In light of recent reports indicating that id Software has suffered around 90 job cuts, largely involving its coders and QA department, a new rumor indicates that the studio was actively trying to branch out beyond the DOOM franchise. According to GamesBeat, after having wrapped up work on the Revelations DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages, the studio had seemingly started pitching new projects.
Among these pitches was a multiplayer and co-op DOOM game that, along with an emphasis on working with other players, would have also brought back iconic weapons from the franchise. id Software also reportedly pitched a new Perfect Dark game following the cancellation of its reboot after the closure of The Initiative.
Yet another rumored pitch was for a project codenamed Fury, which was just in its conceptual stage. The title was described as a sci-fi noir game inspired by the style of the John Wick movies, involving “Chicago and Louisiana gangsters.” Its gameplay was going to offer a mix of melee combat and gunplay referred to as “Gun Fu”. Fury was proposed by studio co-director Hugo Martin. Unfortunately, the project was never formally greenlit.
A survival game with aesthetics borrowed from Westerns while also featuring robots was pitched as well. Codenamed Ironwood, the project was said to be similar in its genre and world to HBO’s Westworld.
While many of these projects were considered to be cross-platform games that would come out across all current gaming platforms, Fury was notable in needing so long to develop that it was likelier to come out on the next-gen Project Helix.
The recent layoffs suffered by the studio have reportedly left its QA department “decimated”, with overall job cuts accounting for 50 percent of id Software’s headcount. One former employee has said that these layoffs have been quite dire, with the studio’s future as a standalone game development team being difficult to imagine.
“I’m not convinced there is a viable way forward,” they said. “It feels like a bunch of knee-jerk responses.”
Another expressed pride at having worked at id Software – a studio with a relatively small team that was still managing to release critically acclaimed AAA games while using its in-house id Tech game engine.
“I have no regrets in the technology that we made, and the games that we released,” they said. “We kicked ass for a small studio of people pumping out a triple-A title. We did genre-defining titles that we rebooted after it was effectively considered dead. I’m proud of what we did. I’m proud of the studio. I’m proud of the people that are there still and the people who aren’t.”
The cuts have been part of larger layoffs across Microsoft that have affected around 4,800 jobs. Of these, 1,600 have been for the Xbox division, and CEO Asha Sharma has confirmed that more layoffs are on the way, with the company targeting a total of 3,200 job cuts by the end of the fiscal year.
In the meantime, check out our review of DOOM: The Dark Ages, which was released on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S last year.
