id Teases Doom 4 Details and E3 Announcements; Views Itself as Multiplatform, Not PC First, Studio

Doom and Quake creator id Software expects to reveal some unannounced "new stuff" at E3 this June, CEO Todd Hollenshead revealed in an interview with GameSpot.

"I'll leave that as a tease," said Hollenshead when pressed for more details. Currently, the studio has three announced major projects: Wolfenstein, co-developed with Raven and due out this summer, Rage, which definitely won't arrive this year, and Doom 4. Additionally, id is continuing work on the free-to-play Quake Live, currently in open beta.

Doom 4 is "not a sequel to Doom 3, but it's not a reboot either," the CEO teased further, entirely ignoring the bit where GameSpot asked if it was a prequel. "It's a little bit different than those, and if I told you why, I would get my ass kicked."

However, that doesn't mean Doom 4, already said to be "significantly different," will abandon its roots. "Everything I've seen on it is classic Doom, so I don't really have worries that people aren't going to like it and start talking about it," Hollenshead stated.

id's CEO also took a few moments to address the company's "sort of philosophical shift" towards multiplatform development, a move he previously blamed on piracy.

"There's no question that our roots are in PC gaming. And when I play a first-person shooter, keyboard and mouse is the configuration that I want to play on," he noted. "But we feel like, in terms of your triple-A, big-budget, big-market title, that you really have to be cross-platform to be successful, unless you're a first party."

"As an independent developer, we feel like we have to be on all the relevant platforms. So we don't really view ourselves as PC first."

Part of that shift was because of piracy, Hollenhead explained, but that's not the only problem. Another issue, he said, is that "retailers are more focused on consoles than they are on the PC platform, primarily, I think, because Microsoft is campaigning for the 360, probably to some extent to the expense of Windows-based games."

That said, there's at least one platform id isn't developing for.

"If you look at the numbers, independent Wii-centric development is not really justified yet," said Hollenshead. "Even if we make an awesome game, there's still a question as to whether we're going to justify our investment."

"Despite the success of the Wii, and the fact that it's the largest-selling console out there, games like we make are still doing bigger numbers than they've ever done before," he concluded. "So that doesn't give us a lot of cause to be worried about the Wii. We celebrate it, we love the Wii, but it's not for the type of games we make."