Doom Eternal is looking great so far according to recent preview impressions of the upcoming FPS. The game was scheduled for release last year, but will now be shipping in March.
In an interview with VG247, executive producer Marty Stratton revealed that no new content was added in during this extended development time, it’s mostly polishing up the game.
“The game was done, we haven’t added anything but what [the delay] allowed us to do was fix a tonne more bugs,” Stratton said.
“It allowed us to do a lot of polishing, hardening of the back-end systems and we do testing throughout where we bring in people externally. We did a couple of additional versions of those and made a couple of additions to the game, just balance-type things and patching up a couple of exploits.”
Despite the added time, the developers at id Software still have to undergo crunch- overtime work.
“We were crunching pretty hard most of last year. It goes in phases,” he said.
“We’ll have one group of people crunching so the next group of people are teed up properly. As they get done, they may need to crunch a little bit.
“We really truly do try and be very respectful of peoples’ time and lives. We have very dedicated people that just choose to work a lot in many cases. It was nice because we want the game to be perfect. We want it to live up to our expectations and consumer expectations. We work very hard and we’ll put in extra time to do that. Sometimes when we just get the extra time we do it anyways because we want it to be that much better.”
Crunch is a notable problem in video game development, especially when it’s mandatory and unpaid. Rockstar was under fire during the lead-up to Red Dead Redemption II’s launch after their lead was proud about being able to pull off 100-hour work weeks, an unhealthy amount considering a normal 9-5 job should have 40 hours a week, by comparison.
But note that there also just hard-working developers that willingly put in the extra hours, either thanks to monetary compensation (bonus, paid overtime, etc.) or just plain passionate about their work.
Doom Eternal is not the only game that do crunch despite delays. Cyberpunk 2077’s delay will also lead to crunch, as revealed by developers CD Projekt Red during an investor call. These are not the exceptions, it’s the norm.
Doom Eternal will be out on March 20th on PS4, PC (Steam) and Xbox One, with a Nintendo Switch release coming soon.
Source: VG247