Slashdot Mirror
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.
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