It's been a bit of rollercoaster ride since I bought a PS5 Pro late last year and sold my launch PS5 to help soften the blow. Since then, I've encountered games that have made the purchase feel absolutely worth it, like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and Assassin's Creed: Shadows.
Still, there's still been a nagging doubt about the money in the back of my mind, and it hasn't helped that I now have access to a bleeding-edge PC gaming rig, complete with Nvidia 5070 Ti. The recent launch of a remaster of my favourite game of all time, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, didn't hugely impress me on PS5 Pro, but on PC it's sucked me into dozens of hours of play.
Now, Bethesda is back for another major launch, just weeks after Oblivion, and this time it's no remaster. Doom: The Dark Ages has been years in the making after the phenomenal popularity of the Doom reboot in 2016 and its follow-up, Doom Eternal. I haven't gone hands-on with the game yet, but the early word is that it's a stunner, sporting an impressive 85 average on Metacritic at the time of writing.
I'm excited to dive into it now that it's out, but there's one big asterisk attached to it right now – according to industry experts Digital Foundry, its PS5 Pro upgrade is one of the least interesting they've seen yet. It seems entirely possible that the development pipeline for the game led its Sony console versions to be slightly undercooked, in fact.
While the Xbox Series X apparently runs really smoothly, the PS5 version of the game has regular performance drops, and these are echoed in the PS5 Pro despite the added power of that console. On top of that, there are basically no graphical boosts to the PS5 Pro version, with simpler resolution bumps standing out as the main change. The game reportedly doesn't even use Sony's PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling, despite having access to it.
This won't be the first or the last time that a game launches without a particularly compelling PS5 Pro patch, but it's a little surprising given how big and graphically impressive The Dark Ages looks. I was looking forward to picking it up for the console, but I'm confident I'll do so on PC instead, to see how it fares on my hardware.
I've got every expectation that the answer will be "fabulously", too. The modern Doom games have a great track record when it comes to PC performance, even as they've pushed forward graphically.
This time around, The Dark Ages brings a new approach to level design that should see some huge environments, compared to the more cramped and carefully laid-out arenas of its predecessors. That will also bring with it more enemies on-screen and more options than before, so I can't wait to work out how it holds up.
Still, though, on a personal level I'm a little disappointed by the PS5 Pro news – my silver lining in the form of a gaming PC isn't one enjoyed by everyone, so here's hoping Bethesda gets a patch out at some point to unlock that PS5 Pro performance a little more.
