The answer is actually pretty simple.
[dropcap size=small]B[/dropcap]ethesda has recently opened up about the cancellation of Doom 4. Pete Hines, the VP of marketing at Bethesda, said in an interview with OXW that Doom 4 was cancelled because “it wasn’t really Doom”.
“With Doom it was a tipping point. 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 [the game’s developer] 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 canceled a game. That’s what we did. We canceled 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 canceled it and basically started over. Which is never easy to do. But it was because we believed in and agreed with the notion of, ‘If this is going to be a success, if it’s going to be worth all this time and effort, then it has to be the right thing, executed the right way.”
While this was a bit of a disappointment to many Doom fans, a Doom game was eventually released and it fared pretty well. This just goes to show that sometimes games should be scrapped if they are not meeting expectations and that starting over can lead to a better product.
