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No Doom 3 This Year?
Ant writes "According to an article at Blue's News: 'Though id Software basically invented the idea of using "when it's done" as a release date, and thus did not specify a release date when DOOM 3 was announced, many have been assuming that the game would be available for this year's holiday season. Now a report on HomeLAN Fed cites Activision's 2003 release calendar and quarterly financial conference call... [saying that] Activision admits that this matter is entirely in id's hands, but that they are not expecting the game this year, and have it "penciled" on their calendars for fiscal Q4 (Jan-March) 2004.' Additionally, Quake IV is now due in Fiscal 2005 (which begins April 2004)."
As long as I don't have to buy a Pentium 6 with 2GB ram and a Geforce 10 running windows 2005 with Directx 15.
Slashdot.. Land of nerds, trolls, and FlameBait..
I'm thinking that after Valve's E3 techdemo and their subsequent best of show awards with little mention of ID/D3 that ID were taken off guard. I'm sure they thought they'd waltz in there and floor the place but Valve came out of no where and blew the socks off of everything hands down.
I think ID realized that they would have to revamp somewhat and code additional features into the engine itself as well as enhance gameplay so the worlds would at the very least be as interactive as the worlds in HL2.
I've never been a HL fanboy the movies I've seen of in game play not cinematics are amazing! They have revolutionized gaming and are taking it in a new direction in terms of a fully interactive world. Go dl a movie of HL 2 off Kazaa or BT and see what I mean.
I had no intentions of purchasing HL 2 but after the tech-demo/in game movies I will now buy it.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Is it just me or does this ideology seem to lead to titles dying from over engineering. I don't think it'll come as a shock to anyone that when you let the engineers decide when a product is ready to ship, that it will never ship. On the other side of the rope are the marketers who want to realease it now, now, now. What you need is someone in the middle who is willing to give a cut-off date, a deadline. This means that the engineers are not allowed to keep adding features, creating bugs, and fixing those bugs after a certain point, and that the marketers have to wait for a product to actually exist before booking orders. Ya, deadlines suck, most of us probably deal with them in our jobs, but they are necessary to making a company run, as long as they are realistic. Too short, and the product sucks, too long and the product dies in engineering or misses the market. When its done, seems to be a deadline that is just way to long for bringing a product to market, and slowly builds dissatisfaction in the customers who would buy your product.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
They have to predict a release date. This is a major product for a publicly traded company. The stockholders are entitled to know what to expect for the near future. It is responsible to give the quarter a product is expected to ship as well as when a product's shipping slips to another quarter. Predicting an exact date can make one look foolish, but that was never the case with this title.
C'mon dagarath, I know you could have thought of that if you tried.
Anyone else feel ID got a little scared when they saw the Half Life II trailer? Much like the 3D Realms guys see their technology be eclipsed every six months?
I cannot express the feelings I felt when I first saw this game, except that pervailing knowledge that my life will become less meaningful than usual come September.
I'm sick and tired of software companies saying that such-and-such product will be "released when it's done" or "done when it's finished."
Since when has any software product ever been FINISHED when it's released? Usually -- and *especially* with PC games -- the release is full of bugs and requires a couple of quick patch cycles to bring up to par, followed by a few more patch cycles over the following months to make it solid.
Would you prefer them to release it when its half-done? This could be an interesting new business model - sell a half-completed product to generate revenue to finish the other half.Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that ID (iD, Id, ID, whatever the hell you want to call it) has bucked this trend. Granted, there have been quite a few patches for their games, but the games are always quite functional. Take for example the game "Rise of Nations" which I could not play for 15 minutes without it freezing and forcing me to reboot.
As far as the comment about "usually and especially with PC games", I've never seen a game on a console that had a patch. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Yes, patch cycles do happen. When you cease testing a product on 10 machines and begin testing it on 1000-10000, lots of weird bugs you didn't see before begin popping up as a result of video cards, drivers, sound cards, moon phases, etc. You don't need me to tell you this, but it seems some might need a friendly reminder.
I see my shadow changing, stretching up and over me...
Don't forget Halflife revolutionized the single player FPS. I'm hoping for some strong single player adventure elements from both these games.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm sorry..you must not have been here in 1993..Doom didn't revolutionize the FPS genre..it created it!
I'm a little bit perplexed about the responses for this story. Many people think that the reason why the Doom III may be delayed is related to Half Life 2, which had an incredible showing this year. This may be true, but that seems rather unlikely, and there is a much more reasonable explanation.
Firstly, it seems to me the phase of development D3 is in right now is polish. The graphics engine is more or less complete, which is demonstrated by the fact that the screenshots from last year compared to this years aren't much different. They've story-boarded the game's story like a Hollywood movie, so unless they're changing a fundamental story element (why?) they're just working on finishing the level designs and maybe enemy (and ally?) AI. I personally figured that that has been pretty much what they've been working on all this year, and why they would release this holiday season.
Now, this far into the development process, close to a final product, you don't fundamentally change everything just because you see some game clips from another company. I too was quite impressed with HL2, but I don't see why we can't just expect two great games. Carmack strikes me as an incredibly pragmatic person, and it really doesn't make sense to me to fundamentally change your development for an unreleased game.
What seems much more likely and actually has been hinted on is that they're delaying the game to so they can have a simultaneous xbox release. id has confirmed there will be an xbox port, and Carmack has been quoted saying Microsoft is offering them a pile of money if they have a simultaneous release. Although the xbox is just a PC variant, because of the fixed hardware and TV constraints (though xbox can output HDTV quality), optimizing the game for a system pretty close to D3's minimum requirements is going to be a slight challenge.
http://www.talknerdy.org