New Doom 4 footage shows what the Call of Duty-inspired FPS would've played like

Doom 4
(Image credit: id Software/Noclip)

New footage has emerged of the canceled Doom 4, the game infamously known to series fans as 'Call of Doom.'

A new video from documentary channel Noclip features two clips from Doom 4. One of them features the player following an imp as it pulls a corpse down a flooded hallway - then there's combat, as the player uses a double-barreled shotgun to take on two imps as they teleport around, flinging fireballs as they go.

The footage shows a Call of Duty-style regenerating health system, and overall looks much more scripted and slow-paced than what we eventually got in Doom 2016. Another, much shorter clip shows a melee fight with a zombie-like humanoid enemy.

Some of this footage originally appeared in Noclip's 2016 Doom documentary, but here it's presented raw and unedited for the first time. In that older documentary, id described the unreleased Doom 4 as much more scripted and cinematic than the classics of the series. Eventually the studio decided that the new direction wasn't going to actually feel like Doom, and scrapped the project in favor of what would end up becoming Doom 2016.

Noclip has also released some footage from early in the development of Doom 2016, including a combat animation test featuring some assets from the original Doom 4. It's a neat look at the transition period between the development of the two games, and it also shows the seeds of what would become the glory kill system.

We're past the era when we called the whole genre 'Doom clones,' but our list of the best FPS games is filled with id's DNA.

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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