"Doom Eternal" was supposed to be released in November 2019, but id Software put the brakes on the project and pushed it back to March 2020. However, executive producer Marty Stratton admitted to VG247 that it was a rather tough trial and error process to get to this point.

According to Stratton, Doom Eternal was completed last year, and no new content has been added since the postponement was announced. Instead, the extra time will be devoted to "a lot of polishing, back-end system enhancements," specifically including additional testing, exploit patches, and balance changes.

Unfortunately, while Stratton said id encourages developers to take as much time as they need to get the job done, he also acknowledged that for most of 2019, time is a fact of life.

"For most of last year it was pretty tough. It's a gradual process. We'll crunch one group of people so that the next group of people can be properly teed up." So that the next group can tee it up properly."

"We really try to respect people's time and lives. A lot of times we have very dedicated people who choose to do a lot of the work. We want to perfect our game. We want it to meet our expectations and the expectations of our consumers."

Crunch, in which studio employees work long, continuous hours for weeks or months at a time during the late stages of development, is a real problem for the video game industry. As this "New York Times" headline succinctly expresses, crunching has a negative impact on workers and is generally viewed as an unproductive use of time. However, it is also a very common practice, especially in larger studios.

CD Projekt was recently criticized for demanding a crunch, even though it delayed "Cyberpunk 2077" from April to September. Interestingly, Stratton suggested that the same thing happened with Doom Eternal: "[The delay] takes off a little steam and pressure, but it's like pushing even harder to make it as tight as possible," he said.

According to Stratton, the delay and effort led to the best game the studio had ever made. He said, "If it hadn't been for the extra time, I don't think I could have said that.

Doom Eternal will be released on March 20. It looks pretty promising: Wes described it in his hands-on preview as "the most hilarious and manic FPS since Bulletstorm in 2011," which is really high praise in my book.