Doom 4 announced

I kinda enjoyed Doom 3.....I mean, for what it was I thought it was technically sound and the gameplay did a good job. It wasn't just you versus the bad guys, it was you versus the bad guys and the environment...unless you cheated and jacked the gamma to high heaven. They nailed the atmospheric thing.

YES, it was repetitive towards the end, but it was clearly a game designed to be gone through once that used Funhouse mentality to get its thrills (intersperse quiet with loud, fast action). It accomplished what it set out to do, but having to choose between flashlight and weapon...while a design decision..was fairly stupid....and with the flashlight on the weapon at all times, it eliminated alot of the spooky...well, until stuff started popping out behind you....every...2 minutes or so.

The bad things about the game are, of course, the lack of hit-animation....so you could be laying into a bad guy and they just kept coming at you until you reached their magical hit point level. With 300 guys rushing you thats one thing, with only 1 or 2 at a time you KINDA want a little more interaction, some satisfaction that you are INDEED expending a whole clip of high velocity rounds into some zombie douchebag. And of course, the Monster-In-The-Closet thing that most folks hated.

I kinda look forward to a Doom4, but frankly....not if its Doom3 with DX10 graphics. There needs to be more than 4 guns and spooky mars caves, Id needs to really stop making tech demos and make an actual game. Doom3 was a step in the right direction........lets hope they can pull it off again with Doom4.

More weapons, more advanced physics..and if its gonna be another dark funhouse ride at least give us some more satisfying environments and some enemies that can take body-specific damage and react to it. And enough of the damn annoying flying-skull "sewer rat" monsters please.....there is nothing so annoying as flyng cannon fodder.

Well Doom I was revolutionary on many levels...the violence, for one. The 3D world for another. Doom II and its ilk were just more of the same.

Doom III actually made the original Doom game a sort of real 3D shooter, the mars base looked like a mars base (and not just a silly maze, etc). But then again....it also was so oldschool in its gameplay, with nothing to do but shoot at the spooks that jumped out of the dark.

I think if they try to do another funhouse game they'll fail, and nobody will buy it. But a better FPS....with some funhouse LEVELS might be tolerable....

I will never ever complain that a game is "too long", ever. Thats the dumbest arguement I've ever heard...its like saying "This steak is too big!"

The game got interesting in the later levels, so I had no complaints...the problem is they did the "everything is dark and shiney" in the last game.....and since pitch-dark games don't always look great on LCD monitors, and EVERYONE bitched about how dark the game was at default levels, I doubt they'd try to do that same formula again.

What will be interesting to see is if they try to do the same format, devoting all their time to graphics and leaving gameplay behind. They really can't expect to release this kind of game again, in 2009 lets say, and not expect to get panned in the process.

John Carmack is too busy flying rocketships around now, isn't he? Does he even do work at Id and if so, what have they been doing for the past few years since D3/Q4?

Yeah I wasn't sure what they have been up to, since it was DOOM3..and then poof, he's off doing his rocket science thing.

I also agree that its a shame we dont see more games coming out using existing engines, we might actually get more games to market. I'd be happy to have games that use the existing engine, but it seems every game maker has to take an existing engine and then try to "tweak it" for 1 or 2 years before getting their ultimately "only marginally improved" game out the door.