Doom: Eternal Update 1 Comes with Empowered Demons, Battlemode Changes

Doom: Eternal’s first update is coming out, and it looks to be a pretty exciting batch of changes.

While exact patch notes haven’t been released, Bethesda has put out a little teaser blog for what will be included in Update 1. Most of it seems dedicated to the multiplayer side of things, with Battlemode, the game’s only multiplayer mode, getting a number of quality-of-life improvements, such as implementing anti-cheat software, providing players with an indicator when they have poor network connection, changing the tutorial to suck less, adding a death screen so you know exactly what killed you, and giving players who are max level more reasons to play with additional late-game prizes.

However, the most exciting changes are actually coming to single player: first and foremost, they’re giving you an extra reason to try and not die with the new “Empowered Demon” feature:

Spice up your campaign runs with Empowered Demons! When a player is killed in the single player campaign, the demon that felled them is beefed up and transported to another player’s game to fight again! Will you fall to this fearsome challenger or avenge your fellow Slayer? Take out an Empowered Demon and you’ll not only be rewarded with tons of health and ammo, but also bonus XP to progress in-game events!

So basically, they’re going to make the harder parts of the game even more difficult by throwing extra-spicy demons at you. That’s fun. But if you ask me, that’s not even the biggest change they’re making to the game: if you ask me, the biggest change is that they’ll also be making it possible to dash vertically while you swim.

That should make the worst parts of the game slightly less worse.

Anyway, there’s no specific date for when Update 1 will come out, but Bethesda says it will be soon, so that’s cool.