Mod Brings Battle Royale To Doom 2

What’s old is new again.

Doom 2, a smash hit of its time and a genre-defining FPS, is proving to this day the strength of its small but dedicated community that continues to find new ways to make the game feel fresh.

This time, the latest-and-greatest mod comes off the back of a modder by the name of Bambamalicious, who has created a fully-functional Battle Royale inside the body of Doom 2.

At the moment, the project is still very much in an early test stage. The huge map is very flat and bland, and weapons and items are scattered randomly around the map. The latest edition featured the inclusion of a shrinking ‘storm’ zone, similar to the zone used in popular Battle Royale titles Fortnite and Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds.

However, attempting to develop such a large-scale experience on such a dated game is leading to numerous problems for Bambamalicious, who stated that he’s having difficulty adding more than 32 AI-controlled actors on the map at once due to limitations on the game’s RAM.

The creator has also mentioned through the mod’s description that “death is not the end” in this iteration of Battle Royale. And while the creator does post a gameplay video of the mod in action, he does not die in the video, leaving it up to anyone’s guess as to what this means for the game. Although no one knows for certain, this post-death feature may allow defeated players a measure of control over the outcome, even to a point that their influence could unfairly influence who walks away as the final winner.

The winner is referred to in the mod page as the ‘Royale With Cheese’, so its likely that the creator knows that some of the current mechanics of the mod are ‘cheesy’ or unfair. One of these could be the post-death mechanics, but others might include the lag the game experiences when being forced to handle such a large number of players on such an expansive map or ways in which Doom 2’s core gameplay mechanics begin to fall apart when introduced into a Battle Royale setting.

Until the mod has progressed to a certain point, the mod creation team (Of which only Bambalicious is ever named) will allow the mod to be hosted by other community members. At the moment, the mod is only being hosted by the creators and their team, though they will be keeping a minimum of eight bots active in the game at all time to ensure that anyone can jump in and enjoy the Battle Royale experience at some level.

To get the mod running, it requires the installation and use of other additional third-party software and programs intended to expand the level of customizations that can be made to Doom 2. To learn more about what you need to do to get this program up and running, check out the mod page here.