Super Mega Baseball is one of my favourite sports games of the past five years, and the sequel looks like it will improve on the arcadey original in nearly every way. One of the major additions to Super Mega Baseball 2 is online multiplayer, and developer Metalhead Software released a video (above) this week detailing just how that will work.

The game pitches two ways to play online. First, you can play any game mode with friends—get a big enough group together and you could create a big elimination tournament, or for something smaller scale you and a friend can play drop in, drop out co-op during games in the standard Season mode.

Second, you can play against randoms online in Pennant Race, which is basically a matchmaking mode to play one-off, 1v1 games. All players will compete to get the best record during one 'Race', and then the leaderboards will reset so that you can go for it all over again. Eventually, the mode will have a tiered ranking system to break up the competition into more manageable chunks.

The game will support crossplay between PC and both PS4 and Xbox One, so you'll be able to play with your friends on console, which is neat.

The game still has no concrete release date. It was due to emerge from the dugout last September, but was delayed into this year, and now developer Metalhead Software says it will be out before the summer.