PC GAMER Article

NewDoom reports the following:

Doom III Gamer
Posted by FACE.UK on Friday, June 14, 2002

PCGamer has hit the streets in the UK and splashed all over the front cover is ID's Doom III. This is the first time it has appeared in a magazine in such depth. The article spans five pages with screenshots and there is even a piece about the original two. Here are a few snippets from that paticular artical:
žDoom nearly ruined the academic careers of most people who work for Future Publishing
žWe might hold up Half-Life as a reference point for all our first person games today, but deep down in our souls it was Doom that set the flame burning.
Available at most good newsagents.

Cool. Guess I'll have to make a trip to my grandparent's town again, that's the only place where I've been able to find the magazine. Best PC game magazine out there IMO, not at all like its American counterpart. And worth the $10 price tag, especially now Doom III's in it.

/me can't wait

Does the magazine have it's own website?
If so, please give us the link..

Look's like I'll have to get out of bed and go and get it tomorrow.

damn, i just picked up this months american issue. GTA3 is on the cover, as if gta3 hasn't been talked about enough already. in the magazine there were maybe like 3 references to doom 3, and they were all made in a topic about games using the unreal warfare engine. meh.

pcgamer.com is the US site
pcgamer.co.uk is the european site

hope those help, dissorder.

Sadly, PC Gamer UK's website is rarely updated and for me, half the images aren't even showing up. Too bad, they used to have a pretty cool site.

We'll just have to wait till someone puts up a scan...

the US site looks pretty good and its been updated. just no doom.

hmm.. going to try and getting the damn magazine at the local train station here, dont know if they have it, but its worth the try

Upload it if you get it, I can't find the damn thing anywhere.

nope they dont have it.. damn

I got it today. No new information whatsoever, it's basically an extended interview with Hollenshead.

Holy shit, news from newdoom.com which is actually original and informative!

fraggle said:

Holy shit, news from newdoom.com which is actually original and informative!

Consider it a reaction to newdoom.tk

Anyone know how to import it?

GS-1719 said:

I got it today. No new information whatsoever, it's basically an extended interview with Hollenshead.

Do you have a scanner ? If so, it'd be cool if you could upload the thing somewhere. Saves me about $10 :)

Lord FlatHead said:

Do you have a scanner ? If so, it'd be cool if you could upload the thing somewhere. Saves me about $10 :)

20 bucks now! :)

If I had a scanner and the magazine, hell yeah I would.

As requested, the text. Blame Office XP's OCR for any errors.

