The studio felt it suffered from an ”identity crisis,” and didn’t really feel all that Doom-like which is ”very hard to articulate.” Both id and Bethesda felt it needed to be rebooted.
It would have languished in the ‘not bad, but not great’ pit of ‘meh’ gaming - this was unacceptable. Willits wouldn’t divulge what he’s got id ”all hands on deck” for.
”It wasn’t one thing,” Tim Willits explains on the reboot. “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 it 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.”
”If it was like the quintessential, ‘yup, that’s Doom 4,’ then we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Pete Hines tells IGN.
“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,” continued the Bethesda VP of marketing.
Willits doesn’t officially confirm Doom, which has only been revealed through job postings at id so far. ”We focused everybody. All hands on deck,” he teased. ”If you have everyone marching to the same drummer, you can get places.” Well whatever they’re working on (wink, wink) it’s getting id’s full creative attention and manpower.
