Doom III Comments by Kristan Reed

Meh...I get the feeling I'm the only person in the world who couldn't care less about Doom III...

First!

Good article. Still not convinced by the game ... HL2 has a far better promotion campaign IMO, although even they couldn't stretch out my interest for three E3s.

Bugger. Second.

Nice article btw. Very surprising they haven't gone for a December release. It could be pride, but money talks in this industry and if they have been delayed it's probably, as you point out, because HL2 stole it's thunder. ID make engines and licenses them. If they dont have the top tech then they dont sell the code. Given Valve's prepensity to 'share', then I think ID have gone back to the drawing board a bit. Bold move as it'll cost them money from potential licenses being snapped up by other developers. All that being said I think HL2 maybe a little delayed itself, after all we are supposedly 1 weeks and 3 days from release day and there's not a single Gamespot sponsorship ad in sight.

Meh...I get the feeling I'm the only person in the world who couldn't care less about Doom III...

Nope. I'm not overly enthused either. And it's not just because my PC has no chance of playing it. It looks very nice, but.... it's not Doom, is it?

>the inevitable taunts that come from showing off a product for, most likely, three consecutive E3s.

Did anyone see Breed on show at this year's ECTS (probably floating around the nVidia booth as CDV weren't about)? If so it will have been the 3rd ECTS that it was on show at.

I was never considering getting this game, even before I read this:

"even the spiders have mutated into gigantic creatures of death, and they're especially vile, slimy, hairy, and they're after you."

Such is the detail of the environment; your marine can walk right up to a computer screen and use it in a convincing fashion. Rather than clicking the 'use' button and your screen switching to the computer view, the screen you're looking at, is your view of the computer, and it's so sharp it's completely readable and all the more convincing because of it.
This is also possible in Valve's Source engine but will require a bit work for a modder to implement, Doom III has a specific part of the engine tailored to produce useable consoles, in fact it uses a markup language a bit like HTML.

I personally think the Valve Source engine will become the license engine of choice. The DOOM3 engine is nice but there are obviously technical reasons as to why they limiting DOOM3 multiplayer to 4 players. Presumably all the graphical loveliness is just not going to scale to a large user count during multiplayer. I guess we will have to see how Quake IV turns out to really know the multiplayer capabilities of the DOOM3 engine. I suspect most of the dynamic lighting will be removed in order for a reasonable amount of players to be supported.

I also notice no mention of vehicle support in the DOOM3 engine. This seems to be being listed against every other next generation engine so I wonder if the DOOM3 engine is up to such versatility.

whee
got to use the ignore poster function again

darnediddely thank you eurogamer for that feature...
not too many first posters left...


still think first person shooters need a bit of horror and this is probly the best one of them coming...

"If so it will have been the 3rd ECTS that it was on show at."

Republic The Revolution anyone?

My computer, it cries. Look at the reflection of the wall in that marines goggles, If thats real time generated we're all boned.

It looks very nice, but.... it's not Doom, is it?

I think that's the thing that's the main problem with Unreal II. Not that "it's not Doom", but more that the problem with all these FPS games with ultra-cool graphics technology, is that the playability suffers a bit as a result. The hardware is being used too much on pushing the graphics that it can't deliver the rest of the gameplay in the way it needs to.

Unreal II has that problem - you only ever seem to get a handful of enemies at best on the screen at any one time, so there is never any sense of the frantic battles the old Doom used to give you. Yet it doesn't sell itself as a stealth shooter either. One on one gun battles with some uber-hard mech warrior just aren't much fun as wasting a load of more puny baddies with a couple of shots. imho.

strange that this article was even posted :S

HL2 engine games will use the valve sdk so anything published with the valve engine would be downloadable through steam... or id kinda think it would.

Doom3 does look good and that leaked demo *cough*im told that was really scary*cough* no way it needed another year, now its another 6months till we get doom3?

Looks like gabe's kicked carmaks arse here then, they should have pushed a release out before hl2

I read somewhere (possibly in the original thread for this article) that Valve are charging significantly less up front for developers wanting to use the Source engine than id is for Doom3 (or at least was for Quake3). Instead they want a %age of the profits.

It's going to be very interesting to see who wins this round of the engine wars.

