Wirehead Studios

http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200708/N07.0803.1731.12214.htm?Page=2

Well there you have it.  There will be a Doom 4, and a sequel to Quake 3.

So is quake 3-2 going to be  like gen? cause it kinda seems like that's what q3 was supposed to be... as for DooM 4... Is it going to be like plutonia, tnt, or eviloution where it's just more levels and nothing else new? cause I think there should be more new-ness to nessecitate an actual sequel.

Well, here's my hope.  I'm hoping that "Tech 5" is the maturation of the engine tech Carmack pioneered with Doom 3.  If so, then for Doom 4 they can concentrate strictly on content and design as opposed to technology development.  That means there's a lot of room for what Doom 3 did not have that Doom 1 and Doom 2 did have.  Of course, this depends a lot on the design goals as well.  We know nothing about Doom 4 as of yet beyond "It's intended".

As for a Q3A sequel... your guess is as good as mine.  If they want to make a Generations-ish game, well, they own the copyrights on all their previous stuff so it's not like we could tell them no or something.  Why would we want to anyway?  I have a feeling it will just be more of an "updated" Q3A using Tech 5 that picks up somewhere Q3 left off.  I do know why Carmack wants to do a sequel to Q3A.  He's stated in other interviews that he feels Q3 is the pinnacle of online gaming and wants to continue that style of FFA deathmatch.  That's the same motive behind Quake Zero.  It's to get people back into FFA deathmatch.  Personally I think it's a good thing.  How many former deathmatchers have been sucked into WoW or other MMO's?  Doom 3 isn't great for deathmatch, and Quake 4 - let's face it, it's Q3 deathmatch with worse system requirements and ugly levels.  Q2 players don't like it.  Q3 players... depends on who you talk to.  Don't even ask Quakeworld players about it, and us Doomers... well there's Zdaemon and Skulltag for us.  I tried Q4 deathmatch once and it felt... strange, especially when playing it on the Q2DM1 and Q3DM17 remakes.  Personally I think Raven does a better job at making their own stuff, like Heretic and Hexen, and Elite Force, than making a sequel for someone else's stuff.

I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what Doom 4 and Q3A² hold.

DooM 4? Man, id is getting boring... Get some new IPs for Christ sake! Or at least create new universes with the Quake brand, don't reuse the ones already created 300 times.

id's oil is getting old, time for an oil change. That's my oppinion, at least.

Y'know that's not really a bad idea... give us new stuff, cause I kinda doubt anyone would like to see an updated Q1 game, or commander keen... everything else is starting to get slightly overused.

Um... Rage is new stuff.  That's what Tech 5 is for.  Doom 4, etc, will come afterward.

As class as Gen is, I've often wondered how id would have gone about implementing the same concept. If Q0 turned out to be a Gen-style game, I wouldn't complain (not least of all because we all got a taste of it first :doom_love: ).

Frankly I'm tired of realism shooters. Don't get me wrong, the likes of R6: Vegas, Black and Resistance: FoM are great games but I'd rather RJ my way out of a situation than spend most of my game time hiding around a corner.

More Doom is always welcome IMO, just as long as I don't have to sell my soul to Steam (sorry for bringing it up again, rant over :ninja: ).

And yes, Pho. Skulltag owns big style. :doom_thumb:

I agree with scalliano about realism shooters, I hate having to crouch-walk all over a level to keep my aim as good as possible, so what's wrong with realistic modern day settings but weapons and physics that make Q3 seem real?

Oh ye of little faith. I would like nothing more than to see a return to the world of Q1.. with those monsters.. and the overall gothic theme of things. I still think Q2, 3, and 4 are undeserving of the name, but that's something else entirely.

Then again, the more I think about it.. the more I doubt myself. Would I really like to see an updated Q1? Gen's spirit is with the Q1 of old that I know and love.. iD would strip that away and start over from scratch in order to 'recreate' it. I think Gen will do a better job at easing my purist soul.

Guess this post was kinda pointless.. oh well.

I'm not sure, a new Q1 remake could be interesting given that they keep everything somewhat true to the original, more weapons would be nice, and more story than something thats little more than a doom rehash...

Well what surprised me is why the Q1 storyline hasn't been revisited with the Doom 3 engine - barring that one project of course, I forget it's name and I've not really checked out more than a few screenies.    Q1 maps were often dark, creepy, and gloomy, and the Doom 3 engine would be perfect for a Q1-style game.  Consider how the hell level looked in Doom 3.  Now imagine that kind of quality and "sporked-over reality" but with the Q1 universe.  Reworking Q1 or making a sequel without plot-slowing stuff like a PDA or squads to @!#!@# gimmicks to get in the way would be something else if done right.  The alternate dimensions could be made incredibly insane, dark, and evil, and the monsters could be made genuinely frightening.  If it were done, I'd want the classic "you vs the world" mode of play - forget the damned NPC's.  They all got turned into grunts anyway, right?

Now if someone made this and made it high quality and didn't screw with the formula I'd play it.  Yes, I know I've said I don't like Q1, and I still don't but a lot of that stems from technical reasons with the engine and the lack of any color besides blue, brown, and olive drab.

Yeah, Q1 on Doom 3 engine would probably look a hell of a lot better, look at the difference between the colors in Q2 and Q4, a hell of a lot less BROWN i seem to remember almost everything in Q2 being tinted with some shade of brown (not a bad concept to make things feel gritty but...) and in Q1 I don't really remember maps being warped alternate dimensions, I just thought of them as relatively normal places with weird crap in them.



I was kinda thinking of some kind of squad based game but that be far more suited to a new Doom on earth during/after an invasion... and look at Q4, squad based games kinda suck when they aren't done right..

