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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
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
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/
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.
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
...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
Are all of the above comments trying to say that Doom 5 is....*gasps*....doomed?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
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.
The Army reading list
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...
link here: doom4 screenshot.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yes, and on its lowest size was pretty unplayable. On mine I'd sacrifice frame rate for a size, using maybe half the screen and having jerky pictures. Even still it was the most awesome game there was, even better than its daddy Wolfenstien.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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
"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.