The long-awaited return to Doom's roots lands today with The Dark Ages, and early impressions suggest id Software has found something genuinely fresh in going further back in time rather than forward. Elsewhere in the practical corner of tech, DuckDuckGo's browser has quietly solved one of the more maddening parts of everyday internet life by finally cutting through YouTube's increasingly aggressive ad walls, while OpenAI is moving fast again, rolling out a new GPT-Live voice model series as a kind of appetizer before the broader GPT-5.6 release that has the AI world watching closely.

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The first big expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages, Revelations, is out now, and after about five hours with it, I'm fairly convinced this is the best the game has ever been. The new combat elements do a lot of heavy lifting here. Revelations picks up right where the main campaign ended, and it doesn't ease you back in. Within minutes, you're thrown into fights that demand you already know the Slayer's full kit.

The star of the show is the Chain Spear, which takes over from the Shield Saw that anchored the base game's combat. Instead of shield-bashing your way toward a demon, you now throw the Spear into an enemy and yank yourself across the arena with full control over where you land, roughly the way the Super Shotgun's grappling hook worked in Doom Eternal. The dash comes back too. It was missing from the base game, and its return reshapes how every encounter feels, letting you slip past enemies, vault over them, and keep moving in a way that clearly owes a debt to Eternal's kinetic rhythm. The Spear ships with a set of abilities you can buy: a damaging stab, an aerial slam, and a javelin toss, each with upgrades built to counter specific enemy types. The Shield Saw eventually shows up again as well, so you can hot-swap between the two sub-weapons mid-fight.

A full review is still coming once I've cleared the final third of the campaign and the endgame content. For now, though, if you're a fan of the series, Revelations is one to play.

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DuckDuckGo has updated its browser to block most video ads by default, including those that appear before and during YouTube playback. The feature is built on open-source community filter lists from uBlock Origin, with DuckDuckGo potentially layering on its own rules to improve performance within its browser. It is already live by default for users on iPhone, Windows, and Mac, with Android users able to enable it manually in settings while a full rollout is pending. The one catch is that it only works when watching YouTube inside the DuckDuckGo browser itself, not through the official YouTube app.

The timing is notable. DuckDuckGo has been picking up momentum as users grow frustrated with Google's aggressive push toward AI-driven search, and the company has been positioning itself as a way for people to stay in control of how much artificial intelligence shapes their online experience. Adding video ad blocking gives it a tangible, everyday advantage that goes beyond privacy messaging. Brave has pursued a similar default ad-blocking strategy for years and recently reported 120 million monthly active users, demonstrating real demand for this kind of approach.

DuckDuckGo is being transparent that the feature is not perfect, warning users that buffering times may increase and that some ads could still slip through. Even so, the combination of ad blocking and a search alternative untethered from Google's AI overhaul positions the browser as a more compelling daily driver than it has ever been.

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OpenAI has rolled out GPT-Live, a new family of AI models built specifically for spoken conversation, and it changes how ChatGPT's voice mode actually behaves. The biggest improvement is a full-duplex architecture that lets the system listen and respond at the same time, instead of waiting for you to stop talking before it starts generating a reply. That one change makes real-time translation possible in voice mode for the first time. It also means the model can start tasks like web searches mid-conversation rather than sitting on them until you've finished your prompt.

There are two tiers at launch. GPT-Live-1 is the default on paid ChatGPT plans, while a lighter version called GPT-Live-1-mini runs the free tier. Both are rolling out across iOS, Android, and the web, with multilingual support baked in. When a conversation gets complicated, GPT-Live hands the request off to GPT-5.5, OpenAI's most capable commercially available model, which takes care of the heavier lifting: detailed explanations, web browsing, that sort of thing. OpenAI says GPT-5.5 will also be able to pass work along to newer reasoning models as they arrive.

Developers get access to it through an API. That means these same real-time voice features could start showing up in third-party apps over the next few months.

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