What was so good about the "brown-ness" of Quake 2, is that its designers understood the power of subtlety. Stroggos was clearly a dusty brown planet, adding to the mood or the atmosphere of the place, but don't forget that the Q2 palette wasn't all brown. Lava orange, deep reds nicely contrasted with the softer brown and green tones of the game, but without becoming a spectacle of rainbow colour (like Quake 3 became). The palette limitation is a limitation, ofcourse, but at the same time -- if well the colours are well selected -- it can help to create a consistent atmosphere, enhance contrast and improve the quality of coloured lighting. That's what I think it did for Q2, anyway.

For an example of misuse of colour, look at the first Quake 4 level, and focus on the indoors areas. The odd combinations of lighting with colourless metal gray, tintless panes of glass and brightly red and yellow pipes is not good. If the colour scheme had been forced by a Q2-like palette limitation, these design flaws would not even have been possible. :]
The same can be noted in those Q3 maps made by people who just can't resist cramming everything in there. It's not good to get too much repetition, but it's equally bad to just start making the rooms as if they were decorated by a bunch of dissenting teenagers.

Sorry, was going on my relatively bad memory, and there is that Q3 bot chat line "Aww crap brown again?"

Heheh -- why apologize? One look at the Quake 2 palette: (http://skindom.planetquake.gamespy.com/faq/quake2/quake2-pal.gif) shows that there is there is definitely some 'leaning towards brownity'. I can sympathize quite well with those who can't appreciate that. :] However, it must be admitted that even crap comes in a great variety of browns..

Quake II has an awesome colour scheme. It gives the game an unique look, a look impossible to imitate, no matter how hard anyone tries. The brown colour is an important colour in the first two Quakes. What made id change the palette from brownish to rainbow in Quake III and from there to greyish in the last Quake? Hmm...
Quake III's palette is varied so that 3rd party developers would easily adapt the engine. The wider the number of colors, the greater number of options. As for QIV... dunno.

well... just how... "involved" was ID in Q4's development?

As for the Q2 palette... LOL

The easy answer to the 'palette change', Kruz (ehr.. Lops), is that there isn't a palette. At least, not of the selective 256-colour kind that lower-bit graphic games like Doom, Quake and Quake 2 use. (One of the difficulties for Quake 2 skinners (*cough*, that includes me), was that you had to pixel-paint using the actual game palette, or face an often horrible alteration of your work as it was eventually translated to Quake 2 colours.)
Bitmaps for Quake 3 are not palette-translated, but stored to allow for 16 million colours, as much as most windows desktops allow.  One of the key reasons why id used all the colours of the rainbow in their game is, I think, because they could. ;]

As far as I know, id was not involved in Q4's development. I think that one is all Raven -- its design sure leads me to believe that. :)

Edit:  If any of this seems redundant, Tab posted while I was typing.

I can answer on Quake 3.  Doom, Quake, and Quake 2 all were limited to 256 color palettes.  Quake 3 uses full 32-bit RGBA color.  RGBA works like this:

Red    = 0-255
Green = 0-255
Blue   = 0-255
Alpha = 0-255

Every pixel drawn has four color values assigned to it.  Alpha is used to determine transparency for certain types of color blending.  In addition, Quake 3 uses a shader which is a scripting language that lets you perform mathematical computations with color as well as the texture coordinates.  All the special effects in Generations rely on the shader.  If you want to see what Quake 3 looks like without functioning shaders, switch to vertex lighting mode in the system menu.  The advantage of 32-bit color is that you have over 16 million colors available to you, plus transparency, and with the shader language you can do damn near anything you want to the textures so long as the engine supports it.

That's not to say the Quake 2 engine couldn't do more than 256 colors.  The textures were restricted to 256 colors, the game engine could offset those with lighting, and I believe the same held true for Doom and Quake 1.  Running a 256 color palette, as Tab said, does have the advantage of unifying the appearance of a game.  It's also very fast to calculate because instead of having to specify RGBA values all you need is a numeric pointer to the palette.  The downside is that in order to do certain effects you had to resort to palette swapping.  The color blends for pain in the view, or Quad, or even the Doom invulnerability are all done either with a palette shift or a palette substitution.

Now as to color schemes in textures, I think Id made Q3 more colorful because Quake has always had that "brown" thing.  Doom was more colorful but the environments wildly varied so it had to be more colorful.  With full 32-bit color plus alpha plus shaders opened up to the designers, I think they decided to try to develop more interesting and varied environments.  How well they succeeded in this is up to the player of course.  I really did not care for the Q3 look or environs myself when the game first came out and it wasn't until I started working with models for Q3 that I learned to appreciate just how powerful the Q3 shader language and the color math is.  I'm doing some effects right now that would have been flat out impossible under any of the older games.

Doom 3 and Quake 4's engine just adds on to what Q3 started in that you could do specular maps for textures (shiny surfaces), bump maps, diffuse maps - all sorts of "effects layers" for textures that can make a 2d surface into a complex 3d form with light and dark areas and glossy and dull areas.  It gives the design artist a lot of options for dressing up a map and making simple model geometry more complex.  It also quadruples the workload to do so.  I think where Q4 went wrong visually is it looks nothing at all like the Stroggos of Quake 2, the same as the Strogg don't resemble the Quake 2 Strogg.  There are some impressive visuals in the game, but the Quake 2 feel is completely gone, and the color scheme and architectural design has a huge effect on that.  You look at the various areas in Quake 2 and they all have a very hard lined, uber-industrial appearance - lots of straight edges and hard angles, a persistent yellow ambiance outside - you certainly feel like you're on an alien world just because of the color of the lighting - and their technology was very much pure function and very spartan in design, except when you get to the palace level and the imperialistic nature of the Strogg reveals that their very technology is a monument to itself.  It's like "what if the Roman empire was made from Cyborgs?"  The Quake 2 Strogg looked like walking industrial machines with human parts tacked on - again, their form was to the point and no BS.  Jump to Quake 4 and you have lots of curves, useless mechanical clutter everywhere, and so much of it looks like shiny metal.  The environs are often very claustrophobic whereas in Quake 2 the Strogg had a lot of very large and open rooms.  The hallways in Quake 4 make no sense.  It's more like Doom 3 was modded to have cyborgs and uglier rooms when you look at the level design.  The outdoors look almost exactly like the Mars terrain from Doom 3!  Another lacking feature in Quake 4 is water.  Stroggos had a lot of sewers and toxic waste pools and lava.  In Quake 4 you have no sewers, no slime pits, no lava.  The Strogg themselves don't have that "Aliens powerloader" look anymore, being more fleshy and curvy.  They're more annoying than interesting.  The original Strogg had personality and a style to them that while they were evil as sin they were likable as bad guys.  The Quake 4 Strogg lack this quality in both appearance and action.

I could go on and on about the visuals as I'm sure Tab could, but you get the idea.  Having more options doesn't mean things will always look better.  You have to work your tail off and keep a concept in your head about how you want something to look and stick to that design plan.  I think that's one great thing about how Generations is working out.  Sure, we're a very small team with a very large project and it takes us a long time to make progress as a result of that, but we have a very consistent visual style and a very consistent feel to the gameplay.  Each class's weapons can be easily distinguished and have a consistent theme of color and feel.  There's exceptions with some models, textures, or effects of course, but then we're also not done either.  Where we are pretty "done" with some things, like the look of the Q2 weapons in the teaser vid, you can see how the final result all comes together.  We're also not trying to reinvent the weapons and gameplay from the old games - notable exception for Wolfy of course.  We're basically updating them to fit with the Q3 tech and letting them all play together in the same sandbox and tweaking where needed.  I think it's a lot harder to do something like Quake 4 or Doom 3 because you're starting from scratch and trying to remake what you had before without it being the same, and for Raven it's even tougher than with Id because you have this whole Quake legacy to live up to, but you want to be creative at the same time.  I still don't understand why they departed from the visual style of Quake 2 when they were able to make a damned convincing Star Trek universe with Elite Force.  Maybe Id just let go of the reigns too much?  I don't know.

I meant in the design department, not on the engine department :/ . Quake III itself (its models, its maps) use lots of colors. Sure, the engine can sustain 32-bits of colors, but the maps and the models didn't have to use half of those colors (exaggeration), they could have continued to use the brownish look.
I like Q3's design, but I prefer Q2's design: it has a lot more personality than Q3's (or Q4's for that matter).
DooM3 is a weird case. It lost some of its original personality, but it gained new stuff. Its design is amazing: the claustrophobic rooms, the dark areas, the monsters, the sounds, the flashlight thing. Wide spaces and a good range of colours was swapped by a constant tone of grey and black (darkness) and tight spaces. It sticked to the concept of colour consistency, like Q1 and Q2 did, and BAM, a great game is spawned. One of the things that amaze me in those two Quakes and in this last DooM is that consistency never equals monotony. Which brings me back to the question: if they knew (and know) how to create a game with colour consistency, why didn't they apply that concept in Q3? Just because of the engine change? The engine change didn't do much for DooM3...

Q4's design is clearly id, despite the fact tha it wasn't made by id (it looks like it, I'm not trying to say that it was planned by id). The game screams out "DOOM3DESIGN" from the beggining 'till the ending.

Think of the early days of Technicolor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor), or the introduction of colour TV's. The combination of a novelty and the disappearance of limitations with it inspires a 'because we can'-type of reasoning in making design choices. People bought TV's with colour saturation turned up to the maximum and kept it there, never mind that those red lips were much more red than the real thing. It took a long while before new monochromatic movies were accepted as being so by design/choice, rather than by a lack of funds -- you were going to make a serious moving picture? It was going to be in colour. Ofcourse, after the novelty wore off, people sort of regained their grip on normality, and saturation was toned down and more subtle colours seemed to be allowed to predominate on even mainstream movie's sets.

Hence my conviction that the engine change, in this case, might have been enough to result in a rainbow-coloured game. 32-bit coloured textures is pretty much the Technicolor of the gaming industry.

I've always liked the appearance of movies and cartoons filmed in Technicolor.  I'm pretty much into eye candy when it comes to colors.  I like bold colors, high contrasts, and stark color differences.  That's a big part of why I preferred the visual style of Doom to Quake 1.  Quake 1 is more muted, and there's less contrast.  "Dimness" in anything visual this bird does not like.  Grey skies and dull dreary days can throw me into fits of depression.  Let the sun shine brightly, even if it's white snow on the ground and cold, and I'll be in much better spirits.  That's one of the things that drew me to video games in the first place is the bright primary colors and melodic tones used in the old synthesizers of the day.  That's not to say I like all uses of bright color.  Pimp just doesn't do it for me, nor does Hippie.  O_o

Bright sunny days and hot weather isn't my thing. I actually prefer rainy days and grey skies.. thunder/lightning storms are even better. I love talking walks in such weather.. seems uplifting to me, both because of the weather itself, and that I know most other people don't like it (seems to make me enjoy it that much more). I even prefer the moon over the sun.. just too bad street lights block out the awesomeness of moonlight. I've never seen the town more beautiful than during a blackout at night, lit only by the moon.

*cough* Anyway.. I couldn't resist posting my opposite preference. Sorry for the 'off-topic'-ness.

