We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

Doom is a chance for id to “prove themselves” with a contemporary FPS

Doom

While much about the new Doom says throwback – the speed, the health pick-ups, the layered maps – it’s also id’s first new shooter in a generation.

By the time it arrives, half a decade will have elapsed since the studio’s last original game – and whatever your sympathies for Rage, its scorched world didn’t quite set ours on fire. The outfit that invented the FPS will have to start from scratch with a new audience – and they’re all too aware of that fact.

“id hasn’t made a game in the current pantheon of first-person shooters,” Bethesda’s Pete Hines told Gamespot. “It’s not a part of that conversation. You can go to any sixteen-year-old at Quakecon and ask them what their favorite shooter is and they’re going to say Call of Duty and Battlefield and Halo, but not Doom, because why would they? We haven’t put out Doom games.

“We can’t walk in and say, ‘Hey, we’re making a Doom game,’ and everyone’s instantly on board,” Hines went on. “id’s got to prove [themselves] and prove how this is still true to Doom and still relevant to first-person shooters.”

id executive producer Marty Stratton said that, after scrapping Doom 4, the studio analysed what made each game in the series tick – and talked to Todd Howard and his Bethesda team about the challenges they went through rebooting Fallout.

“You always want to respect the game and that fondness for it and what it means to people, but at the same time we’ve looked ahead with every decision and every idea,” he said.

Do you think id will succeed in – to use a metaphor from the E3 Doom reveal – ripping off contemporary players’ arms and beating them around the head with Doom?