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Id software director Tim Willits has admitted that the former build of Doom 4 was scrapped because it failed to harness the spirit of the series.

In October 2011 it was revealed that work on the game had been indefinitely postponed” although both Id and publisher Bethesda insist that the game is now back in development and back on track.

It wasn’t one thing,” Willits told IGN when asked about the cause behind the title’s problems. It wasn’t like the art was bad, or the programming was bad.

Every game has a soul. Every game has a spirit. When you played Rage, you got the spirit. And [Doom] did not have the spirit, it did not have the soul, it didn’t have a personality. 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. Everyone knows the feeling of Doom, but it’s very hard to articulate.

We looked at and the Id guys looked at and said, look, it’s not even that something is necessarily bad. But is it good enough? You can make a game and say, ‘that’s not a bad game, but it’s not as good as an Elder Scrolls game should be,’ and there’s a difference.

It’s not great. It’s not amazing. It’s not what people have waited all this time for. It needs to be like ‘this was totally worth the wait.’ And I think what the guys at Id are working on is they’re pushing the boundaries and challenging themselves. I don’t want anybody to look at Id’s next project and have this reaction that it’s still stuck in the 90s.”

Willits added that Doom 4 is the only major project at Id Software today”.

In April Id and Bethesda owner ZeniMax was said to have demanded Doom 4’s release within the year.