No Doom 3 This Year?

Ant writes "According to an article at Blue's News: 'Though id Software basically invented the idea of using "when it's done" as a release date, and thus did not specify a release date when DOOM 3 was announced, many have been assuming that the game would be available for this year's holiday season. Now a report on HomeLAN Fed cites Activision's 2003 release calendar and quarterly financial conference call... [saying that] Activision admits that this matter is entirely in id's hands, but that they are not expecting the game this year, and have it "penciled" on their calendars for fiscal Q4 (Jan-March) 2004.' Additionally, Quake IV is now due in Fiscal 2005 (which begins April 2004)."

I can wait for a decent game

[CoyoteGuy]

As long as I don't have to buy a Pentium 6 with 2GB ram and a Geforce 10 running windows 2005 with Directx 15.

Release Date?

[dagarath]

What's the purpose in trying to predict the release date of a game that doesn't have a release date? Activision doesn't know exactly when the game will be released, and if ID releases it before this prediction then I'll bet Activision will make time to publish it.

There will be no meaningful comments to this article, unless John Carmack or one of the other ID guys decides to respond.

q4 = jan-mar 03?

[gr8gatzby]

hate to be a stickler fer detail, but Q4 of 2004 is actually October to December of 2004....not January to March

Awwww.

[Amorpheus_MMS]

Looks like 2003 is going to be a bit less of the kickass-gaming year it looked to be. And if Doom 3 is only out in 2004, some games that will be released meanwhile could make id's design look real old. *cough* [members.aon.at]

HL 2 Mighted have changed things

[felonious]

I'm thinking that after Valve's E3 techdemo and their subsequent best of show awards with little mention of ID/D3 that ID were taken off guard. I'm sure they thought they'd waltz in there and floor the place but Valve came out of no where and blew the socks off of everything hands down.

I think ID realized that they would have to revamp somewhat and code additional features into the engine itself as well as enhance gameplay so the worlds would at the very least be as interactive as the worlds in HL2.

I've never been a HL fanboy the movies I've seen of in game play not cinematics are amazing! They have revolutionized gaming and are taking it in a new direction in terms of a fully interactive world. Go dl a movie of HL 2 off Kazaa or BT and see what I mean.

I had no intentions of purchasing HL 2 but after the tech-demo/in game movies I will now buy it.

Re:I'm waiting for HL 2...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, my guess is that the good folks at iD pissed their pants upon seeing the HL 2 videos, and have decided to rewrite Doom 3 from scratch.

When its done...

[Sylver Dragon]

Is it just me or does this ideology seem to lead to titles dying from over engineering. I don't think it'll come as a shock to anyone that when you let the engineers decide when a product is ready to ship, that it will never ship. On the other side of the rope are the marketers who want to realease it now, now, now. What you need is someone in the middle who is willing to give a cut-off date, a deadline. This means that the engineers are not allowed to keep adding features, creating bugs, and fixing those bugs after a certain point, and that the marketers have to wait for a product to actually exist before booking orders. Ya, deadlines suck, most of us probably deal with them in our jobs, but they are necessary to making a company run, as long as they are realistic. Too short, and the product sucks, too long and the product dies in engineering or misses the market. When its done, seems to be a deadline that is just way to long for bringing a product to market, and slowly builds dissatisfaction in the customers who would buy your product.

Re:Release Date?

[Mike Hawk]

They have to predict a release date. This is a major product for a publicly traded company. The stockholders are entitled to know what to expect for the near future. It is responsible to give the quarter a product is expected to ship as well as when a product's shipping slips to another quarter. Predicting an exact date can make one look foolish, but that was never the case with this title.

C'mon dagarath, I know you could have thought of that if you tried.

Re:HL 2 Mighted have changed things

[jace48]

***
I'm thinking that after Valve's E3 techdemo and their subsequent best of show awards with little mention of ID/D3 that ID were taken off guard. I'm sure they thought they'd waltz in there and floor the place but Valve came out of no where and blew the socks off of everything hands down.
******

Or just a maketing strategy seeing the demo movie of Doom III and Half Life 2. Half Life is far superior to Doom III, and since Doom III is slated to be released on 2 fortnite of Spetember ID does not wants there sales to be affected by HL. Once people have already had the taste of HL ID can safely release Doom.

