In a surprise announcement at QuakeCon, the first three Doom games were re-released onto Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but fans encountered a login pop-up saying they’d need their Bethesda.net account details to play the classic games.
The original Doom and Doom 2 only required one login before accessing the full game, but Doom 3 players needed to log in each time they wanted to play to unlock all features and content. The bubbling excitement for the re-releases soon became lukewarm, but disappointed gamers pulled a Van Gogh and turned their aggravation into art.
This wasn’t the only bump in the road that Bethesda experienced in the excitement for the classic games’ re-release. Doom and Doom 2 are backward-compatible on Xbox One from their original platform on the Xbox 360, and as the new versions descended onto the Microsoft Store, players found that the old games were disappearing from their game libraries (via Resetera). As in, if the game was already on their system storage, it would play perfectly well, but if the player needed to download Doom or Doom 2, it was suddenly unavailable.
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— Shadow Hog (@The_Shadow_Hog) July 26, 2019
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— Robert Petersen (@Sonikku_a2) July 26, 2019
In response, Bethesda spoke to IGN in a statement, confirming that the login shouldn’t be mandatory and that a fix is coming soon. ‘The BethesdaNet login requirement was included for the Slayers Club, to reward members for playing the classic Doom games,’ Bethesda explained. ‘The login should be optional, and we are working on changing the requirement to optional now. We will update everyone when a fix is ready.’
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— RetroPokeFan (@poke_retro) July 26, 2019
Bethesda were quick to state that it was a glitch and not a move to make players re-purchase the old games. In an email to IGN, a Bethesda representative said, ‘Players who own and previously installed the Xbox 360 XBLA backward-compatible version of the games on Xbox One will still find those games in their Game Library and will be able to reinstall that version of the game. There was an error with this functionality today, but we expect it to be remedied very quickly.’
Bethesda’s response to these issues were pretty speedy, and it can’t be easy ensuring what now is a 25 year old game plays on modern consoles without a hitch. The first three Doom games are available on Android and iOS, Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
