id Software’s game won’t take you minutes to play through, as the new Doom Slayer storyline running on id Tech 8 will be quite a meaty title.

Hugo Martin, creative director at id Software, revealed on the PlayStation Blog that DOOM: The Dark Ages will feature 22 stages. That’s a lot. Almost double the number of maps in 2016’s DOOM and 2020’s DOOM Eternal (which had 13 stages). He says it will be by far the biggest campaign in the franchise, updating the classic frenetic first-person shooter action with new weapons that he says will baffle even veterans of the franchise.

Each stage will take about an hour to complete (of course, this is for normal gameplay: later, speedrunners will surely cut it down to a few minutes…). And there are 22 stages, so you can calculate that it will take more than 20 hours to complete DOOM: The Dark Ages, and that’s not counting the side content, especially considering that this part has a more open environment. This, Martin says, will encourage players to look around the area between attacks from two hordes of enemies.

This time around, DOOM: The Dark Ages will focus solely on the story mode, meaning there will be no multiplayer and perhaps no invasion in id Software’s next game. The studio’s developers believe that including a multiplayer mode would have detracted from the quality and ambition of the main story. Martin explained that they wanted to focus on a single, polished experience and not split resources between story mode and multiplayer. He explained that this decision reflects their commitment to the original vision of the series: frantic action and storytelling without distractions.

DOOM: The Dark Ages will be released on May 15th for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and PC. It will also be available on Xbox Game Pass. We recently wrote about how the game will draw heavily from the legacy of HP Lovecraft.

Source: PS Blog