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Newly unearthed video shows what canceled Doom 4 could have looked like

Kris Wouk
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Doom 4
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Bethesda is set to showcase id Software’s latest effort at this year’s E3, but this won’t be the company’s first attempt at a new Doom game in the interim following Doom 3. No, that dubious honor goes to Doom 4, which never saw the light of day. Now, thanks to footage posted on the Doom World forums, we’re getting a chance to see why.

The video includes brief glimpses of in-game footage, but the vast majority of it consists of cinematics created by Blur Studio, well-known for creating cinematics for the Halo series. The lack of gameplay footage may leave you wondering how the game was to be played, but the video does provide a clear indicator of the tone, as well as of the fact that the game, well, just wasn’t very Doom-like. The video, complete with a bad guitar rendition of a track from the first Doom, is below.

Doom 4 looked amazing

The footage shows what looks more like a standard Call of Duty-style military shooter with the occasional demon than anything resembling prior Doom games. It seems that id Software was well aware of this and other issues, which is why they chose to “reboot” the game, resulting in what we’ll see in the upcoming Doom.

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“It wasn’t one thing. It wasn’t like the art was bad, or the programming was bad. Every game has a soul. Every game has a spirit,” id Software studio director Tim Willits told IGN in 2013, adding that Doom 4 “did not have the spirit, it did not have the soul, it didn’t have a personality.

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“It had a bit of schizophrenia, a little bit of an identity crisis. It didn’t have the passion and soul of what an id game is,” Willits added. “Everyone knows the feeling of Doom, but it’s very hard to articulate.”

While so far the only footage of Doom Bethesda has shared is an 11 second teaser trailer, the company will showcase the game at its E3 press conference on June 14. Hopefully this one actually feels like a Doom game. See the teaser below.

DOOM - E3 2015 Teaser (PEGI)

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Kris Wouk
Kris Wouk
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kris Wouk is a tech writer, gadget reviewer, blogger, and whatever it's called when someone makes videos for the web. In his…
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