Wirehead Studios

Info lifted from www.idsoftware.com

Now, I'd love to see a Action/Horror game, like Doom should be. Even if Doom 3 was good on its own, I still thought I had something missing like, say, fighting 14 enemies at once.

Agreed i enjoyed the action more in doom/doom 2. However the story line in doom 3 was spooky and i enjoyed reading all pda's and listen to their voices while solving some problems (thought most were cabinet codes)

Thought one thing that strucked me while playing doom 3...since we nowdays believe in the equal values between sexes...how come there is only ONE woman in the entire doom 3 game? :)

Perhaps like Dr. McNeil they were smart enough to get off Mars before all Hell broke loose?  At least, until she went back to Mars in ROE...  There's a possible explanation though.  Consider what happened to said female in Doom 3.  Perhaps that's where all the other Lost Souls came from?  Perhaps the mechanism for possession in Doom 3 affects males and females differently.  It certainly affected security, civilian, and military personnel differently.  Until Betruger started making commandos no marines were affected, only civies and security were possessed.  Civilians make stupid zombies, security make smarter gun-wielding zombies, so perhaps, like different kinds of demons, there are different classes of "spirits" assigned to possess different levels of human.  Why the marines and why some civilians would be immune while all of the security personnel were taken over save one guy at the beginning I cannot say, but it would make sense that the weakest spirits be assigned to the weakest humans, and those with more firepower get smarter and more aggressive spirits assigned.  If demons have a command structure, which they do in Doom 3, then that would be logical.  Perhaps a different kind of spirit was assigned to possess females and thus lost souls resulted and we just never got to see the corpses of the other females on the base.  Probably eaten by imps and pinkies.

Hehe that's one good reason pho :)

I hope they don't outsource this game like Q4 or ETQW... neither were necessarily bad games... they're just bad QUAKE games...

Aye, Q4 felt uninspired to me.  I think Id is going to work more directly on this though.  Did you see their list of positions available?  I'm still waiting to see an arachnotron and spider mastermind, along with some other old favorites like the pain elemental.  Maybe Doom 4 will mix in some of Doom/Doom 2's gameplay style?  We've done creepy Mars bases in Doom 3, with a glimpse of Hell.  Let's see Hell on Earth in Doom 4.  Shootable cyberdemons would be a plus as well.

ye give a "real" cyberdemon plx..the one in doom 3 was hardly no challenge at all..

Great news, let's hope Pho's right and D4 is to D2 what D3 was to D1. It's hinted at in the quote. I'm imagining mowing down hordes of Imps with a minigun in the middle of a huge burning city, next-gen style.

*drool*

Well, this game will most likely use the Tech 5, and we all know that Tech 5 is all about huge outdoor spaces. So yeah, this one will probably be able to mix the tension in DooM 3 with the action in 1\2.

Man, id is firing up the engines again. DooM 4, Rage, and most likely a new Quake Arena... Too bad they'll all take a long while to come out. 2010, perhaps?

All good things come to those who wait.

Also, death comes to those who wait. And other bad things. So let's not hope it will take too long.. :]

While Doom 3 was an alright game, it felt far to archaic. Having imps jump out of hidden rooms just big enough for them to fit in, with no other conceivable purpose, got tiring. The forced "fear" didn't work for me either. Having to put down your weapon just to see around felt more annoying than scary.

I think Doom 3 failed to impress because Id doesn't have (or at least didn't show) a good grasp on creating tension. Tension and suspense could have made for some actual frights. Those little quiet moments where nothing happens, but you're expecting it to. Throw that in with a good dose of psychological horror and you might just have something. At this point however I'm much more interested in RAGE.

^ I agree.  The surprise moments first time 'round did their job but it quickly became repetitive (and predictable).  There were only a couple of scenes where they successfully pulled off the suspense needed to make a Doom Marine tremble.  "The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last." (Oscar Wilde)

And hello!  Occasional forum lurker and occasionally on the Gen server Phoenix runs.

I did not find Doom 3 to be scary.  I like it, but I look at it as a slower-paced action/sci-fi shooter.  I do agree that monster closets were used too many times, especially around obviously placed items.  Oh, that armor on the ledge placed obviously where I have to go way out of the way to get it.  Uhuh, out comes imp-in-the-box, as expected.  This got fairly repetitive through the later Alpha Labs levels.

I found the first two levels to have the most psychological factor because you're hearing all the radio chatter, firefights going on through the walls as stuff is going on around you.  The transition from the invasion panic to the levels being very quiet added an unsettling factor but after a while you get used to it.  Afterwards it turned into a lot of monster closets or else just monsters teleporting in in front of and behind you simultaneously (ROE was very bad with this, and I absolutely hate Vulgars.  It's like Imp++).  When the game gets predictable, sorry, there's no longer a spook factor.  I would say the Hell level I was most impressed with not because of any kind of scare factor but because Id went all out on it and I think they did their best mapping as well as best use of ambiance and monster balance.  They should have had more levels on part with Hell, and more Hell levels to fight through as well.  The Enpro plant was another set of levels I liked because it was an interesting environment.