Wasn't this the article that was pulled a month ago?

/looks over right shoulder for men in black stalking him

[MH]

Correct. ID embargoed all information from Activate until today. We messed up.

'Twas.

See, as good as this looks (and yes, it does look good) it just ain't gonna be much else than a "wander round, shoot things, open doors" kinda exercise is it....

HL2 at least has a modicum of puzzlement thrown in there. And as for Deus Ex 2, methinks that'll be a better prospect. Doom was and probably always will be a mindless FPS with lots of gore chucked in for good measure.

Peej

Correct. ID embargoed all information from Activate until today. We messed up.

Yay \o/ My memory still works!

[MH]

Although I am looking forward to HL2 single player I think it is going to be the mods for the Source engine that really start the Source revolution.
If anyone is keeping track of the mods already in development for Source there is already some dam impressive work being done and this is before the SDK even turns up. Ok pretty much all these guys can do at the moment is 3d modeling and art work but the early stuff I am seeing is of a very high standard so I have high hopes.
Valve seem to understand that mods may well be the future of gaming and I don't ever remember a developer taking such a proactive stance towards modding. I guess that little mod called CS made converts of Valve to the modding cause.

3 consecutive E3s? Pah! Duke Nukem Forever will piss all over this...

I think the real war wont be the retail sales of Doom3 and HalfLife2, but which engine the developers will choose to licence out.

Idsoftware are normally ok with releasing a bare-bones FPS game to accompany the engine, which will make good use of the features and convince developers to buy into it, but Valves approach of making a great game first, and building up the engine based upon the game means they have a far greater showcase, which is why i suspect Id have delayed Doom3 in order to create more of a game and less of a tech demo.

Hl2 blows this out of the water (although I will be purchasing Doom III). And just wait for Counter Strike 2 (which will probably be out by the time doom 3 surfaces) !

"Correct. ID embargoed all information from Activate until today. We messed up."

Did 'we'? I thought it was 'they'?

Ahh. I was beginning to wonder about that awful sense of deja vu...

krudster - phew, thanks for putting my brain at rest!

Coulda sworn these words seemed dauntilly familiar

is it true that this is a remake of the original doom like gamespot claim today?

Im just wondering if those 'dark' bits in DoomIII will show anything up on my tft monitor...

"Im just wondering if those 'dark' bits in DoomIII will show anything up on my tft monitor... "

Yep. Reckon I will have to whack the gamma up to the point where it all becomes irrelevant.

It amazes me the amount of people comparing the gameplay in the two games, considering that neither of them are on the market yet :)

This article got Valve fanboy writen all over it

That post has ID fanboy written all over it ;)

[MH]

I want this ere game quite a bit now.

Can't wait to check it against my specs and see that I'm already due for another upgrade.

:|

The tards appear normally after 16h, I wonder what country is waking up by then?...

I am. Big fan of ID titles. Mind you, pretty excited about HL2 as well. Bit of a strange person I suppose...I can be excited about more than 1 game at a time. Still, Deus EX 2 will blow both these away :)

I'm happy for HL2 around late October, Deus Ex 2 for Xmas and Doom 3 around Easter time. Might actually be able to afford all 3 if they are spaced out like that.

Solid article there.. I'm wondering: seeing as HL2 will be out first and then Doom 3 follows, what chance this numerical count-up will result in the release of Duke Nukem Forever?

Aye, that's right, bugger all.

Sure, you have a torch (and a mind-blowingly effective looking one at that), but you can't shoot and wave your lamp at the same time.

You can in the alpha version...

[MH]

and ^ that is whats wrong with the comments system, even retards can use a keyboard :P

For a while I thought it was just me who thought the creatures in Doom 3 were a tad silly. Thank god for Penny Arcade!

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3

I had thought of that too. Really bad use of recent technology to reproduce Doom's original monsters IMO

Well I tend to care about both: information and opinions, and I know which of us isn't normal...

Shrui wrote:

"For a while I thought it was just me who thought the creatures in Doom 3 were a tad silly. Thank god for Penny Arcade!

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3"


Absolutely right. I really hope there are other, more menacing, creatures in D3, otherwise I doubt the 'scare factor'.

Hey, I'm so hurt and shocked by your cutting comments. I might even cry.

