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Your opportunities to murder demons in gruesome fashion are getting expanded with the release of Doom Eternal‘s final DLC expansion, The Ancient Gods Part 2. With the final chapter in the story that began with Doom 2016, you’ll add the Sentinel Hammer to your repertoire of weapons, and you can expect it to change up the combat calculus that’s central to the Doom Eternal experience.
As game director Hugo Martin explained, the hammer stuns enemies in the area around you when you use it, while also making enemies drop more resources when you hit them with glory kills or your chainsaw, flamethrower, or ice grenade. That makes the hammer an extremely useful addition to your existing combos for restoring health, armor, and ammo, giving you new opportunities to take down enemies and making your current abilities more powerful, without replacing them or forcing you to rewrite how you play the game. You can use the hammer as you build up “charges” for executing glory kill finishing moves or hitting enemies in their weak points, and as game director Hugo Martin put it, if you’re playing optimally, you’ll be adding the hammer to your move set frequently to make yourself an even more effective killing machine.
“There is this series of actions that the player does that, when they do that, they get into that flow state–they’re burning, they’re ice-bombing, they’re comboing, they’re glory-killing, they’re chainsawing,” Martin said in an interview with GameSpot. “And we always want to reward the player for being in that flow state.”
The hammer is going to amp up the Doom Slayer’s skills significantly in The Ancient Gods Part 2, it sounds like. The hammer will instantly kill smaller enemies and stun larger ones, and Martin said that gives you the power to chain abilities together to take down tough foes like the Marauder in a single go. Staggering the Marauder, blasting it, and then using the hammer to stun it will give you a chance to deal so much damage that Doom Eternal’s most fearsome enemy will never have a chance to recover.
As a result of taking on that kind of power, Martin said, “Shit is going to hit the fan.”
The Ancient Gods Part 2 is adding five new enemies, Martin said, that will force players to rethink how they address the battlefield and move through a fight. You’ll see Riot Shield Soldiers whose shields can’t be broken (and who take after the chaingun wielding Former Commando of Doom 2); Stone Imps that’ll add some seriously damage-resistant fodder enemies to the hordes chasing you that’ll require some serious punishment to take down; the Cursed Prowler, which sneak in to poison you and then slink away to put distance right after, forcing you to chase it down; the Screecher zombie, who you’ll want to avoid killing because its death will buff all the other enemies in the arena; and the Armored Baron, which Martin says is the “star of the show.”
All of these new enemies aim to refine your combat and movements skills around the battlefield. Martin said he thinks these additions, along with the hammer, represent developer id Software continuing to better its own approach to Doom Eternal.
“I think it’s just getting better as a studio with our execution and refining the formulas that we use. We said since the beginning of launch, Doom Eternal will be a combat puzzle worth your time to solve, and there’s a sense of satisfaction as you master the systems and really control the chaos,” Martin said. “So we really can’t just be like, ‘Hey, here’s more Barons.’ The player has murdered, at this point, a lot of Barons.”
There’s one other big challenge that you’ll face in The Ancient Gods Part 2: The Dark Lord. The ultimate enemy was teased at the end of The Ancient Gods Part 1, when the Doom Slayer revived the king of Hell in order to destroy him once and for all. Turns out, the Dark Lord and the Doom Slayer are mirrors of one another, and your final test in Doom Eternal will be to take down someone equal to yourself.
We saw the Dark Lord briefly in the teaser trailer for The Ancient Gods Part 2, where he waited for the Doom Slayer, flanked by the armies of hell–and driving a huge mech suit.
“I want it to feel like you’re fighting another player,” Martin said of the Dark Lord boss fight. “The really cool wrinkle is that he can take resources away from you, just like you could take resources away from him. So when you do good and you damage him, and do different things, you’ll replenish health, just like you do throughout Doom. If you mess up and he hits you, he could take health from you. So it creates this amazing seesaw battle.”
The Ancient Gods Part 2 is bringing the story arc of Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal to an end, and as a result, expect the DLC to amp up Doom’s scope significantly. Martin said you can expect to fight through battlefields where you’ll see Sentinel mechs taking on towering titans (the corpses of which we’ve seen in the background more than once across Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal). According to executive producer Marty Stratton, in terms of the epic scope of those battles, this is the biggest thing the studio has done.
“The last level is incredible. We’re closing the arc that started in 2016, and I think the team delivered on the payoff,” Stratton said. “You land there and you can’t believe what’s happening around you. And it’s really like nothing that we’ve done in a Doom game or any game, honestly, at id.”
For players compelled by the surprisingly deep and intricate lore Doom Eternal has built since its release–which brings together just about every game in the franchise into one unified, expansive story–Martin said there will again be a lot to dig into in The Ancient Gods Part 2.
And while this arc of the story of the Doom Slayer is coming to an end, it doesn’t necessarily mark the end of Doom until the franchise’s next reboot.
“The story, for those that dive in, they’re going to be surprised,” Martin said. “There’s a good twist at the end. There was a twist at the end of DLC 1, there’s a twist at the end of DLC 2. And then I guess a sense of closure. I hope they feel a sense of closure at the end of DLC 2, but also there’s just tons of intrigue.”
“We had to wrap it up with a bang. That’s the end of this story arc, but the reason why we make the Doom universe, we just want to take you to cool places so you could shoot cool things with cool guns. That’s really the whole point, but there’s more stories to tell, absolutely. This is just the completion of this arc. And I think you’ll see when you play DLC 2 hints of where we could go.”
