The majority of Doom: The Dark Ages' DLC got made 'in three or four

What the report says

Diego Argüello,Contributing Editor, News,GameDeveloper.comSeptember 1, 20262 Min ReadImage via Id SoftwareThe majority of Doom: The Dark Ages - Revelations was reportedly made under heavy crunch in just a few months.This is according to an interview from Insider Gaming published yesterday. Andrew Willis, former producer at developer Id Software, spoke about the overtime involved in getting the DLC out of the door."There were two months where I was working something like at least 12 hours every day," Willis tells Insider Gaming. "I know I hit 17 a couple of days. It was brutal, and the majority of the game got made in three or four months."The producer continues on to say that there were multiple instances in which more things continued to be added to the game, leading to more development time requirements.

According to Willis, the number of hours depended on the week, but he recalls having reached "at least 80 hours" a few times."There were days where I didn't see my son the whole day; multiple days of that that I sacrificed to get this out the door at the level of quality," Willis says. "And it's not just me, but everybody on the team was really putting in the hours. We had people that worked in Hollywood for 20 years and game development for 10 and said that this was the worst crunch they'd been a part of."Regarding the decision to work overtime, Willis refers to it as a "blurry line," explaining that it wasn't an official company mandate.

Yet, since the work needed to be completed, it felt like that's what had to be done to finish the project."It's a really blurry line. You get loaded up with 60 hours of work in a week, and what do you do?" Willis says. "You can make a version of that work that would probably be just barely passable, but is that what you want to put your name on? It’s almost this thing like, at the level of quality that the players expect and that you expect from yourself, it's kind of like almost pseudo-induced crunch."Back in July, as parent company Xbox prepared to "reset" its video game division by eliminating 3,200 roles by the end of the current fiscal year, 136 workers at Id Software were impacted by job cuts.Later in the month, speaking to Game Developer, anonymous sources told Game Developer that around two thirds of those left at id Software who worked on Doom (2016) were laid off at the beginning of July.

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That reportedly included many "multiple hat" developers who were integral to the team."You spend so much of your energy and hours of your life, and sacrifice a bunch of things, to get something [out] the door, and then they lay you off the day before," Willis tells Insider Gaming. "It's such a wild feeling."XboxTop StoriesAbout the AuthorDiego ArgüelloContributing Editor, News, GameDeveloper.comDiego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist and critic from Argentina. Video games helped him to learn English, so now he covers them for places like The New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone, and more.

He also runs Into the Spine, a site dedicated to fostering and supporting new writers, and co-hosted Turnabout Breakdown, a podcast about the Ace Attorney series. He’s most likely playing a rhythm game as you read this.See more from Diego Argüello