During QuakeCon 2018, id Software revealed why the sequel to 2016’s DOOM is called DOOM Eternal, rather than simply DOOM II. The reason for the name is actually simple.
It all boils down to not being confused with the first DOOM II, which was released in 1994. It is a problem id previously encountered with their 2016 reboot of DOOM, and one that the team wanted to avoid in the future.
“You hear us say it all the time, we call it DOOM 2016, and the internet has called it DOOM 2016,” id Software Executive Producer Marty Stratton told IGN. “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.”
However, that doesn’t mean id was willing to do the same with DOOM Eternal. According to Stratton, if id ended up “coming out and saying ‘we’re going to do DOOM 2‘ we would have done DOOM 2: Year of Release Date.” Would have been a bit of a mouthful, wouldn’t it?
Hugo Martin, DOOM Eternal‘s Creative Director, was a bit more frank with his reasoning. When it comes to online searching, simply calling it DOOM II would have made everything “a giant pain in the butt, because you get all this [other] stuff.”
The studio took DOOM Eternal‘s name very seriously. Stratton said the marketing team was brought in to help make this major decision, and he noted the developer wanted a name “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.”
Martin noted that the studio also took inspiration from Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy of films. “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 had its first official gameplay reveal at QuakeCon 2018. It has also been confirmed that DOOM Eternal will have single-player DLC, offering the chance to expand on the lore even more.
DOOM Eternal will be released for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Do you prefer DOOM Eternal as a game name? Or would you like DOOM II better? Let us know!
[Source: IGN]
