By Quintin Smith on August 12th, 2010 at 12:16 pm.
Veteran news-commandos over at Eurogamer have spotted a tweet by John Carmack saying that id will be announcing a new game at QuakeCon tonight. In all likelihood this’ll happen during his keynote speech, which starts at 8:30pm UK time or 2:30pm Dallas / CDT time.
What could it be! Well, we kind of know what it’ll be. It’ll be Doom 4. We know id started work on Doom 4 back in 2008, and in 2009 they said that they’d be talking about it at QuakeCon 2010. Still, exciting! We only have some 10 hours of precious ignorance left! Let’s make some wild assumptions. I think Doom 4 will be a shooter, featuring some kind of gun, with emergent weaponry based on repurposing the body parts of various demons. Like, dual-wielded kidneys, or perhaps a whip made of intestines. What do you think, readers?
Oooh! I hope you can sling explosive/metal bits in the general direction of angry-looking-but-never-talked-to creatures that may or may not have had the intention of harming me before they were hit by previously described bit!
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Magic Schadenfreude 8-Ball predicts that this will be an isometric-view turn-based tactical squad combat game.
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Intriguing. Isn’t today the announcement of Irrational’s next project too? Stealing the spotlight, just coincidence, or they’re working on the same thing?
(coincidence)
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given the dates of quakecom predate irrational’s announcement, it’s proabably coincidence, which is a shame. I’ve not had a good controversy in a while :(
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let me quote…
“Lest hardcore gamers fear Carmack is going soft, he notes his fights to simplify “Doom 3″ haven’t always been successful. He admits the id Software developers got into bitter arguments about whether to include “crouch” and “use” keys in the upcoming game. (He lost the debate over “crouch” – which now appears – but convinced the team there was no need for a “use” key.) “
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please ignore my reply, was meant for my reply further down
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I think there will be blood
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Possibly demons.
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I DRINK YOUR PINKY DEMON!
Sorry.
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The only thing I can say for certain, is that it will be pretty much like the other Dooms.
I am sure I heard something about how John Carmack was arguing about having a “use” button in their games, for fear of it taking away from the “pure” shooter experience. Or was that just the Quake series?
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all doom and quake games had a ‘use’ key. how else could you flip those coloured switches??
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actually, Doom 3 did not have a use key.
Instead, the crosshair rather ingeniously became a mouse cursor on all in-game interfaces. I loved it, and it really hasn’t been done that much since, which is a shame.
speaking of which. i should really complete doom 3 before next shoot-ugly-creatures-in-darkness is released.
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Painkiller didn’t have a use key and would have been worse, if it had one. You could consider it “what Doom 3 should have been”.
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let me quote…
“Lest hardcore gamers fear Carmack is going soft, he notes his fights to simplify “Doom 3″ haven’t always been successful. He admits the id Software developers got into bitter arguments about whether to include “crouch” and “use” keys in the upcoming game. (He lost the debate over “crouch” – which now appears – but convinced the team there was no need for a “use” key.) “
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@Ihzr
None of the Quake games had a use key. 1-3 automatically activated things when you bumped into them, and 4 used the same system as Doom 3.
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wow, so they were even more basic than i remembered. thanks for breaking my rosey glasses :(
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Prediction: Doom 4 will have more open spaces. Just wait. It will have creepy corridors AND spaces a plenty via idtech5. you heard it here first.
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Actually, i don’t think he was referring to Doom 4. Doom 4 is already “known”. I think teh Carmack was talking about some new unannounced iPhone game.
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No it’s an announcement that Doom 3 is coming to the Mac
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DOOM 3 on the Mac was already released…
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If there are open spaces then where will they stick the monsterclosets?
Monster port-a-loos, perhaps.
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Like Leeds Festival port-a-loos? I’ve known people pass out in them before.
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Yikes! Talk about survival horror.
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Inspired by the Interactive Fiction field and that bit at the end of ME1 where you talk Saren into doing the job himself, Doom 4 will be a psychotherapy-’em-up where you trade chainsaws for couches and talk to the demons about where this deep-seated need for destruction comes from and does it still hurt that their Daddy ran out on them when they were only 4 eons old?
Also, Quinns, seeing as you now post as much as the rest of the Hivemind combined, when are you actually getting your credit at the bottom of the site? I bet you’re a better healer than John as well.
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One day… one day…
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You already have that orange background thing going when commenting… the day can’t be that far off!
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Quinns official induction into the RPS hivemind making it a Quintuplet is long overdue. Even if he has no iron.
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Quinns must be assimilated!
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Also tonight: Project Icarus announcement, nay?
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There’s going to be a Wii port that requires the simultaneous use of the balance board, zapper and the wheel.
