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?"

Comments

Misstep?

[MankyD]

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?

Re:Misstep?

[Pazy]

The flash light thing was a bit wierd but I the experience it created was awesome. Seeing the light at the end of a corridor, or not wanting to leave an area because it had light was a great experience or perhaps the lone light source being a fireball hurling towords you? If you accept it in I think most people will enjoy it (in the same way you can enjoy horror films). Unfortunately most of my friends gave up easy being used to bright lights and jungle textures and things.

Re:Misstep?

[MankyD]

I just want to second you on this, Pazy. Yes it was dark - and that was awesome. It's one of the few games where I genuinely felt scared and startled at times. Sure it became a bit predictable at times, but so are horror movies and people still love those. Again, I don't think the game was perfect, but it was one of the better FPS productions I've seen I'd seen in awhile.

Re:Misstep?

[morgan_greywolf]

The repetitive gameplay (turn corner; monster jumps out of hiding; rinse & repeat)

<sarcasm type="heavy"> Yeah, because Doom and Doom 2 were nothing like that.</sarcasm>

Re:Misstep?

[AlexMax2742]

Doom 3 was a terrible game, but turning Doom 4 into a wannabe Half Life 2 is not the solution.

It seems that a lot of people have really fuzzy memories of classic Doom and have totally forgotten why it was a good game. Classic Doom, after you got over the initial scare factor, was a balls to the wall arcadey action game.

Sure the AI was simple, but with clever level design and judicious placement of the two-dozen monster varieties you could create entirely new situations that tested your ability to plow through them. Levels, though generally only having one 'solution', were non-linear. Puzzles were always simple and arcadey (find switch to lower tower, find key and put it in a colored door), and ultimately the game never took itself too seriously.

Doom 3 was totally different from that. It traded in its arcadey roots for a bland, linear, by-the-numbers shooter that happened to have awesome graphics. Of course monster closets felt dated in Doom 3, that's because their use was way too obvious and not clever at all. Of course the game was too dark, blame the engine. Of course the story was terrible, Doom's story was meant to be a one page manual filler that nobody was supposed to pay any attention to and Doom 3 kept reminding us of it.

I loved classic Doom. I hated Doom 3. But since the release of Quake 1, there have been a grand total of TWO gaming series that have gotten the 'arcadey shooter' feeling right: Serious Sam and Painkiller, and it's high time we had another highly publicized one by the ones who started it all. Turning Doom 4 into another wannabe Half Life 2 is NOT the solution.

Re:Misstep?

[Coryoth]

Wow, talk about bitter. I forked over the cash for the game, but didn't need to upgrade my PC. Doom3 didn't run at maximum quality, but it wasn't bottom end either. And I enjoyed the game; it was, to my mind, what the original Doom had aspired to be, but couldn't because of the relative lack in computing power at the time. It was tense, scary, and fun, and the quality of the graphics and sound were what made it the experience it was.

Having said all of that, I also understand some of the complaints. It was repetitive, and it certainly didn't bring anything new in the way of gameplay to the table (I didn't mind because I was looking for "Doom done right", but I can certainly understand that others would appreciate more creativity). I don't understand the bitterness though; it seemed pretty clear what Doom3 was going to offer in the way of experience (especially given that it was following after Doom and Doom2 which were repetitive, had fairly simple gameplay, and were pitch black at times). I don't really see that the game was ever misrepresented in what it was going to be, so I'm not sure where you got your expectations and feeling of entitlement from.

they seem like more of a tech company,

[hey0you0guy]

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.

Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3?

[Scutter]

Still the Doom 3 is one of the few games that actually made me jump.

Personally, I'm getting sick to death of game designers (and movie makers, for that matter) who confuse "startling" me with "scaring" me. Any hack can startle someone. All you have to do is have a cat jump out from behind a curtain or something. It's not scary, it's just annoying. It takes a real talent to actually scare somebody with a movie, and especially with a game.

Stop flogging the greasy spot

[Leo Sasquatch]

the horse is long since gone.

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 .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.

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 .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.

Besides, it'd be a major hit as a YouTube video.