Play with your mates as we wait for Doom: The Dark Ages.
Nightdive’s remaster of Doom + Doom 2 has given me hours of sweet demon-blasting joy since it launched in the middle of last year. I dropped in only yesterday to clarify a hazy memory of a particular level, and lost a good forty minutes to disemboweling imps with a shotgun in glorious 4K, Andrew Hushult’s thunderous riff on the E1M1 theme thrashing in my ears. Never mind the days I spent last year picking through John Romero’s episodes Sigil and Sigil 2, or the ferociously difficult new campaign by MachineGames, Legacy of Rust.
It was a pretty comprehensive package, but Nightdive and Bethesda have continued to tinker away with it in the months since. This culminated in a new update that arrived earlier this week, which makes numerous smaller fixes and quality-of-life changes, but mainly adds support for multiplayer mods.
Playing multiplayer mods through Doom + Doom 2 is a little more elaborate than playing modded single-player Doom. For starters, the accompanying Steam post notes the mods in question “must be authored with Vanilla DOOM, DeHackEd, MBF21 or BOOM to be compatible” and that the host must activate the mod before entering the online menu. Players will likewise need to subscribe to the same mod before joining the match, which the blog recommends doing using “room codes”. While it may sound complicated, it’s a fairly standard requirement for playing multiplayer mods through a base game, and certainly more straightforward than playing modded Doom multiplayer via other means, which required players to install Zandronum or GZDoom (the latter of which didn’t have great support for multiplayer mods) and then install compatible mods.
You can read the full patch notes here. 2025 is a big year for the first-person shooter’s angry green grandaddy. The latest entry in the series, Doom: The Dark Ages, got its first in-depth presentation earlier this week, with id Software revealing a heavier, more grounded combat system than the airborne acrobatics of Doom Eternal. The new game also unlocks glory kills from fixed animations, allowing players to brutalise demons “from any angle, in and out as you see fit,” according to game director Hugo Martin. Most importantly of all, we got a firm release date, and frankly, May 15 can’t come soon enough.
Alongside multiplayer mod support, the update tweaks the collection in various ways. For singleplayer, it resolves an issue whereby “some red doors did not display as red on the automap,” which explains why I struggled so much to find red doors when running through the campaigns last year. Conventional multiplayer, meanwhile, adds a spectator mode for players waiting to respawn during co-op mission play. Finally, the update adds several features for both mod players and creators, shoring up the mod downloader so it can “process more than the first 100 subscribed mods” and enhancing mod compatibility for the aforementioned authoring tools.
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