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That would be awesome! I’d buy that! But only if it includes a full keyboard with every key mapped at least twice. ;)
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Maybe this time you can talk to the monsters. BUT SERIOUSLY FOLKS, I don’t know what to think about id these days. The whole Zenimax Media thing makes me wonder how much Carmack still cares.
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Yes having the opportunity to work with/alongside Bethesda must suck balls. I wonder where he gets the motivation to get up in the morning……
(fyi sarcasm just incase your detector needs new batteries)
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Malibu Stacey, almost every post I’ve seen you make at RPS contains some combination of passive aggression, arrogance or plain old trolling. Please leave me out of your plans, whatever they are.
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The trouble with these mysterious sort of announcements is that whatever is twitching behind the curtain is, in my head, more awesome than whatever will be revealed :-(
It’s obviously a one-button cover-based shooter with retro stylings and a jaunty chip soundtrack, with a story that is a metaphor for animal testing.
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Exciting in the way, say, an egg mayonaise sandwich is exciting.
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I’ve got a homemade egg-mayonaise sandwich (with homemade bread too) for lunch.
I’m really excited about it.
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What’s that? You’re rough-cutting a freshly boiled egg? Mixing it with egg yolk and olive oil? A touch of mustard? Paprika too? All between two thick slices of wholemeal bread still warm from the oven! Goddamn am I excited! And I’m getting a blow job while i’m eating it too! WIN!
(The ingredients represent, like graphics and and light RPG systems and stuff. The blow job represents talking with the monsters, mostly in the sense of it not going to happen).
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Me too, although not so luxurious as to have homemade bread. But still, it was lovely, and I have been looking forward to it all morning.
This doesn’t make me said, oh no; it makes me very happy, as it happens.
So I’d say exciting in the same way that roadworks are, or something.
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How can you eat that? I swear I’d throw up violently, if I had to eat that. It’s like eating margarine, pure, with a spoon, except even more disgusting.
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@Barefoot: Are you talking about the sandwich or the blowjob?
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David Carradyne would have loved it.
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Doom 4, flashlights monter closets, yada yada yada.
Update your blog Quinns! I want o know how your ridiculous backpacking saga cum LSD trip went!
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Doom 3 was a scary game, I only wish System Shock was as good.
Just listen, you enter a dark room and then it turns pitch black, yellow portals and red pentagrams appear and from there three imps emerge.
What a brilliant game design.
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Any idea if there’s going to be an Internet stream of the keynote or the various panels during the event? There’s Quake Live TV but as far as I could figure it out, they only show the competitive gaming matches. Or am I wrong?
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I was wondering this too. Coverage info is here, but it’s not entirely clear what will fall under the ‘other scheduled events’ category.
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They’ve updated it:
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nice trollin’ bro.
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id are bringing Granny Shooter 5 inhouse.
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It’s going to be a new Commander Keen for sure.
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Oh shit, I know you were being sarcastic, but this would make me so happy.
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Nah, they’ll only turn it into a FPS set in the 1950s.
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Man. Commander Keen as a 3D platformer would be ace.
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They should make the new Keen in the Minecraft engine.
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Doom 4 news and the imminent announcement of Irrational’s new game make this the best day since… at least last Friday!
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John Carmack is one of those fascinating people who has so much stuff to say, so I’m looking forward to hearing the keynote.
Also his Twitter is really interesting, almost indecipherable, but interesting nonetheless.
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Left 4 Doom? You and three other gritty space marines of various backgrounds fight your way through demon Hordes, controlled by the all powerful Producer. From time to time you encounter “Super-Demons” which challenge you to a specific type of team-play. There’s a horrible monster known as the Warlock, which sits in a corner, silently chuckling to itself until you point your flashlight at it.
You and the other Space Marines quip about the situation and how such an unlikely quartet ended up together in this Demon Apocalypse.
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Anyone ever try that Dungeon Doom mod? An attempt to bring Zangband/nethack into the Doom 3 engine in realtime.
I thought it was pretty cool. Maybe they could bring more of a random level element into the new game.
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I’m still waiting for Rage Mr. Smartyman.
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Also, Little Sisters will appear.
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But you’ll shoot those, too.
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The tweet by John Carmack was
I’m almost certain that that means that it’s not going to be Doom 4. “neat?” That doesn’t sound like Doom 4 at all. I predict something related to rendering, maybe a glimpse at the next id tech.
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Yep, it sounds a lot like some tasty tech bit, not like a full blown game.
But we’ll see anyway.
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Carmack has reverse engineered Super Mario Bros. 3 and has it running on an analogue watch.
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Quake V announcement: The return to the Lovecraftian Hell.
Goddamned fiends and shamblers. And those flying things that piss on you.
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Quake 3 had a use key for med kits
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No it didn’t, you just ran through them & they healed you if you were less than fully healed.
