Slashdot Mirror
id Software Announces Doom 4
spoco2 writes "The id Software site has announced that work has begun on the next sequel to their most famous game, Doom. Will they be able to resurrect the series after what many considered to be a serious misstep with Doom 3? Oh... and they're hiring for the team, so maybe you can steer them in the right direction?"
Doom 3 certainly wasn't perfect, but I enjoyed it. And I certainly don't see how they veered too far from the original concept of Doom either. Am I alone in this opinion?
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
...I think was how one of the gaming sites put it. The atmosphere was spooky and demonic, and the art was sometimes fantastic, but the game just didn't feel like it was tied together very well. Maybe they should have had Valve do it. :)
I'd love to make a game of complete darkness that's nearly impossible to play without cheat codes and and over clocked super cooled box...
No I'm not bitter at ALL! It's a speech impediment...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
... we see Doom 5 before we see Duke Nukem Forever?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Can't they spend the 'brightest' minds on new content instead?
I liked it. It was a great change of pace. Yeah it was scripted and it was in their trademark brown for the most part but the story and presentation was great! I play Half Life 2 for similar reason, great story and proper visuals. If I wanted to rip Doom 3 for overly scripted encounters that seemed to repeat a lot I could seriously pummel Half Life for the same. Hell I would love to punish the HL team for their over use of their damn physics engine... yeah I know you have one but some things get annoying after a while.
I guess we can hope for a flash light taped to the gun this time. Still the Doom 3 is one of the few games that actually made me jump. Great sound and visuals.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Since when was Doom 3 a "serious mistep"? It sold well and generally got great reviews.
not a games company. Yes they make games, but their engines are what shine. The doom 3 technology looked fantastic. It's when other companies license id's engines. That's when we see a better game.
I thought id was currently working on Rage and Quake Zero. I hope they're not spreading themselves too thin. Unless Doom 4 will be like Doom 2, same engine as its predecessor, just more levels.
But after Doom 3, Quake 4, and Prey, I've played as many id Tech 4 shooters as I can handle.
Which one will be released first, Doom 4 or Duke Nukem Forever?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
It had a fairly decent story that I would have found enjoyable if that script had been used for the movie. Perhaps the biggest problem was that Doom 3 suffered from the "walk backwards because that's where the enemies come from" syndrome or maybe not enough enemies on screen at a time.
I don't know what was wrong with it, but I'm sure someone else will let me know what problems they had with it...
Summation 2
Yet another FPS in which a lone soldier takes on the legions of Hell, starting off with nothing but his trusty .45 semi-automatic. I'm going to reserve a copy right away, yeah!
I write sci-fi for metalheads
...but I think people who used duct-tape mods for DooM3 were playing it "wrong".
Yes, the flashlight was an ENORMOUS hassle to play with at first, but I'll be damned if the thing didn't ramp up the adrenaline rush tremendously... constantly balancing between seeing where you're going and being able to defend yourself was very very tense and scary; I loved every moment of it.
Machine9dotNet
and could care less about everything that came after
i still play it today sometimes, because its low time commitment
i don't want all immersive environments and storylines that eat up hours of my day. i have a life. i want to waste 5-10 minutes pointing a shotgun at imps, then get back to what i have to do
maybe if they placed modern graphics rendering on top of the old 2D control system, i would take a look
no, i'm not insane: 2D controls dumbs down the game in the RIGHT way: pure enjoyment, pure... id
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Are all of the above comments trying to say that Doom 5 is....*gasps*....doomed?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
$ wget -S http://www.idsoftware.com/
--08:57:08-- http://www.idsoftware.com/
=> `index.html'
Resolving www.idsoftware.com... 192.246.40.185
Connecting to www.idsoftware.com|192.246.40.185|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Thu, 08 May 2008 12:57:20 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Length: 28
08:57:08 ERROR 503: Service Unavailable.
I recently gave my DOOM 3 box to a friend who bought a new laptop... after several years the game should be playable now on a medium-powered laptop. That's the way to do it - buy the "3.years.ago" game of the year and play it with all the dials turned up.
The Army reading list
This is just IMHO of course, but. Doom 3 was actually quite good, it just wasn't anything really new or exciting (except for the flashy graphics, of course). The original doom - though similar to previous sprite-based FPS's - was quite an innovation in many ways, especially from the perspective of multi-player fun.
Doom3 was fairly repetitive, but - if you go back - so were the originals... people just weren't worn out from the deluge of a gazillion other FPS games. The storyline wasn't actually bad either. If you actually followed all the little videos and stuff, it was quite interesting, and would have made a heck of a better movie than the POS the came out with "The Rock."
Now at the same time as Doom3, Half Life 2 was out and about. Despite being overused a bit, the physics engine made *that* particular game a bit of something new, and the missions themselves: though also tedious at parts, are also fairly interactive. And the gravity gun... well, the BFG was a fun innovation back in the doom days, the gravity gun was a more modern innovation in gameplay from a weapons perspective.
HL2 was also fairly nice on older hardware. Doom3 could be run on an older PC, but tuned down quite a bit in terms of graphics, etc.
So was it a bad game, no? Did it do as well as the competition, no quite. Is there hope for the future, hell, why not?
