First Doom 4 Production Shots Revealed

An anonymous reader writes "Actor Brad Hawkins has been tapped to do motion-capture work for Doom 4, and revealed that the game features the military and civilians fighting side by side. Does this mean the game is set on Earth for sure? GGL Wire has an interview with Hawkins and a selection of production shots. '[Filmmaker Mark Bristol] was very specific on the civilians having a certain personality and the military characters having a separate one as well. The body language of the civilians is less, well, "trained." They carry their guns in a looser fashion and are a little sloppier when they run, a little more freestyle. The military characters are sharp as razors, with very swift moves, exact hand positioning and can turn on a dime.'" This follows news from last month that British novelist Graham Joyce was brought in to develop the story for the game.

Comments

Re:...and?

[Secret Rabbit]

You're assuming that they are in it to make games. Are you sure that's a good assumption? Because, from where I sit, they seem to be more in the business of making game engines and licensing them, using DOOM to show it off rather than anything else.

Can't see the article

[CRCulver]

I'd like to read this article, but I'm reluctant to put down my gun to pick up my flashlight.

Re:...and?

[Makarakalax]

lalala I have a stereotypical opinion and I'm angry about it.

Pleb ;)

[Moraelin]

Bah, only a pleb would think that black is black and can't be improved any more ;)

Sure it'll be black, but will it be HD-rendered, bump-mapped, paralax-mapped, pixel-shaded, floating-point-colour black? I mean, just #000000 is soo last century. Nowadays only plebs and nostalgiacs would even look at that. Nowadays we want high-res high-polycount shiny objects with normals and displacements precisely calculated to accurately reflect and refract the surrounding, umm, black. We want black reflected on photo-realistic shimmering black water.

And pay attention to the high resolution part. Just filling a 256x256 texture with (0, 0, 0) doesn't cut it any more. If it's not at least 4096x4096 worth of pure black, you might as well make it text mode.

And will it have realistic depth-of-field effects? It's not a modern game if you can actually see clearly at more that 10 ft. You know it's really modern if you feel like a myopic guy who lost his glasses. In fact, like a myopic guy who just got beladonna drops in the eyes at the occulist, lost his glasses, and is returning home through a severe fog. If you wonder if your CRT suddenly lost the focusing coil, or if your 1600x1200 TFT is actually badly upscaling a 320x240 image, _that's_ a modern game. I mean, bah, black. What we need these days is _blurry_ black.

Re:Pleb ;)

[Moraelin]

Black is sometimes very useful. You can spare a lot of work in places where you don't need any detail and safe a lot of valueable time which you could invest into other places. But only dark levels... of course this truly sucks.

Well, I was actually just aiming for "Funny", but I'm probably not that funny if I end up having to explain it.

Of course I'm not proposing to elaborately paint the parts of the texture which aren't even used, or which don't need any detail.

I _do_ find it kinda weird though that so many games, especially on the PC, seem to be (A) stuck with some black-and-brown palette from the 90's, and (B) have to make everything dark. It's like a quest for some devs to use all those amazing graphics possibilities juts to make more "realistic" black-on-black images.

I bought my first console very late. It was a Dreamcast. Let me tell you it was a shock to see the lush and bright scenery in those games, after coming from the everything-is-an-unlit-sewer games I had been playing on the PC. Mind you, a lot of PC games have discovered colours too in the meantime, but we're talking about ID and the successor of Doom 3 here. I can't resist taking a jab at whichever genius thought it's a great idea to make a game where half the time you can't see a fucking thing at all, because you can't use a flashlight and fight at the same time.

And the second jab was at the accursed depth-of-field effect. My first contact with it was when I applied one patch in COH and suddenly everything past 100 ft or so was blurry. As if my character had severe myopia, and couldn't _possibly_ focus on anything at a distance.

In the meantime the annoyance seems to have just spread. E.g., I've installed "Hellgate: London" a Vista computer at one point and turned all the graphics options to the max. (Hey, it's a GTX285. It can take it.) It actually made me squint. There was a road sign some 50 ft or so away, and I still remember that it was so blurry, it was practically smeared into the surrounding pixels. (The effect only seems to exist with DirectX 10, btw.)

I find it pretty damned sad. Here we have more than a decade of GPUs and increasingly sophisticated mapping and filtering possibilities, billions sunk into R&D both on the software and hardware size, etc... and they're used top make the game as blurry and smeared as something rendered in 320x240 on an old VGA card and upscaled badly on a 10 year old TFT.

Re:...and?

[Makarakalax]

Id actually developed an awesome survival horror game that those of us who enjoy such games loved. But everyone else in the world expected a shotgun gorefest and thus described it as boring, or whatever.

And the expectations were thus because they called it Doom.

I'm not sure why they did that. Possibly because Carmack is not a marketing guy. Possibly because Doom 3 was inevitably going to sell buckets whatever the content.

Saying they have dropped out is nonsense, you've just attached yourself to the 13 year old fanboi meme. Doom 3 was actually a very well executed game with good level design and well written game progression. It just wasn't what people expected.

However having said that, I'm not sure I care anymore either. FPS games bore me nowadays, and Id seemingly can only make those.

A derivative survival horror game

[the_raptor]

I like survival horror, but DooM was a derivative shockfest, it is what your typical big budget horror movie is to real horror movies. DooM III tried to be System Shock and failed (even copying the audio diary story telling format).

Hint: When something jumps out of every corner it ceases to be a surprise. I "won" DooM III when I realised the level designers would put the monster door right in the spot an FPS player would put their back to instinctively. After that point I would know roughly where the monsters were going to be.