DOOM 3 will use P2P System? 223
Ant writes "From Page 6 of FiringSquad's QuakeCon 2002 Postmortem article: John Carmack said something at the end of the Q&A about how the multiplayer will be only four players?
Tim: After 2 hours of talking up at the podium, sometimes you leave a few details out. Doom 3 multiplayer will be fully scalable. It will be a peer to peer system. We haven't started working on it yet. Tell everyone not to panic - it will be fine. John just forgot to mention it'll be scalable past four players. It's hard to give a hard number because we haven't started working on it yet. Right now we're focused on making Doom 3 a kickass, over the top single player game."
Re:why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because you can't really do a good storyline if all people are doing is shooting their mates.
Because only a subset of the gamer community is interested in multiplayer. Many more don't want to have to go online to play.
Because, in the end, multiplayer limits what you can do, even in a FPS.
single player claim to fame. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're joking, right? Goldeneye 007, Half-Life, Deux Ex, Thief, System Shock, Rainbow 6, Jedi Knight, Medal of Honor: Frontline, No One Lives Forever, MDK, Outlaws, Hitman, Shogo.
I like playing FPS because they let me pit my wits against other people.
You can play most games online, from Backgammon to Chess to every RTS made nowadays.
Ever heard of Half-Life? (Score:3, Insightful)
I fiddled with UT and Q3 when they came available, but HalfLife spanked the pants off of them both- if anything of that caliber single-player ever comes around, I'll probably check it out. Until then, I'm sticking with RPGs. I like FPS, but I fucking HATE multiplayer.... it's great to see iD focusing on the one thing that makes a game great- the single-player experience.
It's all about the 3D Engine (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I can't wait to play it because I'm also a Resident Evil fan. I remember playing the very first publicly released version of DOOM when it came out.. I had nightmares from playing it so much.
I think they are limiting it to 4 players because the game is so resource intensive. Anything above 4 players would be a strain on the system. This is also probably one of the reasons they don't have a lot of monsters on the screen at the same time. In my opinion for this particular type of gameplay, dozens of "A.I. dumb" monsters on the screen isn't very exciting. I personally prefer sacrificing quantity over quality. But what is so incredible about DOOM 3 is the wonderful 3D engine John has created! Shadows and lighting are the most important things to me in a game, and from what I've seen of the screenshots and videos, DOOM 3 does it beautifully.
Re:This is great! (Score:2, Insightful)
You know what i really hated about Descent?
That due to the system you praise above, anyone with a trainer could give themself unlimited health and weapons and whatnot, and since there was no authorative server, they could get away with it!
Cheats totally ruined Descent 1 and 2, anyone could just be an asshole and cheat if he felt like it.
Client/Server is the only way to go to have decent cheat-protection!
Re:why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually it should have no problem playing over the same connections as previous versions. The significant improvement in graphics doesn't change the amount of data that needs to be sent.
If I shoot a rocket all I need to send everyone else is the velocity, angle and starting position of the rocket which can be done in less than 20 bytes. If it hits a wall, all the clients will know about it and destroy the wall (or anything else that's destructable) without any further information being sent.
The only data being sent on a regular basis is still position, velocity and angle like every other FPS multiplayer game.
If you can play Quake III on-line you'll be able to play Doom3 on-line.
Ben
Re:Read this, and wonder why this story got posted (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So what if it's P2P and single player specific? (Score:1, Insightful)
However good the single player is, if it doesn't have good multiplayer, it will be a game confined to the history books within a year.