As most of us are aware of by now, the new Doom was unveiled at last weeks Quakecon event. This reveal, however, was only meant to be viewed by those in attendance at the event. Even the live stream of Quakecon cut out for a short time so that the reveal did not go public. So what’s the deal? Why did Bethesda and id Software not let the rest of us see what’s next for Doom?
According to Bethesda, there are a few reasons why they choose to do the reveal in this manner. One reason was to quell the rumors that id and the Doom project were in trouble. Bethesda Softworks VP of PR and Marketing Pete Hines stated:
We’re working with [id] to say, ‘How does this work? What do we want to show?’ And they’re like, ‘Look, we don’t want a stream to go up for a game that isn’t at the point where we would formally show it to the world, and now that thing is getting picked apart, and digested, and gone through frame-by-frame and getting nitpicked to death, when normally we wouldn’t be showing this to anybody at all.
This also brings us to the other major reason behind the non-public reveal. Doom just isn’t ready enough for us to see. This can be a very good reason as well. Too often we get to see demos of games way too early. Anybody remember the E3 2005 Killzone demo for PS3 that was supposedly running in real-time? Yea, not even close. If Bethesda was going to have a “press-ready” demo to show off they would have missed Quakecon again and that would have been a big mistake.
As it stands, doing this limited reveal for Doom served as a compromise that accomplished three things: id earned a renewed confidence, Quakecon attendees weren’t disappointed and Bethesda can go back to being quiet about Doom until it’s ready. For the rest of us on the other hand, we are most likely not going to get a good look at the Doom reboot until next year. Which brings up a question that I have about this game…
I thought we already got a franchise reboot with Doom 3? So why is it getting rebooted again? But those are questions for another time. In the meantime check out Gameskinny’s Everything We know About the New Doom and stay tuned for more information when it becomes available.