Is alright.  I like thunderstorms myself.  The spectacle of ominous dark clouds with flashes of lightning is a beautiful sight to me.  I sleep very soundly through them and find them quite relaxing once the rain starts - so long as I'm content in my nice warm nest and not stuck out in the deluge.  I just dislike constant grey skies, and fog I cannot abide at all.  Turbulent storms that arrive, rain profusely, and depart in the same day I do not mind.

regarding Quake 3 A 2 i hope that there is more of a gen feel to it and not just q3a with D3 and q4 weapons added

as for D4 i'm not looking forward to it D3 ruined the doom series for me and RoE was a hideous HL2 Styled Expansion

as for rage i'll wait and see

For anyone looking for new Q1 stuff there is this  mod It's kinda neat, a few too many "earthquake" events but I think it does a good job of replicating Q1 on the D3 engine.

http://doom3.levels4you.com/downloads.l4y?review=16099&cat=199

Yeah that mod is good. Shame it's only one level, although apparently there's a sequel in the works. Music was a bit cock-rock for my taste, though, so rather than turn it off I replaced the .OGG file with some old-skool NIN goodness. Can't beat it. :slippy_thumb:

I hope that doom 4 will be like the Classic Doom's, since Doom was never intended to be a scary game... It was more like "DIEDIIDEIDEIIDIEDIEIDIEDIQJDU<LVGDALYDFILSAHGFOASDHVFHDSU?LOL" kind of gameplay.

Doom was an action game, no mistake, but it was supposed to have some scary elements to it, or at least, some unnerving components.  Who can forget the twitching bodies hanging from the chains, corpses of slain marines, and otherworldly architecture?  How about the first time one of those nearly invisible specters mauled your face?  Or when the doors came open and the Barons of Hell roared, marched forward, and after a dozen shotgun blasts, or a few rockets, just would not die?

First time I met the cyberdemon, I'll admit I was startled.  I play on Ultra Violence, naturally, so when I see the flying skulls out through the door I let off a rocket to blow the first one up.  So I hear a maximum volume ROAR, followed by this quite loud mechanical stomping noise.  I turned to gather some rockets then BOOM!  BOOM!  SCREEN GOES RED AND I'M TOAST!  I never saw what shot me.  Apparently I chose one of the two rooms near where the cyber is spawned, and he walked along the wall, and decided to shoot me in the back.  The second go-round with the cyber I was watching for him, and when I saw him I thought, "Oh, it's just a big demon with a rocket launcher for an arm."

So there you go, first time I played the registered version of Doom I got a bit of a fright.  Tis what I get for using loud volume and not covering my exits.

I remember my first encounter with ol' Cyber-chops. Two rockets up the jacksie and I was on the deck, staring at something in the distance, allthough old-skool Doom's limited resolution prevented me from seeing exactly what it was, other than it was BIG. The feeling of unease was furthered by the level's ace custom animated flaming background. Thing is, the PSX version also lobbed in a couple of Mancubii on that level  (great fior in-fighting). :ninja:

Yeah, Doom has a high speed but not for running and cowering in the shadows.

I've never cowered in shadows in Doom, nor Doom 3.  Demons tend to do that in Doom 3.  I just wait for them to come into the light, then blast them, or else lob a grenade into the dark places.  The exception is security zombies and chaingun commandos.  Those I'll attack from behind cover, and I'll use rockets on the chaingunners.  Tentacle commandos I found an evasive maneuver that's quite effective and allows me to execute a point blank chainsaw or shotgun attack to the head while avoiding damage completely.

DooM was full of scary stuff, so D4 will probably be as scary as D3.

I think part of D3's non-DooM-ishness can be blamed on the lack of corpse decorations, like the writhing upside-down guy with his ribcage torn open.

That and vanishing corpses.  I HATE vanishing corpses in games.  Half of Doom's mood was having dead people and monsters all over the place.  I realize there were engine limits, but please... let's bring back persistent corpses and gibs.

Aye. The one good time to study a model/skin's features is when a monster has finally stopped moving. Instead, I get to see a cheap-assed shader effect briefly, then nothing. Thankfully there are mods to change that..

I miss the games where they were run and gun. Now they are objective driven where you usually have a few stupid AI bots you have to keep alive or you have to start all over again  :wall: . It drives me nuts sometimes. Especially with Quake 4. I want something a bit more old school with kick ass graphics and rocking music. I'd take just looking for keys to get to a new area over keeping bots alive any day. I doubt we will get that again.

I just couldn't help this when I saw Classic DooM brought up  :doom_love: . For a long time I helped beta test CDooM with Flaming Sheep. That was a lot of fun and got tons of screen shots in my time with them. I guess I can't get shot for showing one now lol.

(http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b369/Death_Stalker/E1M7imp.jpg)

The music Sonic Clang came up with was awesome. I wish DooM 3 was like that to begin with  :doom_love: .

My bad if that was a bit off-topic. Been dying to show off some of those shots lol.

The strange thing is, run and gun is no longer acceptable for first-person shooters, despite the fact that FPS is inherently run and gun.  The idea is that everyone wants something more, so more is added - PDA's for storyline, or NPC's, vehicles, etc.  "Find key, open door" is replaced by "fulfill objective, advance to the next area", which is just FKOD with more visual glitz.  What's the difference between shutting down the pumping station so you can divert power to the Phobos Labs teleporter in Resurrection of Evil and flipping a wall switch to raise a set of stairs in Doom?  One just looks more plausible as a real goal than the other, but effectively it's the same thing.  Let's consider a few of the latest gimmicks in FPS games and see how innovative they really are.