DOOM III

“We’re going to scare the shit out of you,” says a grinning Id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead.
We’re inclined to agree. Hollenshead is in good spirits - clearly satisfied in the knowledge that Id’s next game is the buzz of the show floor at the annual E3 Expo in Los Angeles. It’s also the cause of much queuing.
Tortuous lines of developers PR, people and money men snake around the Activision stand — all desperate to grab a seat in the mercilessly hot industrial style bunker that passes for a behind-closed-doors auditorium. Its after witnessing the ten-minute game demo hidden within that we sit down with Hollenshead to talk about what’s almost certainly the most anticipated game on the PC since.., well, Doom II, probably. id Software aren’t known for talking to the press too much (this being the one UK press interview about the game); that said, when on a subject that’s close to his heart, Hollenshead is more than happy to wax lyrical. In short, Doom III is eight years overdue. Why have we had to wait so long, and why make it now?
“Well, we’ve had a lot of stuff on our plate:’ Hollenshead begins. “We went from Quake to Quake II to Quake III Arena and Team Arena, and then there was Return to Castle Wolfenstein too. Why now? Well, [Lead programmer] John Carmack’s vision of the technology matched the type of game we wanted to make, so it’s just the perfect time. It’s a dark, scary, moody game. A lot of people - if they think about what Doom meant to them – were scared when they played the previous games. Now there’s a match between the technology and the game design — enabling us to scare the hell out of people. Most of the guys in the company were raised on Doom as players and its like the Holy Grail of development to be able to make the next one. We’re just super excited as hell to be able to do it.”
Super excited as hell? So are we to be frank. Casting our cynical British games journalist personas aside, watching the demonstration of three of the game’s environments reduced us to the level of a bunch of seven-year-olds on Christmas Eve. Watching a new Star Wars film. Having eaten sugar all day. We managed to contain ourselves when the US journos started a round of “It rocks, man!” — but only just.
The reason for the excitement is a combination of two things: the visuals, and.., hell, to be honest, it’s just those visuals. Unreal Tournament 2003 looks great. Unreal Episode II looks even better. But Doom III is just spectacular. Check out the screenshots and keep telling yourself they’re in-game and not renders. Without seeing it in action, that’s the only way to convince yourself that some of the scenes in Doom III are even possible as real-time in-game images.
Hollenshead explains: “it’s an absolutely 100%- new renderer. In fact it represents a new paradigm how 3D graphics are going to be presented, Pre determined light maps and bsp processes have all gone now for Doom III. All the lights act within the world, and all the characters cast shadows on the environment and themselves; all the lights are just like lights in the real world. So just as the director of movie, who would set up a camera shot with all the lights that he’d use to set the atmosphere and mood, the game unfolds in the same way — the level designers actually use that process.
“There are tons of other features too, like the bump-mapping, skeletal animation system, scripted sequences, and in the physics demo when you saw zombie fall down the stairs — it was all running straight off the renderer, in real time, on the PC. None of that stuff is a movie or a different file…”
Hollenshead’s referring to a scene in the demo — a bloated zombie having been blown away with what looks to be the game’s default basic weapon, a fast-action pistol — the grotesque corpse completely realistically down the metal staircase. No clipping problems, no ‘hovering’, no graphical glitches — fully realistic tumbling that bends limbs of the cadaver as it hits every separate step.
Doom III appears to mark a departure for Id Software in many areas — not just technologically. The most fundamental is that the game is to be a predominantly single-player affair, with only rudimentary deathmatch-based multi-player included. So why the shift to single-player, and why tackle the game themselves when it could have been handed over to a third-party developer like Gray Matter (who made Return to Castle Wolfenstein) or Raven (who are currently busying themselves with Quake IV?
“After making Quake Ill and Team Arena, which were hardcore multi-player games and tried to be innovative on the multi-player side, it had been a long time since weed done a single-player game - since Quake II, in fact. A lot of the designers felt that they wanted to work on a single-player experience, plus we feel that the technology will be really powerful from a single-player perspective.”
Creating the sequel to one of the most well- known and well-loved games of all time clearly hasn’t fazed Id either. Quite the contrary, in fact — they’re completely at ease despite our massive expectations.
“Expectations are high and deservedly so,” Hollenshead admits. “But we really haven’t felt a lot of pressure because we’re so excited to be working on it, I mean, I think you can tell when you look at the game demo that everyone in the company is 100% into making this game:’
Ah, the game, it’s easy to get caught up in the technology to such an extent that Doom III feels like a demo of a game engine rather than an actual story- driven shooter, it’s a renderer that will power many fries long after Doom III has been released and reviewed, and will doubtless have potential licensees arguing over the benefits of Doom I tech as opposed to Epic’s Unreal,
In terms of ‘gameplay’, then, it’s important to note that this is not Doom III all over again, You can forget about hordes of enemies and cartoon visuals, That, it seems, is now solely Serious Sam’s remit, the legacy of mowing down multiple monsters is replaced in Doom III by much more intimate action. Think a first-person Resident Evil but far, far scarier, or as Hollenshead offers: “We’re really going for the fear factor over fast action, so the monsters are more individually terrifying, powerful and frightening. There’s a lot of power.., a lot of ‘oomph’, as opposed to wanting to just throw vast quantities of moving gun turrets at you.”
A cynic might suggest that the game code (shown running on an Intel 2.4GHz at 1280x1024, no less) might not be able to handle a plethora of models regardless of the desired design doc. Despite having fewer enemies on-screen than Doom II, though, its potential for truly terrifying scenes is still huge. It soon transpires that lighting is key to much of the tension — shadows are cast high on walls, a dramatic indicator of approaching creatures; hiding in the shadows as a means of avoiding some of the gargantuan beasts is possible, but, naturally dark corners can also serve as hiding places for your foes...