I followed Doom3's progress with great anticipation. Right from the first showing of the tech at a Steve Jobs keynote I was hooked. I went to E3 in 2002 with Redwood and watched the first big public showing in the "Doom3 theater". It was seriously awesome and the graphics world was rocked by its coolness. The E3 judges couldn't believe the lighting was real time 3d. Many more screen shots and cool trailers would follow until the game finally shipped. And then I was pretty underwhelmed. The graphics were cool and the ending animations were quite photo realistic, but I kept asking myself, where in the hell did most of the stuff from the E3 showing disappear to? There was a lot of story and characters that just changed or got yanked completely. What the heck? The way the player was stalked and killed by the demon knight was so cool in the e3 demo, yet so totally unexciting in the actual game... If they could make a game that captures the essence of what was shown at E3 2002. I would be interested...
The doom rpg for the cell phone was actually quite good. They need to revisit this idea for the PC.
link here: doom4 screenshot.
Am I the only one who couldn't stand the off centered torch? it was annoying to be looking at your cursor but then having to look at the torch light off centered.
Started to really bother my eyes pretty quickly (And i never seem to have any trouble with anything else) and I could never play it for long.
I didn't even care about the lack of a torch on the machine gun
1: Monsters
The monsters were pretty much all encountered one at a time orm in small groups only. This wasn't how it was in doom 1 or 2, where you often found yourself in a large room surrounded by lots of different things that wanted you dead.
2: Weapons
Ok-ish, but I found them to be balanced towards a slower pace of fighting them was the case in doom 1/2.
3: Lighting
Neither doom 1 nor doom 2 were that dark all the time. Since when was it required that you constantly be walking around in poor lighting in order for it to be a proper fps? Darkness did occur in doom 1 and 2, but it was well used, and scary.I was constantly irritated by the darkness, never entertained.
4: Fear
On the subject of fear, well, doom 3 was too similar to other games to scare me. I was bored a lot of the time.
The first time a monster appears out of nowhere was a little starling, but when the only nerve inducing element is 'where will the next monster come from', it gets old real fast. There are a lot more ways to induce fear then just monster spawns, but Id seemed not to recall this.
5: Vehicles
Awful, really, really, awful. We've got used to vehicles like the warthog in Halo, and the various cars in Half life 2, and they give us bathtubs on wonky wheels.
5: undoominess
They wanted a slight departure from the original dooms, but this was a completely different game that took the doom name and otherwise failed to remind me of the originals in any respect, bar the vague similarity in shape of some monsters.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Doom 3 was poor.
Both from a game pov and from a "id are a tech company" pov.
The game was very poor. The game engine was barely used by anyone else because the tools were so bad and the quality quickly surpassed by others.
Prey showed how good the game could have been [and also how good artists could use Carmacks tech and make it work too]
ET:quake wars showed that Valve [with TF2] are light years ahead.
Unreal showed Id that a lack of tools and an arrogance that they matter just because they are Id is false.
Clearly plenty of other games companies that originally followed in ID's FPS wake have overtaken them.
Valve have created better games, a just-as-good engine, and developed steam. Carmack's response to steam "they didn't want to be publishers" is like someone in their 50s living in poverty saying there's more to life than money...if he'd said it before steam was a huge success it might be believable, but after, well, it's just stupid to say you wouldn't want to have created steam...and he isn't stupid...so it's worse, it's trying to save face. It's even more laughable given that, before ID games appeared on steam, ID had an FTP server on their site that most home users could have done better.
Id haven't produced a decent engine that loads of developers want to use, a decent game nor do you want to publish games...So, what exactly do you want to do then Carmack? Porting Doomto a mobile phone is probably your only recent success, but just about any bunch of half-literate open source buffoons have ported old versions of ID software games to different platforms...it's hardly world leading activity.
Carmack, more or less, acknowledged the tools for D3 were crap and no one [except the usual suspects like splash damage, raven and nerve] used the doom 3 engine and instead the Unreal engine was the tour de force when he introduced id tech 5.
As he introduced the brand new tech 5...he also claimed they were writing a "new IP", albeit without much evidence.
But the biggest problem with Doom 3 [and HL2 to some extent] were the years of hype and hyperbole with nothing to show. The games, no matter how good, could never live up to those expectations.
HL2 lived up to more though, even Ids hastily "it's supposed to be dark" to counter the tech appearing before hardware could really do enough lights and the stolen and kludged gravity gun for the sequel [saying "we always had one" didn't fool anyone...plenty have acknowledged ID as inspiration, it's a sign of their arrogance that ID don't acknowledge their sources]
Sadly it seems that Rage and ID Tech 5 are going the same way...lots of hype and are probably so far off as to be meaningless. Now, to add to the hype, Doom 4.
C'mon Carmack, implement something new...write the code, chuck out the dead wood and write some game play and instead of just saying "when it's done" STFU about it until it is and then, and only then, shout about it.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
I'd been playing DOOM since I played the first one on my old 386, with the graphics turned down enough that it was playable. As soon as I saw DOOM 2 on the shelf I bought it, too. I had hundreds of user-created levels for the two DOOMS.
