Minecraft is filled with fan-made monuments to other games. It’s not uncommon to see players spend hundreds of hours recreating familiar cities or towns to a one-to-one scale, and there are plenty of official texture packs from Mojang to tempt creativity. Every now and then, though, something still comes along that manages to blow us away.
Doomed: Demons of the Nether is a Minecraft adventure map that borrows inspiration from recent Doom games. It’s been in the works since March 2020, and it’s coming out tomorrow (January 8). You’re getting a single-player campaign with levels through Mars, the UAC Facility, The Foundry, and The Nether alongside custom 3D modelled and programmed weapons and abilities, boss fights, and cinematics. While creator Sibogy took plenty of inspiration from Doom 2016 and Eternal, though, they’re keen to stress that Doomed is very much its own thing.
“It’s not a copy-paste though; the level design is all different and will provide something new even for people who have already played the other Doom games,” Sibogy says. “I didn’t want to make a 1:1 copy because you might as well play Doom at that point. If something seemed fun I looked to implement it.”
Sibogy estimates he spent around 1,200 hours putting it all together over two years. The busy Minecraft builder works full-time in IT, so everything had to come from their spare time. While they’ve made plenty of resource packs and other maps based on things like co-op puzzles and Call of Duty’s Zombies mode, Doomed is the biggest project Sibogy has taken on yet. Naturally, that throws up challenges.
“Minecraft’s limitations were the main challenges,” Sibogy explains. “Some things weren’t really doable to implement, such as dashing or glory kills. One of the biggest challenges in development was the final icon of sin boss, which took two months by itself. Completely custom made including hitboxes, 3D models, AI/behaviour, and loads of animations.”
Sibogy tells me that they’re more or less done with the map and eager to release it, though a temptation lingers to make a “standalone map with an endless mode with waves of demons”. However, that could prove difficult due to Minecraft’s “limited AI range”.
You can check out the Doom-inspired adventure map on PlanetMinecraft when it goes live, if you fancy it. There’s also a bustling community on Discord you can join if you want to keep up to date with what’s going on.