Vehicles - First saw them in Shadow Warrior best I can remember - 2.5D sprite-based shooter.
NPC's - Napalm/Nam had them, Doom engine (I have a copy but never got around to playing it).
Realistic physics - Tresspasser had it long before Doom 3 or Half-Life 2.
Skeletal animations - Tresspasser also had these before Doom 3 or Half-Life 2.
Objective/Mission based play - Quake 2 introduced this.
Scripted actions - Half-Life introduced this, along with Unreal.
Cinematic cutscenes - Wing Commander series introduced this.

So what's really new about what's in the newer FPS games?  Best I can tell it's using everything all at once, bumping up the visual detail, etc.  You have the basic FPS play, but all this extra stuff thrown in like light and shadow, vehicles, rag doll, objectives, cut scenes, etc.  The extra stuff complicates and expands the game, which may or may not be a good thing depending on how the player sees it.  Serious Sam is the only game that has moved away from this trend, but I think it went TOO far in the opposite direction.  I've not played Serious Sam 2.  From the screenshots I saw, it looked like it went a bit on the silly side - even more so than the Second Encounter - and I'd prefer something a bit more, well, serious. :P

Serious Sam 2 is rather silly in a number of cut scenes/secrets, IF i remember right, it seems like I had trouble with FMVs...

but the problem is even though there is some element of run & gun in recent games it's rather watered down, not enough enemies due to hardware limitations (? dunno, RE4 had rather large amounts of things to kill) then again... nah, FEAR needed a few more enemies

I think the biggest thing I miss in the newer Id games would be the sound tracks. The music playing in the background while you played to set up tension or to build up adrenaline during a hectic fight. I noticed in both DooM 3 and Quake 4 there was a lot of silence. Usually all you heard was the ambient sound effects of the area. Don't get me wrong though, that did help to build up tension for a good scare when something actually did happen though. Although, being a player of the old games, I do miss the music. Quake 4 on the other hand did have some pretty cool tracks for some of the areas though. I guess I'm just old fashioned lol. Even with my problems with the way they handled those 2 games I still can't wait for a new DooM game to come out though  :doom_love: :doom_love: :doom_love: .

As for Serious Sam... I did like it to an extent. However my hands did get tired after a while. I haven't tried it since I upgraded my system a while back. Hmmm... :doom_?: I wonder...

Doom 3 used a LOT of ambient sounds.  I've been through the pk3 with all the sound files, and there's no shortage.  I can't remember ever hearing true silence in Doom 3.  If you use headphones of good quality (as I do) you'll hear a lot of subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ambiance.  That's a huge part of the atmosphere.  To play Doom 3, here's what I do:

1)  Make sure I can get a steady 60FPS almost all the time.  Sync my monitor up to 60Hz, and tweak Doom 3 to not allow any stuttering.  Make sure the light balance is correct in the game.
2)  Adjust the sound volume so I can hear the subtle noises (but not so loud that gunshots hurt my hearing) and use the headphones.
3)  Get my nest pitch black except for a soft red light so that I do not get "screen blind".
4)  Use my weapons mod pack that makes the shotgun not suck and speeds up the plasma rounds.

I think that really helps get the most out of it, or at least to me it does.  If you can get that immersive element going Doom 3 can be enjoyable for the dark creepiness.  If you can't hear all the ambient sounds I think it loses a lot of it, and playing Doom 3 in bright ambient light just destroys it.  I do miss the music tracks in the games, but I think triggered music is what everyone has gone to.

Triggered music isn't necessarily BAD, it helps the blood flow quicken for fights and slow for (overused?) puzzles/obscure paths, it's simply UNDER-used. The half life series is a prime example, you get some rather good music when you get a car/hoverboat but squat in the city rebellion or during the final boss fights.

I'd think you'd need adrenaline pumping music more in a fire fight than you would when you get in a freaking crane...

Call of Duty has plenty of run-n'-gun moments. In fact, Call of Duty was a great combination of objectives and run-n'-gun. Apparently, the last installment of CoD is more tactical than run-n'-gun. A shame, really.
Objectives and run-n'-gun can live together, but they have to be balanced, and I guess that is the major problem with today's FPSs. Devs aren't balancing these two elements correctly. The result? Mediocre FPS that could have been a lot more than what they are.

About soundtracks: HL2 is an awesome example of a well-applied soundtrack. The right song for the right moment. However, if  a game companie doesn't have a competent music composer, then I'd rather play the game without music than with music. :P

I'll have to give that a shot Pho. Maybe the same would hold true for Quake 4. Haven't really been able to sit through the entire game yet. I guess I have Quake 2 still in my mind while playing it lol.

Sorry about hijacking the thread. Please continue.

This discussion is all relevant, so I'd not consider it hijacking.  Now as for Quake 4... no amount of tweaking can really improve anything.  It's not creepy and atmospheric like Doom 3, and it's not meant to be.  It's supposed to be more of a stand up fight.  Therein lies some of the problem I think.  The Strogg and the Strogg environs in Quake 4 are just flat out wrong.  There should be at least some resemblance to Quake 2, yet there is none whatsoever.  The gameplay is way off as well, and certainly the arsenal is wrong.  If it were just its own game it could be forgettable or even forgivable, but this is supposed to be THE successor to Quake 2.  Doom 3 can be accepted because you've gone from 2d sprites and 2.5d terrain to a full 3d, realistically lit physics environ with a complete retconning of just about everything.  The horror theme could be played off of with the new engine.  Quake 2 already had a 3d environ and well recognized domains for its denizens.  It only needed enhancing, not reinventing.

