id Tech 7 will highly surpass its predecessor.

In a new video interview with Digital Foundry, Marty Stratton, the executive producer of Doom Eternal mentioned several improvements that the new engine will bring: „The size of the world, the scope of the world, our levels are twice as big as they were in DOOM 2016. That was to establish a sense of scale and epicness to DOOM Eternal. You know, one of the things that we established coming out of DOOM 2016 was that we wanted to take players to places that they’d never seen before. DOOM 2016 was pretty much just Mars and Hell. And you know, in this game we do Hell on Earth, we do the Sentinel homeworld, something we alluded to in DOOM 2016 lore. We take you to an Arctic cultist base, we take you to kind of our version of Heaven, and Hell. Each of those set pieces in these worlds had to be big. That was I would say that drove a lot of the technical work that that was done across the board. Of course, you know, things like physics and some better destructibility in the world that would reinforce your power. Our Destructible Demon system required quite a bit of technical effort from our team and updates to the animation system.

We completed the departure from Megatextures, which allowed us to do more instance geometry, more instance texture tiling textures, which also allowed us to have higher fidelity texture. So for the first time, I would say we’ve gotten away from that. I think in the last several games, you could criticize our texture fidelity to be a little blurry. And I think DOOM Eternal is the first one where we are again at the top of the heap when it comes to texture fidelity,” he said.

They will have work with the engine after the game is out, though. Ray tracing will be added post-launch: „So we haven’t talked about that at all. And we, quite frankly, haven’t spent a ton of time the team did some initial implementation and exploration of raytracing about a year ago, but at that same time, we had so much that we wanted to do on the game still. I mean, our tech team, they are the biggest fans of new tech so it was a little hard to pull everybody off of that because it was the shiny new toy. But when we’re talking about getting DOOM Eternal out there and getting it out as close to on time as possible and at the highest polish and quality, we kind of had to pull back on that effort. So it is something that they’re like literally just about ready to start looking at again and have some interesting ideas. I don’t want to go too far down that path because who knows what exactly we do, but there’s more that you can use the technology for than just, you know, the reflections, the shadows, and the real-time lighting. They have some cool ideas that I think will not only just make it a better experience for players, but actually, you know some of what they’re talking about will make it better and easier to create experiences for developers,” Stratton added.

That sounds like an excuse to make them available for the next-gen consoles (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X) as well. He also added that the game will use the most computing power on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as possible, and the Nintendo Switch port, handled by Panic Button, is also coming together well. Doom Eternal will „scream at outlandish frame rates” on a high-end PC.

Doom Eternal will thus have bigger and more varied levels (such as platforming segments, as discussed earlier this week), and faster gameplay. The game will launch on March 20 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The Nintendo Switch port follows at an unknown date.

Source: WCCFTech

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