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

Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3?

[OzRoy]

If you try to outsmart an FPS game, you're not going to enjoy it. Next time when you play a shooter, don't conserve ammo, don't use fail-safe tricks to kill enemies, don't tip-toe around the game. Why shouldn't I do that? Why should I dumb muyself down to make the game fun? A game is supposed to be challenging for the player. It isn't my fault Doom 3 was easy to fool. It's not like waiting and hiding is an unusual tactic.

I tried to use the same trick in FEAR (a game that I thought really was scary). I shot one of the bad guys hid on the other side of the door and waited. And waited some more. And nothing happened. Just as I was about to give up and walk through the door myself I got shot in the back of the head by a sneaky bastard who had flanked behind me.

That game had decent challenging AI. In reality it still used a lot of tricks to keep things simple for the developers, but it gave the appearance of being intelligent and made the game fun and interesting.

Re:Misstep?

[neomunk]

Fourthed. I played that game for a few days starting it up somewhere between 1AM and 3AM every night. Turned all the lights off, TOLD myself to lower my mental defenses and got INTO the game. It was crazy, with one part actually spooking me (as in glancing around my livingroom for demons). It was the part where the screen turns red and you hear the woman's voice "my baby, somebody help my baby" moments before flying baby demons come screaming at you from everywhere.

Yeah, that was the best horror movie I've seen in a while, probably because I was more sucked into it than I can be with cheesy static horror films.
The flashlight mod was for grannies and Halo players (same thing :-D).

Re:Misstep?

[Anonymous Coward]

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. I loved DOOM III while it was fresh. It took me back to the days of DOOM I/II. I was actually afraid to go around the corner a few times. That my friend was exciting!!

Now, my issue was it didn't change much which everyone and their grandmother knew about this issue. My thought is, ID needs to rinse and repeat again what DOOM is all about just as they always have. The only thing they need to do different is add functionality to the game (ala Crysis) and the landscape. What I mean by that is everything doesn't have to be dark and dank to be scary. I remember the Cyber Demon in DOOM I scaring the crap out of me in broad daylight! Just the sound of him in the distance without even seeing him caused chills to run up my spine! LOL

There's more to it

[DesScorp]

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) 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.

Re:great experience, bad game

[RogueyWon]

I'd agree with that assessment in some ways. The atmosphere, for the first few hours, was stunning. They lost it a bit later on, because they never really seemed to understand that varying the pace is a key part of building atmosphere. Some of the people posting on here have already mentioned the Alien movies. If you look at the second movie, which is the closest comparator for Doom 3, the actual action sequences are fairly short. In Doom 3, once the first shot had been fired, it was non-stop shooting through to the end of the game. A real pity.

While they were flawed in many (oh so many) ways, the two PC Aliens vs Predator games kind of understood this. They did, at least, both have no enemies at all in the first mission of their marine campaigns. The second game even had some quiet spells later on, which was very effective. I know there are allegedly a couple of Alien games under development by Sega at the moment... I just hope they've got a decent writer on board.

As for the actual gameplay in Doom 3... it wasn't really that bad. Sure, it was a run-and-gun fps, but it was by no means a bad one. I played Area 51: Blacksite recently (unwanted present I couldn't quite be bothered to return) and all I could think, all the way through that, was "this is like Doom 3 but not as good". I think people just had absurdly high hopes for it.

I'm not really convinced Valve pulled it off better. Half-Life 2 was a monumental let-down for me. Leaving aside how the AI seemed to have regressed and none of the weapons *felt* right, the atmosphere of the game was just too pretentious. The silent protagonist thing just seemed to really jar, in a game where so many NPCs have "conversations" with the main character.

To my mind, the real winner of that fps generation was Farcry, with Quake 4 (which came a bit later) in second place.