Do you need to play Doom 2016 before Doom: Eternal?

Doom: Eternal is the follow-up to the Doom game that released in 2016. The Doom 2016 game was a soft reboot of the franchise, providing players with an updated feel of the classic shooter game. Both games have been a huge success. For those who are jumping into Doom: Eternal, and learning it’s a sequel to the 2016 game, do you need to have played the first one to understand the new one?

There are a handful of details you may not completely understand if you miss out on the Doom 2016 game. You may not realize who Samuel Hayden is, a cybernetic robot who was once a man but downloaded his consciousness and mind to a robotic figure. He was featured in the Doom 2016 game and makes a return in Doom: Eternal. Luckily, that’s not too much of a problem. 

You learn a lot about the game from reading the codex entries. You can find them on each of the levels. These provide context for what’s happening at that current moment in the game, allowing players to read much more in-depth pieces about the demons and the world of Doom: Eternal. When you meet up with Samuel Hayden in the Arc Complex level, the codex pieces of that level delve deep into what happened to Samuel Hayden after the events of the Doom 2016 game. 

It’s not too big of a deal if you don’t read these. The main context of Doom: Eternal is saving the entire world from demons, and killing as many as you can along the way. You can reference the codex page at any time if you want to take a break from the endless onslaught to learn about the world of Doom: Eternal.

There are plenty of ways to play through Doom: Eternal. You can choose to play it on one of the standard four difficulties, or turn it up a notch by playing it on Extra Life Mode where when you die, and you have no extra lives available, you start over at the beginning. By completing the campaign through this mode, though, you do earn the rare Phobos skin.

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