TheGamePhilosophe

Looks like Tiago Sousa, in the year he's been at id, remade the Doom engine into something more like Crytek. That was definitely the vibe I got from the demos, especially the foundry level. From what I've seen, I don't like it. Crytek is too clean and sterile for me. Everything looks bland--and boring. I think id tech 5 (or a refinement of it) would have been perfect for the new Doom. Megatextures give the world a graphic novel aesthetic. I feel this would have been great for creating really interesting looking hellish environments with lots of artistic flourishes. It would've also have let them make monsters more reminiscent of the classic Doom, with cartoon-like, exaggerated features--not the overly slick, generic, cgi looking things in the demo. The Cyberdemon would have looked amazing with megatextures.

OK. But this seems more like the exception than the rule in the demo. Re-watching it, other than this moment, the player is fighting waves of 3-4 demons at a time, with a lot of obvious scripting (i.e., as soon as he finishes one group of enemies, another shows up).

Yeah, but in this demo I'm not sure if we ever saw more than three enemies at a time, which came in waves of succession. There's a pretty big difference to me between 3-ish and 6-12 or more.

During the post-show interview, Marty Stratton described id Tech 6 as a significant departure from 5. From what I can see, the new Doom is not using megatextures. I don't get any impression of the painterly quality of megatextures in the demo. Instead, I notice a lot of atmospheric effects and lighting. I'm very disappointed by this. I'm a big fan of id Tech 5 and enjoyed immensely the games made with it (RAGE, Wolfenstein, and Evil Within). The amazing detail the engine allows breathes so much life and character into its worlds. I find games like Crysis 3, with all its bells and whistles, to be quite dull by comparison. I was hoping they would continue to iterate on this technology, which seemed to get better (less pop-in, fewer blurry textures) with each game using it.