Fans ofDoom 2016might be surprised to find thatDoom Eternalwill not feature the original’s Deathmatch multiplayer, as confirmed in arecent developer interview. Instead the upcoming title will only have the 2 vs 1 Battlemode announced duringBethesda’s E3 conference.
According to Executive Producer Marty Stratton:
No traditional multiplayer mode. Battlemode is our primary multiplayer mode. The cool thing about it is it’s ripped straight fromDoom; it’s the combat players want and love, you’re familiar with the gameplay, playing as a Slayer.
He then further elaborated on the decision to not bring back Deathmatch mode toDoom Eternal:
When you look back toDoom 2016, we kind of did something more traditional. Skill vs skill twitch vs twitch. It didn’t have any of the components ofDoomthat people loved from the campaign. It didn’t have the slayer or demons in a meaningful way. It just kind of fell flat so we really flipped the script on it and decided we need to develop this internally, we need to pull it from whatDoomis all about, demons vs slayer.
The team put just as much thought into the reasoning behind its new 2 vs 1 Battlemode multiplayer mode. According to Creative Director Hugo Martin, having two creatures against one slayer was the best way to ensure that twitch skills didn’t unfairly dominate:
We couldn’t figure out a way of introducing another slayer to the experience without it just becoming twitch skills vs twitch skills," says Martin. “Which is what we did last time. If we go head to head as two slayers - if your twitch skills are better than mine, I can’t overcome that. But with demons, I can overcome someone’s twitch skills with strategy and teamwork, and in that was the spark.
It’s good to see developers that pay such close attention to player feedback and are willing to completely revamp an entire mode from scratch to properly address the criticisms. And from what we’ve seen so far,Doom Eternalseems toimprove on its predecessorin every other way, judging from it stealing the show in our DualShockersE3 2019 Awards.