DOOM 3 came out. I'd just had my CPU fry from its fan failing, and bought a new motherboard and video card. I bought DOOM 3, knowing I had enough hardware to throw at the game.
It required the new Windows OS, XP. Sixty bucks for a game that wouldn't run on my OS. It still sits on the shelf uninstalled. I didn't RTFA, but don't think I have to to know that it's going to require a four CPU machine with a $10,000 video card and Windows Vista (service pack six) to run.
I'm done with Id's software. R.I.P. Springfield Fragfest.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
...playing Doom on Rockbox on my Sansa.
Is running down and endless series of boring hallways, triggering bad guys who appear out of thin air, really going to cut it in this era of open FPS's and sandbox games like Half-life 2, GTA, Crysis, et. al.?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Somebody mod this guy funny ;-)
You have a Slashdot account - http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=userinfo&nick=John+Carmack , say something about D4/ Make it a Slashdot exclusive! Meet your adoring fans so they mod you (Score:5, OMFG!!) or something; it'll be fun.
Doom 3 was ok. I would have preferred to play HL2, but alas, I have no windoze boxen at home. Hopefully Doom4 will have a linux version to give me something to do when I'm bored at home.
Just released!
http://shackpics.com/files/doom4_cppoa3tgsdzavn7aec03.jpg
Doom 1-3 go out the window, and Doom 4 is based on the uber-successful movie!
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
the horse is long since gone.
.45 hollowpoint. Until you do it enough times to kill them at which point they die instantly, but until that point they will be at full combat effectiveness. You can kneecap a monster and it will still be able to chase you at full speed. If a monster is armoured, you can shoot it in its eyes and open mouth as much as you like without hurting it unduly, because they are every bit as heavily armoured as its scaly, plated hide. Half the monsters will have ridiculous hit points, and the big ones will be somehow impervious to your weapons and the laws of physics until the point where they rear up and reveal their weak point.
.22 air pistol. They can wear jeans, so the pellet won't penetrate skin. As they're rolling around on the ground in pain, or hopping and screaming and cursing, tell them to remember what it felt like when they come to design the weapons, the monsters and the monsters' reactions to getting hit.
Wolfenstein - great idea. Doom, brilliant sequel. Doom 2 - nice, more levels. Quake, wow.
Doom 3 - where's the duct tape? Or string - anything really. Where's the £4.99 headband torch I keep in my backpack?
Nobody really wants to break the FPS formula, least of all the guys who practically invented it. It'll be Doom with shiny graphics, more polygons in the average monster's arse than comprised an entire level from the original Doom, and it'll still be shite, because it's been done to death now for 15 years. The shotgun will be a great weapon for 90% of the game, and be the only weapon for which there's ever enough ammo. Despite being set in the future, and on some alien world, the weapons will have been toned down to the sort of sub-standard kack you wouldn't give to a modern day grunt. Nobody involved with the game will have the slightest idea about current or future military hardware, or know where to find a copy of Jane's Infantry Weapons. There will be no metalstorms, no gauss rifles, no sabot rounds, no poison darts, no armour-piercing rounds. The sniper rifle will carry 5 rounds at best, and any weapon capable of killing an enemy quickly will have almost no ammo available as that might render it somehow useful. You will find weapons dropped by other groups of people who'd been previously ambushed by the monsters. Quite why you'd want to pick them up is unclear, as they clearly didn't do their last owners a blind bit of good.
As for the environment, if there's enough light to see, it'll be drab and featureless as otherwise it might be possible to work out where you are. The colour palette will be green, brown, and grey. Wood will not burn, glass will withstand a rocket launcher if it has a bit of chicken wire in it, and despite carrying around 200lbs of explosives, the door will not open if you don't have the access code. Using a grenade to go through the plasterboard walls will not be an option.
The monsters will not react in any way (stagger, pain, fear) to being shot in the nose with a
In short, it will have every flaw that every other FPS has, but because it's got the magic word 'Doom' written all over it, it will sell many copies and the usual fanboys will be sucking its dick because it's so shiny.
Here's something I'd love to see happen before they write one line of code on this game. Line up every developer, and designer who's going to work on the game, and shoot them in the thigh from 4 feet away with a
Besides, it'd be a major hit as a YouTube video.
The site's down already.
This IP was played out and over cooked with Doom 3. Strip out all the good graphics and what you have left was a rehash of a rehash. Doom 4 will push the rehash to new realms with fancy graphics and game play that is a decade away from good.
HL2 and its follow up episodes are good, satisfyingly and resoundingly good. With the release of the Orange Box, Valve blew the lid off of gaming. HL2 Episode 2 is GOOD. Team Fortress 2 is excellent. Portal is the game that shocked everyone in how excellent a new concept combined with excellent writing produced one of the best games ever.
Sure, one can say that Valve is rehashing old stories like ID is with Doom; but they aren't. HL1+HL2+ Episodes are expanding upon a story line that is a decade old...it is still fresh, and fun. Each new bit builds upon the last bit and extends it.
ID and Carmack are going to foist a re-engined same ole' same ole' upon us, just like they did with Doom 3, just like Epic did with the very badly done UT3.
