Among all the delays in the past week, id Software’s DOOM Eternal is one of the titles that’s on track. A new story trailer highlighted the explosive action and gorgeous production values that will define the experience. However, it probably wouldn’t have reached this point without being delayed from November 2019 to March 2020.
Executive producer Marty Stratton spoke to VG247 about the same recently. “I say it’s the best game we’ve ever made,” he said. “I don’t think I’d say that if we didn’t have that extra time. The game was done, we haven’t added anything but what [the delay] allowed us to do was fix a tonne more bugs.
“It allowed us to do a lot of polishing, hardening of the back-end systems and we do testing throughout where we bring in people externally. We did a couple of additional versions of those and made a couple of additions to the game, just balance-type things and patching up a couple of exploits.”
The pressure was fairly high last year – Stratton revealed that the development team “were crunching pretty hard most of last year. It goes in phases. We’ll have one group of people crunching so the next group of people are teed up properly. As they get done, they may need to crunch a little bit.
“We really truly do try and be very respectful of peoples’ time and lives. We have very dedicated people that just choose to work a lot in many cases. It was nice because we want the game to be perfect. We want it to live up to our expectations and consumer expectations.
“We work very hard and we’ll put in extra time to do that. Sometimes when we just get the extra time we do it anyways because we want it to be that much better. [A delay] takes a little bit of the steam and pressure out but it’s almost one of those things where we’ll push it even harder to get even more just as tight as it possibly can be.”
This sounds pretty much in line with Cyberpunk 2077’s development. Despite being delayed to September from its initial release, CD Projekt RED admitted that its developers would have to work extra hours to ensure things were up to the mark. So while a delay may or may not result in a better game, there are still hundreds of developers working tirelessly behind the scenes all the same.
DOOM Eternal is currently slated to release on March 20th for Xbox One, PS4, Stadia, and PC. The Nintendo Switch version doesn’t currently have a release date but is still in the works. Stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.
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