Doom Eternal is getting its first DLC in October, but its turns out that The Ancient Gods DLC is actually a standalone title, meaning players won’t even need to own Doom Eternal to play it. The Ancient Gods debuted at this year’s QuakeCon before getting a bit more fleshed out in a recent trailer at Gamescom.
When Doom hit shelves in 2016, players said that the reboot was the perfect encapsulation of the decades-old franchise, bringing all of its old-school glory into the modern day with stunning graphics, unbelievable speed, and an arsenal of weapons that somehow just felt exactly right. Its followup had a lot to live up to, but Doom Eternal proved to be every bit as good as the 2016 release, embracing Doom’s brutal aesthetic and design ethos so thoroughly that its developers didn’t even bother to include a pistol, instead equipping players with a room-clearing shotgun from the word go.
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Now, Doom Eternal is getting its first DLC in the form of The Ancient Gods, and even players who didn’t pick up the base game earlier this year will be able to get the chance to meet (and most likely destroy) the ancient gods in question. In a recent interview with PCGamesN, executive producer Marty Stratton revealed that The Ancient Gods DLC will be a standalone release available to purchase and play even without the Doom Eternal base game. Stratton says that The Ancient Gods is “every bit as grand as the main game was,” likening it to a two-part film. In fact, the upcoming DLC is just part one of a continuing storyline, with the second part expected to launch less than a year from the first.
While Doom is mostly thought of as a fairly mindless series, focused on over-the-top combat above all else, its latest release does a lot to build out the universe the series takes place in. While some reviews knocked the game for stuffing in too much complex lore, it’s impressive just to see how its creators managed to tie Doom Eternal into the rest of the series while leaving the door open for new expansions on that canon like The Ancient Gods.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Doom without plenty of fun gunplay, and Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods looks like it will have no shortage of that. The new enemies it introduces seem like some of the most powerful ever in the series, so players should prepare to bring their A game when it launches this October.
Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods will be available on October 20th, 2020.
Source: PCGamesN