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

That is a shame

[El]

Yes, playing against people of equal skill levels is more fun. But co-op is great for allowing less experienced people a chance to learn the game. About the 10th time in a row I frag my wife, its stops being fun... especially when she starts threatening a divorce...

Re:That is a shame

[Flunitrazepam]

I will never tire of fraggin your wife

Quake? Doom?

[ooPo]

Quake? Doom? Weren't those ancient games people played before Unreal Tournament came out?

At least we know it can be done.

[Night Goat]

It's too bad Doom 3 won't have cooperative play when it ships. I had a very good time running around Doom's levels with friends, and I'd like to be able to do it again with the new game. The good thing is, id can always put co-op play in in a patch. They add features a lot with their patches, hopefully they'll add this once they get a little less busy getting the game shipped. I bet they just wanted to focus on the single-player game first.

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).

idunno

[drjenk]

They didn't really make it clear if the it is split screen co-op or over xbox live...

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:And here is why....

[Orien]

Yes, but every time I do a LAN party I do Serious Sam co-op. Co-op isn't for playing with random stranger on the internet that hogs all the good action and do things to make you mad, it's for chillin' with people you know. It goes right back to the old days for me. When I was a kid (think mid to late 80's when the Nintendo was big) I had a best friend who I would always play video games with. Almost every weekend we would beg our parents until they gave us money to rent a game, then we would run down to the rental place and look on the back of all the boxes until we found the ones marked "two player simaltenous action!" or whatever. One player games sucked because one of us would always be sitting there bored, and if the two player wasn't simeltenious it wasn't nearly as good.

I know everyone will have a different opinion about this issue, but for us the goal was to beat the game, and that was a lot more easy with co-op. Try beating Contra by yourself! If a game wasn't co-op then we ended up competing with each other and we would end up getting in a fight by the end of the night. With co-op we felt like a team and it left me with some of my favorite childhood memories.

Don't discount the value of co-op on PC. You should hear the people raving about UT 2004 demo and the onslaught game mode. That is a perfect set up for one of the best co-op games ever. They have set it up so that it's next to impossible to win without a good team effort, as opposed to traditional CTF where you commonly get 'that one player' who is 100 frags above the curve and scores all the points for the whole team.

And no, I didn't spell check this, so go ahead and flame me.

Playing old DOOM games with addons...

[antdude]

I remember the days I played addons and mods with my buddies in DOOM 1 and 2 over dial-up modems and SirDOOM (lets you do 4 players on BBS' with dialup modems). It was much more fun when playing maps that we haven't played before.

I was hoping DOOM 3 (PC port) would have co-operative play like System Shock 2. I guess not. Maybe someone can hack DOOM 3 to have co-op like Sven Co-op.