Doom The Dark Ages all difficulties explained: Which one should you choose?

Doom The Dark Ages is ripping and tearing its way through hordes of hell with new changes to the difficulty system. While Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal saw the settings being customized through a bunch of presets, The Dark Ages' introduces detailed tuning to bring the franchise back to the "Stand and Fight" mentality. It pays tribute to the classic games Doom (1993) and Doom II (1994). However, the new system might have players wondering about the difficulty they should choose.

This article will go over the difficulty system of Doom The Dark Ages, and take a look at all the presets, sliders, and which one you should go for.

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All difficulty presets of Doom The Dark Ages

Doom The Dark Ages features the good old preset system with familiar settings that can be found in the previous titles. However, what makes this prequel to Doom 2016 stand out on its own is the new difficulty slider that allows players to tune the game's pace, damage modifiers, parry window, and more to their liking.

Difficulty presets in The Dark Ages (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming || Bethesda Softworks)

Let us first go over all the presets found in The Dark Ages:

• Aspiring Slayer
• Hurt Me Plenty
• Ultra-Violence
• Nightmare
• Pandemonium
• Ultra-Nightmare

The four base difficulties here range from Aspiring Slayer ("I'm too young to die" in previous games) to Nightmare (highest base difficulty). The Pandemonium setting is a new name for the extra lives option, where the difficulty is Nightmare, and players can pick up extra lives called Life Sigils.

These allow players to restart the chapter. However, running out of extra Sigils ends the campaign. Ultra-Nightmare is almost the same, with base Nightmare difficulty. However, one death is all you can afford, as that will halt your progress for the entire campaign. In this preset, Sigils can only heal you, instead of providing extra lives.

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Recommended settings for The Dark Ages

For newcomers in both the Doom franchise and FPS genre, Aspiring Slayer is the go-to setting as it will help you get familiarized with the game at a slow and enjoyable pace. Players who are more experienced with FPS games are recommended to try Hurt me Plenty or Ultra-Violence. Lastly, those who have played Doom Eternal before and cranked up the settings, Nightmare is your go-to option.

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Difficulty sliders in Doom The Dark Ages

The difficulty sliders introduced in The Dark Ages bring both replayability and enjoyable pace to a wider audience. Where Doom Eternal was met with mixed reviews from the fanbase because of its heavy reliance on movement, The Dark Ages can be tuned to suit your playstyle.

Sliders let you further modify The Dark Ages' difficulty (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming || Bethesda Softworks)

Let us go over all the difficulty sliders:

• Parry Window: Lets you set a smaller or bigger parry window.
• Enhanced Targeting: Lets you enable auto-aim.
• Empowered Attacks: Lets you interrupt enemy attacks.
• Damage to Player: Modifier that sets damage taken by Doom Slayer.
• Damage to Demons: Modifier that sets damage taken by Demons.
• Enemy Aggression: Lets you modify the number of enemies attacking Slayer simultaneously.
• Game Speed: Modifier that sets game speed.
• Daze Duration: Modifier that decides how long enemies stay stunned for.
• Enemy Projective Speed: Modifier that sets how fast enemy projectiles move.
• Resource Values: Modifier that sets the amount of health, shield, and ammo pickups.

These sliders can be adjusted to your liking after selecting a difficulty preset. However, a point to note is that if the difficulty preset is changed after having modified the sliders, then the slider values will reset accordingly.

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More on The Dark Ages' difficulty

The overall difficulty in all 22 chapters of Doom The Dark Ages is substantially lower than what Doom Eternal and the Ancient Gods offer. This is because Doom Eternal relies on very high APM (actions per minute) with crazy movement and gun-specific enemies.

However, The Dark Ages brings the difficulty down to such a level that one can go around killing different demon types with just one gun without caring about resources or positioning. This makes Doom The Dark Ages a more enjoyable experience for a wider range of audience. In this title, players face the events at Argent D'Nur, which serve as a stepping stone to the Doom Slayer's journey.

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For more on Doom The Dark Ages, follow Sportskeeda:

• Doom The Dark Ages review
• Is Doom The Dark Ages a standalone title?
• Is Doom The Dark Ages coming to PS4 and Xbox One?