Doom Eternal won't have traditional (deathmatch) multiplayer. Its offerings are strictly the 2 v 1 Battlemode announced at Bethesda's E3 conference; but by all accounts, this is a very good thing.

"No traditional multiplayer mode. Battlemode is our primary multiplayer mode," says Executive Producer Marty Stratton. "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."

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Although Doom 2016's single player mode was fantastic, the team learned a lot from its not-particular-well-received multiplayer mode.

"When you look back to Doom 2016", says Stratton, "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."

"In 2016, we discovered we need to lead and not follow," continues Creative Director Hugo Martin. "In the single player, we lead. And we owned it, we made a Doom game, we didn’t necessarily care about the trends or anything. In the 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. 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."

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As for the 2 v 1 ratio, where two demons go up against one slayer, Martin says it was the best ratio possible to ensure 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."

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iD Software is also very open to Doom: Eternal cross-platform play, and has ensured there are no technical restrictions in place to prohibit the team from implementing it."We haven’t talked too much about that publicly," says Stratton."We haven’t done anything technically that would prevent it, so we’d love to - we want to connect players in as many ways as possible, there’s a lot of publishing and first party type of stuff that we need to sort out, but from a technical perspective, we’ve made sure we haven’t limited ourselves to prevent that."

Lucy O'Brien is Executive Editor of Features at IGN. Follow her on Twitter.