And on the subject of your enemies, Id are clearly going to town on some of their designs. Slow- moving zombies soon give way to a variety of hell- beasts — many of them a combination of metal and flesh that would be at home in some of the darker corridors of Quake II. One foul foe boasts attacks as diverse as an up-close kung fu kick and an extensible fleshy arm not unlike the tongue of Resident Evil’s Licker. The inspiration of Quake’s Fiends is also obvious in many — particularly the fireball-firing crawling beasts that, should you get within their range, will launch themselves at you — a hideous frenzy of flailing arms and guttural grunts.
Fighting back won’t elicit errant limbs, however. There’s no dismemberment system as such - not for this game the GHOUL-technology from Soldier of Fortune II. Yet even without that, Doom III has no trouble turning the stomach. 1-lollenshead is clearly at home talking about the gore. “All the collision detection and hit detection is per-surf per- polygon location damage, so if you shoot a character in the shoulder there will be a connection. Not only what’s shown on the character, but how they react and the skeletal animation. Boom! They get hit in the shoulder. Boom! They get hit in the leg, or their head will fly back. There are different ways the blood sprays off, too..:’
It’s a system whose effects are revealed in gratuitous close-up during a scene in which a floor- crawling monster is shown chewing on the corpse of one of your fellow marines. Coupled with a swinging overhead light that changes the shape of the shadows constantly — alternately concealing then revealing the horror that’s ensuing — it’s a powerful demonstration of just how atmospheric and hugely cinematic Doom III is going to be. One to play in the dark with headphones on, then.
Shock, horror: there’s a story-line too. They’re not keen to give anything away just yet, but having hired the man behind the stories of 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, Matt Costello, they’re clearly serious about creating an involving yarn that’s going to offer more than the wafer-thin premises of the original Doom and Quake titles. The year’s 2145, and our hero works for the Union Aerospace Corporation. As the intro solemnly intones: “For years, man has looked to science for answers... But now, science has opened the door to the unknown:’ Cue a scan of planet Mars, a beautifully rendered fly-by of the planet’s industrial complex, and a lovingly crafted intro that reveals nervous security forces, secretive scientists and the inadvertent opening of a passage to the underworld. Possessed marines swiftly follow, along with the introduction of some of the most outrageously sinister in-game enemies you’ll have ever seen. Although the environments that follow are all variations on a theme — rusty industrial interiors, moody lighting and retro futuristic squalor — it’s been revealed that the game will eventually transport the player to Hell. The story apes the journey of the marine from the original Doom game.
Speaking of which, is the story and single-player experience the only reason Id have chosen to take Doom III on themselves?
“Well, Raven really wanted to work on Quake IV;’ says Hollenshead. “We have a special, unique relationship with them, and if we’re going to entrust one of the most important games — if not the most important PC game of all time — to someone, then it had to be Raven. Plus, I guess we’re just too damn greedy to keep Doom for ourselves..’
Who can blame them? Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of the Doom III action — including Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, who turned up at the E3 show to lend his support. Hollenshead is enthusiastic but has to be cautious since at the time of writing, Reznor and Id Software hadn’t yet signed a deal for the full game score.
“We’re working on a path to completion to get Trent on board for the full game. From Trent’s standpoint, what we’re able to do with the game’s atmosphere means that he can really innovate on the sound side, to an extent that hasn’t been done on the PC before. Overall — the sounds, the visuals, the environments, and the immersive nature of the game... and I know that these are marketing-speak words, but if you see it then you understand this is not just bullshit. This is the game. It’s going to completely redefine what people expect to see and experience in a game. It’s more than just watching it on the screen. It gets into your head.’
It’s liable to get inside the heads of the online community too, for it’s planned that Doom III will be the most easily modifiable shooter ever, with the tools and editor both shipping with the game. Id are clearly going head to head with the Unreal engine making sure that their fan base will have the means create new mods and maps from day one
As Hollenshead says “John [Carmack] has been an innovator in that regard and really I think that he brought the ability to modify PC games to the level they are now. The cool thing for development with Doom III is that the editor and all the tools will be built into the game so as you make a level you can literally light it as you go.”
With 20 people working on the game — the biggest team size Id Software has ever had — it’s clear that work is continuing apace Its already been under way for 18 months and the team are evidently keen to throw all resources at it The announcement of add on for Return to Castle Wolfenstein - called Enemy Territory - was somewhat inevitably overshadowed by Doom III, and the extra single-multi-player level expansion that’s being worked on by Mad Doc and Splash Damage respectively is a conversation for another time.
For now there’s only one game on everyone’s lips and its the undisputed
hit of the E3 Expo Id Software (and John Carmack in particular) have done it again, and as a game that currently PC-only, it’s doubly satisfying.
Hollenshead’s closing thoughts: “It’s a leap ahead. People might debate this, but from my standpoint, everybody else is essentially working on the Quake III graphics implementation model. They may have new tweaks and features and additions that they make it but Doom III is really a different paradigm and that’s why it looks so different Its a generation ahead of everything else that you’ll see.”
And the talented Mr Carmack? “Well, a lot of people will be like — damn that guy,” he laughs.
There most certainly will Doom III vs Unreal Episode II, anyone?