To me, the best psychological parts were areas you'd enter and there was absolutely nothing.  There might be some ambient noise, but nothing around.  Where's the monsters?  Something's going to happen, but you don't know what.  The first time you meet an Archvile was done pretty well.  There was a lot of "sneaky" factor that was left out, too, and sometimes I wonder if it's because some elements might have been deemed too scary during play testing.  I'll give you an example.  The first time you encounter trites, they swarm you.  Monsters swarms are difficult, but not scary.  In addition, the trites, despite their spideresque nature, always followed standard floor paths to the player.  Headcrabs in Half-Life could startle the hell out of you if you weren't careful because they were sneaky with them.  You never knew where they might be and they didn't make a lot of noise when moving around.  Id could have been very nasty with trites making them cling to walls and hide in shadows and jump in your face when you least expected it.  Looking at the trites I really don't understand why this was not done because there was so much potential there for this monster.  Only a few times do I remember them dropping down off a line or jumping out from a hidden spot.  They became more of an annoyance than anything scary.

To this day I think the most frightening monster Id's ever come up with was the zombie soldiers in Wolfenstein 3D, and here's why.  They are completely silent and the first time you meet them you walk into a completely empty level.  Nobody's around.  You go through a door and BLAM!  WTF!?  All through Ep 2 you did not know where they might be and they could sneak up on you or surprise you at any time.  Honestly that was more intimidating to me than any part of Doom 3 was.  All the monsters in Doom 3 either make a loud alert sound or else you can hear the teleport whispering, and introducing new monsters with a cutscene kind of took away any sense of suspense.  The Archvile introduction was exactly what it should have been because there's an uncertainty factor about the monster and suspense leading up to it.  ROE did a better job introducing the Vulgars and Bruiser than D3 did with, say, the Imp, Pinky, etc.  The Vulgars teleport in and you get a glimpse of them but don't really know what they are until you start fighting them.  The Bruiser teleports in and by the time you've processed "wait, that's a new monster" you've got 4 fireballs in your face.  I really hope Id saves the cutscenes in D4 for important dialogue and "away from player" story advancement instead of introducing new monsters all the time.  Oh, and bring back Specters.  Invisible D3 pinky demons could scare the pants off someone if done right.

The Classic Doom mod for D3 has invisible Pnikys/Spectres. Very Predator-esque.

In the old skool days of Doom 1 and 2 monster closets were very much part of the game, but that was because the maps were only loose representations of their locations, whereas in D3 which was meant to be more realistic, it just got irritating. Suspense was something that the classic games delivered on numerous occasions. That maze level with the Archviles in Plutonia comes to mind.

Scariest Doom moment? I've mentioned it so many times, but the first time I turned a corner and got a rocket in the chops from you-know-who on the PSX version still ranks as one of my scariest game moments ever.

That's what I missed most of all from D3. Just turning a corner and being confronted by some big mutha who initially bitch-slapped you and took an entire evening to beat. No game has provided that since. Maybe I'm getting better at games, but the only game that got close was the final fight in Q4. That's a full ten years later.

My first encounter with the Doom cyberdemon was worse.  First of all, in the original Doom, cyber's stomping noises always play at max volume.  After opening a door and firing a rocket at a lost soul, I hear this roar, and this mechanical stomping that's quite loud.  Not quite sure what is making that noise, and since it's impossible to judge distance with a full-volume sound, I turn around to stock up on some more rockets and the next thing I know it's BOOM!  BOOM!  I'M DEAD!  I never saw what hit me.  That ranked up there in startle factor with my first encounter with a Wolf zombie shooting me point blank in the back.  Turns out I happened to pick one of the two doors on the same side of the map as the cyber, and not knowing what was out there, he calmly stomped up to the door and fired three rockets in.  Good thing for save games, or I'd not have saved the earth!  So I reload, this time got out the door and fought the skulls outside and found the cyber.  I thought "Oh, it's a big demon with a freaking rocket launcher.  No wonder I died instantly..." and proceeded to pummel the SOB.

I think that's a big problem with a lot of newer FPS games is that there's so much that's already been done.  When Wolf came out it was innovative.  Nobody had done a real-time first-person shooter before.  Doom took it up a notch.  You had height changes, and it was shooting demons from hell with modern and futuristic weapons on another planet.  There was a "Oooh, what if we throw in a chainsaw?  And how about giving this demon a rocket launcher for an arm, you know, make him a cyborg!  Wait, let's add x..."  But after all that, what hasn't been done in a FPS?  Every conceivable weapon has been done in some form or another, vehicles, squads, powerups, even experience-point reward systems (ala Tron 2.0) have been done, but the same formula is there.  I think that's why nothing has ever come close to the original games.  It's all variations on the standard features coupled with improvements in graphics, enemy behavior, and more complex object interactions.  I don't think you'll ever see anything as revolutionary as the old games were again.  I think Doom 4 or any newer game can be just as good as far as quality of game experience goes, but we'll see.