Doom Eternal Isn’t Doom 2 for a Reason
Id Software spoke on Doom Eternal at QuakeCon 2018, revealing why they decided to pass on the obvious name choice for the game, Doom 2. Marty Stratton, the game’s executive producer, says that their decision was influenced by the problem that came from the last Doom’s name.
“You hear us say it all the time, we call it Doom 2016, and the internet has called it Doom 2016,” he said.
“We go back and forth on whether it was a mistake to call it Doom,” he continued. “I still don’t think it was a mistake, because we really were kind of drawing a new line in the sand.” And although he stands by the decision and reasoning behind it, he recognizes that “coming out and saying ‘we’re going to do Doom 2,’ we would have ‘Doom 2: Year of Release Date.’”
Hugo Martin, the game’s creative director, also said that it would have made it difficult to search for the game online “because you get all this [other] stuff.”
Stratton said they asked their marketing team to create a name “that had meaning and spoke to what we were doing with lore and how we want people to feel about the game. And Doom Eternal was something that just felt right.”
Martin also said that Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy was an influence on the game’s name.
“I think [Christopher] Nolan did it the best, and we thought about that,” he said. “It wasn’t ‘Dark Knight 1, Dark Knight 2, Dark Knight 3.’ Each one had its own name, but there was an arc there. They were all connected, as is this game as a sequel to [Doom] 2016.“
“[Doom Eternal] felt like a good way to go in that regard,” he continued. “You’re not limiting yourself, and you’re also not creating confusion with the brand.” It would be easy to imagine the ongoing confusion it would have caused, had Eternal been called Doom 2 or even Doom: Hell on Earth.”