The surprise reveal of Doom Eternal at Bethesda’s E3 conference was one of the highlights of the show. Over the weekend, id Software showed the first Doom Eternal gameplay trailer at QuakeCon to a delighted audience. However, since the reveal there have been questions over the title. If the first game was happy to call itself just Doom, then why is the sequel not simply Doom 2? Especially as Eternal seems to be set primarily on Earth, and the sequel to the original game was called Doom II: Hell on Earth, so it would seem to be a perfect fit.
id Software has now explained that calling their game Doom Eternal “just felt right”, and that their name choice was actually influenced by Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy. In an interview with IGN, executive producer Marty Stratton says that it actually began with the problems caused by the last game’s name — which most people, including id themselves, refer to as Doom 2016.
“We go back and forth on whether it was a mistake to call it Doom,” he said. “I still don’t think it was a mistake, because we really were kind of drawing a new line in the sand… [however] coming out and saying ‘we’re going to do Doom 2,’ we would have Doom 2: Year of Release Date.”
Note how Stratton subtly avoids saying “2019” there, as despite the big showing the studio still haven’t confirmed a release date for Doom Eternal. He adds that they sat down and looked for a name, “that had meaning and spoke to what we were doing with lore and how we want people to feel about the game.” Doom Eternal apparently “just felt right.”
Creative director Hugo Martin brought up Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of Batman films as being an influence on the title. “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.”
In other words, expect to see The Doom Slayer Rises coming from id Software in 2022.