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@Jac
I totally forgot about that. But “use inventory item” isn’t what most people mean by “use key” :)
@Malibu Stacy
Not, quite. Quake 3 had a (very limited) inventory system. You could only carry one item at a time, and there were, I think, only ever two inventory items in the whole game. One was a teleport that dropped you someplace random, the other was a med-kit / syringe thing that healed you.
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A reimagination of the Quake franchise, as a Lovercraftian horror game, in a sub, in the artic, with a fresh inventity system to create your own properties. Somewhat like John Carmack’s Bioshock….. QuakeShock?
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Fingers crossed for nonviolent walking around, interacting with sweet computer screens and steadily gaining higher security clearance!
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In pitch-black-darkness I hope!
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all i know about doom4 is that it will have a 30fps limit. and i think i remember something about more open spaces, but not sure… anyways. there will be something interesting for me to read tomorrow morning.
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I think Carmack is going a bit senile in his old age. He has made some truly baffling decisions lately.
Doom 4: Capped at 30fps, because even if your PC is capable of more, it’s VERY TECHNICAL AND WE CAN’T EXPLAIN IT.
Rage: Matchmaking-based multiplayer without servers, because that’s the way forward and not at all how you get laggy games hosted by one guy with a ridiculous ping advantage.
Doom iPhone: We removed the one halfway-decent control system from the options menu, because nobody mentioned they could use it. You can reenable it via a hidden console command, but it’s not documented at all.
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Carmack has said in an interview that it’ll be at least a decade before they produce another new IP so that they can support the ones they already have.
So even if we can’t be totally certain (just mostly certain) that this announcement will be Doom 4 we can say for sure it’s not something brand new.
Commander Keen remake anyone?
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or a game by another developer using id Tech 5.
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i just cant get excited about this after Doom3, i want explanations about the duct tape thing, i just cant believe the thought that “not being able to use the light and a weapon at the same time” was completely retarded just happened to slip everyone at the dev team, testers and previewer’s minds, that freaking crap was an outright specific design decision, i want answers
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A horror game where you have to choose between being able to see or being able to shoot? Design decisions which in indie games would be praised as innovative but in mainstream games are lambasted?
Oh right, internet. I forgot (again). Apologies will try harder in future.
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In the future people forget how to mount flashlights on guns.
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or to tie things, or using duct tape or holding both weapon and flashlight at the same time, or mounting highlights on heavy space armor that limits mobility and visibility (like the one you wear), or having head mounted light helmets on dark places, or putting emergency lights in starships/spacestation and i could keep going, jeez i have a led flashlight that illuminate better than doom3′s brick, has 1/5 the size, already comes with a sticker like thing behind to paste it on the wall and lasts more than the duration of the game with just one set of batteries
and btw, have you played any Silent Hill ? you have lights on all the ones i played and they are a lot more scary and doom3 and its “always spawn behind you after the sound cue” enemies
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I’m still chuckling at the idea of dual weilded kidneys… perhaps you can combine them together with a stretch of oesophagus and create a bolus…
/gets coat
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/helps to put it on
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Are there going to be any links to a livestream of this? I can only find ones that are defunct or from previous years (e.g. IGN or UStream).
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If it is Doom 4, I just hope they’ll do a way better job than Quake 4.
… but what happend to RAGE?
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@Zinic:
Nothing happened to RAGE. It was at e3 and will be at QuakeCon, certainly.
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Simultaneous games development is huge in the industry now.
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It’s a tricky one, this. I don’t really believe he will announce Doom 4, but if he does, then it will have to walk carefully between new ideas and old ones. I’ve played Doom back and forth, sideways, upwards, in and out, and I’m done. If D4 is nothing more than a cosmetic update, then I couldn’t care less about it. If it has loads of new ideas, then the traditonalists will hate it.
Also, monster closets = fuck this game.
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Quake for the Iphone?
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Doom4, the MMO.
Because every second game these days has to be an MMO apparently.
But if it’s another monster closet + gloomy hallway dash then as Zogtee mentions – fuck it.
Go back to the wide open levels filled with scores of enemies and I may deign to have a look.
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If nothing else it’s encouraging that the fellows are expending lots of energy arguing about groundbreaking innovations like “use” keys. I can only imagine what revolutionary new ideas they’re cooking up for us.
(Disclaimer: In this post I used sarcasm to make a point.)
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Doom + Total War = win!
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Wasn’t Quake4 made by Raven?
I’d much rather see a new Quake game by id with a single player ‘story’ to it. I loved Quake 3 but I also loved Quake 1 and 2 for the single player.
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Singularity wasn’t that bad.
It wasn’t great but it was on par with say…Wolfenstein [the old new one not the new new one I haven't played yet]
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Please be good!
1) Do something with the corridor if you must have one.
2) No identical monsters right next to each other.