I said that Doom 3 was the most accurate flashlight simulator to date; and I was right. They have the graphics tech, but no plot, no story and no direction. Worse, they have no passion.
Doom 3 was made by clock punchers.
Portal was made by people that love games, game design and gamers.
Doom 4 will be made by people that love John Carmack.
I enjoyed it, some of the cut scenes were really good. Guy crawling out of the hole and seeing the cyber demon and especially the lady who turned in to a burning skull were good to me.
The flashlight was my only grumble the whole time. I played it through w/out duct tape. Still it was a bugger.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
What happened to the other game they were working on? The one that was said to be not entirely within their FPS genre -- I think it was called Rage? I don't remember id ever working on (at least not publicly announced) concurrent projects. Will we ever see this project or has it merged into Doom 4?
Have you actually played any other single player FPSes? Doom 3 had issues, sure. The flashlight was annoying, but bearable and one of the few spots of realism in the game. Yes, carrying around an entire arsenal isn't particularly realistic, but neither is affixing, removing, and re-affixing a flashlight to each weapon you carry with duct tape really really fast when you swap weapons, or carrying around 10 or so flashlights to duct tape to everything. Things spawning behind you wasn't surprising after very long, and was seriously overdone, but they learned that lesson in the expansion.
I don't count a couple annoying issues that should've been looked at harder a serious misstep. You may not have liked the story, but it at least HAD a story. Doom 1&2 and Quake don't have stories, they have premises. There is a difference. In fact, I generally think of Quake 1 as the real "Doom 3", and Doom 3 as really the premise of Doom 1 reworked into a more modern game. It's fair to be disappointed that it wasn't another massed thoughtless enemies game like its direct predecessors, but I personally consider getting away from that kind of gameplay as a plus, not a minus. Painkiller and Serious Sam are fun to a point, but I never bothered to finish either (well, I finished Serious Sam 2, but it was a coop LAN party event that took several hours.)
And the competition? Painkiller was interesting, with impressive boss fights, but was empty calories. No story worth bothering with, and as I said before, endless streams of enemies are something I'm glad to do without. Far Cry has piss-poor storytelling, and fakes nonlinearity with huge mostly empty levels that you have to trudge through pathetically slowly. Halo multiplayer may have been the best thing since sliced bread (though I have no real opinion, since I never played it multiplayer), but after the introduction of the Flood, it was a totally brainless "kill the marauding hordes" experience I couldn't even bring myself to finish in single player. Half Life 2 is a cinematic masterpiece, and as a result is probably the most linear game since Rebel Assault. Not telling your story as well as Half Life 2 is no crime, and you've got a lot of company.
It was a simple, focused game. It was an atmospheric game. It was a nostalgia trip.
From a design point of view, you can certainly criticize it. For starters, 3-4 levels could have been removed to improve the pacing of new features. Some level design tricks were used to excess (e.g., monster closets). One of the bosses was ridiculous and out of place (in terms of using Nintendo-style mechanics). It also had some brilliant moments: the atmosphere of the first level, the incredible hook of wanting to see what hell was like.
But most of the complaints are about things that are outside the scope of the game: wanting puzzles, wanting character interaction, wanting an elaborate story with multiple plot twists, funny arguments about how everything in the original DOOM was so much better back when I was 12 and played it on the school network. That's not criticism. That's just armchair design.
...endless sequels that re-invent the same damn game, over and over again, and we can't even get a proper conclusion to the System Shock series? (Don't mention BioShock, that's not System Shock.)
Honestly, you people who think Doom3 was the height of a dark and scary environment have no idea what a really scary game is like...System Shock 2 created a scary environment very well without relying on "turn the corner, another monster pops out". Forget the graphics, the one thing System Shock 2 (and all the Dark Engine based games) had was a true SOUND engine, one that Looking Glass used very well.
Someone convinced me to give FEAR a try because it was supposedly scary...I yawned, never finished it. Talk about repetative. Can't hold a candle to System Shock 2 or Thief 3's "Shalebridge Cradle" (which manages to scare you to death with sound alone, long before you've even encountered anything REAL).
Once upon a time John Carmack was quoted as saying that he created Quake because "he didn't want to do Doom 3." Here we are looking at Doom 4. Once again, YAWN.
is what I want... My favorite game is Quake 3. I want something new!
Why not a completely new series of ID games? I hoped they'd wait a bit with new sequels of DooM. We waited about 10 years for Doom3! And now they are doing it like EA! Doom3, Quake4, Doom4, Quake5, Doom5... boooooooring! Yeah, it's a pitty that DooM becomes now an engine demonstration product, too. What about a new game? No more creative people working at ID Software? And don't tell me about Rage. How about something new and innovative? I Guess, Rage 2 and Rage 3 aren't far.
This is the sort of groundbreaking innovation that will save the Windows gaming industry.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Less is more when it comes to fear, terror and those sorts of things.
3D Monster Maze on the ZX81 was a lot more scary than Doom (as was Awesome Wells 'War of the Worlds' in AM radio format).
