id Software Announces Doom 4 425
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
they seem like more of a tech company, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:let's do yesterday again (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Misstep? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Misstep? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3? (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:2, Insightful)
Have you gone back and played the original Doom(s) recently? IMHO the problem is Doom and Doom 2 were way more fun than Doom 3. Doom 3 was just a much slower Doom and Doom 2. Doom 3 also wasn't that scary, but admittedly it had a few moments.
And yes, games can be reasonably faster paced and scary! Undying [wikipedia.org] was a really neat game, a good storyline, and it was pretty creepy sometimes. Didn't people also find Quake to be kinda creepy for it's time (and more so than Doom 3 now)?
And with Doom 3? You're basically left with a game that's slow, not that fun, and not even that scary. So what exactly were you left with? A really shiny, graphically immersive and beautiful, but mediocre game.
Re:What the hell was wrong with DOOM3? (Score:2, Insightful)
Come on Carmack! (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Re:Misstep? (Score:2, Insightful)
OMG! We'll use a gazillion polygons, two fucking hundred lights per object, half a megabyte pixel shaders, and more RAM than Oracle! Wow this game is so good go buy it!
It doesn't matter if the game plays exactly like everything you had and you don't even enjoy the supposedly awesome graphics because they're the same old id Software crap: you're in a dark tunnel made of black walls, black ceiling, black floor, and black everything else, with no light whatsoever (well, it actually has 123890125 light sources, but they're all set in the vicinity of (0.015, 0.01, 0.02)), with monsters which you can't see, and even if you can, are ugly lumps of fat you couldn't care less about even if their model has three million triangles because it's piss ugly and lacks any form. And if paying $60+ for this sounds useless enough, you actually have to pay $400 more on your "rig" (as stupid gamers call it) if you want to get the game running, because it's OMG so hardcore, awesome graphics dude! 3571290702938571249 vertices on screen r0x0r OMG!!11one
Re:the problems with doom 3 (Score:2, Insightful)
I think I killed a hundred spiders before I realized they were just going to keep coming.
From that point, killing the enemy seemed meaningless and I just focused on running through the levels, leaving them behind. You'll generally take less damage just running past the enemies too.
I kept that up until I got to the hell levels, then I called it a day.
A second thing that pisses me off with a lot of new games is the constant shaking of the camera. The challenges should be in the game world, not in my ability to interact with the game world.
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.
Talk about one-hit wonders... (Score:1, Insightful)
Honestly, you people who think Doom3 was the height of a dark and scary environment have no idea what a really scary game is like...System Shock 2 created a scary environment very well without relying on "turn the corner, another monster pops out". Forget the graphics, the one thing System Shock 2 (and all the Dark Engine based games) had was a true SOUND engine, one that Looking Glass used very well.
Someone convinced me to give FEAR a try because it was supposedly scary...I yawned, never finished it. Talk about repetative. Can't hold a candle to System Shock 2 or Thief 3's "Shalebridge Cradle" (which manages to scare you to death with sound alone, long before you've even encountered anything REAL).
Once upon a time John Carmack was quoted as saying that he created Quake because "he didn't want to do Doom 3." Here we are looking at Doom 4. Once again, YAWN.
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?
Re:Misstep? (Score:3, Insightful)
HL2 really annoyed me by having me solve puzzles all the damn time. There was too much space between fire-fights.
Doom 3 had just enough story to move you from point to point and to give you an excuse to blow the shit out of hell-spawn. I love it for that. It remains one of my favorite FPS of all time, above HL2, for really hitting the target of what I love about FPSes.
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.
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.
Re:Misstep? (Score:1, Insightful)
Good lord man, Aliens was a landmark movie back when it dropped in, what, 1979? Prior to that it was all big explosions and poor costumes.
Alien brought setting, lighting, foreshadowing and more importantly, IMHO, pacing, and gave the genre legitimacy.
Re:Stop flogging the greasy spot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Misstep? (Score:3, Insightful)
John Carmack said that Doom 3 lost millions in sales because of piracy before the official release. I'd argue that that's because people realized how crappy of a game it was. Roomie and I would have bought a copy if we hadn't known. Thanks to piracy, we discovered that it just wasn't worth paying for.
Re:the problems with doom 3 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ambiance And Cacophony; DOOM3 was brilliant! (Score:2, Insightful)
Most of the things you mention, like the hellish flashbacks or telekinetically jerking bodies, occurred in the first half-hour of the game and were never seen again.
Re:Misstep? (Score:3, Insightful)
But it wasn't.
It wasn't even the best of the lot out at the time.
It just made people think "Me, iD has kinda lost it a bit"
And that made a lot of us sad.
Re:More Doom? Here's The Design Doc (Score:3, Insightful)
Really... so, let's see how many games used it?
So, let's look on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for that... hmm, about a dozen game, wow... that's even less than I though.
And what about their competitor, the Unreal engine? I can't actually find a list of games, but companies that have licensed it include: Atari, Activision, Capcom, Disney, Konami, Koei, 2K Games, Midway, THQ, Ubisoft, Sega, Sony, Electronic Arts, Square Enix.
A high percentage of the best FPS games to come out recently use it... hell, even my kid's favourite show, Lazy Town, uses the engine to render the backgrounds.
The engine under the hood of Doom is a serious failure compared to others in the market, it was unweildy, not very scalable (as much as others would like to say it is, Unreal based games run far better on lower spec machines than that round of id tech games) and harder to create content for.
It failed in most ways compared to its peers.
Sure it made them money, and whoopdedoo for them, but I'm afraid Epic and the Unreal Engine has a monstrous slice of the market now, and the games that come out using it look and run superbly.
Re:Misstep? (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember Quake? The engine was a huge leap forward, but the game was incredibly dull. I completed Duke3D but never managed more than two or three levels of Quake before getting bored with the shear tedium of the game. In deathmatch it was okay but, again, got old quite quickly.
Then there were the mods. At one point I had almost 500MB of mods installed for Quake (the original game was about 50MB), and many of these were a lot more engrossing in single or multiplayer than the original. Team Fortress was played in multiplayer a lot more than the original and things like Horrorshow and Quake Rally were also entertaining. I think Id started to depend on this with their subsequent games - release an engine and a free SDK for it and hope the community puts together an exciting game based on it. Unfortunately for them, the Quake 1 engine plus community refinements is still good enough for some very fun games and works with much older computers.