Posted Wed Apr 3, 2013 at 09:30 AM PDT by Brian Hoss
The litany of trouble signs for 'Doom 4' begs the question, when was it ever on track?
It has been years since id was sold to Bethesda parent, ZeniMax, and in that time the studio has produced one game with its extravagant id Tech 5 engine. That game was 'Rage,' and is by most accounts better left unremembered. id Software's ongoing turnover, combined with five years of 'Doom 4' with nothing to show for it has apparently piqued the curiosity of Kotaku.
In an article entitled 'Five Years and Nothing to Show: How Doom 4 Got Off Track,' an outline of the past five project years is presented along with an absence of a hopeful outlook for the project. Within that outline, which is studded with moments where the underway work was cited as lacking in both quality and excitement, is a moment in 2011 not long after 'Rage' debuted to an unforgiving public, where ZeniMax/Bethesda decided to become more involved and reboot the development of 'Doom 4.'
Zenimax's ambitious plan was to take the 'Rage' team that was currently working on the suddenly cancelled 'Rage 2' and 'Rage' DLC, and combine it with the 'Doom 4' team that had just necessitated a project reboot. According to the article, with this kind of oversight, "ZeniMax executives told id leads that 'Doom 4 can and should be as big as Skyrim,' as far as both sales and cultural impact."
While at one point the project suffered due to designs that mimicked the heavily scripted single player of 'Call of Duty,' the project is currently ongoing without that particular focus, presumably now with an ultimate goal to ship on next-generation consoles.
Source: Kotaku
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