Only Xbox Port of Doom 3 Will Have Co-operative Play

Ant writes "According to this interview with the Xbox developers Vicarious Visions over at GamePro, only the Xbox port of id's Doom 3 will have co-operative play, and the PC version will not have co-op, unlike the original Doom games. There are also two recent interviews with id themselves on the GamePro site." Co-op was one of the parts of Doom (and Quake) that really got me into the genre, but after I got good enough fighting alongside my friends, I found it was more fun to fight against them, since they were more challenging than anything the computer could come up with then.

Comments

Clarification

[IshanCaspian]

From the post some people might imply that the co-op mode was given only to the x-box as some kind of incentive to play that particular version. However, it was not created by Id, but VV, the company in charge of porting D3 to the xbox.

Id didn't want a co-op mode, and these guys did. That makes me feel much better than if it had been a decision by Id itself in some kind of an attempt to make people buy both versions.

Re:Clarification

[daVinci1980]

I just had to point this out...

"As computer hardware continues to accelerate at this pace, the divide between computing power with hardcore gamers and non-hardcore gamers increase, it will be harder and harder to make PC games."

This is actually not as true as you might believe. I am a graphics programmer, and the sad truth is that we are barely scratching the surface of the capabilities of the newer and newer cards. Sure, they have improved fill rates and higher vertex throughput, but only if you organize your data in such a way to keep the number of batches sent to the hardware very small (less then 600 per frame will get you close to 60 fps on *anything* newer than Radeon 9500, regardless of what's in the batches).

One of the main reasons that games post only slightly better results between card x and y (and the reason why even older generations of card x and y don't perform terribly worse), is because the increase in performance on the cards and CPU speeds have more or less caused us to get lazy. Rather than using insane optimization tricks to improve the performance by the linear performance imrpovement of the card; we've just gotten more linearly lazy about our data submission.

The overwhelming majority of games don't even keep the GPU busy at all. We just spin on the CPU side, submitting batches to the hardware.

If you're interested in a technical presentation on the subject, you can look here (pdf required).

Re:Short-sighted

[orn]

Why they didn't bring the co-op portion of the Xbox code to the PC version I have no idea.

Actually it's the other way around. The PC version is being ported to the X-Box.

I was talking with one of the developers of the X-Box version while playing Natural Selection. He said that they had a later release date and could polish the code better. So, it's pretty much a scheduling restraint...

I'm pretty bummed about it - I love cooperative FPS. Team sports are great.

Re:Short-sighted

[arrow]

Actualy your both wrong. This months GamePro has an interview with an id's level designer(?). He said that the XBox and PC versions of the game were being written side by side.

There is as little porting of code as possible, and its taking place in both directions. id software is focusing on optimizing the game for PC, and Vicarious Visions is focusing on heavy optimization for the XBox.

A ultra-tweaked engine for both platforms is the ultimate goal. Mostly because id makes most of their bank from selling engines to other companies. This is, in my opinion, one of the driving factors in bringing an experienced console developer into the mix.

Re:Quake? Doom?

[Cthefuture]

BTW, I like how you threw in a little ego-building mention of your skills. I'm sure they're quite big and manly but I'm not interested.

I mearly threw that in because there's always someone who starts spouting off about how there is no difference. Just like there's no difference between 30 FPS and 300 FPS.

You only notice those things when you start playing at the higher levels.

I didn't say I was better than anyone else, I just said that I'm not a newbie.