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Doom III Officially Announced
Jacek Fedorynski writes "The end is near. First, id Software's site is updated for the first time since the Quake II times and now they officially announce Doom III!" If you recall, there were some screenshots released last year, but I don't think there's been much since then - these are probably out of date.
The mere thought of a new DOOM game is certainly exciting, but... RtCW ruined any joy I could possibly have replaying the old Wolf3D games - there's such a massive gap between high tech 1992 and high tech 2002.
I have many fond memories of playing DOOM late at night with the volume cranked way up, and it was the game that gave me my love for horror games (Silent Hill, etc) - but could DOOM 3 destroy the replay value of the original DOOM games?
I think the only saving grace is DOOM's atmosphere - I remember getting jumpy a few levels into episode 2. The graphics in Wolf3D couldn't really present an atmosphere like that.
What do you think?
Each id game is pretty much a tech demo for what we should expect to see in the intervening years between games- I don't expect much out of Doom III- but it's a harbinger of the next Half-Life.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Aside from the original .plan update from Carmack, there's been at least one official press release announcing Doom III before. This is just one of those "it's getting closer to release date so let's announce it again to make sure people haven't forgotten about us" press releases.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Think of the resources as being put towards a big part of many new and exciting (and many more boring and repetitive) games - the engine will mostly likely be licensed by many companies over the next few years and will contribute to the development of interesting games... hopefully.
sic transit gloria mundi
To me, the defining features that make Doom are:
Dozens of monsters swarming you all at once
Monsters that can be tricked into killing each other
Light and music providing atmosphere
All this talk of how pretty Doom III will be, and how you will need a GeForce 4 or Radeon 8500 to play it, are making me worry that maybe you will only see a small handful of monsters at a time (like Quake). I'm not too worried about the other points.
By the way, the screenshots reminded me a lot of the movie Aliens (the James Cameron sequel to Alien). I hope someone does a total conversion, or maybe they use the Doom III engine for an Aliens Vs. Predator game.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Hmm... I'm not even sure it's so much "atmosphere" as it is originality. When games like Doom (or even Duke Nukem 3D) came out, they were so much fun because you never knew what was going to happen next. The weapons were mostly "never seen/done before", and the enemies would truly scare you as you kept running into more and more powerful ones with new tricks up their sleeves.
This whole 3D shooter genre has been done and re-done so many times now, I think we've gotten to the point where we've seen everything. Tricks like grenades you could toss and detonate with a second click of the mouse aren't "awesome" anymore. It's not exciting anymore when you push on a secret wall or walk over a sequence of buttons on the floor that open up a new room. All that's left is to keep incrementally improving the graphics resolution, and make good use of surround sound.
When they attempt to improve things by adding more storyline (movie sequences/intermissions), that's not even so great anymore. It is, after all, still supposed to be an action game. Those cut scenes just make for more B.S. to click past and slow down the loading of the next level. There was a time when people watched those in awe, just to see the "real-life" graphics quality of them. Nowdays, everyone's seen full-screen multimedia - and we just don't care anymore.