It’s been quite a while since we’ve been talking about the good old high watermark for new-gen consoles, 1080p and 60 FPS, but one game is putting those data points back in the limelight, Doom. In an interview with the game’s executive director, Mary Stratton, Gamespot learned that id Software is going all out in pursuit of a 1080p/60 FPS release.
"We've always been at the forefront of saying we want our games to run as fast as possible at the highest resolution possible," Stratton said. "So for us, that goal is 1080p and 60 FPS. Along with that goal, the mantra of our technology team is that we want to be the best-looking game out there at 60 FPS and 1080p. So you draw that line in the sand."
He says that it’s not just for bragging rights, that he really does believe the game plays best when it hits those marks. Doom is a much “faster” FPS than most on the market, which is a core part of gameplay in trying to emulate the old feel of the game. A higher framerate will be key to that experience, while the resolution? Well, everyone wants higher resolution.
This is a debate we haven’t seen surface in quite some time. It used to be the case that you couldn’t turn around without bumping into a story about which games were some combination of 720/900/1080p and 30 or 60 FPS. Early on, this was a big point of contention in the console race, as many fans were not amused that after waiting so long for new consoles, hitting 1080p and 60 FPS wasn’t automatically standard practice. Debates about what was actually “upconverted” 1080p raged, and the whole debate actually bolstered
Doom might have been one of the biggest games of E3 this year, but it had the misfortune of debuting right before Bethesda’s Fallout 4, and everyone couldn’t stop talking about the latter for the rest of the show. Still, paired with Fallout and Dishonored, it made Bethesda’s event arguably the best of the show. A show that also included
It was also interesting to see Doom spark a reaction that split many fans and commentators. It was effectively the first major game debut of the show, and some reacted to its hyper-crazy ultra-violence with disdain, asking if we were “still all about this kind of thing” in gaming as the lead character dismembered demons with chainsaws and shotguns. And yet others, even normally progressive commentators, agreed that Doom was Doom, and ultra-violence was simply its “thing.” Doom is always going to be about graphic violence, and that will only get more graphic as the technology evolves. Given that the ultimate victims in this game are mostly demons, I doubt this will be a terribly controversial release when all is said and done, outside of usual bannings in places like Australia.
If Doom can consistently hit 1080p and 60 FPS on PS4 and Xbox One, that will be a big selling point to the crowd that cares about this sort of thing, which seems like a lot of people every time this issue comes up. Back when this debate was the most heated, it seemed clear that over time developers would continue unlocking power in both consoles, and we’d probably see more and more high-end performance in the future. With Doom coming in 2016, that future is almost here. And yes, I realize that PC players never stop laughing about consoles trying to hit benchmarks they take for granted.
I’m a little surprised we haven’t seen all that much more from Doom since E3. I worry a bit that the footage shown felt very much like a vertical slice for the show, so I’m hoping the final product lives up to the gameplay we saw. From the sound of it, it seems like the team wants to deliver a technically superior product, and given that this is id/Bethesda and not say, Ubisoft, I think it’s safe to hope that turns out to be true.
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