The situation surrounding Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations was already grim. Id Software put out a fantastic expansion that addressed many issues present in the (still pretty good) base game, placing it among the best works the FPS specialists have ever produced. The reward for many of The Dark Ages team was to be instantly laid off, as Xbox cut 136 members of the studio’s workforce.
Now, it also appears that getting Revelations to the finish line was a punishing experience for those involved, at least according to former id Software producer Andrew Willis. Speaking on the Kiwi Talkz podcast for Insider Gaming, Willis revealed that the team experienced a gnarly level of crunch in the months leading up to Revelations’ release.
“It was tight,” Willis explained. “There were two months where I was working something like at least 12 hours every day. I know I hit 17 a couple of days.” Willis goes on to describe the experience as “brutal” and says that most of the expansion was put together “in three or four months.”
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That’s a ridiculously short turnaround for an expansion that’s around six hours long, especially when you consider the main game—which runs at about 20 hours—took five years to build. Revelations’ development timeframe was meant to be even shorter. But Willis says the expansion encountered feature-creep, with new elements being added as the DLC was built.
“There were days where I didn’t get to 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 continues. He says that everybody on the team had a similar experience, and that even veteran designers from both the game and film industries were shocked by the level of crunch involved. “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.”
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Willis makes clear that crunching was not mandated by id Software, but says that the amount of work they needed to do, combined with the timeframe the team was given to do it in, made the implication clear.
“You get loaded up with 60 hours of work in a week, and what do you do?” he says. “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.”
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Willis was one of the many id Software devs laid off as part of Microsoft’s massive cuts, in which it slashed 1,600 jobs (with another 1,600 being cut over the next fiscal year) and numerous studios like Compulsion Games and Double Fine were cut loose from Xbox Game Studios. Apparently, the Revelations team learned about the layoffs the day before the expansion was due to launch.
“You spend so much of your energy and hours of your life, and sacrifice a bunch of things to get something out of the door, and then they lay you off,” Willis said. “It’s such a wild feeling.”
(Image credit: Xbox)
It all sounds pretty unpleasant, and it makes one wonder what the situation at id Software was like after The Dark Ages’ release to make it so desperate to rush an expansion out of the door. Was this an internal decision? Or a consequence of pressure from the higher-ups at Xbox? Statistics suggest that The Dark Ages sold significantly fewer copies than 2020’s Doom Eternal, though this was to be expected given that The Dark Ages released day one on Game Pass.
As for what’s happening with id Software more broadly, Hugo Martin insisted that the studio is fine in the wake of Microsoft’s layoffs.