Slashdot Log In
id Software Announces Doom 4
Posted by
timothy
on Thu May 08, 2008 07:38 AM
from the this-time-it's-yours dept.
from the this-time-it's-yours dept.
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?"
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Misstep? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Informative)
- The massive (at the time) system requirements
- The repetitive gameplay (turn corner; monster jumps out of hiding; rinse & repeat)
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Funny)
The whole effing thing was really dark, and you couldn't even see the stupid alien, except when you did you didn't want to because it was ugly, and it scared the shit out of my girlfriend. Then, on top of the $60 I spent on tickets and concessions to see the retarded movie, I had to buy $400 in roses and chocolate to get my girlfriend to go see another movie with me.
I guarantee that because of my negative experience, nobody else will ever care about or like the movie Alien. I just don't see the point of using all those special effects for the alien when it's so ugly and grotesque. Why they made FOUR sequels and a cross-over series is just beyond me, because nobody could have possibly cared about those either.
(Protip: Alien came out before I was born, and I enjoyed the series. I like Doom too. YMMV, YHBT.)
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Funny)
OH man...thanks for making me feel really old. Hahaha.
I remember my older cousin getting us all into the original Aliens movie on a hot summer afternoon.....man, those scenes with Sigorney in her undies really made the movies for us really young guys...
*sigh*
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Funny)
I know, kids these days, they don't know how good they have it [penny-arcade.com].
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Informative)
Even with all options turned off/at their lowest settings, my Radeon 9600XT was barely able to manage acceptable framerates in 1024x768 (no FAA either).
And I don't mean 120FPS either, the game was crawling under 10FPS in lots of areas. And yes I had enough system RAM too, if that's what you're wondering.
Parent
There's more to it (Score:5, Interesting)
- The massive (at the time) system requirements
- The repetitive gameplay (turn corner; monster jumps out of hiding; rinse & repeat)
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.
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Insightful)
Careful level design that kept going back to the same well for the same tired mechanic: "It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue^H^H^H^Hdemon". A mechanic that was hard to believe in the first place. I could have bought it if the protaganist wasn't a freakin MARINE.
That and monster closets.
Id makes a nice engine, but they haven't had a coherent story since Quake II. I hope they have better luck licensing the engine this time: only major Doom3 licensee I can remember was Prey.
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Funny)
Monster closets make perfect sense!
Okay, you know how sometimes you'd hear a demonic voice and the area would turn all red and then a some evil lightning would flash and a demon would appear? Well when there's a room with a demon with no opposable thumbs already in it, how do you think the demon got there? Right, it was portaled in earlier. And what do you think happens if the forces of hell miscalculate the vector? That's right, monster stuck in a closet.
Hey, you try ripping open the fabric of space-time and boundary between life and death and see if you don't occasionally miss your target!
Oh, and the reason why your space marine wouldn't duct tape the flashlight to his gun is because he didn't want to have to clean off the glue residue before his next inspection.
It all holds together.
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Informative)
HL2, by comparison, was quite a bit better just for the diversity of gamepla, with vehicles and interesting new weapons (grav gun was innovative). This made up for the heavily scripted, linear gameplay.
Now that there's competition from other amazing game engines too, I think Doom 4 is going to have to raise the bar on its gameplay if it wants to compete with new titles like Crysis. Not only did Crysis look astonishingly good, but the gameplay was hugely varied, with the sandbox option of playing missions a dozen different ways each time.
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:4, Interesting)
I absolutely hate getting puzzles in an FPS. When I play an FPS I want action, adrenaline, and mindless carnage. I want to vent, to get rid of my frustrations.
Back when Wolfenstien was new there was a german shepherd in the yard next door that would bark all night. I'd take great pleasure in firing up wolfenstien just to shoot the dogs.
If traffic had me pissed on the way home I'd fire up Screamer. If jaywalkers and those damned idiotic runners had me pissed I'd play Road Rash.
Puzzles? No thinks, I'll buy a newspaper for 75 cents and save my $60. Or have those damned games gone up even higher? Seems everything except my paycheck has.
-mcgrew
Parent
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
I'll apply! (Score:4, Funny)
No I'm not bitter at ALL! It's a speech impediment...
Re:I'll apply! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
What's the betting... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What's the betting... (Score:4, Funny)
"Duke!" I said. "Hey, dude, it's mcgrew, haven't seen you in a while! Where you been?"
"In the hospital mostly." He was bald, wrinkled, walked with a stoop and carried a cane. No doubt the cane had a sword in it. Or even more likely, a chain saw.
"What happened?"
"Well, after Mr. Broussard and the guys retired me I started drinking pretty heavy. I wound up homeless and depressed, and tried to kill myself. They said I had PTSD and put me on Paxil. Boy, mix that stuff with alcohol...
"Then I got a bad case of gout. I have arthritis all over now."
It was sad, seeing my old hero like this.
"Who's your doctor?" I asked.
"I'm indigent, so I have to go to the VA hospital and take whoever they give me. The new doctor's name is 'Proton'. They tell me he's pretty good."
-mcgrew
Parent
What the hell was wrong with DOOM3? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3? (Score:5, Insightful)
The story that they hyped up claiming to be written by a professional writer etc was kind of shallow and stupid.
Even the AI was crap. I found the tactics for the first game worked equally well in Doom 3. Imps for example could move across the ceiling, but they never took advantage of that ability. They would crawl across a wall, then jump down and start slowly shuffling towards you throwing fireballs. The easiest way to dispatch enemies was the get their attention with a pistol, then sit on the other side of a closed door with a shotgun waiting for them to open it so you could unload both barrels into their face at point blank.
I could go on, but that was the worst of it for me. In summary, it was generic and kind of boring.
Half Life however had pretty good AI. An interesting plot and varied enemy encounters moving you through different environments, not allowing it to become just the same old crap.
Parent
Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But it went on too long, and got boring. If Doom 3 were about 2/3 the length it was, then it would have been much better.
Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3? (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind that there hasn't been a single alien in the game prior to this point.
I unloaded a full clip of ammo and several grenades into the walls.
That wasn't scared?
Parent
Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3? (Score:5, Funny)
Did you manage to kill the gazebo?
Parent
they seem like more of a tech company, (Score:5, Insightful)
What was wrong with Doom 3? (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
the problems with doom 3 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Maybe I'm being elitist here... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
So what you're saying is... (Score:4, Funny)
They need a custom HTTP 503 page... (Score:3, Insightful)
--08:57:08-- http://www.idsoftware.com/ [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.
First Screenshot (Score:4, Funny)
I'm tired of Doom (Score:3, Interesting)
Come on Carmack! (Score:4, Insightful)
Doom RetCon (Score:3, Funny)
Stop flogging the greasy spot (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stop flogging the greasy spot (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Played out (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
DOOM 3 criticism is usually misguided (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Boy, if only John Carmack were here... (Score:5, Funny)
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:
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...
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact most of the modern games arent that diffrent from Doom, there may be a million billion polygons and shaders and stuff like that, there may be 'iron sights' and 'Squad based multiplayer' but at there hearts FPS's havent changed since the early days
There's also being able to aim up/down, I'd say that was pretty major. The elements that haven't changed are that you can run around in a 3D world shooting stuff, and choose weapons using the top row of number keys.. not much else has stayed the same. Oh, and Wolfenstein was first ;) Though Doom was presumably first with multiplayer, and deathmatch is something that's still good fun. I personally prefer team based games these days as I don't then feel like everyone is out to get me - I play games to get AW
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:great experience, bad game (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent