Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters is getting a free update with new enemies and gear, seems to be teasing more DLC

Since its release in 2022, turn-based tactics face-brutalizer Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters has received a string of free updates, with another due this month. While that update will add an enemy spawn group called the Tainted Sons, three new bits of wargear for the beleaguered Grey Knights, and two more warp surge events, the latest video on the official Daemonhunters YouTube channel seems to be teasing something different.

The video, embedded above, is presented as a transmission from someone named Grand Master Havlik to Inquisitor Vakir, one of the NPCs who joins your ship during the campaign, simply asking: "What do you think you have found?" It's bookended by the symbol of a skull with a dagger behind it that represents the Officio Assassinorum, the Imperium's executioners, which gives us a clue. Maybe we'll be getting an expansion that adds an assassin to our squad? Or lets us do missions with a whole squad of sneaky killers? The fact nine hidden achievements were recently added to Daemonhunters, it might be something substantial.

The Grey Knights could certainly do with the help. Daemonhunters is a great tactics game, but an unforgiving one. I've never bothered bumping the difficulty up to Ruthless, let alone Legendary, and the previous DLC, Duty Eternal, made it even harder. While I'd love to play an Imperial assassin in a stealth game, like Dishonored but 40K, I'll settle for having them added to Daemonhunters.

Meanwhile, Update XIII will bring a new spawn group of enemies who have loads of hit points and a boon that gives them a 15% chance to mutate whenever they're attacked. The Tainted Sons will have low armor and resistance though, so fingers crossed we'll be able to take them out fast before they transform into anything too horrific. They'll include three new enemies: Nurgling swarms that buff daemons, plague surgeons that can also appear in existing spawns, and slimy Beasts of Nurgle that immobilize anyone who gets close.

The new warp surges are Generous Effusions, which makes heretics that die in the subsequent three turns grant nearby enemies three hit points, and Roiling Mutations, which mutates every enemy on the map. To combat all that the Grey Knights get a purgation skull, which targets a single enemy for purging up to 10 squares away and ignores cover, an autoloader skull, which lets a target perform their reload ability (or abilities, in the case of the dreadnought, who has two), and rad grenades, which cause bleed. The update should be rolled out on July 25, may the Emperor protect us all.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.