‘We were crunching pretty hard most of last year,’ states Doom Eternal dev id Software

Doom Eternal developer id Software has admitted the team creating Doom Eternal “were crunching pretty hard most of last year”, despite the game being pushed back from its intended November 2019 release date to March 2020.

“We were crunching pretty hard most of last year. It goes in phases,” executive producer Marty Stratton told VG24/7, “crunch” being the term given to developers required to work long days and substantial overtime in the run-up to release. “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 people’s 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.”

In the end, the team and publisher Bethesda agreed to delay the release for four months, allowing the chance to let “a little bit of the steam and pressure out”, “fix a tonne more bugs”, and “do a lot of polishing”.

“We work very hard and we’ll put in extra time to do that,” Stratton added. “Sometimes when we just get the extra time we do it anyways because we want it to be that much better.

“[A delay] takes a little bit of the steam and pressure out but it’s almost one of those things where we’ll push it even harder to get even more just as tight as it possibly can be.”

Despite the five-month extension following a delay from its original release date, Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red also recently admitted that the additional time will likely, and “unfortunately”, result in further crunch.

“To some degree, yes, to be honest,” studio co-founder Kiciński said when asked if staff would still be required to crunch despite the delay. “We try to limit crunch as much as possible but it is the final stage. We try to be reasonable in this regard, but yes. Unfortunately.”