How 'The Dark Knight Trilogy' Influenced 'DOOM Eternal'

DOOM Eternal is the second game to be released in the rebooted DOOM series, but developer id Software had its reasons for opting for a name other than simply calling it DOOM 2, one of which references Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy.

The follow-up to DOOM, the 2016 game that took the name of the classic brand as its own, DOOM Eternal brings more of the same gory carnage that the first did, some of that shown off during Bethesda's QuakeCon event over the weekend. Speaking to IGN during the event, id Software's executive producer Mary Stratton told IGN that the game creators did think about calling the new game DOOM 2 instead. He says that the conversation actually goes back to the 2016 DOOM game with the developers wondering internally whether it was a mistake to name it that.

"We go back and forth on whether it was a mistake to call it Doom," Stratton told IGN. "I still don't think it was a mistake, because we really were kind of drawing a new line in the sand."

Should they have called the next game DOOM 2, he said, they likely would've gone with "DOOM 2" followed by a colon and the year that the game released to leave no question about which DOOM players were talking about.

Hugo Martin, creative director at id Software, also weighed in on the decision to avoid calling it DOOM 2 by saying that it would've been a pain for players to search for anything on the game. To help explain the logic behind DOOM Eternal's name and its place in the rebooted series as a sequel to DOOM, Martin said that Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy had a model for the movies' names that's similar to what id is doing with DOOM.

"I think [Christopher] Nolan did it the best, and we thought about that," Martin 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."

The creative director added that calling it DOOM Eternal ultimately "felt like a good way to go" by saying that doing so avoids any confusion within the brand.

Bethesda revealed more on DOOM Eternal during QuakeCon by sharing details on the Nintendo Switch version as well as an invasion mechanic that'll let players wreak havoc on others' worlds. The game doesn't yet have a release date, but it's expected to be out in 2019.