The ZX81 screen was black and white, somewhat blocky (80 by 50 'pixels'). There were no guns at all in the 3D Monster Maze game and just the one maze to exit. The sight of the baddy (a T.Rex) was really scary and the seconds between screen updates only made it more so. (It was seconds per frame, not 'FPS' back then.)
As well as the panic in normal game play there was an added hardware function. If you accidentally nudged the 16K RAM-pack then the computer would crash, throwing random graphics on the screen - terrifying in a 3D Monster Maze game.
Much like how painting has been going downhill with nothing new since the Mona Lisa, so it is with games. Doom is merely a tarted up version of 3D Monster Maze with a few bombs and weapons gimmicks thrown in for the American market.
Anyone for a game of Hunt The Wumpus?
AVP2 scared me so much that i had to finish the game with the sound turned off (sb live 4.1) doom3 made me jump out of the chair some times
I can't see what all the fuss is about. (*nudgenudge*)
For those who enjoyed DOOM 3, did you also enjoy its expansion?
For all DOOM games, I only enjoyed the non-hell levels (e.g., DOOM's episode 1). I always loved the space base theme. I also played people's mods and maps based on it.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I remember when Resident Evil 4 came out and everyone who were "true" fans threw a fit like little school girls. They took a franchise with the worst controls in history and made it like Doom, keeping the horrible controls. It was still a good game, better the the previous ones. Sure, Doom 3 wasn't great but it was a fun game that was worth every penny I spent on it. I couldn't play it online, or with any cool features turned up but when i bought it for the XBox I finally saw what people were ooing and aweing about. That is pretty sad that I had to buy a second copy for a console rather than being able to play it on my PC...
I really don't have anything much to say...
All you have to do is set some bait and wait. On a basic level John Carmack is no different from most of us he loves his technology and he loves talking about it and he loves knowledge. Moreover he knows that most of us are on his side and that whatever he posts will be cherished like golden poos dropped upon a silken pillow by Jesus Christ.
So all you have to do is post something that shows at least minimal knowledge of the kind of work he does and ask for advice or perhaps if you are brave then call one of his past decisions into question. (Of course this is bound to fail. John Carmack knows more about graphics than you not only because of his natural technical skill but also because he thinks about little else all day long. I mean sure he has a wife and expensive sports cars and he wants to fly to the moon on a rocket made of popsicle sticks but I mean come on read his blog. I think he got married just so that he could see a real woman's skin up close so as to improve the lighting effects for human characater models in his next graphics engine.)
Since some of you may be hesitant I will give you an example: Subject: a technical question about the future of idtech
I remember hearing one of the id developers talking about using sparse voctel octrees as part of a next-generation graphics architecture to improve the efficiency of texture storage in ray casting engines, especially those based on a Davis matrix in which subprimitives are hashed as vogon blits while using the classic X49-B algorithm (see Peters, et al) to eliminate mutex lookback when calculating the reflection-transduction factor for a global vertex integram network. However, I'm wondering how this might affect the classic problems of caching and buffering frames in the GPU's anterior register stack, especially since it could easily push the bus latency above them 4.9M/p limit for theoretical omicron digitization.
Do you guys think that id will use this approach in Doom 4? Boy, if only John Carmack were here... Note the subtle (ahem) weaving of fact and fiction which can only serve to lure Carmack the more strongly because again like any of us if he believes there could be a gap in his knowledge then he wishes it filled immediately.
Dude it's like Peter Pan and believing in magic we all have to close our eyes and imagine how awesome it would be if John Carmack were here and then post with him in mind. Suddenly he will appear in a flash of light and smoke (or fog, depending on your video card) and then we can love him.
I really loved the coop play in doom 1 & 2, to the point where we would lug our whole systems to each others houses. I was pretty bummed to see them rely on mods for decent multiplayer action in doom 3. I did get a kick out of the ambiance of doom 3, they just didn't take it far enough to be really scary. Sure, there were bloody walls and crazy lighting, but does anyone remember the twisted stuff from the first two games? Twitching tortured corpses, rivers of blood, walls made of psychotic human faces? Maybe my expectations of 'hell' are just too high :)
I recall Doom3 selling very well. How can you imply Doom3 "killed" the series? Doesn't someone at Slashdot have to approve these articles before they get posted?
I'd rather see a victorian era themed horror single/multiplayer game, sort of like the first game called Blood but not as goofy. Maybe a Bram Stokers like game but with more than just vampires or were creatures and various heros with different abilities/weapons to choose from, and not this big hulking person in a suit of armor or stupid robot shit.
We need something new, this is starting to look like King's Quest 5,000, how many Dooms and UT do we need?
and fuck you invalid form key
Fifthed. (I know, it's getting tired, but...)
:-)
I would play it after my daughter was in bed, and my wife would come downstairs and watch. I played on the XBox with a 48" TV and the home theatre sound system cranked up and the lights down low. My limit wasn't much more than an hour before I had to turn it off because I was starting to get freaked out. Don't get me started on those little wasp babies. When they first showed up I was backpedalling as fast as I could, blasting away with the shotgun yelling "That's sick! That's sick!".
I like the dark. It heightens the effect. But it does preclude playing in the daytime, since I can't darken my theatre room enough.
