Bethesda scrapped Doom 4 because it felt like Call of Duty 'with a Doom skin on it'

The version of Doom that was shown during this year's E3 wasn't the first attempt at bringing the series back. There was an earlier version of the game that was ultimately cancelled, and Bethesda's Pete Hines described what happened in a video interview with Polygon.

"We weren't happy with the game that was being made," he said of the decision to kill the project. "We decided that it wasn't Doom enough and needed to be thrown out and started over. Some folks left and some faces changed at the studio. Out of that change — which was not easy for those guys to go through — some amazing things happened."

The main issue was that the game didn't feel like Doom ... at all.

"You can probably close your eyes and imagine a 'Call of Doom' or a 'BattleDoom' game, where it starts to feel way too much like: 'Wait, this doesn't feel like Doom, it feels like we're playing some other franchise with a Doom skin on it,'" he said.

A little bit of leaked footage is available online, although it's being taken down when discovered. If this is related to the game as described by Hines, which makes sense, he's right: It doesn't look like anything that should have the Doom name.

"It wasn't fast enough," Hines said, listing all the ways the game went wrong. "The way that the demons worked. The visceralness of the combat. A lot of the stuff that you see with the finishing moves wasn't part of it at all. The combat was more disconnected, you almost found yourself taking cover at times and using things from other FPSes, which might be fine for them, but for Doom it just doesn't feel right."

You can watch the footage of the official Doom shown at E3 below.