Earlier this year, Bethesda confirmed that all completed progress on Doom 4 had been trashed, and that the project would begin anew, likely for next-gen consoles. Until now, relatively little was known about the reasons behind scrapping the project. At this year’s QuakeCon, sources at IGN spoke with the studio director of id Software, Tim Willits, and Bethesda VP of marketing, Pete Hines about the project’s rocky start.
“It wasn’t one thing,” Tim Willits said. “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.”
Both Bethesda and id Software agreed that the game they were making just wasn’t Doom. Peter Hines commented, “If it was like the quintessential, ‘yup, that’s Doom 4,’ then we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” says Hines.
“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.”
While the release of Doom 4 is much anticipated, and it’s unfortunate that it’s delayed, id and Bethesda are displaying the all-too-rare quality over ideal-release-date aspect of a gaming company that is sorely lacking in the industry today.
Are you glad the team is taking their time to do things right?
Source: IGN
