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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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... we see Doom 5 before we see Duke Nukem Forever?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
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
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.
I unloaded a full clip of ammo and several grenades into the walls.
Did you manage to kill the gazebo?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
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.