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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?"
Since when was Doom 3 a "serious mistep"? It sold well and generally got great reviews.
I think he's referring to 2 things:
- The massive (at the time) system requirements
- The repetitive gameplay (turn corner; monster jumps out of hiding; rinse & repeat)
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
HL2, by comparison, was quite a bit better just for the diversity of gamepla, with vehicles and interesting new weapons (grav gun was innovative). This made up for the heavily scripted, linear gameplay.
Now that there's competition from other amazing game engines too, I think Doom 4 is going to have to raise the bar on its gameplay if it wants to compete with new titles like Crysis. Not only did Crysis look astonishingly good, but the gameplay was hugely varied, with the sandbox option of playing missions a dozen different ways each time.
A-Bomb
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
what massive system requirement? Just about anything could play that game, the beauty of it was that the game could run very fast even on systems that didn't support pixel shaders or normal maps. In fact it ran faster on systems that didn't support those options.
Just because you had high-end hardware at the time doesn't mean everyone also had it.
Even with all options turned off/at their lowest settings, my Radeon 9600XT was barely able to manage acceptable framerates in 1024x768 (no FAA either).
And I don't mean 120FPS either, the game was crawling under 10FPS in lots of areas. And yes I had enough system RAM too, if that's what you're wondering.
My GeForce MX 440 (suped up GeForce 2) actually played Doom 3 smoothly. I just played it 800x600 with no special effects (it still looked pretty good).
>To me it felt the same as Doom 1 with better graphics.
If you ever watched any of the Id commentary, that was their goal. Mission accomplished.
They already made a Doom 3 before Doom 3 came out, and you mentioned it:
It was called Serious Sam. Coop, multiple episodes, insane levels of action, devious traps, and giant monsters which were intimidating as all hell while at the same time being somewhat comical.
That was what Doom was always about.
Doom 3 was not like that. Too predictable, too linear and claustrophobic, too utterly dependent on nyctophobia in its use of tension.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.