I know I've said this before, but I would really have preferred a remaking or expanding of Quake 1 using the Doom 3 engine.  I know there's the Shambler's castle project (which I've not played) but I mean a full game.  Q1 had what could have been a very creepy side to it, and had a lot of shadow.  It seems a shame that Id passed this up.  It seems our Slipgate Ranger has become a casualty of innovation.

I never really understood why the story went from what it was in Q1 to the one from Q2. I wouldn't have changed it for the world because I love the story in Q2. Q1 on the other hand kind of lost me a bit.

I shouldn't try to think tonight... hurting my head. Got to take a final in the morning. Nite guys lol.

Well the short answer is John Romero left Id, and Id went in a different direction, or you could say John Romero left Id because Id was going in a different direction, or Id's going in a different direction caused John Romero to leave Id.  Anyway... the old Q1 never got an actual sequel, just a few expansion packs.  Consider, not counting expansion packs:

GAME Wolfenstein 3D Doom Quake Quake 2

SEQUEL Return to Castle Wolfenstein Doom 2, Doom 3 ---- Quake 4

I don't count Quake 3 Arena as a sequel or as needing a sequel since it's primarily multiplayer and incorporates some elements of Id games prior.  Q1 is left all alone.

My biggest issue with modern FPS games is that mission objectives are pretty much allways completely laid out for you. There's no real PUZZLING anymore (HL2 Portal aside, obviously). You know, working out some mad combination of switches in a level that opens up a massive secret area, platforming/teleport puzzles or the sort of set pieces that make you stand back and think, Right, I need to get over there, but how??

A good practical example of what I mean is the Alfred (http://www.doomwadstation.com/alfred.html) wad for D2. Not much of a looker, but it's completely bonkers. The thing is, it CAN be beaten without cheating.

That's one of the things I liked about Trespasser.  You were left completely alone to solve everything by your wits.  Sometimes it was somewhat obvious what to do, other times not so much, and while there was a definite linear progression, you could wander around and explore.  You just want to go straight to the next goal?  Fine.  You want to roam a bit and explore?  You might find something useful if you do or just scenery, or maybe something you'd rather not encounter.

I think this is also why I liked Unreal.  You pretty much had one main goal, which is the typical FPS "find the exit", but it was never spoonfed to you.  The progression from one level to the next felt natural, the environments were varied and interesting, and you didn't have an NPC or mission computer telling you "go here, do this", you just did it.  You had the translator for backstory and important clues (*cough* Doom 3 PDA *cough*) or you could ignore a lot of it and gun things down.  As for dark and creepy... when you shut down the Skaarj ship's reactor they did a good job there.  That was the original dark flashlight FPS moment as far as I'm concerned, and it felt a lot more natural.

Too many games now make you feel like you're being herded.  I think there's a tendency for overscripting of important events.  Do we really need cutscenes for every new monster we meet?  To me that's rather anticlimactic.  I'd rather just meet the things.  For example, Doom 3's trites had no cutscene.  You see a shadow in a crawlspace, and when you first meet them they just come out and attack you, and it's a SWARM when they do.  That sent my "I REALLY hate this creature" meter up nice and high, though surprisingly they never do swarm you inside a crawlspace.  Same thing with the Cherubs, which I hate more than trites.  Damned evil babies.  It's on the ground, and next thing you know it's slashing at your face.  I compare that to the cutscene monsters, like the Revenant,  Mancubus, Imps, Pinky demons, etc.  Maybe just a preference on my part, but it feels like the cutscenes take something out of it.  I think it breaks continuity.

I agree. Just imagine what Babel would have been like if you had been shown a cutscene of Cyber-bake coming around the corner. It would never have had the "WTF WAS THAT??" factor that made it so memorable. I still get chills thinking about laying on the ground staring at that big red silouhette in the distance.

I'm in two minds on the cutscene usage. On the one hand, I prefer to remain in control, and more importantly, in character, rather than get a weird third-person cutscene right before the action. The way it was handled in some games (including D3) took me out of the game, rather than aid immersion. On the other hand, where used properly such effects do tend to add to the dramatic effect. I'm not so sure I think the FPS genre needs that kind of thing, or whether it can use it without making it a gimmick. However, I do appreciate the gaming industrys attempts, succesful or not, to bring gaming to a kind of maturity on par with the cinema -- so long as there will be at least some games that stick to the old set-up..

I prefer HL(2)-style dramatics-, immersion-, and cinematographical aids: they set the mood, but keep you in the game.

I kinda like how FEAR did things, you saw everything through your character's eyes but thanks to psychic visions you got more of the story than you would in say HL2

Cutscenes must have something meaningful. Most D3 cutscenes serve one purpose: to show a new monster to the player, and that isn't exactly meaningful. Like you guys, I'd rather face a new beast face to face than through a cutscene.
HL2 has no cutscenes whatsoever, and I really like that about the game. FPSs are about first person, so I believe that everything that happens in a FPS should be seen through the eyes of the character, not through a "camera" behind the character.

To me, cut scenes can be used to advance dialog or show some other plot device happening away from the character.  For example, the air duct sequence in Doom 3 where at the end Campbell says, "Alright, plan B," is an example of where that's appropriate.  I think what's happened is there is a change in how cinematic sequences are handled.  A lot of older games had a clear cut division - cinematics were for story advancement, gameplay was gameplay.  Now you have the cinematics inside the gameplay.  I kind of understand part of why Id used cut scenes.  If the player is free roaming, they might look the other way and miss something, so I can understand their thinking there.  I do think Half-Life 2 handled it better by keeping the player in the game at all times.  I still think the best cut scene ever was Quakeguy standing on Shub's platform with the axe, with text scrolling by to the sinister music.  ^_^

Wow, I've missed out on quite a bit of discussion so far...

