DOOM developer Id Software has been heavily gutted in the wake of Xbox’s layoffs. Alongside the sale and independence of multiple Xbox studios, teams such as The Elder Scrolls Online’s Zenimax Online Studios have been heavily slashed.
Historic FPS studio Id Software has been severely hit with layoffs; 136 developers, many in senior roles, have been kicked out. A large number of these developers include those working on Id Software’s in-house IdTech engine, the software that powers DOOM, MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, and Arkane’s upcoming Marvel’s Blade.
IdTech, in all of its variations, has served as the staple of video game technology for three decades. John Carmack’s original incarnation of the engine, although it wasn’t called IdTech back then, transformed PC gaming. The industry today would be completely different if it wasn’t for IdTech.
However, IdTech today is still a source of inspiration for developers. While many may scoff at the mandatory ray-tracing requirements of DOOM: The Dark Ages, the studio’s use of ray-tracing was sublime compared to its competitors. Even on entry-level RTX cards, The Dark Ages can run at a stellar level of performance.
For DOOM: The Dark Ages, the mandatory use of ray-tracing helped to save years of development, and many studios want to move to mandatory ray-tracing. The issue is that ray-tracing is very expensive, but IdTech’s brilliant optimisation has helped guide developers, and has likely stamped the future of gaming with its awesome tech.
Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced, which reviewer Callum Self reviewed for us here, has directly cited IdTech as its technical inspiration for the remake’s advanced lighting. Assassin’s Creed Shadows was an incredibly intensive game with its use of ray-traced lighting. In fact, on consoles, ray-traced lighting was only available in the game’s performance mode with a backup probe-based system used for 60fps gameplay. The Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, obviously, used this system as well.
However, even on lower-power systems, IdTech made use of fully ray-traced lighting at high-performance levels. DOOM: The Dark Ages, for example, still maintains full ray-tracing on Xbox Series S. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle also uses ray-tracing on the lower-power machine. At this point in time, there is no studio doing ray-tracing as well as Id Software.
Speaking to Digital Foundry, Ubisoft confirmed that they looked at IdTech’s Siggraph 2025 presentation to improve Black Flag Resynced’s ray-tracing. Using a fantastic denoiser tool, IdTech’s ray-tracing actually runs at 1/16th the resolution of the main renderer, allowing RTGI to look great while also saving on performance.
Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced looked at IdTech’s implementation of this technology and created their own solution. While the game still uses screen-space reflections for large bodies of water, just like MachineGames’ Indiana Jones, it can now deliver ray-traced global illumination at 60fps on Xbox Series X and PS5.
It’s a testament to the developers both at and now departed from Id Software. While Xbox seemingly doesn’t value the history and the legacy of IdTech past and present, game developers most certainty do. Obviously, IdTech hasn’t always made the best steps forward—mega-textures were short-lived due to the technology of the time—but it’s always served as the benchmark of the games industry, more so than Unreal Engine.
Of course, IdTech still lives on, even if Id Software itself has been kneecapped by Xbox’s layoffs. MachineGames has its own tech team that can continue to work on the engine, so does Arkane. After all, engines never really die, they usually just merge into something else. (Blam, for example, is still alive under Unreal Engine in Halo: Campaign Evolved!)
