Doom 3 Q&A Gives More Gameplay Details

Arcane writes "This interview with id lead designer Tim Willits at Gamespot goes into more detail about Doom 3 than the usual 'mind blowing graphics' or 'changes the future of gaming' phrases." It's nice to see some new screenshots, mention of multiplayer modes, and most of all, Tim's descriptions of actually playing the game. New trailer debuts at E3, apparently.

Comments

Re:HIDEOUS!

[Walker2323]

I really don't see what the big deal is. It's aheck of a lot easier to read this than Wired magazine. Of course, maybe my shitty monitor doesn't give me the crisp, cold whites that others get.

wow

[standsolid]

did anyone elses read the article? if so check out the first screenshot with the "worker zombie" -- not only is it amazingly good lookin, but that zombie was well blessed in the "family jewels' depatrment... i mean jeesh. (or is it just me... i'm not gay am i?)

/me looks around nervously

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

link : http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/doom3/screens_60 26019.html?page=1

yup look at 'em!

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

"My testicles won't fit in my underwear."

"Bart! Get those oranges out of there!"

Re:wow

[Beatbyte]

1. yes, you are gay.
2. he's seems to be blessed with a square'ish, rectangular, horizontal penis... not very 'blessed' if you ask me

Re:wow

[Directrix1]

You may not be gay, but you are definetely confused :-P. Is it me or does Doom ]I[ not seem to have as spectacular graphics as all the hype implies. I mean, everybody is wearing boring ass gray shit. And why are they all dressed like inmates? I think they've watched Resident Evil a few too many times. Why do they refuse to put any sort of non-dull boring color in this game.

Re:wow

[Thing 1]

I think the zombie's wearing his ass backwards.

Longevity not "Doomed"

[patoco12]

As usual, the game looks to be great.

But the game will have longevity if only because most people (and by people I mean people, not hardcore gamers) won't be able to play the game until the market is saturated with the power needed to run it.

whoa..interview duplicate in HTML source

[Dr. Awktagon]

Hey, just did a "view source" because the page was rendering all wrong... the whole interview is in plain text within a comment at the beginning of the HTML source code (do a view source).

Cool! Plain ol' text is so much easier to read.. is this a common gamespot thing?

Re:whoa..interview duplicate in HTML source

[Pyrosz]

Get Opera 7.10 browser and you can select what they call Author Mode by a single button click, makes it an instant text only view (after you turn off graphics). It maintains some of the layout but not the annoying colours and such.

Sounds oddly like Splinter Cell

[ctr2sprt]

The description given sounds an awful lot like Splinter Cell. There are definitely parts in SC where you can track an enemy's progress by his shadow, and naturally sticking to the shadows yourself is a critical part of that game. Most of the lights in SC are also destroyable, which makes for great fun. The model physics are rag doll-like, though probably not as advanced in SC as in D3. I've never played Thief or any of the other games in this genre, but I imagine they are similar too.

It's interesting to imagine Doom with a kind of covert-mission aspect to it, instead of a mindless bloodbath. I'm sure there will be a bloodbath part of the game, and I'm sure it'll be significant, but... it's an interesting twist on the Doom series, which has never exactly been subtle.

Re:Sounds oddly like Splinter Cell

[Anonymous Coward]

What worries me is that Carmack has gotten so caught up in his ragdoll physics that he'll forget to make it look spooky. One of the things that made Doom I and II so good was precisely the fact that it wasn't true 3D - when you looked at a bad guy he was a perfect bitmapped image of that bad guy, not a frame of painted triangles. Unless Doom III has some unbelievably huge number of triangles for each model, i'm not holding out much hope for realistic-looking monsters. I'd rather have low-res bitmaps than high-res high-poly-count frames.

This is exactly the problem that Mortal Kombat went through. The sole thing that made MK1-3 so good was the fact they used digital captures of actors, and if you screwed your eyes up a bit (to account for low resolution) it'd look like a TV picture. But come MK4, it went 3D, and suddenly you have triangles walking around. Sure, they were motion-captured, but no matter how much you screwed up your eyes it'd never look quite right.

I know a lot of people hate voxels, but i really think 3D graphics accelerators should have moved in the direction of accelerating voxels rather than triangles. I'd like to see a 3D bitmap of the bad guy, not a texture-mapped polygonal bad guy... I really hope id manage to make something out of this, but i fear that at the end of the day Doom III is not going to be any better than Quake 3 or any of the other polygonal 3D shooters out there :-(

Re:Sounds oddly like Splinter Cell

[mr3038]

What worries me is that Carmack has gotten so caught up in his ragdoll physics that he'll forget to make it look spooky. One of the things that made Doom I and II so good was precisely the fact that it wasn't true 3D - when you looked at a bad guy he was a perfect bitmapped image of that bad guy, not a frame of painted triangles. Unless Doom III has some unbelievably huge number of triangles for each model, i'm not holding out much hope for realistic-looking monsters. I'd rather have low-res bitmaps than high-res high-poly-count frames.

