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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?"
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
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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.
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.
...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
which is totally what she said
$ 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.
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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.
In a nutshell: people are upset because their hopes were too high. The original Doom revolutionized the genre; they were expecting Doom 3 to do the same, and instead it ended up just being a pretty good game, but nothing revolutionary. If it had been given a different name and produced by some company people had never heard of, people would've heaped praise upon it for being a surprisingly good game from a new company.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
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.
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.
Three words.. infinite enemy respawn..
I think I killed a hundred spiders before I realized they were just going to keep coming.
From that point, killing the enemy seemed meaningless and I just focused on running through the levels, leaving them behind. You'll generally take less damage just running past the enemies too.
I kept that up until I got to the hell levels, then I called it a day.
A second thing that pisses me off with a lot of new games is the constant shaking of the camera. The challenges should be in the game world, not in my ability to interact with the game world.
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.
Yeah, that was Quake 4 - a game I thoroughly enjoyed, except for any time I was in a vehicle. Quake 4 had a plot, lighting, and interesting variations on the classic weapons and monsters. Doom 3 had closets, with monsters, in the dark, and nothing else.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You wrote a wordy, ridiculously pretentious diatribe about a game that's nothing more than blinking lights, monster closets, and an occasionally player-triggered script.
Most of the things you mention, like the hellish flashbacks or telekinetically jerking bodies, occurred in the first half-hour of the game and were never seen again.
"Sufferin' succotash."
"It had a great engine that sold really well to the major customers - other games developers."
Really... so, let's see how many games used it?
So, let's look on Wikipedia for that... hmm, about a dozen game, wow... that's even less than I though.
And what about their competitor, the Unreal engine? I can't actually find a list of games, but companies that have licensed it include: Atari, Activision, Capcom, Disney, Konami, Koei, 2K Games, Midway, THQ, Ubisoft, Sega, Sony, Electronic Arts, Square Enix.
A high percentage of the best FPS games to come out recently use it... hell, even my kid's favourite show, Lazy Town, uses the engine to render the backgrounds.
The engine under the hood of Doom is a serious failure compared to others in the market, it was unweildy, not very scalable (as much as others would like to say it is, Unreal based games run far better on lower spec machines than that round of id tech games) and harder to create content for.
It failed in most ways compared to its peers.
Sure it made them money, and whoopdedoo for them, but I'm afraid Epic and the Unreal Engine has a monstrous slice of the market now, and the games that come out using it look and run superbly.