If Doom Eternal's first three hours are anything to go by, the sequel to 2016's Doom is shaping up to be one of the best games of 2020--or at least the most metal. Doom Eternal is set to launch on March 20 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, with the Nintendo Switch version due out later this year, but it was originally scheduled to release last November before being delayed.

In an interview with VG247, executive producer Marty Stratton said that the team at id Software were working long hours in the leadup to the delay. "We were crunching pretty hard most of last year," he explained. "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."

Developer crunch has been a hot button issue in the video game industry over the past couple of years, with criticism aimed at many developers for creating a culture of expected, and sometimes mandatory, overtime at the expense of employee wellbeing. Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser previously claimed that some employees were working 100-hour weeks on Red Dead Redemption 2, as an example. The closure of Telltale Games unearthed some painful truths, too, while it was recently revealed that Cyberpunk 2077's delay won't reduce crunch.

"We really truly do try and be very respectful of peoples' time and lives," Stratton said. "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.

"We work very hard and we'll put in extra time to do that. Sometimes when we just get the extra time we do it anyways because we want it to be that much better. [A delay] takes a little bit of the steam and pressure out but it's almost one of those things where we'll push it even harder to get even more just as tight as it possibly can be."