Doom 3

25 Jul 2004 · #techtalk

Doom 3 has gone gold and to cover that news, G4/TechTV have made this really nice ‘making of’ feature for Doom 3. Among other things, they look at all the gameplay elements they’ve brought over from the original Doom into this recreation and the new things that they’ve put in. Most of the weapons from the original - including the chainsaw :-D - have been retained in Doom 3. Our favourite demons get nasty upgrades too - pinky the bull is even more scary now. And with 6.1 surround sound in the game, you can be sure that pinky’s warning snarl will scare the shit out of you.

Doom 3 will be coming out for the PC and the Xbox. In the G4 feature, Carmack says that they built the original engine keeping in mind that this was going to run on the Xbox. But I remember that in late 2001/early 2002, after the first Doom 3 demo was shown, id suddenly went into a shell and delayed the expected launch. The net was buzzing with rumours that this was because Microsoft struck a deal with them to bring out Doom 3 on the Xbox simultaneously and that this made the team at id go back and redo a lot of stuff to work on both platforms.

Whatever be the case, this is how I see it. Doom 3 on the PC will kick ass. But if the Xbox version is at least as good as the PC version, then Doom 3 will spawn a new surge in Xbox sales (the first surge was due to Halo). This good visibility and enhanced market share will have Microsoft in a very comfortable postion when it is time to launch Xbox 2 sometime in late 2005. Of course, Xbox 2 will have Halo 2 to carry it and with Sony further delaying PS3’s launch, Microsoft’s Xbox team can look forward to some good times.

Coming back to Doom 3. I doubt I’ll be using an Xbox to play it - the keyboard/mouse combo is the way to go for FPS games. I really hope I have enough money soon to buy a really beefy PC to run the game. HardOCP has the official Doom 3 benchmarks which should help decide what to buy.

Oh, almost forgot why I started writing this - the link to the torrent for the Doom 3 feature. It’s a 145MB download.