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Doom developers explain the campaign's progression system

Kill demons the way you want to

Samit Sarkar (he/him) is Polygon’s deputy managing editor. He has more than 15 years of experience covering video games, movies, television, and technology.

Doom's single-player campaign will let you customize your skills to suit your play style, and in a new developer diary, the game's developers at id Software discussed the options that the system offers.

You can modify your guns, turning the up-close-and-personal shotgun into a mid-range weapon with an alternate fire mode. According to Doom creative director Hugo Martin, weapon customization will determine how you tackle the enemies that the game throws at you, since you'll have to use specific guns for certain foes. This also applies to the player character.

"We kind of have this whole upgrade system that allows you to play in a lot of different ways and use your own strategy in how you approach the different arenas, and even tweak that as you go through the game," said executive producer Marty Stratton.

You'll pick up progression items such as research projects and runes, which allow you to customize your character and the way they play. A rune might present you with a task, like getting 15 kills with a shotgun within a particular time limit, that rewards you with an upgrade:

Doom rune screencap 1920

Martin explained that he prefers to focus on speed above all else.

"I like to tailor my experience to speed — make it so I can glory-kill faster, I can mantle faster, I can switch mods faster; I can do all these things just a little bit faster. And once you stack these things on top of each other, the game just plays even faster than it already does, which, out the box it's pretty fast," said Martin.

Doom is set for release this Friday, May 13, on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One; we won't have a review before launch. For more, check out the launch trailer.