Slashdot Mirror
id Software Working on New Title
id Software has announced that, powered by the 'magic' of a new Carmack-crafted engine, an entirely new franchise is on the way. GamesIndustry.biz reports that the venerable FPS development house is hard at work on a completely original game. Without ties to Doom or Quake, the company hopes to begin moving in some new and interesting directions. "Id's last major internally developed title was 2004's Doom 3, which utilized new technology created by Carmack. In the interim, id's technical director has been heavily involved in bringing games onto mobile, including Doom RPG and Orcs & Elves. 'Our first task at id is as a single studio developer,' [Todd] Hollenshead continued. 'That's really where everything spawns from. Because John Carmack is a programming genius, who in my opinion is unequalled in video games today, he makes a great technology that we can use across a wide range of applications and different games within our suite of franchises. The new stuff that we're working on does have a brand new engine that John has been working on, actually is still working on today. We can't really talk any details about it; we'll see about when the timing is right for an announcement. We like to be able to talk about stuff that we can show at the same time and it's not really ready to show yet.'"
I wonder what John Carmack thinks of DirectX/OpenGL improvements that have come out since 2004. It'll be interesting to see what he can do with the new technologies.
Also, assuming that it's an FPS, is there any new territory to cover? It seems to have pretty much just run its source and any new IP would probably just be a new flavor of aliens/demons/WW2.
hehe, it's an MMO... come on, you know it is. An MMO FPS.
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
He has grumbled about the slow progression of this API in the past. Is now the time when he will make the jump to Direct3D?
The Quake III engine was widely licensed for dozens of FPS titles from 1999-2005. The Doom 3 engine has been an abject failure in this regard. Epic and Valve have eaten id's lunch so to speak. Unless Carmack has made a conscious decision to stop spending time on 3rd party support so he can play with his rockets, this is something he will definitely want to address.
I hope Id does something OTHER than an FPS game. The market for those seems to be getting pretty saturated. Imagine what they could do to an RTS with all their graphical godliness. Heck, how about an RPG. Maybe combine the best of two genres. I used to play a HL mod that had a "commander" who saw things from top-down and did the RTS stuff while everyone else was in FPS-mode (think BF2, but SciFi).
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.