After John Carmack was being really tight-lipped about Doom 4, another id Software dev has opened up about the development of the upcoming Doom iteration from id Software.
Speaking at QuakeCom, id Software’s studio director, Tim Willits, said that the studio has placed its entire focus on Doom, even putting other projects aside in order to make it happen.
“We focused everybody. All hands on deck,” said Willits, who added that the team “cut distractions out,” and are focusing hard on Doom 4. “If you have everyone marching to the same drummer, you can get places,” added Willits.
Willits explained that the development of Doom 4 has had its ups and downs, it just lacked “soul” rather than having anything inherently wrong.
“It wasn’t one thing,” said Willits. “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.”
Doom 4 leaked artwork before the change – now said to have no relation to the Doom project in the works.
This “identity crisis” of Doom 4 led to the team reworking the entire game to deliver something that hopefully lives up to the hype.
“If it was like the quintessential, ‘yup, that’s Doom 4,’ then we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” said Bethesda VP of marketing Pete 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.”
Source: IGN
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HL2 is kinda loosing its “example” status as an awesome game and franchise to me with EP3 (or is that now HL3?) being a no show and Valve going about if there is no story that we want to complete in this lifetime. “Valve time” is turning into 3D Realms time.
But as for id Software and the article, I think and hope Rage made them look twice before releasing a game, Rage wasn’t bad at all, but it lacked that id Software magic, Whether they still have it is another question. A lot of time has passed since Doom 3 and Quake Wars.