3) I NEVER WANT TO BACK PEDDLE IN A SHOOTER.
Firing at an on rushing monster whilst blindly walking backwards is rubbish. Either I stand my ground or I strafe to the side…you know like I did in DOOM.
4) Please be good.
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1) Laminate flooring?
2) Twins do exist in the monster world you know!
3) Side peddle is the new back peddle?
4) Sorry I’m being an arse.
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After thinking about it, I would like to see some actual AI, beyond the “see player = shoot player” kind. I do want to see monsters getting pissed at each other and start fighting. I always liked that about Doom and it’s so very rare in games.
I think I can condense this down to “fun, no bullshit, and colors other than brown”. Yeah, that’s what I want.
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Slightly shinier monsters jump out of closets. Exciting.
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I’m not sure I can conjure any enthusiasm up for this…
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I don’t care what it is, as long as your character goes ‘UMPH!’ every time you press the use key against a wall.
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*looks in the dictionary*
DOOM… hmm… DOOM… aah, here we have it:
“look under YADSWNIAA”
Allright then… YADSWNIAA does mean…:
“Yet Another Default Shooter With No Innovation At ALL”
Great! I’m back to bed! ID is dead.
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I’ve never understood all this Doom 3 bashing.
The flashlight/weapon idea was an inspired piece of design which really ramped up the tension of the game. The whole point was that you could either see or shoot in certain spots. The dark was something to be afraid of.
The level design was absolutely amazing and I don’t think we have seen as polished a game since. Who can forget the opening scene with the ship landing and the computer monitor watching the scene zoom in flawlessly? It was a testament to Carmack’s absolute genius as an engine programmer.
Doom 3 was also one of the few games I’ve ever played to get me so tense that I have actually had to take a break from playing. The game was genuinely scary in spots.
I think the problem was that people were expecting some sort of open level shooter which was all the rage at the time and instead they got the best damn corridor shooter ever mind.
I think I’m going to go off and reinstall Doom 3 for another playthrough.
To all the people who have jumped on the “Monster closets” bandwagon. Go back with an open mind late one night with a good surround sound system, forget all the mindless internet cynicism that has been all the rage over the last few years and just give it a good go. You might just be pleasantly surprised.
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I hope someone just Copy-Pastes this comment whenever anyone hates on D3 here. You nailed everything about this game that I find so under-appreciated.
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Relatively speaking Doom 3 was a poor game.
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Agreed. Compared to earlier Dooms and Quakes, the later versions were much less of a breakthrough, but apparently opinions are much divided.
I’m with the haters. I never finished either the last Doom and Quake. The old Dooms had a good balance between the number of enemies and their strength. Plus they would attack eachother if they happened to hit one another. The last Doom was unfair, things appearing where you just looked three seconds ago feels like its pointless to play careful. I didn’t even know there was a “monster closet wagon” but here is how i see it:
If there IS a skeleton in a closet, and i see the closet from a distance, and i think: “hey! there might be a skeleton in that closet”, so I approach it carefully, and I try to open that closet, but i cant, then I played flawless, so to speak. To have it open up anyway when I trigger some magical floor tile up ahead (so it will be behind me) is a cheap scare.
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I didn’t hate Doom 3, but I didn’t ever feel the need to replay it either. Compare that to the original Doom, which I first played 16 years ago, and still play to this day. It just lacked soul, I guess. The weapons felt weak, and combat quickly turned into ‘Two enemies spawn in front, one behind’.
It was decent enough fodder, but it could have been so much better.
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I’ve been wanting to play Doom3 for ages, but I haven’t had a decent video card before just now (last week, actually).
Turns out its €20 on Steam.
That’s a bit steep, to be honest.
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Doom 3 wasn’t a bad game. It just wasn’t really particularly good, which, given the pedigree, let a few people down.
It remains one of the most overrated games of the past decade. It seems to appear in every ‘scariest video game’ list i care to think of, when in actuality its about as scary as william hague’s smile.
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@ Raum – how about £3 on eBay?
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Well, it’s not €20 any more.
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They just announced Doom 4 isn’t ready for showing =(, turning off the live feed.
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That’s not the announcement, though?
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To help us cope with Doom 4 being a no-show, I wrote a hefty piece about why Doom 1/2 are still brilliant, and how to get the most out of it on the forums here.
http://rockpapershotgun.com/rpsforum/topic.php?id=3196
Perhaps that will help dull the pain?
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Add coop and a funner faster pace.
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Hmm… since RPS didn’t post about it (reasonably, since it’s not directly relevant to our PC-centric interests), but there’ve been enough posts in this thread to suggest that some people are interested, I’ll just go ahead and drop a little link about what the newly-announced game actually was…
http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/12/carmack-blows-minds-with-id-softwares-rage-running-on-iphone-a/
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Doom 4?
I think i just came.
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