HBH
"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
- The massive (at the time) system requirements
- The repetitive gameplay (turn corner; monster jumps out of hiding; rinse & repeat) It wasn't even the high system requirements. It was that, well, Doom 3 just wasn't Doom. I spent many a night playing Doom and Doom II. I absolutely loved those games. And Doom 3 was DINO... Doom In Name Only. None of the monsters or demons looked like Doom monsters and demons, and they weren't an improvement. And in an attempt to make the game scary, they made everything too dark, which more often than not, just made Doom 3 frustrating instead.
I don't want to stumble around in the dark with generic monsters. I want to take badass weapons and go into the pits of hell (or hell on earth), and fight off legions of imps, cacodemons, and Baron's of Hell. Real Doom characters.
Doom 3 just didn't look, feel, and play like Doom. Want to make a good Doom game for version four? Go back to Final Doom, and recreate that exactly, but with finer graphics and movement options.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The whole Doom concept is about running and gunning with monsters in a seriously creepy setting. Serious Sam ended up doing that in a silly setting. Doom 3 was trying to be more like a Japanese creeper game. Wrong genre.
Once again, I'm happy they're developing a new engine and will be interested to see what a real game-making company can do with it. But I'm not going to be foolish enough to expect that Doom 4 will be a game worth looking at.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Anyone that is critical of this game for not being "faithful" to its previous incarnations, complains about supposed "repetitiveness" (laughable in today's cookie-cutter FPS genre), in any way compares to the pathetic fisher-price toys called Half-life and Halo, complains about vehicles (because you know, YOU HAVE to have a selection of "govenator"-styled APCs to take on Hell (TM) - especially when everyone's used to Halo and UT golf carts, right?), complains about flashlights or lighting in general (oh noes! I'm being limited in the visual information presented to me for gameplay and effect! It's just not realistic for scientists on Mars to not leave duct-tape around!!), complains about pace or lack of weapons' OOMPH ("I win" trigger please! Oh and hurry up, need my ADHD pills!!!), etc., etc. - they are placated by the dull status quo of current blockbuster-safe, generic and unimaginative game design. Even if a game has a decent story to drive it, modern productions place safe, flaccid bets, during their composition. And who can blame the producers' really, it's a multi-million dollar gamble, from an objective POV. However, DOOM3 deviates from this and has that rare semi-unmeasurable quality that resonates awe and reflection.
Like all things that make genuine Art truly brilliant, you have being willing to step past your experience of expecting presentation in a "most common denominator"-type assertive narrative that our entertainment is almost ubiquitously produced to extrapolate the highest probability of revenue. Instead, in DOOM3, the Evil (TM) bleeding through everything (literally and figuratively) would alternate between a genious and subtle caress of malice, and flip to almost schizophrenic overt session of violence. And it didn't want to just mince you up into tiny pieces, it wanted to attempt to make you soil yourself, in the process.
Walk down hallways and arbitrary objects or dead bodies would telekinetically jerk across the room, spontaniously, silently and without subsequent attack. Back-room afternoon scientist lunchrooms had candle-lit pentagrams with an oppressing and enabling agenda both visible, but not understood. Conscious satanic flashbacks, pushing the protagonist to the brink, by something seemingly trying to "take him over" or possess him. Emails and Voicemails left by now flayed or disemboweled technicians proceeded along with story, "Martian Buddy" in-jokes and spam, slippery claustrophobia, boss fights that made you both think and fight hard, an uncanny sense as an isolated underdog and a Hell Dimension that I found breathtaking, the very first time. DOOM3 was VERY creative and its gameplay (i.e. flashlight) intentionally crafted to crayon its atmosphere and slow-march of foreboding.
It was fracking brilliant and a true gem in our Post-Golden Age of Gaming (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Schafer) of this relatively infant-stage of computing technology. Any comparison to another genre or title is just shallow and myopic.
Game designers of DOOM3, my hat's off to you.
Cheers.
"I drank what?" -Socrates
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -Mark Twain
I love seeing errors on high profile sites. It looks like ID is running their web server on windows...
PHP Notice: Undefined offset: 8 in E:\web\id\php-includes\news.php on line 164 PHP Notice: Undefined offset: 9 in E:\web\id\php-includes\news.php on line 164
I quite liked doom3 but it never felt like the originals. The best bits of the first two were where you have enormous numbers of bad guys attacking you en masse. That basically never happened in 3.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
The massive (at the time) system requirements
A reason for the massive system requirements. The game was in part a "demo" of the engine that id wanted to license to other developers. By the time a licensee has a game ready to ship those system requirements become common.
I think the big letdown in Doom 3 was the actual gameplay. The graphics were awesome, and contrary to all the naysayers, I didn't find the hardware requirements that crazy. I always stay a step or two behind the top-end graphics cards... I believe I had an X700 at the time Doom3 was released and it ran fine at High Detail, 1280x1024. I'm quite tolerant of 20-25 framerates so YMMV.
It was the first of the "next-gen" FPSes with its cinematic graphics and fantastic lighting... the darkness worked because it wasn't just tacked on, it added a very thick sense of insecurity. No longer could you run through the halls with rockets blasting everywhere, you actually had to look around and for me, at least, it was an unbearably tense situation that made it absolutely thrilling.
