Doom Eternal Won’t Feature Traditional “Deathmatch” Multiplayer

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Doom Eternal won't see a return of its less then well-received Deathmatch multiplayer, instead offering players a new and better balanced mode.

Fans of Doom 2016 might be surprised to find that Doom Eternal will not feature the original’s Deathmatch multiplayer, as confirmed in a recent developer interview. Instead the upcoming title will only have the 2 vs 1 Battlemode announced during Bethesda’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 from Doom; 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 to Doom Eternal:

When you look back to Doom 2016, we kind of did something more traditional. Skill vs skill twitch vs twitch. It didn’t have any of the components of Doom that 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 what Doom is 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.