Doom 4 is still in development but id Software can't talk about it right now

Doom 4 was once again a no-show at QuakeCon 2013, and during hos keynote, id Software technical director John Carmack' said he couldn't talk about the long overdue shooter.

When asked by a fan about its status during the Q&A portion of his talk Carmack said he even asked ahead of time if he could say anything related to development, and "the answer was, no, I couldn't."

The game was being retooled as of 2011, and according to id's co-founder Tim Willits said the company has now focused its efforts only on Doom 4 and no other game at present.

He also said the game, which was announced by Carmack at QuakeCon 2007, was mainly an effort to attract new talent to the studio.

"We have found that long PR cycles don't help," Willits said to Polygon. "They're a distraction to the development team. Your message can easily get diluted if you're not careful. Bethesda has had great success with - heck, look at the Skyrim launch, that was like nine months!

"One of the problems we got into — it's always easy to say that — is that way back, when we wanted to grow the studio and look for great talent, we said, 'Hey, we're going to make another Doom game.' We thought, 'If we tell people we're going to make another Doom game, we're gonna attract some great talent.' But that put a flagpole in the ground of when people thought we started on Doom. We wanted to throw that out there to tell people, 'This is what we're working on for the future, but we want to find people to do it.

"It takes forever to hire people. It takes months to hire one person. But yeah, it was a while. But again, like we said, now we're streamlined. It's difficult for developers to always have to make demos, go to events and shows, and at the end of the day, a great launch is important for a game, but a great game is important for success."

At least it's still in development, and hopefully, this will be the last QuakeCon it misses out on.