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?"

Misstep?

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?

Re:Misstep?

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)

Re:Misstep?

The repetitive gameplay (turn corner; monster jumps out of hiding; rinse & repeat)

<sarcasm type="heavy"> Yeah, because Doom and Doom 2 were nothing like that.</sarcasm>

Re:Misstep?

I agree. In fact, it's a lot like the movie Alien. Alien is a movie that just doesn't matter.

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.)

Re:Misstep?

Just because you had high-end hardware at the time doesn't mean everyone also had it.

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.

Re:Misstep?

Iâ(TM)m not a serious gamer at all but without that duct tape mod I found the game virtually unplayable.

Re:Misstep?

The flash light thing was a bit wierd but I the experience it created was awesome. Seeing the light at the end of a corridor, or not wanting to leave an area because it had light was a great experience or perhaps the lone light source being a fireball hurling towords you? If you accept it in I think most people will enjoy it (in the same way you can enjoy horror films). Unfortunately most of my friends gave up easy being used to bright lights and jungle textures and things.

Re:Misstep?

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.

Re:Misstep?

> anyone playing with duct tape mod or whatever completely missed the point and basically pissed all over a lot of careful level design

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.

Re:Misstep?

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?

I thought Doom 3 was boring and unimaginative. It looked good, of course, but looks alone don't make a game great. There were no interesting puzzles to solve, no original encounters and action scenarios, just more of the same dark hallways and slobbering monsters slowly thudding toward you ready to absorb a hundred hits from the rocket launcher.

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.

Re:Misstep?

Doom 3 was a terrible game, but turning Doom 4 into a wannabe Half Life 2 is not the solution.

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.

What's the betting...

... we see Doom 5 before we see Duke Nukem Forever?

What the hell was wrong with DOOM3?

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.

Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3?

To me it felt the same as Doom 1 with better graphics.

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.

Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3?

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:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3?

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.

Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3?

In the demo for Alien Vs Predator 2, there's a part where the floor falls out from under you.

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?

Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3?

I unloaded a full clip of ammo and several grenades into the walls.

Did you manage to kill the gazebo?

they seem like more of a tech company,

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.

Stop flogging the greasy spot

the horse is long since gone.

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 .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.

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 .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.

Besides, it'd be a major hit as a YouTube video.

Played out

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.

DOOM 3 criticism is usually misguided

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.

Re:I'll apply!

Hold on Let Me Make a Web Based version of this...

<html>
  <head>
      <title>DOOM 5</title>
  </head>
  <body bgcolor="#000000">
  </body>
<html>

Enjoy

the problems with doom 3

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.