The Doom Slayer and the dragon in Doom: The Dark Ages.

Veteran Doom fans aren’t happy about a strange change that The Dark Ages has made to the series’ iconic difficulty levels, as one of the names has been changed for seemingly no reason.

From the moment Doom: The Dark Ages was first revealed, it was clear that id Software was aiming to take the series in a different direction than what it did with 2016 and Eternal. Not only is the setting completely different with a bigger emphasis placed on story than ever before, but the gameplay has seen some radical tweaks to make it more about standing and fighting than ripping and tearing.

Alongside those differences, The Dark Ages also aims to be as welcoming to every type of player as possible. Much has been made by id about how customisable the Doom Slayer’s adventure is this time around, with many of the difficulty options being completely up to the player, such as game speed, parry windows, and much more.

You Can’t Be Too Young To Die In Doom: The Dark Ages

Guess You’ll Have To Settle For Aspiring Slayer

Although id clearly put these options into the game to make The Dark Ages approachable, some players weren’t so happy about it since Doom is skill-based. The small backlash towards those options seems like it was just the beginning, though, as those with early access to The Dark Ages have discovered that it’s changed one of the series’ most well-known staples.

As pointed out by Redditor Superb_Dentist_8323 on the Doom subreddit, id Software has strangely decided to change the name of The Dark Ages’ lowest difficulty level. In every other Doom game, this difficulty was called “I’m Too Young To Die”, but in The Dark Ages it’s instead named “Aspiring Slayer”.

It’s not really clear why this change has been made, but fans over on the subreddit aren’t happy about the decision and call it “blasphemy”. There’s a chance it was tweaked to make the difficulty clearer, as it sounds somewhat like a mode where you literally can’t be killed, whereas Aspiring Slayer is more clearly an easy mode.

Some fans over on the TwoBestFriendsPlay subreddit think that it’s a “board decision” to be more inclusive and less insulting towards players, but that doesn’t really make sense either. Unlike Wolfenstein’s “Can I Play, Daddy?”, Doom’s lowest setting isn’t really insulting in any way. It’s just a very strange decision that’s a shame to see, especially considering how “Hurt Me Plenty” managed to stick around.