100 box demo room or not, Carmack and co have admitted that the physics engine in Doom3 will not play a part in the gameplay. It will just be eye candy, like monsters falling down realistically or things falling off shelves when an earthquake hits. A bit of a missed opportunity in my opinion. This is why I'm firmly rooting for Half-Life 2, where the interactivity of the environment is paramount.

It's good to see that CultureShock has gotten over his shame at the pile of poo that is Judge Dredd though ;)

I think that the big addition to Doom 3 might be better lighting, perhaps the inclusion of some kind of indirect lighting or Global illumination. I know Carmack stated a year ago he would have liked to have included it but didn't think it would work well on all graphics cards. Having probably seen that Half Life 2 has global ilumination, and seeing as it makes scenes look much more incredibly real (it's the reason stalker looks so good) then I wouldn't be surprised to find it added with this extra time.

Well genuinely laughing my arse off at Error and Cultureshock here. I mean *guys* if you come out some insanely rabid about stuff people just assume that you are fanboys or publishing hacks on the defensive. There's nothing wrong with the article and you, hysterically, seem to decide that the journalists in the audience thought Hollinshead reacted a bit off-ly to a comment about HL2 is a lie. And you were there were you?

Legally speaking I think the phrase is.... hrm.... oh yeah.... "arsewipes". That's the term.

Why are all of you getting pissed off with each other? We should be celebrating a renewed flux of great games and the technology that will hopefully bring more great games in the future.

There has been alot of stupid rumours over the past year or so, saying computer gaming is dead, with consoles becoming the mainstream. I'm just thankful that we can see some great games that really lead the field and show all gamers how great the PC is as a gaming platform.

I can't wait to play Stalker, Far Cry, Doom III and Half Life 2. So grow up people; we're all winners.

CultureShock, you sound like you want too much, too soon. I think the graphical leap from Doom 1 to Doom III is an important and necessary one; yes it takes time for graphics card manufacturers and games developers to conitnually advance and adapt to the needs of rendering realistic looking worlds, but there are real benefits for this evolution.

I think we are all beginning to understand that increasing the number of polys and textures in a scene, doesn't necessarily make it more tangible, and I'd agree with you that there is still something indelibly missing from computer games, but that's because we're not looking at their face value; they are still simple forms of entertainment, meant to while away your time with enjoyment; not alter your take on reality and push you to higher plains. However, I can imagine a time in the future when that may be possible. Virtual Reality, or technologies not yet in existence are the key to adding that 'something' to computer games, pushing them past the simple forms of pleasure they currently exist as.

The advancement of graphics hardware in the quest to create ever more realistic worlds is an important step in the development of games. Once we have reached a critical limit to how 'real' something can look, we will find fault with the inhibiting controls that we use to navigate these virtual worlds, and perhaps then, a revolution in gaming and interaction will take place. But like the space race, you must take little steps; you can't have the moon on a stick straight away.

I actually work in the games industry; have done so for over a year now, working for a games company in the UK. I've seen and been a part of the game creation process, and I will say the production schedule, and the people who have control over the games that are produced make it very difficult to really advance and develop what would be considered tertiary elements of a game; the plot, character and story arcs\ devlopment etc. The roles of all the team members on any particular game are focused on just two things: graphics and gameplay. There doesn't seem to be the creative force, or even the time to concentrate, explore and develop great naratives and characters that do more than just look good or work well as an interactive control to reach an end goal. Im not even sure how games could actually use film narrative techniques to change or enhance games in such a way that would make them better. Steven Poole's book Trigger Happy goes into some depth on this topic, and can't conclude a viable solution or way forward for games and a convergence with cinematic elements.

I do find myself less inclined to play games these days; I would put this down to time management, and my busy schedule. We are nearing completion of the last milestone before the game goes gold, and the last 9 months have meant late nights, and some weekends. I find it hard to go home after spending all day making a game, and pick up a controller to start playing one. Have I grown out of it? It would seem so, but I find alot of comfort in multiplayer online gaming; interaction far more complex and involving than any single player game currently offers. Perhaps this is the future; always online gaming. Epic quests set against a backdrop of war, espionage, or something else just as grand and unifying for millions of players.