Hello everybody! This is Hugo Martin, Game Director on Doom: The Dark Ages reporting from the offices at id Software – we are all hard at work polishing this latest installment in the franchise. It’s almost ready and we can’t wait for you to play it.  In the meantime, we have a new look at gameplay we put together for you. There’s lots to breakdown from the video, so let’s get started – I’m guessing you’ve got some questions, let me try and give you some more details…

High level – you could say it’s a blend of the two but with a new, medieval toolkit. We’re looking to create an experience that has the depth of Eternal’s loop with the simplicity of Doom (2016)’s control scheme. As a player, you performed a lot of cool actions in Eternal, and each action/attack had its own input. In Dark Ages we have a brand-new set of cool medieval actions to perform but this time, with fewer buttons to press!

The depth/simplicity is achieved by making the behavior of items like the Shield-Saw change based on the material it interacts with. It’s contextual: the shield throw ricochets off plasma shields hitting other enemies (feels awesome), it sticks into flesh (stun locking larger demons), or it can shatter armor creating an AOE blast – all with a single button press.

I love analogies: it all adds up to us having fewer strings on the guitar this time – but we added frets to maintain the mechanical depth of the experience, giving the player something new to learn and master.

With all of this, we are relying on familiar FPS inputs to execute these moves, giving the loop an intuitive learning curve. The actions feel impactful and fun to execute, and the results give you a tactical advantage – fun on the outside smart on the inside.

The yellow rings you see appearing around the characters are falter indicators. “Falters” is a meta in Eternal and 2016.  Great players figured out what caused falters and they started to stack those attacks to stun-lock powerful enemies (which is what we