It's A Good Thing Id Restarted Development On Doom 4

The Doom 4 trailer-that-wasn't, like a necromantic summoning ritual, appears to have opened a portal to a hell dimension of leaked artwork and footage. Supposedly leaked video and artwork posted on the Doomworld forums and All Games Beta show what the game once looked like prior to 2013, when development was scrapped and restarted. Now we know why.

With a colour palette somewhere amidst Call of Duty, Metro and Gears of War, Doom 4 looked brown as hell. Except less red than that. And looked very little like any Doom, even Doom 3.

The footage comes from the show reel of a former cinematics director at CGI wizards Blur Studios, Mark Bristol. It definitely takes some cues from John Carmack's megatexture-em-up Rage, plus all the games mentioned above. The best part of the video? Someone's failed attempt at playing the Doom theme in the background. I mean, it’s not meant to sound like that, right? [I'm pretty sure that music's added as a joke -ed.]

As terribly bland and generic as this footage is (though certainly technically sound), it actually gives me renewed hope for whatever Bethesda have to show us at E3 next month. Moreso than those 2 seconds "shown off" yesterday. If they realised this was a terrible idea, then maybe the actual thing won't be so bad. When Nathan got a peek at QuakeCon last year, he said it had "fast combat, linear levels, emphasis on madcap action over scares" and was "Doom, but with ludicrously violent, ultra-fast melee finishers". Fingers crossed.