I was less than impressed with the pacing, and I would have certainly appreciated a breather here and there, or some event that makes you feel awesome like a badass gun or new ability (the soul cube was kinda lame). Despite that flaw, it was an impressive game that I keep revisiting once in a while, because the newer releases don't quite own up to it as well as Doom did.
Quake 4 in comparison was a dull thud. The multiplayer felt exactly like Q3 only shinier, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the single-player campaign was uber boring. I hope they don't make the same mistake with Doom 4.
I think what fans are expecting is:
- Crazy graphics a-la Crysis
- Gripping storyline and character development
- We want to fucking know more about the Doom world!
- 3-or-4-way Coop multiplayer ? Pretty please!
Nail at least 3 of those 4 requests and it will be a thundering success.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I dont know why everyone says halflife 2 was such a great game and it wasnt sandboxy at all unless you had a mod and halflife 1 was so much better maybe its because i didnt get very far in halflife 2 to get interested number 1 was way spookier than the second the second one is like oh no its an enemy the first one was like holy crap there is an alien there. BACK ON TOPIC...... Doom 3 was great on the pc but crap on the xbox,I never had problems running it on MY computer but I also never tried it on anyone else's, it wasnt to dark but you did need to turn up the brightness a bit so you can see but its not like "could never see at all" i would like to see doom 4 and if they added stuff like shot in knee slower movement,group attacks,monsters utilizing there abilities and a change of scene sometimes in the game i think it will do great on 360 or pc
Hi Subby,
I am sorry Doom 3 was not up to your elitist "standards".
I happen to play just about every good PC game that comes out, as long as it is not a RPG or a MMORPG, I have to save TIME for better things, like SEX.
Some are good some are bad some are melancholy.
Doom 3 was excellent, and you are just trying to piss all in the face of ID software and their well made creations, here in a public place, and I find it somewhat disgusting.
What was the last game you produced?
Dj fuQ [url="http://djfuq.org"]djfuq urges you to listen to the beats[/url] [url="http://djfuq.org"]http://djfuq.org[
I enjoyed the heck out of number 3. Perhaps more than I did 1 or 2. 1 and 2 where fun, but 3 was down right scary. I would play it at the office late at night, leave for home around 1am and walk a few blocks to get there. I would hold my maglite in tactical position to hit any imps in the head that may jump out. It was a fun game.
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
...will it run on Linux?
The environment created by ambient sounds and especially the radio chatter was excellent!
I loved the story line.
I would have liked to have saved some of the other survivors I found...
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
Here it is!
http://i32.tinypic.com/mbn2x4.jpg
Doom 3 was essentially a tech demonstrator for their game engine, and seems to have had much greater success as a sales tool for their technology rather than being anywhere near as groundbreaking as the original. Cynical but profitable.
...but not great games. After about a half hour of running into darkness, switching to flashlight, switching to gun, switching to flashlight, wash, rinse, repeat, I promptly uninstalled it.
Um... well, actually, i really have nothing to say, just wanted to continue the trend into oblivion
I played doom3 on a athalon 2800+ with a radeon 9500pro and 1 gig of memory. Most of the game I was getting @ 25 FPS, a few time it did dip down into the high teens. This rig was my SP "gaming" rig at the time. It never went onto the internet so I had no anti-virus/firewall/inet apps running in the background. I allway keep my SP "gaming" rig just for gaming. I install winxp (sp1 only) then run the app xplite to remove all the fluff from the OS that I don't need to game, boom, 25-35 % increase in framerate off the bat. This is a good way to stretch out a SP gaming "rig" for a couple years at least.
Q3 (and Team Arena) was the best game in this whole group. They f'd up Q4 because the multiplayer gameplay in Q3 is still the best. I still play Urban Terror; it's lower graphics still compensate for the fact that it's play is better than any newer fancy looking games. Bring back the grappling hook! Bring back the Q3 play! It took me many hours to develop those skills.
I really think Half-Life 2/Doom 3 comparison is pretty pointless, I feel Half-Life is as different from Doom as Ghost Recon series are from Half-Life.
Doom 3 was good for the type of FPS it was but I think that type of FPS appeals to very few people and even then it was as people have said here rather repetitive.
Bioshock was an example of what Doom 3 should've been - it had the darkness and the creepyness whilst remaining fun and innovative with great gameplay. Doom 3 was essentially Bioshock minus a good storyline, minus innovative gameplay.
I felt id has been lacking in these areas for a long while now however, whilst Romero was a complete failure by himself I can't help but feel id went downhill after his departure. Despite being worthless as a CEO of a game company he was a brilliant story teller. Similarly when id lost mappers like American McGee, modellers like Paul Steed it did them a lot of harm. Carmack is their remaining key player being brilliant and developing jaw dropping visuals, but unfortunately that's where their talent ends nowadays when compared to other game developers. They went from having the cream of the crop in most the major areas a game studio needs them (models, maps, design, code) to having only Carmack keeping them ahead of the game in the coding department. This isn't of course intended as a slant against id's other staff, they're perfectly good developers - as good as any other company but that's just it, they're as good as any other company but not better than other companies equivalent employees which leaves them in a weaker position than they historically have been.