I too feel the DOOM 3 engine would have been perfect for a Quake 1 sequel.  I need to reinstall DOOM 3 so I can check out the Shambler's Castle mod.

I personally liked the inclusion of the PDA in DOOM 3.  I will concede that some of the audio logs ran long though.  It would have been nice to be able to move around while listening to one.

I also liked the inclusion of NPC's in DOOM 3.  The sentry guns were really your only friend in that game.  Everything else was trying to kill you.  Quake 4 was a little better but once you became "stroggified," you were on your own again.

As for the color palette of a game, I prefer vibrant and contrasting colors.  Quake 2 came out when colored lighting was still a relatively new thing.  As such, it had all sorts of crazy color combinations and I loved it.

DOOM 1 & DOOM 2 were about action first and horror second.  DOOM 3 was a let down for me because it focused far too much on the horror element rather than the action.  Its expansion, Resurrection of Evil, did a far better job of balancing the two.

The sewer portion of RoE is a great example of this.  You had a long narrow corridor populated by many enemies, a chain-gun full of ammo, and a desperate need to get to the other side.  The helmet that shielded you from the poisonous air also enhanced the mood by muffling all of the noise around you so that you could only hear the rapport of your bullets and the dying screams of your enemies.  :)

Returning to the Delta lab was also a wonderful mix of horror and action.  The entire section phased in and out of Hell.  You'd be in an empty corridor one moment and then surrounded by damned souls the next.

Painkiller is also in the vein of DOOM although it plays more like Quake 1 in terms of movement.

I like ambient noise, but I'm not a big fan of ambient music.  (I hate most of Quake 1's soundtrack.)  I also like triggered music, but I don't like it when it's only triggered by being in combat.

I personally think Raven did an acceptable job at recreating the Quake 2 universe in Quake 4.  The architecture was decidedly Stroggish sans the crazy colored lighting.  The character designs for the Strogg were generally different but still adequately disturbing.  I also thought the inclusion of squad-mates was appropriate given that you're fighting a war and that you weren't the only survivor this time.

As for the arsenal, well I think they were going for a mixture of weapons past and present.  I didn't mind the choice of weaponry so much as the choice of sounds that accompanied them.  The Quake 4 nail gun produces one of the most obnoxious sounds I've ever heard.  The fact that you come to rely on the upgraded form of the nail gun later on in the game just makes it worse.  *CHINK* *CHINK* *CHINK*

Oh and you also have to give Quake 4 props for the drop scene.  That screamed nostalgia.  (It was one of the few instances where a game made me shout out in glee.)

In regards to why the setting and story changed between Quake 1 and Quake 2...

I remember reading something about that in one of the interviews of John Carmack during Quakecon 2007.  He said something to the effect of that they wanted to call Quake 2 something else but every name they tried was already taken so they just stuck with Quake since they had the rights to it.

I too miss secret areas.  Puzzles are too often used now to pad out a game's length.

As for cut-scenes, I prefer third person but I don't mind first person when it makes sense.  I don't want to feel like a camera attached to a pair of disembodied arms.

In regards to DOOM's 3 cutscenes, I too feel that the monster introduction scenes were overused.  The only two I really enjoyed were the pinky demon and the cyber-demon.  I liked the pinky demon just because it filled you with a sense of dread about what the beast could do to you if it ever got close enough.  The cyber-demon scene just made you feel horrifically underpowered and insignificant (which is why the actual battle is so ridiculously anti-climatic.)

And I think that's everything I wanted to respond to... :p

Doom/Doom II = Massive hordes of monsters from hell that you need to kill.
Quake = Not so massive, but adds difficulty with the "activate Button - Oh shit!" kind of trap.
Quake II = Run n' gun through tough cyborgs.
Quake III = Blowing every one's ass with slugs/bullets/missiles/energy projectiles.
Quake 4 = Even more run n' gun
Doom 3 = Killing maybe one or two monsters at the time with those typical "moster suddenly out of the closet" moments.
Doom 4 = Should be more like Doom II
Original Quake sequel = Should be more like Doom 3, only with more enemies and more athmospheric.
 

It was. Just click away the PDA, and the log keeps running.
In D3 (as opposed to Bioshock) you would actually be unlikely to run into anything while listening to the log, provided you don't just run to the next fight-zone.

Whoops, memory serves me wrong then.

You could lower the PDA when video disks were running, too.  The audio would still play in the background.  Actually it was pretty nice how they handled the video disks.  All of them except for two were on UAC displays in the game, so if you missed something you'd get a video disk of it later.  I think the plasma gun briefing was the only disk that wasn't on a display loop somewhere too.  I did not dislike the PDA in Doom 3.  It did advance the story and if you wanted into a storage cabinet you needed them, and you could ignore a lot of things on it or read everything as you saw fit.  The only area they failed with the displays was in the medical lab in the Delta complex.  It was overbright and washed out and you couldn't read the options to change the text logs around.  I had to click at random to read all the medical logs.

Something I did find out kind of accidentally when replaying Doom 3 was that the PDA does not pause the action.  It's held like any other weapon, and if you take damage while the PDA is up, it will drop and you'll switch back to your gun.

Kain:  ROE did feel more like a standup fight than creeping around.  It was way too easy to just use the artifact for about every fight though.  It's fulfilling to run circles around the Z-Secs and pop them in the head with the shotgun, but I found most of the big fights were governed by timing your artifact usage.  That and the combination of the grabber made the game feel a little bit easy.  Still, it was enjoyable, and the only thing I really disliked was the overabundance of vulgars.  Doom 3 was mostly "imp-in-a-box" or "imp teleport in", ROE was "vulgar teleport in".  As for NPC's... the sentry bots were my favorite thing in the whole game.  They're practically indestructible and kick the snot out of the enemies... unlike most NPC's.  I found I could work in concert better with the sentry bots in Doom 3 to form a fire team than I could with the squads in Quake 4.  In Quake 4 I felt more like I was babysitting medics and techs so I could have walking armor and health stations.  Talk about a let down...

