Bethesda’s vice president says cancelling DOOM 4 was the right decision

By Shabana Arif

Bethesda vice president Pete Hines on the cancellation of DOOM 4 and the development of the reboot.

Before the DOOM reboot, there was DOOM 4, now relegated to the pile of scrapped titles that will never see the light of day.

If you haven’t already watched NoClip‘s DOOM documentary that features id Software staffers talking about the trials and tribulations experienced during development, you should give it a look, but in a recent interview with Xbox: The Official Magazine, publised by GamesRadar+, Peter Hines expands on the game’s cancellation.

“With Doom it was a tipping point that we reached where we looked at it and said, ‘This game is not hitting the marks it needs to hit.’ And it wasn’t just Bethesda, it was id coming to us and saying, ‘It’s not that it’s not a good game or an okay game, but it’s just not Doom. It’s veered from the things that we think Doom should be about.’

“And again, it’s not like we were happy about it! We essentially cancelled a game. That’s what we did. We cancelled a thing that people had spent a long time working on and we’d spent a lot of money to get to that point and then we cancelled it and basically started over.”

Hines made it clear that the decision to cancel the game wasn’t taken lightly, saying, “We are still a company. We do have to pay salaries and keep the lights on and it’s not like we take these things lightly or easily. Games are hard to make and sometimes things happen. ”

Moving on to address the reboot, he described DOOM as “fast and visceral and different – unique in a way that this genre, quite frankly, could use.”

In NoClip’s documentary, DOOM 4 was compared to Call of Duty with reference to the direction it was going in; it was a lot more cinematic and story driven, which ultimately wasn’t what they thought DOOM was about.

Would you have preferred to play the fabled DOOM 4, or are you happy with how DOOM turned out? Chime in below.