DOOM: The Dark Ages Slaughter Mode Comes Free on November 16

DOOM: The Dark Ages is getting Slaughter Mode on November 16, 2026, and it costs nothing extra. The new endless combat mode arrives as a free update for owners of the Revelations DLC, the Premium Edition or the Premium Upgrade, Bethesda announced on November 12. It is id Software’s mode, and no unlock hour has been announced.

The pitch is short and nasty. You fight escalating rounds of random encounters, bosses and arenas, and the official post says it plainly: no two runs through Slaughter Mode are the same. You carve out personal best scores and unlock rewards with Skulls collected from the carnage. At every checkpoint you have to decide whether to take the score you already have or gamble it for more.

The gamble is the interesting part. Reach a Round Checkpoint and you can Secure your Skulls against death, or pick Risk It to add to your Skull Multiplier, which raises the Skulls you can earn during the run. If you are killed while Risk It is active, every unsecured Skull is forfeited. Death is not the end, either: each Round Checkpoint you clear also unlocks another starting point, so later runs begin deeper into the encounter list.

Rewards are Slayer skins for Slaughter Mode only, weapon skins that work in all modes, and profile icons. Tracks from Andrew Hulshult’s IDKFA soundtrack play in Slaughter Mode and in the Ripatorium, and weekly challenges give you more chances to earn them.

What it costs depends on what you own. Here is the Steam pricing as of today:

For players, this is the payoff for a DLC that landed on July 7, 2026 and had so far given you a campaign expansion instead of an endless mode. Secure-or-Risk-It is the whole design in one choice: it turns a wave shooter into a push-your-luck run where a greedy multiplier can wipe out an hour of good scores. That is a very different feel from the campaign, and it is the sort of mode people replay for numbers rather than for a story. If you own none of the packs yet, the $19.99 Revelations DLC is the cheapest way in, and Bethesda is making the mode free for everyone who already bought one.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report