Doom: The Dark Ages already sneakily revealed its ‘new Marauder,’ and the devs hope he’ll be just as challenging, but a little less frustrating

Speaking to Doom: The Dark Ages project director Hugo Martin and producer Marty Stratton for our upcoming print issue 408 (396 in the US), I had to ask about the Marauder.

This infamous miniboss in Doom Eternal split the player base, with some loving its next-level challenge, while others decried it as an unwelcome difficulty spike. With The Dark Ages’ equivalent enemy, Martin and Stratton hope to offer a similarly memorable challenge that doesn’t catch players off-guard to the same extent.

“The Agadon Hunter is the new Marauder,” Martin said when I asked him about the big guy from The Dark Ages’ trailers, revealing the new enemy’s name in the process.

He makes a memorable impression, a big, beefy demon dude with a fur cape, shield, and Darth Maul-but-analogue double-ended sword. He’s Capra Demon-coded, looking like one of those non-plot-critical FromSoftware bosses who still manages to traumatize the player base.

“He’s not based on the Marauder. He’s not like, ‘Big Marauder,’ it’s Dark Ages, so it’s very different,” Martin clarified. “But he’s similar in that a lot of the bosses they’ll challenge you in different ways. It’s all about pushing: parry, dodging and weaving between projectiles.

“We take everything that you’ve been doing in the game up to that point. It’s like it’s exam time, everything else is a quiz. When you get to the boss, it’s the final exam.”

Marin described the Agadon Hunter as having combo attacks that we’ll have to parry in sequence with the Slayer’s fancy new shield⁠. Martin expressed a love and admiration for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in our conversation, and The Dark Ages’ parry system sounds very similar to that game.

Hold up your shield to block, and if you time it to within the first few frames of the animation, you’ll execute an enemy-weakening parry move. To continue the metaphor, the way Martin described the Hunter’s moveset reminded me of late-game Sekiro bosses like the Long Arm Centipedes or Lone Shadows.

And that sounds like a key difference between the Hunter and the Marauder, what you’re asked to do to defeat it. Martin believes that players “don’t mind a good challenge,” and that the Marauder’s minor controversy came more from how it was introduced and explained to players, rather than its sheer mechanical difficulty.

“I watch a lot of people play,” said Martin, “And I think pretty consistently it’s people who didn’t understand what to do that got frustrated. People who got it, they didn’t mind as much. They appreciated the challenge.”

“When I think about the Marauder,” Martin said, “Much of what he was asking you to do, the core of what he was asking you to do, in terms of shooting him and faltering him during those windows, you hadn’t really done much of that in the game up to that point.

“So when the Agadon Hunter shows up, or many bosses, everything he asks you to do. You’ve been doing the whole game.”

If all goes as planned, the Hunter’s parrying-centric challenge will be better-ingrained in our muscle memory by the time we’re throwing down with him. That also ties in with a wider initiative for The Dark Ages overall: A core gameplay mechanic that’s meant to be more intuitive than Eternal’s weapon quick-switching.

“You shouldn’t be fighting the controls,” Martin said at a press preview ahead of Doom: The Dark Ages’ developer direct trailer in January, “You should be fighting the bad guys.”

To that end, the new game is focused more on combos between its new shield, melee weapons, and the guns rather than between individual firearms like in Doom Eternal. And we won’t have long to find out how it all feels in the hand: Doom: The Dark Ages will launch on May 15.

Ahead of that, you can check out my full interview with Martin and Stratton in the upcoming issue 408/396 of PC Gamer’s print magazine. We also discussed The Dark Ages’ crazy new weapons, like the one that’s constantly chewing up skulls and spitting the shards at enemies.