The Doom: Eternal gameplay reveal from QuakeCon has all of us pretty pumped. Clad in the classic, yet updated badass armor and stocked up on a new set of deadly arsenal, Doom Slayer is ready to bring the fight to the demons in our dear old Earth.
While it looks like Eternal will be a reimagining of id’s own Doom 2: Hell on Earth and a direct sequel to Doom 2016, the developer has explained why Doom: Eternal is not called Doom 2 or Hell on Earth. Speaking to IGN, executive producer Marty Stratton actually revealed that the studio was considering calling Eternal “DOOM 2“. However, id wanted to avoid the same problem it had with the first game.
“You hear us say it all the time, we call it Doom 2016, and the internet has called it Doom 2016. We go back and forth on whether it was a mistake to call it Doom. I still don’t think it was a mistake, because we really were kind of drawing a new line in the sand.” Though it seemed fine with Doom, Stratton realized that “coming out and saying ‘we’re going to do Doom 2,’ we would have ‘Doom 2: Year of Release Date.’”
Then there is also the need for making the game easier to find while searching for it online. Marty thinks that naming the game Doom 2 would end up being “a giant pain in the butt because you get all this [other] stuff” in search results. Hence, the development team sat down with marketing to figure out something “that had meaning and spoke to what we were doing with lore and how we want people to feel about the game. And Doom Eternal was something that just felt right.”
The team was also influenced by Christoper Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy when it came to naming the game. “I think [Christopher] Nolan did it the best, and we thought about that,” he explained. “it wasn’t ‘Dark Knight 1, Dark Knight 2, Dark Knight 3.’ Each one had its own name, but there was an arc there. They were all connected, as is this game as a sequel to [Doom] 2016.”
“[Doom Eternal] felt like a good way to go in that regard. You’re not limiting yourself, and you’re also not creating confusion with the brand,” said Martin.
Doom: Eternal will launch for PS4, XBox One, PC and the Nintendo Switch sometime in 2019,