Here's How Doom 4 Became Just "Doom"
For a while, the reboot of Doom wasn’t a reboot at all: it was going to be Doom 4, as announced in 2008. Somewhere between then and now, they changed their minds and scrapped the entire original project. Why, exactly?
Polygon recently conducted a video interview with Bethesda’s Pete Hines where he revealed what was behind the ultimate fate of Doom 4 and why the game had to be buried after years of development.
According to Hines, a Doom game should carry a specific feel to it, and Doom 4 wasn’t capturing that feeling. “You can probably close your eyes and imagine a ‘Call of Doom’ or a ‘BattleDoom’ game, where it starts to feel way too much like: ‘Wait, this doesn’t feel like Doom, it feels like we’re playing some other franchise with a Doom skin on it,'” he said.
“We decided that it wasn’t Doom enough and needed to be thrown out and started over. Some folks left and some faces changed at the studio. Out of that change — which was not easy for those guys to go through — some amazing things happened.”
We would embed footage of Doom 4 here from YouTube to illustrate his point, as Polygon tried to, but the footage is frequently deleted wherever it shows up, and it’s no longer on their page. It would be better to Google the footage yourself and find wherever it currently is.