Doom Eternal's new Battlemode multiplayer mode was revealed last year as a 2v1 throwdown between one player as the Doomslayer, and two others working together as demons. Today we got a closer look at that asymmetric mode in action courtesy of a 12-minute IGN video featuring one of their guys against two of id's.
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"It's skill against teamwork and tactics," game director Hugo Martin says in the video. "Teamwork and tactics for the demons, and skill for the Slayer. A game of cat and mouse—definitely the Slayer is the cat, and the demons, even though they're these giant creatures with rockets on their hands, they are definitely the mice."
The basics are straightforward enough: The demons have to kill the Doomslayer, while Doomslayer tries to do the same to them. The Doomslayer comes to the fight with a full loadout, which is handy, but downed demons will be resurrected as long as their partner is alive, so after one is down, the second one has to be put down quickly too. Demons have special abilities of their own, like the ability to spawn other enemies, but the Doomslayer can, kind of ironically, take advantage of stealth to get the drop on his foes—demons can see the Doomslayer's outline through walls as long as at least one of them has eyes on him, but if he breaks line of sight with both, the outline goes away, enabling him to sneak off to other, more advantageous positions.
Interestingly, Battlemode will be the "primary multiplayer mode" in Doom Eternal, which will not have a "traditional multiplayer mode." Executive producer Marty Stratton told IGN last year that id Software opted for the new approach to multiplayer after the "more traditional" modes in the 2016 reboot failed to catch fire.
"In the [Doom reboot] multiplayer, we took a little bit of this and a little bit of that and it became obvious to fans and obvious to us that’s not what we wanted to do," Stratton said. "We developed Doom: Eternal's multiplayer internally and we really focused on making the best multiplayer possible. It feels like Doom but with our friends."
Doom Eternal comes out on March 20.
