Id Software was "crunching pretty hard most of last year" on Doom Eternal

The executive producer of Doom Eternal has revealed that the team behind the first-person shooter spent months in crunch before deciding to push back the game's release.

In an interview with VG247, Marty Stratton said the studio attempted to balance the extra hours so that some members of staff were given a break, but admits the working schedule was intense.

"We were crunching pretty hard most of last year," he said. "It goes in phases... We'll have one group of people crunching so the next group of people are teed up properly. As they get done, they may need to crunch a little bit.

"We really truly do try and be very respectful of peoples' time and lives. We have very dedicated people that just choose to work a lot in many cases. It was nice because we want the game to be perfect. We want it to live up to our expectations and consumer expectations."

Doom Eternal was originally due for release in November, but was pushed back to March 20, 2020. Stratton says this "takes a little bit of the steam and pressure out", but added that the some of the team opted to "push it even harder to get even more just as tight as it possibly can be."

Stratton emphasises that the four-month delay was ultimately beneficial, declaring Doom Eternal to be "the best game we've ever made."

"I don't think I'd say that if we didn't have that extra time," he said.

Crunch is an ongoing issue in games development, with several high-profile examples emerging in the past few years. Last year, Epic Games developers spoke out about intense working conditions on Fortnite, while NetherRealm staff told GamesIndustry.biz about the studio's self-sustaining culture of crunch.