The Doom franchise is easily one of the most legendary gaming franchises of all time, and the prospect of a new Doom title – presumably, Doom 4 – for the next generation could be considered as one of the most epic things to happen. While Bethesda confirmed earlier this year that all accomplished progress on Doom 4 had been trashed so that the project would begin fresh, there is still some more new information waiting to be revealed about the game. Here’s a bit of it...
At the recently concluded QuakeCon 2013, IGN spoke with the studio director of id Software, Tim Willits, and Bethesda VP of marketing, Pete Hines, about the project and if there are any prospects of seeing the game officially any time soon.
"It wasn’t one thing,” Willits told IGN. “It wasn’t like the art was bad, or the programming was bad. Every game has a soul. Every game has a spirit. When you played Rage, you got the spirit. And [Doom] did not have the spirit, it did not have the soul, it didn’t have a personality. It had a bit of schizophrenia, a little bit of an identity crisis. It didn’t have the passion and soul of what an id game is. Everyone knows the feeling of Doom, but it’s very hard to articulate.”
Moreover, after both Bethesda and id failed to create the next Doom in the likeness of the previous titles in the famed franchise and didn’t recognize the usual Doom-iness in the game they were making, the companies agreed to start over on the project. On a similar note, Willits also emphasized on the fact that the game was never formally announced, but only revealed in job listings.
“If it was like the quintessential, ‘yup, that’s Doom 4,’ then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But, it was something that we looked at and the id guys looked at and said, look, it’s not even that something is necessarily bad. But is it good enough? You can make a game and say, ‘that’s not a bad game, but it’s not as good as an Elder Scrolls game should be,’ and there’s a difference...it’s not great.”
“It’s not amazing. It’s not what people have waited all this time for. It needs to be like ‘this was totally worth the wait.’ And I think what the guys at id are working on is...they’re pushing the boundaries and challenging themselves. I don’t want anybody to look at id’s next project and have this reaction that it’s still stuck in the 90s,” Hines stated.