It's also the case that whilst still arguably a genius, Carmack doesn't stand out like he used to either, producing an engine like the Quake 1 engine was a rare feat back in the day, the number of game developers capable of doing so could be counted on one hand with two fingers and missing. Nowadays, due to excellent libraries, better documentation of techniques, superb middleware and simply more people working in the field, developing an engine that looks utterly fantastic is something that many people can do now.
The monsters, music, gore.. all that's fine... But what really made Doom great was killing your buddies (over and over) in network Deathmatch. Once graphics went overboard, I think network play suffered, it's just not the same (to me anyway).. I'd still rather play old fashioned Doom Deathmatch than anything past Doom 2. Although Duke 3d and Shadow Warrior were great for this too. (damn I'm old)
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
They seem to release linux binaries for many of their games. I like being able to play Doom 3 and ET:QW natively on my linux desktop. Though the HL2 series tends to work well through wine, it ain't perfect.
I would like to be able to buy more games for linux.
I can't remember the last time I forgot anything.
You guys are crazy, doom 3 was a good horror game I liked it much better then 80% of half life 2's scenes. I played it with a 3 year old video card and it ran fine, and now I play it on max settings and it looks better then a lot of games out there and especially better then hl2 that looks so bland, ok so it doesn't look like crysis or UT3 which is btw an awesome game that if people would play it instead of bitching it just because everyone says so, it's a fuckin good game that doesn't have the respect it deserves
The thing that's missing from Doom 3 that was in Doom 1 and 2 is FUN.
Doom 1 and 2 were FUN.
Doom 3 had a lot of stuff - Fantastic graphics, eerie atmosphere, jack-in-the-box scare bits, but it wasn't much fun.
The problem is they've fired most of the people that can make fun stuff, and what's mainly left are guys that can make a fantastic tech demo.
It's not just iD; Most games are falling into this trap these days.
Another thing I missed in Doom 3 and most new games is decent music.
I don't know a single person who's played Doom1 or 2, who doesn't grin when they hear a clip of the D1E1M1 or D2E1M1 music.
Most of the old games right the way back to the C64 had simply stunning music. Chris Hülsbeck's Turrican music is legendary, and so was Robert Prince's music for the various iD games (Even Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom - All had great music!!)
TIE Fighter and the iMuse engine had what I consider the best soundtrack ever created, and it was never the same linear track playback - It was different with each play-through.
All modern games could REALLY do with something like that - Slow creepy music for the slow parts, and OMGWTFBBQ music for the crazy gun action bits, but hardly any games do this! The last one I remember is Deus Ex FFS!
In this age where we've got graphics so detailed that no system can render it properly in realtime, why does the sound get shafted so much?!
And still nobody has made a decent meaty shotgun sound since Doom!
Why?! WHY??!
Enjoy! Don't forget to read all the way through it. It's high concept.
I can't see how anyone could call Doom 3 a misstep. It had a great engine that sold really well to the major customers - other games developers. On top of that id managed to sell the demo to games players as well, a great achievement.
notwithstanding improvements in technology. The proof is that even having completed it people, myself included, replayed it over and over. Doom 3 once was enough. The fun of Doom 2 lay in the hordes that roamed around the world whereas in Doom 3 the numbers were down to a few toughies at best and the distance of targets at times. And the music- it was so cheapo cheesy in quality (general midi) but so overwhelmingly moody. What I would like to see in the next one is a return to these winning factors plus I would love to see some moments of the player being stalked. The AI development should be there now for this to happen and that is the scariest and most exciting thing I could imagine. Imagine being really stalked by a Death Knight that had strong AI.
id and the Doom series are best left to the 1990's. They were great in their day, but their time has passed on; time to hand over the keys to the next generation of game developers.
I loved low grav facing worlds rocket blasting or the huge "kitchen sink" and "bathroom" mods. Further Unreal Championship games turned to serious or to precision/action based and it left the arcadey - shoot up up, die and get back in type action that made it fun.
Mind you every game has its place, but i agree. Doom 3 was a bore because it was work instead of fun. I beat it, i played through it but its still sitting on my shelf to this day never having been installed for even an online match.
Go back to UT, Doom 1 or Doom 2 and i spent a good chunk of my first job paying for expensive network cards, stupid coax terminating ends we kept on losing as we moved pcs around and paying for novel dos so i could run IPX/netware legally and fast.
That's it's more like Doom 2!! So many WADs, such a long lifespan.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Id's about building tech, and in a more developed games market their best days may be behind them.
Wolf3D, Doom, Quake were all revolutions in the way we played games - back in the day they won because the engines made them wildly innovative (OMG, I can look *up* - how the hack do I control game like that!?).
Nowadays gaming is more sophisticated. While pretty visuals still gets some kudos for a game (Crysis), people appreciate narrative (Bioshock) or freeplay options (GTA) a lot more.
There will be plenty of other really amazing games in the future, but I don't know that id's got the right corporate mentality to make them.
I really hope I'm proven wrong!
DooM 3 scared my pants off. Then I got bored and surfed porn. Thank God I watched the movie, so I know what happens at the end.