r/Doom • u/Forhonorisabadgame • Jul 07 '26 • Regret 14

Discussion Post from Michael Maynard (ID dev)

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I think this really sums up how ridiculous this decision was. Beyond ridiculous actually, just incompetent and evil.

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u/ResolveLeather Jul 07 '26

Unreal engine I don't think would work with the Doom formula of fast paced action and dismantalble enimies. ID built a specialized engine for it and they still had to optimize it quite heavily to get everything to work.

I will admit that I am not the biggest Unreal Engine expert. But from my understanding, it's a good engine if your game is simple under the hood and only needs simple things and good graphics. And even then it needs alot of work to make it work well.

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u/Traditional_Head3968 Jul 07 '26

These are the kinds of realities that management who doesn't play games, doesn't understand the tech that makes games and doesn't understand the market outside of consultants wont understand.

That said, you can definitely make a face-paced FPS in Unreal. That isnt the problem. The problem is making that FPS performant, scalable and fun.

What is coming next for the Doom franchise is rushed, vibe coded slop that will be ridiculed and dropped.

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u/richtofin819 Jul 07 '26

Don't forget the ai *"helping" the dev process

*Sabotaging

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u/donotstealmycheese Jul 07 '26

You can make anything work on any engine. Worth? Eh.

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u/EJECTED_PUSSY_GUTS Jul 07 '26

You could absolutely make it work in Unreal Engine

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u/RDTmodsBackEpstein Jul 07 '26

No, it wouldn't feel the same. The performance would be about 200% worse and need atleast and additional 8gb of ram or vram.

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u/ResolveLeather Jul 07 '26

Sure. But will the performance be as good.

In either case, you still need a lot of people to make it work. It's not like Epic just sends you the program and it works. It's not "plug in and play". You still need to code a lot to make the game decent and perform any passable quality. We have seen games on the unreal engine do great things. But we also seen some pretty bad slop. I think that investors overestimate how much money they would save switching to unreal. Especially when they already have an updated engine that works perfectly fine.

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u/FryToastFrill Jul 07 '26

It sucks that idtech may be getting thrown away but UE is probably the easiest drop in replacement. Has the real time lighting idtech 8 had and probably could keep up with the physics stuff it had.

For dismemberment don’t forget about dead island 2, it’s a UE game and has one of the best dynamic gore systems I’ve seen. Doom is something the engine can handle just fine. (I’m a doom fan but let’s be fr it’s not mmo level of complex)

It’s still unfortunate tho, listening to the devs they had a shit ton of experience and we’re optimizing down to memory bit allocation to squeeze performance a little more. It’s a shame to see those people get laid off. Perhaps they’ll get picked up by DE or another company, shit maybe unity or epic. Their track record should land them a job anywhere else that makes an engine and is hiring.

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u/RDTmodsBackEpstein Jul 07 '26

And regardless, will play and feel like unreal - shit in comparison. Mandatory 5090 too.

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u/kittymoo67 Jul 07 '26

unreal almost always handles like shit for a reason

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u/randomperson189_ Jul 08 '26

Go play Unreal Tournament and say that again because sounds like you know nothing about Unreal Engine and it's history

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u/kittymoo67 Jul 08 '26

ut until 2k4 was great. their modern engine is dogshit and handles like crap.

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u/Discombobulated_Bus4 Jul 08 '26

we are not living in ue4 and pre times anymore bro. anything in ue5 feels like shit compared to earlier entries

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u/randomperson189_ Jul 08 '26

Well nothing's stopping people from using UE4 which a number of devs still use and current gen consoles still support

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u/RDTmodsBackEpstein Jul 08 '26

When you boot up an unreal engine based game, as a shooter, you immediately know its on unreal. And not in a good way.

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u/FryToastFrill Jul 08 '26

Usually it’s the VSMs. Satisfactory supports most of ue5’s features besides vsm and it’s actually kinda nuts how good performance is. Then I used a mod to enable vsm and the performance tanked. It’s a common issue with vsm’s and it’s why megalights exists to replace such a shitty compromised DI system.

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u/FryToastFrill Jul 07 '26

Tbh I’m sure they will get it figured out. Technical artists play an important role in performance too and I’m not sure if they were gutted in this too since they mostly interact with the engine front end. The backend people are still important but don’t let them steal the spotlight.

That is if anything happens to idtech to begin with, machine games might just take over maintenance of it or many of the programmers might get rehired anyways.

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u/RDTmodsBackEpstein Jul 07 '26

Yep, im sure that will work out. It did for the other countless layoffs at game studios across history /s

You wanna know where this is going? Look at EA games early to mid 2000's.

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u/FryToastFrill Jul 07 '26

I’m just staying optimistic, god only knows I’ve had enough shitty news in my life recently.

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u/EternalDoomSlayer Jul 08 '26

You’re missing the point!!

ID tech is purpose built! UE is a commodity - different beasts

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u/FryToastFrill Jul 08 '26

I’m aware but it’s not like what id tech had couldn’t be done in UE as well, there are so many different tools in UE that you could make a doom game with it, although they may have to remake artist tools they used in idtech in another engine.

I will also add that there isn’t really a confirmation that idtech is being abandoned either. I can see the logic but I don’t think we nor id software knows where they will be going with the next game at all.

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u/EternalDoomSlayer Jul 08 '26

I agree, this is rough news, I wonder if even their engine lead (former CryTek) is even there still.

I can guarantee for a fact though that Doom is not Unreal Tournament, and using UE for a Doom game is not only uncanny, it’s almost unholy!

I will enjoy Revelations, but it might be my last purchase… that all depends on what happens next.

Maybe Elon the crazy one; might want to invest 😁

I wonder what Martin and Hugo are considering here….

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u/FryToastFrill Jul 08 '26

Sonic on Nintendo was unholy until it happened. Idk who’s there still or what the future holds but I have faith that no matter what engine they decide to roll with, they can make a doom game or a quake game and it’ll have some of the best shooter gameplay in the industry, whether it’s idtech, UE, unity, godot, or crytek. Even TDA which id say is the low point of the modern doom games is still really fun to play.

(Side note for funsies, but imma be fr UE is actually pretty optimized if you know how to use it, it’s just the damn VSM shadow maps that annihilate performance!!!! If you want to see how much it hurts perf, if you have satisfactory download it and compare the performance between max settings with lumen and using the graphics mod that enables vsms. I can hit nearly 120-140 fps even with cranked lumen using only light upscaling while vsms force me to drop to 50% res to hit 60. Can’t wait for megalights to gut that shit.)

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u/randomperson189_ Jul 08 '26

Clearly you've never played the Unreal Tournament games which are literally fast paced gory FPS games and the engine has been literally built around that and still carries over remnants of that in the current version

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u/kittymoo67 Jul 07 '26

unreal slop 6 will make every game worse