NINE YEARS IN HELL

You see those two ugly pixellated screenshots at the bottom of this box? What the devil, you might reasonably demand, are they doing adorning a feature on the most visually stunning game ever? Well, they’re the reason we’re so excited about Doom III In fact, they’re one of the main reasons why we’re excited about PC gaming at all.
Back in 1993, a small but highly talented development studio known as Id Software released a game — their second first-person shooter, the follow-up to their seminal Nazi-blaster Wolfenstein 3D. It was simply entitled Doom. That was when everything changed. Id decided to release the first third of the game for free, thus making it shareware, just like Wolfenstein 3D Distribution of that first episode went into wild-fire mode as it became obvious that this was a revolution in that everyone could play on the cutting edge of horror gaming, for free. Doom was terrifying, violent and beautiful to behold. Doom was a B-movie that scared the hell Out of you. Doom made the first-person shooter the premier PC genre. Doom introduced the digitally rendered shotgun as a sublime form of entertainment and it set all the precedents for modern 3D gaming. Doom nearly ruined the academic careers of most people who work for Future Publishing. Doom changed the world forever. In 1994, Doom II: Hell on Earth arrived, then the inappropriately named Ultimate Doom (‘95) and Final Doom (‘96). The Doom games spread across all the formats, eventually reaching even the Game Boy Advance for hand-held Doom action.
We might hold up Half-Life as the reference point for all our first-person games today, but deep down in our souls, it was Doom that set the flame burning. Possibly its greatest achievement was to brand its name into the general public’s consciousness, so much so that when moralisers cite a game they think has corrupted the minds of the young they’ll point the finger at Doom. A game that’s now nine years old. It’s time to be excited.

Thx m8 for the info!
While it doesn't offer any new information about the game, I still enjoyed reading this wonderful article.

For anyone who missed anything about DOOM III - this is the article for you! :)

That was a treat indeed, thanks.

/me writes note to buy magazine.

PC GAMER guy said:

Having eaten sugar all day. We managed to contain ourselves when the US journos started a round of “It rocks, man!” — but only just.

Jeez, they say americans are stuck up, but get a load of this guy! :P

But good article otherwise, i wish i could get a copy :(

Man. That's some good stuff right there. Thanks GS-2168798 or whatever your name is. I'll still be buying the mag when it comes out, though - and I encourage everyone here to do so, too.

Of course, what stood out most for me was another tech-related thing. The Doom III presentation was running at 1280x1024. On ATI's new card. With only a couple noticeable slowdowns.

It's time to get excited alright.

Found scans of the article on doomiiifiles :
page 1 (621 Ko)
page 2 (515 Ko)
page 3 (641 Ko)
page 4 (785 Ko)
page 5 (793 Ko)

Great work! I feel like printing that out :P

Hey, buddy, thanks for the entertaining read! Very cool!

Yeah. They did goof up by saying "the original models were 100,000 polygons, but it'll be less in the final game". This gives the impression that the final game will be less impressive than the E3 presentation. But hey. Y'know.

Lord FlatHead said:

Yeah. They did goof up by saying "the original models were 100,000 polygons, but it'll be less in the final game". This gives the impression that the final game will be less impressive than the E3 presentation. But hey. Y'know.

They also stated the hell knight (drooly) was the Imp.