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[EARLY ACCESS] The Tragedy of Doom 4
🕑 Added 2024-10-19 18:00:09 +0000 UTCRegarded as the father of first-person shooters, id Software’s Doom had long set the standard for first-person action when the studio entered production on the franchise’s fourth numbered entry. Doom 3 hadn’t exactly hit the mark, though, a sentiment shared among critics and series faithful who begrudged the game for prioritizing its technical prowess at the expense of gameplay. Doom 4 ran the risk of falling into the same trap, its earliest version bearing more in common with Call of Duty than classic id-developed shooters.
Doom 4 1.0, as developers have called it, centralized a narrative with big ideas, ideas that replaced the usual Doom Slayer hero with an Average Joe surrounded by a cast of characters. A cinematic-level of spectacle rested at the heart of the would-be experience, all while a more plodding style of gameplay drove the action. Instead of the brand’s genre-defining, fast-paced combat, Doom 4 1.0 implemented cover-based mechanics and drown-out final kills that robbed the shooter of its trademark momentum.
After closely examining the work-in-progress, leadership at id Software shelved 1.0 and organized talks to reevaluate Doom’s fundamentals. A pair of reboots and the realization that id functioned best as a one-game studio emerged from various meetings with developers and parent company ZeniMax Media. The development house lost quite a bit of veteran talent during this season of change as well, though new blood would come in to help shake things up considerably.
Ultimately, this trying time in company history begat what became Doom 2016, the reboot that repositioned the father of first-person shooters as the key to rejuvenating a genre that many would say had grown stale in its absence.
This is the tragedy of Doom 4.