Re:I can wait for a decent game

[edwdig]

Remember when Doom 3 was supposed to be playable on a TNT 2 without having to turn it down to lowest quality? GeForce 3 was supposed to be able to handle it on max quality too.

Maybe by then...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

...the drivers for that hardware will actually work. :-)

Oh for crap's sake

[aliens]

Way to be narrow minded. Don't need more FPS? You discount an entire genre right off the bat? Do you lump Wolfenstein with HL2? Hell let's just lump everything that uses a pixel as FALSE innovation since it's not really doing anything new, just reusing those same pixels.

I'd have to say that those two games(wolf & HL2) are different genres, two totally different worlds of gameplay. I really dislike this arguement that "games suck there's no innovation". The whole argument of more frames per second died out awhile ago, it's all about how detailed your environment can get now, how interactive.

What is TRUE innovation? Without some new interface to meld human to computer we're kind of stuck with using what we have. DDR I guess was innovative, but that's just a rehash of Track & Field for NES.

Re:Doom Forever?

[frankthechicken]

Anyone else feel ID got a little scared when they saw the Half Life II trailer [fileplanet.com]? Much like the 3D Realms guys see their technology be eclipsed every six months?

I cannot express the feelings I felt when I first saw this game, except that pervailing knowledge that my life will become less meaningful than usual come September.

"Done when it's finished"

[Brian Kendig]

I'm sick and tired of software companies saying that such-and-such product will be "released when it's done" or "done when it's finished."

Since when has any software product ever been FINISHED when it's released? Usually -- and *especially* with PC games -- the release is full of bugs and requires a couple of quick patch cycles to bring up to par, followed by a few more patch cycles over the following months to make it solid.

Re:Calendars are for Blizzard....

[veddermatic]

Everything I have heard was that Quake 4 was the next step of Quake 2; it's a mostly single player game with some maps for DM tacked on. Then again I just read gaming news sites all day.....

Re:"Done when it's finished"

[mmdurrant]

I'm sick and tired of software companies saying that such-and-such product will be "released when it's done" or "done when it's finished."

Since when has any software product ever been FINISHED when it's released? Usually -- and *especially* with PC games -- the release is full of bugs and requires a couple of quick patch cycles to bring up to par, followed by a few more patch cycles over the following months to make it solid.

Would you prefer them to release it when its half-done? This could be an interesting new business model - sell a half-completed product to generate revenue to finish the other half.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that ID (iD, Id, ID, whatever the hell you want to call it) has bucked this trend. Granted, there have been quite a few patches for their games, but the games are always quite functional. Take for example the game "Rise of Nations" which I could not play for 15 minutes without it freezing and forcing me to reboot.
As far as the comment about "usually and especially with PC games", I've never seen a game on a console that had a patch. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Yes, patch cycles do happen. When you cease testing a product on 10 machines and begin testing it on 1000-10000, lots of weird bugs you didn't see before begin popping up as a result of video cards, drivers, sound cards, moon phases, etc. You don't need me to tell you this, but it seems some might need a friendly reminder.

OpenGL

[woodhouse]

Oh, and a final issue, purely to play Devil's Advocate, I understand Half Life 2 uses DirectX and some might suggest that it is the reason why HL2 apparently is more scalable and achieves more effects more easily across many performance levels. Could HL2's apparent conquering of Doom 3 at the moment be the defining moment of DirectX's conquering of OpenGL?

No. OpenGL is just as functional as D3D where it counts, although until recently it was a pain to implement vertex or pixel shaders due to the fact you had to program them differently for each card. But now OpenGL 1.4 includes vertex buffer objects, (equivilant to D3D vertex buffers), ARB_fragment_program, and ARB_vertex_program, equivilant to D3D's pixel and vertex shaders.

Further, Nvidia's Cg provides a high level (c like) shader language which is equivilant to D3D 9.0's HLSL. OpenGL 2.0's HLSL will provide even better functionality when it's released.