Are you sure? Would you really rather have graphics that looked like DOOM2 instead of Final Fantasy (the movie) or Monsters Inc (hopefully DOOM's monsters are more scary)? Pretty much all movies use high-res high-poly-count frames for the FX shots. The only problem with the games is that most games have less than 20K polys per frame when you would really want 20-80M polys per frame [1].

Unfortunately, DOOM3 isn't going to display that many polygons. I guess it's more like 200K polys per frame but I'm pretty confidient that DOOM3 as a whole does look better with its polygon based characters than any game with pre-rendered characters glued on more-or-less-static background. That is, if you have hardware to run DOOM3 with full rendering quality.

[1] It has been claimed that one would need roughly 80M triangles to model a single scene so that it would be indistinguishable from the real thing. One could first thing that because 1024x768 screen has only about 780K pixels one could have one polygon per pixel with a 780K poly model for the entire scene. However, once you start throwing transcludent stuff to the scene, you'll notice that you need more than one polygon per pixel if you want high quality rendering. In addition, as DOOM3 has shadows, some polygons outside the scene in your view can cast shadows to the scene and increase the complexity despite the fact that the polygons that made up the shadowing object aren't visible in the final picture. If you don't need shadows, some voxel-based technique could be the answer. However, without the shadows, the end result would be far from great -- I'm not aware of any technique to quickly render shadows with voxel-based scene.

Re:Sounds oddly like Splinter Cell

[stubblehead]

Most of the lights in SC are also destroyable, which makes for great fun.

Screw shadows! I don't know about you, but the first thing I'll be looking for in this game is how to turn as many lights on as possible. After I map all my vital keys, any leftovers become the "Use" function.

*shoot* *use light switch* *shoot* *run away* *use light switch*

Re:Sounds oddly like Splinter Cell

[IanBevan]

It's interesting to imagine Doom with a kind of covert-mission aspect to it, instead of a mindless bloodbath

Isn't that like imagining a date with Cindy Crawford but without the sex ?

Re:Sounds oddly like Splinter Cell

[entrigant]

Think about what your saying. A hardware voxel accelerater would still be limited by todays technology... it's not much different from making an entire came world out of 3d cubes. However, if you want to read some interesting ideas on what should dethrone raster based polygon renderers, check out the real time ray tracing project. They have theories and even som enumbers showing how after a while... ray tracing becomes more efficient than trying to pump out another 300,000 polygons to get more detail. Real time ray tracing/radiosity is the future! >:)

more real than ever...

[Anonymous Coward]

'The original Doom was groundbreaking in that it drew players into the experience of a video game like never before. Players were scared of the environment and the characters--they would try to dodge fireballs by leaning in their chairs, or jump out of their chairs in fear when a hell knight came around the corner. Doom III is the next evolution in that experience, and it will change our expectations for how a first-person game should look and play in the same way Doom did.'
So what is the next evolution en that experience?
Will people jump out of windows and hide under their bed, or have to take drugs to stay calm?

PR blurb

[Negatyfus]

While it could be possible that ID's lead designer is genuinely enthousiastic about Doom III, it seems that he's hyping the game with popular words and playing the "I love this game so much!" part. I sure hope he's the honest sort, since I hate this kind of behavior.

Re:PR blurb

[The Evil Couch]

well, if you've been working on a game for about 3-4 years, you'll either love it and think it's the best thing since sliced bread or hate it and dream about stabbing Carmack every night. when you're in something for that long of a time, it becomes a part of you.

Re:PR blurb

[Negatyfus]

Perhaps. The wording just sounds like:

Tim: "Well, Mike, just the another day, something AMAZING happened! I was walking down a hallway carrying my FANTASTIC shotgun, when this INCREDIBLE zombie scientist spotted me. Seeing as I was low om ammo and health, I ran back and hid in the other room. There was a light behind him that cast an UNBELIEVABLE long shadow in front of him!"

*applause"

Mike: "That's AMAZING, Tim. Please, tell us more!"

Tim: "Well, I shot the zombie point blank in the chest and the force of the shot just blew him straight through this window that was behind him and our FABOULOUS patented RAG-DOLL(tm) system made his fall down the stairs look SO REALISTICLY I wet my pants!"

*audience laughs*

Mike: "That's absolutely great, Tim. This game really changed your life. I remember when I saw you six months ago, you were vastly impopular and couldn't score a chick even if she was unconscious. But now, you have a Ferrari, three girl-friends and will never have to work again! Isn't that AMAZING, people?"

*applause, confirmative nods*

Tim: "Yes, Mike, Doom III saved me from the gutter. If it weren't for Doom III, I'd probably have to kneel on one of those little platforms with wheels all day, pretending to be crippled, with a "FEED ME" sign hanging from my neck!"

*laughing*

I don't know, it just slightly comes across like that, as if it were pre-orchestrated.

P2P Based Multiplayer

[niai]

I seem to remember hearing a rumour a while ago about DOOM 3 having a P2P based multiplayer component. Now it seems I am imagining it all. But wouldn't be cool to be able to play on a private server with your friends without having to own a dedicated server and a fast connection?

Is this possible to implement while maintaining low pings?