Now two things that have not made sense to me come to mind.  The first is... why did the BFG9000 turn into a BFG10k?  Second... how does shutting down the reactor in ROE give more power to the teleporter system?

Now as for Quake 4, there were a few moments in the game that really caught my attention, but only a few.  The most memorable was when the Hannibal landed.  Doom 3's engine can move big things around, and it was good to see that.  Other than that, it was an OK game, but just OK.  I just did not like the direction they took with it.

Why everybody thinks the original Doom where action/horror games? Oh sure, I had it's semi dead guys randomly impaled throughout some corridors, but other than that, nothing alse is intimidating/scary. Actually I remember when I was 8 years old and the only thing that scared me (a little)was those "sacrificial murals" (you know, those with the big goat and the inverted pentagram).

Actually, I don't know from where the people got the idea that Doom was scary... What are they? 3 year old or something?

Keep in mind that when Doom first came out, nothing like it had been made before in terms of video games.  First-person gaming now is quite established, so everyone's used to having near photo-realistic environments, enemies, etc.  Prior to Doom and Wolfenstein-3D, you had Nintendo.  The whole idea of dropping a person into an environment with zombies, demons from hell, etc, was novel and innovative.  As for scary... well, people all react differently to different things.  What scares one person might not scare another.  Take the average person whose gaming experience consists of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and give them something like Doom.  It might be a little more scary to that person seeing those corpses twitching on spikes or hanging from chains than for someone who had played through Wolfenstein 3D and was used to action games.

DooM (and Wolf3D) was scary as shit, back in the day. People have been 'desensitized' or otherwise have gotten used to more dramatic horror in games (and movies), but -- like Pho says -- you have to keep in mind that things weren't always as they are now. The atmosphere of these games was particularly broody and ominous, and nothing like that was there before them. Games were 1 part visuals, 3 parts imagination, for most of us who found the "oldies" thrilling.

Go see horror movies from before the 70's and you'll find that they are not scary to you (or even hilariously failing to live up to their modern day competitors in the genre), even though they were, undeniably, seriously disturbing horror-movies in their times..

Suggestion was more powerful in the early days of gaming, whereas visual prowess is (generally speaking) more influencial now...

What I find more unnerving in a game is not the presence of certain things, but the absence.  Seeing the bloody walls, goop growing from the ceiling, monsters popping up and throwing fireballs is one thing.  When you wander for a while, or go into a room and there's nothing around - that gets my attention.  As the old phrase goes, "It's TOO quiet..."  In nature, absolute silence is very, very rare, and we biological creatures are tuned to interpret that as a sign that something is wrong.  Sometimes this can be overplayed, such as an obviously powerful item placed in what looks to definitely be a trap in an otherwise empty room.  Really good level design makes you walk into the trap first, then realize you shouldn't have gone in there a second before something happens.

I'll tell you a few places where I've seen this effect used best.  In the original Half-Life, the warehouse area where you meet the assassins screamed "don't go in there".  Another example is when you drop down the ceiling into the room with the big missiles and all the laser trip mines all over the place - and a few damned headcrabs skulking around that you know are going to jump right through one of the beams and set one off.  As soon as you're in the room you know you're screwed.

As Tab said, suggestion is very powerful, usually much more powerful than overt gore.  What's more frightening, the dead body laying out in the open, or the darkened doorway behind it?  The body is already dead and cannot hurt you.  The doorway, on the other hand, holds every innumerable horror that the imagination can conjure, and the expectation that, at any moment, any one of those might venture forth from that blackness after you, or worse, that you must pass into that blackness of your own accord and face whatever monstrosity that lies within.  The dark doorway, the darkened wood, the fog over the graveyard... all these things play on the psyche.  Your God-given instincts say "Bad idea, you don't know what's in there and it's not worth your life to find out."  Perhaps nothing is there, but you're certainly no worse off by avoiding it, and if there is something there, you'll be much worse off by venturing where you should not.  That's why such things are scary.  Fear is there to help keep you from dying.

Another thing that would help raise the fear part of games is if all the box art/advertising/other related things didn't show you what your enemies look like...

What's worse knowing what all your enemies look like or treading into a game knowing practically nothing about it?

There's a bit of a trade off involved in that.  Granted, you don't want to spoil everything, but how can you sell the game without showing it off?  Raven made a huge mistake with the Stroggification in Quake 4 in my opinion.  That's something that should have been saved as an "omgwtf" moment, but no, they spoiled that before the game even went gold.

Yeah, the whole "to beat your enemy you have to become one" tagline killed the shock of that scene and made an otherwise clever and unexpected plot twist as visible as a mac truck to anyone who even passed the case in a store...

Well, I never saw the tagline, so when I was playing through the single player, I was full expecting to get away while I saw the guy ahead of me being impaled.  Then after that, I thought, "Well surely I'll escape now while they are cutting off his legs".  Nope.  So it was interesting, but that's sort of diverging off-topic.  Resume

I think where the original Doom fell genre-wise, if we're going to compare it with movie genres, is sci-fi horror.  Doom 3 went more for classic horror in a futuristic environment as far as the horror gimmicks were concerned. 
Well, if Doom 3 was creepy horror, monster-in-a-box, ROE was some creepy horror with a bit more straight up fighting, Doom 4 should hopefully be a Doom 2-style monster fest.  At least, we can hope right?

I hope it is. PainKiller Style gameplay rocks.