Doom: The Dark Ages' Latest Update Overhauls Its Customisable Arena...

Doom: The Dark Ages received a whole new mode back in August—the wave-based "Ripatorium" that allows players to build their own demonic encounters. But it seems id Software has had a rethink about the Ripatorium, as The Dark Ages' latest update substantially overhauls how it works.

While update 2.3 is mainly Ripatorium focussed, it's worth briefly going over the adjustments it makes to the campaign and general play. Regarding the former, the update introduces another round of combat encounter tweaks, adding an enemy here, removing another there. On the latter front, it adds an option to adjust TDA's "Brink of Death" feature, which determines how likely you are to survive a near-death situation. Basically, you can now reduce the system's impact on combat, making you more likely to die at low-health.

Onto the main event, update 2.3 introduces "Ripatorium 2.0", which chiefly converts The Dark Ages' arena mode from a purely wave-based affair to a more structured round-based format. Previously, players only had broad control over an encounter, able to select enemies they wanted to fight, dictate number of times enemies would respawn and choose whether or not to set a time limit or to simply toggle endless mode.

With Ripatorium 2.0, players instead face up to five rounds of enemies, with custom settings available for each round. You can still adjust the type of demons you face and number of respawns within each round, with rounds supporting up to 10 waves apiece. But the round structure means you don't just face the same arrangement of enemies over and over, and instead can build a greater sense of progression into a fight.

In addition, the update adds five new music tracks to listen to when eviscerating hellspawn, and adds new encounter presets for players who aren't interested in a custom experience and just want to dive right in. Most interesting to me, though, is passcode sharing. This lets players save encounters they've created with a unique passcode, then share them with friends and other players.

In isolation, passcode sharing is not all that exciting. But id Software is looking to add the best custom encounters as "community-made" presets, encouraging players to share the codes on social media (tagged with @doom). While I'm not all that interested in designing my own Doom encounters, I am interested in playing the best encounters that other people have designed.

In fact, I'd love to see a system that lets players share and rate encounters within t

Source: PC Gamer