First Doom 4 Production Shots Revealed 136
An anonymous reader writes "Actor Brad Hawkins has been tapped to do motion-capture work for Doom 4, and revealed that the game features the military and civilians fighting side by side. Does this mean the game is set on Earth for sure? GGL Wire has an interview with Hawkins and a selection of production shots. '[Filmmaker Mark Bristol] was very specific on the civilians having a certain personality and the military characters having a separate one as well. The body language of the civilians is less, well, "trained." They carry their guns in a looser fashion and are a little sloppier when they run, a little more freestyle. The military characters are sharp as razors, with very swift moves, exact hand positioning and can turn on a dime.'"
This follows news from last month that British novelist Graham Joyce was brought in to develop the story for the game.
The rape of the series continues... (Score:1, Interesting)
What they really should do is stop fucking the Doom franchise and outsource development to the people responsible for Painkiller or Serious Sam. If I wanted heavily strategic gameplay and a deep story, I sure as hell wouldn't buy a game with "DOOM" written on the front of the box. When I buy a Doom game, all I want to do is kill tons of dudes with an assortment of awesome weapons.
Re:Pleb ;) (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I was actually just aiming for "Funny", but I'm probably not that funny if I end up having to explain it.
Of course I'm not proposing to elaborately paint the parts of the texture which aren't even used, or which don't need any detail.
I _do_ find it kinda weird though that so many games, especially on the PC, seem to be (A) stuck with some black-and-brown palette from the 90's, and (B) have to make everything dark. It's like a quest for some devs to use all those amazing graphics possibilities juts to make more "realistic" black-on-black images.
I bought my first console very late. It was a Dreamcast. Let me tell you it was a shock to see the lush and bright scenery in those games, after coming from the everything-is-an-unlit-sewer games I had been playing on the PC. Mind you, a lot of PC games have discovered colours too in the meantime, but we're talking about ID and the successor of Doom 3 here. I can't resist taking a jab at whichever genius thought it's a great idea to make a game where half the time you can't see a fucking thing at all, because you can't use a flashlight and fight at the same time.
And the second jab was at the accursed depth-of-field effect. My first contact with it was when I applied one patch in COH and suddenly everything past 100 ft or so was blurry. As if my character had severe myopia, and couldn't _possibly_ focus on anything at a distance.
In the meantime the annoyance seems to have just spread. E.g., I've installed "Hellgate: London" a Vista computer at one point and turned all the graphics options to the max. (Hey, it's a GTX285. It can take it.) It actually made me squint. There was a road sign some 50 ft or so away, and I still remember that it was so blurry, it was practically smeared into the surrounding pixels. (The effect only seems to exist with DirectX 10, btw.)
I find it pretty damned sad. Here we have more than a decade of GPUs and increasingly sophisticated mapping and filtering possibilities, billions sunk into R&D both on the software and hardware size, etc... and they're used top make the game as blurry and smeared as something rendered in 320x240 on an old VGA card and upscaled badly on a 10 year old TFT.
Re:A derivative survival horror game (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree there were too many shocks. I wonder if they decided to do that because they could take advantage of the true darkness that Doom3 engine allowed?
However, some were good. My favourite shock scare was when I approached some stairs, I could only see the stairs because of some glare off them from another light source. Suddenly a light under the stairs turned on and through the gaps in the stairs I could see the silhouette of an imp staring back at me, maybe half a meter from my face. And of course the music went "BLAAAH!".
Scared the crap out of me, and I thought it was a clever scare.
However I would also hate the game if it was just shock-scares. That's lame. I hate horror films that focus on that. So I have to say IMO, there was a lot more to be scared of.
After a few levels the game got very eerie. Distance whimpering just on the edge of hearing. Strange noises, things moving on the edge of your view. The gradually deteriorating sanity in the audio logs you were finding and listening to.
The level in hell was incredible, as you followed the terrifying ordeal of one of the scientists that was abandoned there as he was hunted and toyed with by the demons.
When you finally reached Delta labs, that level was seriously unnerving.
I wonder if people who call it just "shocks" played the whole thing at all. And if they did, maybe I'm just weird in that I found so much more scary than just the shocks.