Re:Doom 3 verus Half Life 2

[Hatta]

Don't forget Halflife revolutionized the single player FPS. I'm hoping for some strong single player adventure elements from both these games.

Re:Doom 3 verus Half Life 2

[EverStoned]

I'm sorry..you must not have been here in 1993..Doom didn't revolutionize the FPS genre..it created it!

Re:Doom 3 verus Half Life 2

[Moofie]

1) You are on CRACK to state that HL never got any status in the serious gaming community.

2) I never said that HL was more popular than various Quake iterations. I simply said that I didn't care for them.

Re:Doom 3 verus Half Life 2

[geekster]

The SERIOUS gaming community? Unlike those who just play for FUN? What kind of elitist crap is that? The only kind of people who measure games (or any kind of entertainment or art) against each other are the kind that know nothing about them.

Re:Doom 3 verus Half Life 2

[Nogami_Saeko]

Quake and Doom were always nice engines.

HL took the engine and wrapped it into a gaming experience that was much more than just "kill everything and advance to the next level".

So, imho, yes, HL revolutionized the FPS genre. I can't say I've ever had the inclination to finish one of the Quake or Doom games in single-player mode. After a few levels I got bored of "shooting stuff".

HL had me hooked, right to the end. A good plot, great voiceacting, and some clever twists. I expect the new one to be even more so...

N.

Re:Pretty eye-candy, but not much else...

[I. M. Bur]

Also don't forget that the original DOOM and DOOM II engines were used as a base for other games in their time as well (Heretic, Hexen, ...)

Re:It's not surpsing Carmack wants to get it right

[Cannelbrae]

Its called a feature set.

Doom isn't trying to be Battle Field -- so why spend resources trying to add a feature (like vehicles) that your game doesn't call for?

If the concern is licensees, anyone with the money to license the engine surely can afford programmers who can add vehicles. Hell, Gunman Chronicles, which starts as a mod and never even had engine source access added a vehicle, even if it was a bit simple.

Doom isn't targeting massive outdoor areas, so why does it need to support 64 clients? Scalablity costs time and money. If they aren't going to use it, then there is no reason at all to work on it. If there was a huge demand for 64 player games, either ID would do it if it fit in to their feature set and time line, or a licensee could add it.

If you are a licensee and you want to add an occlusion system, well, go for it. Same with LOD (though LOD can frequently be a slowdown if the CPU is doing it dynamicly).

Carmack and Id know their shit. I am not a fan boy (hell, I am part of the competition :) ) but all of shortcomings you mentioned have specific reasons and could changed by any decent coder.

The reason for the season

[joeytsai]

I'm a little bit perplexed about the responses for this story. Many people think that the reason why the Doom III may be delayed is related to Half Life 2, which had an incredible showing this year. This may be true, but that seems rather unlikely, and there is a much more reasonable explanation.

Firstly, it seems to me the phase of development D3 is in right now is polish. The graphics engine is more or less complete, which is demonstrated by the fact that the screenshots from last year compared to this years aren't much different. They've story-boarded the game's story like a Hollywood movie, so unless they're changing a fundamental story element (why?) they're just working on finishing the level designs and maybe enemy (and ally?) AI. I personally figured that that has been pretty much what they've been working on all this year, and why they would release this holiday season.

Now, this far into the development process, close to a final product, you don't fundamentally change everything just because you see some game clips from another company. I too was quite impressed with HL2, but I don't see why we can't just expect two great games. Carmack strikes me as an incredibly pragmatic person, and it really doesn't make sense to me to fundamentally change your development for an unreleased game.

What seems much more likely and actually has been hinted on is that they're delaying the game to so they can have a simultaneous xbox release. id has confirmed there will be an xbox port, and Carmack has been quoted saying Microsoft is offering them a pile of money if they have a simultaneous release. Although the xbox is just a PC variant, because of the fixed hardware and TV constraints (though xbox can output HDTV quality), optimizing the game for a system pretty close to D3's minimum requirements is going to be a slight challenge.