Staring at a locked menu for a campaign expansion you already paid a hundred bucks for is a special kind of frustration, but you can bypass the broken launch system.
If you picked up the Premium Edition of DOOM: The Dark Ages, you should be ripping through the new Revelations DLC right now. Instead, you’re probably staring at a prompt telling you to buy it again or waiting on a «coming soon» storefront page that refuses to load. A massive entitlement bug is currently blocking Premium Edition owners on both Steam and PS5 from accessing the campaign. Bethesda Support finally acknowledged the glitch on social media, but waiting around for a corporate hotfix while your evening disappears is a terrible option. I tracked down the actual user fixes that are getting people past the lock screens right now.
Keep Your Wallet Closed
The most critical thing you need to know right now is that you must not buy this DLC a second time.
The storefronts are heavily glitched. If you look at the standalone page for the Revelations DLC, it might show a price tag of twenty dollars. Do not click it. Buying the expansion separately won’t magically solve the underlying account recognition bug, and it will just leave you short twenty bucks for absolutely no reason.
The community is heavily pointing fingers at the recent massive layoffs at id Software for this sloppy rollout. It is hard to argue with them when half the development team got handed pink slips right before a major drop. But while the infrastructure is a mess, your license is still valid. You just need to force the platforms to recognize it.
How To Force Steam To Load The DLC
If you’re on PC, standard troubleshooting steps like verifying your files or restarting the game aren’t doing anything for the vast majority of people. The issue is a deep registry breakdown between Steam and the Bethesda servers.
The Account Relog Trick
The only consistent fix for PC right now requires a complete account reset. Don’t just close the Steam client window or reboot your computer. You need to go to the top left of your client, click on your account name, and explicitly sign out of your Steam account.
Once you’re completely logged out, close the client down from your system tray to ensure it’s completely dead. Boot it back up, type your password back in, and log in fresh. This forces Steam to completely rebuild your library license keys from scratch. For most players, the client will immediately trigger a quick update or push an account notification confirming that the Revelations campaign is officially attached to your profile.
How To Unlock The DLC On PS5
Console players are hitting the exact same brick wall, but the solution on PlayStation 5 is entirely different and deals directly with how the PlayStation Store handles seasonal upgrades.
The Zero Dollar Purchase Method
If the campaign is greyed out on your main menu, close the game entirely and head back to the PS5 dashboard. Navigate to the DOOM: The Dark Ages game hub and scroll down to the add-ons section to find the standalone page for the Revelations DLC.
Instead of showing a purchase price, the store should display a button that says «Free» or shows a total of zero dollars. Click that button to process the transaction. You’ll get a standard automated receipt email from Sony confirming a zero-dollar purchase. Once that transaction clears, the console will immediately flag the content as owned, and it will unlock inside your main menu the next time you boot the game.
A Quick Warning On The Spear
Once you finally get past the digital gatekeepers and load into the actual game, prepare yourself for a massive mechanical shift.
The new campaign introduces a spear weapon that completely alters how you move. If you try to play this exactly like the base game, you’re going to get sent back to the checkpoint over and over. The spear forces you to completely unlearn the defensive shield flow you spent the entire main game mastering. It is clunky at first and the learning curve is steep, so take a second to practice the timing on the opening fodder before you get swarmed by anything heavy.
