DOOM Eternal is shaping up to be a killer game, but don’t expect the latest in advanced lighting effects. During a recent interview with Digital Foundry, executive producer and id Software studio director Marty Stratton confirmed that the hellish FPS would not feature ray-tracing support in any official capacity.
Stratton admitted that the id Tech team had experimented with the technology about a year ago, but it decided to drop the hyped technique for bigger priorities. That would include getting the game out on time and delivering it at the “highest polished” level. Considering how demanding ray tracing can be, that makes plenty of sense, as it could work against DOOM Eternal’s fast-paced but silky-smooth shooting experience.
That said, the news might be disappointing to some DOOM fans, especially those who listened in on Stratton’s interview with Giant Bomb at E3 2019. During that discussion, the producer confirmed that id Tech 7 would support NVIDIA RTX, which implied that ray tracing was coming to DOOM Eternal. Stratton also claimed that id Software would “do it better than everybody.”
Unfortunately, DOOM Eternal won’t be putting that statement to the test. Gamers who want a taste of id Software’s future ray-tracing exploits may want to turn to the MachineGames’s Wolfenstein: Youngblood, an id Tech 6 title that was recently updated with RTX support.