The super-fast movement. The incredible shotgun. Those beautiful, pixelated torrents of gore. The original Doom, from 1993, was groundbreaking for dozens of reasons. But it also spearheaded modern speedrunning. Those end-of-mission screens, where you could compare your time with id Software's own, in house par, were a gauntlet thrown down – how fast can you go? Between Half-Life, Quake, and the latter-day Fallouts, some of the best speedrun games are also FPS games. The record for Doom Eternal is a staggeringly tiny 17 minutes. Now, with Doom The Dark Ages still relatively fresh on Steam, one player has already gotten id's latest down to a lean 70 minutes.
If you want to get everything possible out of id's new Doom The Dark Ages a mere five days old (as of this writing) one player and speedrunner has already broken it wide open.
'Daravae' has been posting Doom The Dark Ages speedruns ever since launch day. Their first run, from Thursday May 15, is a super-quick two hours and 29 minutes. But since then, the time has kept coming down: one hour 56, an hour and a half, one hour and 16 minutes. Now, Daravae has achieved a new low.
So, how is it done? There are two main tricks here. Firstly, using the Slayer's fast movement, and also the bulk of the Atlan mech, it's possible to clip out of bounds of Doom The Dark Ages' maps. Liberated from the prescribed level geometry, Daravae is able to effectively teleport to the end of each mission – the key is finding the specific little gaps in the architecture that allow them to slip through. You can see the whole run here.
Secondly, there's a technique using the in-game map screen. The Slayer is represented here by a small, yellow triangle. By holding down the left mouse button and 'dragging' the cursor, Daravae is seemingly able to move that triangle within the map screen, and when they unpause, the game relocates the Slayer to that position within the game itself.
"Decent run, but still lots of time losses," Daravae says of their most recent record. "Lost another two minutes in Belly, another one and a half minutes in Temple, and a couple of 30 to 45 second time losses in several levels. Other than that, I feel like this run, I got most of the strats down."
The official Speedrun leaderboards for Doom The Dark Ages aren't open yet – Speedrun often puts an embargo on new releases, so that players can learn and unpick the game before beginning to submit official records. When the rankings go live, however, we'll see just how quickly Doom The Dark Ages can be beaten.
Until then, check out some of the best medieval games on PC.
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