DOOM Eternal is almost here, and people are hungry for its rage. The 2016 reboot was much beloved for its old school approach to the genre, which put blood, guts and guns forefront in fast-paced battles against hordes of demons. The sequel largely takes the same route, as you can see from our review through here, but ironically, despite being loved for that old school mentality, being too old school is one of the reasons the game has a different type of multiplayer.
In an interview with Shacknews, Bethesda’s Pete Hines was asked about the lack of a traditional deathmatch in Eternal. He basically said that was too old school, saying the deathmatch format was “eons old.” Including it in the new game just because DOOM featured it years in the past wasn’t how they wanted to approach the new title’s multiplayer mode.
“That mode is eons old. We don’t want to do something just for the sake of doing it, or because something has always been a certain way.
“The biggest problem we thought we had with DOOM 2016 was that [multiplayer] wasn’t done at id, and felt really disconnected from the base game that everybody loved. Whether you’re playing by yourself or with others, we want it to feel like you’re all playing the same game. That’s as opposed to, ‘I’m a badass demon slayer in single-player, but when I go over to multiplayer, there are no demons, and it’s just Deathmatch.’ I don’t know what that has to do with [DOOM] other than that, well, a couple of decades ago we had that, so we should just have that again.”
Hines does have something of a point, since straight deathmatch is somewhat out of fashion. The game does have a multiplayer mode (which you can read more about through here), and of course the single player is no doubt the star of the show for many. DOOM Eternal releases this Friday.