At QuakeCon, id Software’ studio director, Tim Willits, and Bethesda VP of marketing Pete Hines, spoke with IGN about the troubled development of Doom 4.
Willits explained:
It wasn’t one thing, 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.
During early development, the makers of the game couldn’t relate; it just wasn’t Doom or what they wanted it be.
Hines explained:
If it was like the quintessential, ‘yup, that’s Doom 4,’ then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. 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.
No word on when Doom 4 will be out, but it’s likely to be only a next-gen and PC title.