Re:P2P Based Multiplayer

[mrkh]

From what I remember, Serious Sam had a P2P based network system, but in recent patch versions switched to a conventional client server due to sync problems.

Last Ninja 4

[Per Wigren]

The game I've really been waiting for is The Last Ninja 4! What's really cool about it is that the developers have been very active in Last Ninja fan-forums, asking fans of the classic Last Ninja 1-3 games questions how they should do this or that to keep the wonderful feeling of the old games. It's been in development since 1999 and the current planned releasedate is set to "end of 2003". Their attitude is also "if it doesn't have the same state-of-the-art gameplay and atmosphere (compared to today's games) as The Last Ninja 1 when it was released in 1986, we won't release it."

Exciting

[Snowspinner]

I haven't heard about a game that's promised this much since Daikatana.

Suffice it to say, therefore, that I don't expect to see this game in the next five years. Nor do I really expect it to be very good.

Which really is a pity. Because I still find myself playing through Doom or Doom 2 about once a year. And I'd love a good sequel.

Re:Exciting

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? Doom III will be WAY closer to schedule than Daikatana, I guarantee that. If you don't believe me, then you obviously don't know much about ID.

Also, the features 'promised' _WILL_ be in the game; some of which you could see NOW if you wanted. An alpha version of the game was leaked after last year's E3, doof.

Re:Exciting

[Tralfamadorian]

and the leaked version was supposed to be old then, and it was playable.

It's going to be a cool game from what I've seen.

"Gameplay Details"

[ShaoK]

Unfortunately most of this sounds like PR.

When you play Doom III, you forget that you are playing a video game, and it's at that moment we can really terrify you.

and most of the rest of it seems to be claims on how good the physics/detail is on the engine.

When will they learn that detailed textures is not what makes a game immersive!

Then again i also think that the fact you can save your game anywhere also detracts from any sort of 'dread' you can feel. (who cares whats around the corner, i can always just come back 3 feet away from it.) bleh!

Re:"Gameplay Details"

[danila]

At least it is better than Half-Life 2 article that was published recently, when they boasted "advanced enemy AI" that stopped them from attacking the player if he was sprayed with some crap that made him smell like them (sounds like invisibility from Doom) or attack other monsters (sounds like Doom again).

And no, it doesn't sound exactly like PR. If the game allows such realistic non-scripted events like a monster flying through the window after being shot with a shotgun, that is gonna be one hell of a game.

Re:"Gameplay Details"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Then again i also think that the fact you can save your game anywhere also detracts from any sort of 'dread' you can feel."

Then don't use the save game feature! You can also ruin a game by only playing it in "god mode," but most people see that as a form of cheating and pride themselves on playing the whole game w/o cheat codes. Think of the "save at any time" feature as just another cheat code and don't use it. That way you can have your dread, and the people who want/need the saved game feature can have what they want also.

I mention all this because I worry that some game designer will see a post like yours and decide that it will improve the game by eliminating the "save at any time" feature. I played a game like that, Dark Forces I, and it only made the game annoying.

A possible compromise would be to keep the "save at any time," but only allow the user to load a saved game when he first starts the program. That way the player would have to save, exit, restart the program, and reload the saved game. That might make players more likely to play straight through a level in one shot.

Wow..

[Rudy Rodarte]

I really want this game. Sadly, none of my systems could ever hope to run this beast in a million years
** Looks at systems **
233 Dell P2 with 64MB RAM 6GB HDD Integrated video
333 Toshiba Celery 256MB Ram 66GB HDD Integrated video
800 Dell Inspiron 256MB Ram 10GB HDD Integrated video.
Wha! I'll wait for the gamecube version.

--
What happened to the AC Option?

Re:Wow..

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging by what you listed it looks like you're (over)due for another computer.

First of all, don't get a Dell OR Toshiba. Buy each part seperate and build it yourself (but research a little first). If you are lazy then have a shop do it for you.
Oh and don't get integrated video. It's pointless when you will need to buy a new video card anyway.

Hope this helps,
AC

Lighting

[illumina us]

I had the opportuninty to play a demo version of Doom III, seeing as it was not the full version, and the game is still in development I won't judge it too much. Yet I can't seem to understand why the lighting in Doom III and Halo look so much alike. The lighting is surreal, I think it sucks.

Re:Lighting

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the opportuninty to play a demo version of Doom III

*cough* leaked alpha *cough*

Re:Lighting

[aderusha]

the demo version you were playing is a pirated, leaked alpha version from a year ago. your impressions are not only dated, they're also likely to be the reason that id isn't showing a playable version @ e3 this year, as the version you played was stolen from last years e3.

Worms 3D

[danila]

The same is done by the Team17 with their upcoming Worms 3D. They have a lot of "Making of" style articles on their site and an active community in the forums, where they often ask the fans things like what little tricks they used in multiplayer that should be learned by AI worms (like teleporting a worm really-really high in the sky so that it has lotsa kinetic energy when it hits the enemy on the ground). And their attitude also was that having the same freedom (completely deformable landscape) and similar gameplay was essential if they were to make Worms. It seems that it is working out and we'll soon be able to play Worms in glorious 3D.