Another Doom 3 Preview

Over on Computer & Video Games Dot Com there's another one of those nifty Doom 3 previews you've come to know and love so much (we haven't seen any in a while either). Mostly, as with other previews, it rehashes on stuff you probably already know if you've been keeping up with this stuff, though I found a few things I didn't know before:
...Todd lets slip the fact that the cream-coloured box [running Doom 3] contains a GeForce 4. A card that's going to be available for very little money when the game finally ships in 2003. And that's if you want to play the game with full detail. Apparently the game will play with most detail turned off on a first-generation GeForce card.
"We're not going to try to overwhelm you with lots of stupid monsters," says Todd. "We're not going for 1,000 imps coming at you at once. They're going to be smarter and scary in their own right, as opposed to scary just because there's loads of them."
There's also few screen shots there as well that I haven't seen before, but I may be mistaken about their newness. Also to read the second page of the article you need to sign up with the web site, but they don't appear to check if your e-mail is valid or not. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more.

Activate 2002 Coverage (10:32 am)
Doom 3 - Posted by Dave "mewse" Kiddell - 0 Comments
There's an article on Computer and Video Games.com detailing the author's experience watching a Doom 3 demo at Activate 2002. This would normally be where I talk a bit more about things the article has to say, but apparently, "Guest privileges for today have expired - but why not join us now?". Frads.

muhahaha

way to post AFTER me with a story four times as long, jerk store

I seem to remember quite clearly that Carmack, in a .plan update said "Do not buy a geforce 4 for playing doom"...and now they're demonstrating the game on a geforce 4? interesting....

Jello said:

I seem to remember quite clearly that Carmack, in a .plan update said "Do not buy a geforce 4 for playing doom"...and now they're demonstrating the game on a geforce 4? interesting....

No. He said 'Do Not buy a Geforce 4 MX for Doom'

Also, all those 'new' screens in that preview are from the Legacy video.

"We're not going to try to overwhelm you with lots of stupid monsters," says Todd. "We're not going for 1,000 imps coming at you at once. They're going to be smarter and scary in their own right, as opposed to scary just because there's loads of them."

Thats too bad. It isnt scary when 1000 imps come at me in doom/doom2, its just the real doom feeling of having a nice amount of targets to fire my shotgun at and seeing them die one after another. It would be seriously non-doom if i would need half of my ammo just to kill one smart ass imp :(

Jello said:

I seem to remember quite clearly that Carmack, in a .plan update said "Do not buy a geforce 4 for playing doom"...and now they're demonstrating the game on a geforce 4? interesting....

yeah, that was a geforce 4 *mx* which is lacking pixel shaders, a lot different than the geforce 4 ti or whatever

Gherkin said:

Thats too bad. It isnt scary when 1000 imps come at me in doom/doom2, its just the real doom feeling of having a nice amount of targets to fire my shotgun at and seeing them die one after another. It would be seriously non-doom if i would need half of my ammo just to kill one smart ass imp :(

Actually that would probably be more like DOOM than DOOM is, if that makes sense. That is, with the new atmosphere of DOOM 3. I hope DOOM 3 will have a real hell, instead of a bunch of randomly mixed textures and flats and levels resembling an open-area Laser Force arena.
/me thinks of E3M6 - Mt. Erebus

Alright, thanks for clearing up the "MX" "TI" thingy for me. I guess I didn't remember as clearly as I thought.

Gherkin said:

Thats too bad. It isnt scary when 1000 imps come at me in doom/doom2, its just the real doom feeling of having a nice amount of targets to fire my shotgun at and seeing them die one after another. It would be seriously non-doom if i would need half of my ammo just to kill one smart ass imp :(

The largest number of enemies I can recall on screen at once in Doom or Doom 2 is in map08, when there are 31 Imps in one room. For some reason people always seem to confuse how many monsters the Doom engine can handle with the amount that appeared in the actual game. :o

If the levels in Hell Revealed were the original Doom levels, I'd have to agree with you, but the new Doom is a remake of the original game, not the engine :)

so if doom3 can run on a first gen gforce, then i presume it can run on just about anything with probobly 16 megs of ram or more???
if this is true then whoop di da for my tnt2

=oD

Yes, people are seriously overestimating the specs Doom 3 will need. I expect it will have at least a dozen graphics options (probably more), each with several levels they can be set at.

As I've said before, bear in mind that Doom 3 is also being developed for the X-Box, which has relatively low specs, so although the PC version will (hopefully) be much better than the X-Box version with everything turned up, you should be able to turn everything down so it'll run acceptably on at least an X-Box equivalent system, if not even lower.

Um, XBox has a 733mhz CPU as well as a 300mhz GPU and 64megs of DDR. It's quite a capable system and also remember it's a dedicated gameing machine unlike a computer which also has to run a bigger OS, as well as a bunch of extra background processes as well as the game.

I'm betting doom3's absolute min specs will be around a 500 (maybe even as high as 700 though) mhz CPU, 128 memory and a vid card with at least 16mb of memory, but who knows.

I prolly won't look at this thread any more, so no one bother yelling at me eheh.

Cyb: I'm talking about the people who seem to think that Doom 3 will require a 1.5ghz system with 256 megs RAM and the very latest graphics card.

Besides, there are already PC games that would make the X-Box slow to a crawl without being severely tweaked. Morrowind is a good example, and as that game actually is coming out for the X-Box, it'll be quite interesting to see how much they've had to change it - I expect they'll probably just reduced how far into the distance you can see.

Oh, and I should think the winter forest levels of Medal of Honour: Allied Assault would also perform horribly on the X-Box ;)

Gherkin said:

Thats too bad. It isnt scary when 1000 imps come at me in doom/doom2, its just the real doom feeling of having a nice amount of targets to fire my shotgun at and seeing them die one after another. It would be seriously non-doom if i would need half of my ammo just to kill one smart ass imp :(

Well, Doom 3 won't have one "smart" imp in a room that you'll waste all your ammo on - if you're an experienced fps player (and I assume that you are), you can take it down with at least two-three shotgun blasts - that's definitely not half the player's ammo and since modern systems will be able to handle up to five characters on-screen in the Doom 3 engine, this'll mean that they can still throw small groups at the player.
If the id guys design the maps right, they can still throw a satisfactory amount of enemies at you.
There won't be "hordes" of enemies in large outdoor areas all at once, but that wasn't the typical situation in Ultimate Doom - the typical situation there was more like what we've seen in the videos so far - rather crammed, darkened corridors, monsters hiding around the corners and a shitload of suspense and then from time to time, a few groups of enemies would be thrown at you, but rarely anything overwhelming.

But it won't be another boring Unreal-like game which only throws one or two annoying monsters at you once in a while after walking/running a couple of miles, like you insinuate.

kain said:

so if doom3 can run on a first gen gforce, then i presume it can run on just about anything with probobly 16 megs of ram or more???
if this is true then whoop di da for my tnt2

=oD

Geforce1 is the stated minimum, not sure whether its hardware T&L or other hardware specific acceleration. But the tnt2 wont cut it.

When will people learn that the original Doom's were atmospheric shooters and not Shoot'em'ups? I'm sure Doom3 will have many monsters as well. From what we've seen it's constant action.

Shaviro said:

When will people learn that the original Doom's were atmospheric shooters and not Shoot'em'ups? I'm sure Doom3 will have many monsters as well. From what we've seen it's constant action.

The trick about Doom was that it was a bit (quite a lot actually) of both. There WAS plenty to kill, but there was also plenty of suspense to frighten you.
And from what I've seen so far, Doom 3 captures the essence of the old Doom perfectly imo - lots of action and LOTS of suspense :-)