Upon unveiling the gameplay for DOOM Eternal, id Software impressed many of us with the expanded movement, gorgeous level design, and intense action that made the first game so loveable. Interestingly enough, when we first heard rumours of a follow-up to DOOM (2016), we thought the game would simply be called DOOM 2. However, id Software went with a different route.
Speaking to IGN, executive producer Marty Stratton actually revealed that the studio was considering calling the sequel “DOOM 2“. However, it wanted to avoid the same problem it had with the first game.
“You hear us say it all the time, we call it Doom 2016, and the internet has called it Doom 2016,” he said. “We go back and forth on whether it was a mistake to call it Doom. I still don’t think it was a mistake, because we really were kind of drawing a new line in the sand.” Though it seemed fine with DOOM, Stratton realized that “coming out and saying ‘we’re going to do Doom 2,’ we would have ‘Doom 2: Year of Release Date.'”
This naming for DOOM would have also made searching for it online “a giant pain in the butt because you get all this [other] stuff”, as per creative director Hugo Martin. Thus, the development team sat down with marketing to figure out something “that had meaning and spoke to what we were doing with lore and how we want people to feel about the game. And Doom Eternal was something that just felt right.”
Martin also brings up the naming conventing used for Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy of films. “I think [Christopher] Nolan did it the best, and we thought about that,” he explained. “It wasn’t ‘Dark Knight 1, Dark Knight 2, Dark Knight 3.’ Each one had its own name, but there was an arc there. They were all connected, as is this game as a sequel to [Doom] 2016.
“[Doom Eternal] felt like a good way to go in that regard. You’re not limiting yourself, and you’re also not creating confusion with the brand,” said Martin.
DOOM Eternal is currently scheduled to release next year for Xbox One, PS4, PC, and Nintendo Switch (for which it will arrive on the same day as other versions, surprisingly enough). The game will have multiplayer developed in-house at id Software, and instead of SnapMap, there will be single-player DLC to look forward to after launch.