Video game openings have always been a source of fascination for me. As a player, you're excited by the prospect of the game to come - the sights you'll see, the challenges you'll face - and first impressions can make or break your entire perception of what a game is versus the one you had stored in your head before switching it on. For video game creators, however, a new beginning is often racked with questions. What, exactly, do you choose to show players first? How will you introduce them to something they've never seen before? And if that game is successful, how do you keep reinventing that first impression across what could be several decades?
In revisiting every mainline Doom game to celebrate its 30th anniversary this month, it's clear that even id's iconic shooter has wrestled with how to answer these question, and the ways it's tried to reinvent itself over the years paints a captivating portrait of a series trying to move with the times. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its opening levels. Played in close succession, crushing 30 years into not even quite three hours, what emerges isn't just the evolution of one of the all-time great PC games, but also a potted history of the FPS. So join me as we chart Doom's rise, fall and rebirth through the lens of its first stages.
]]>“When people read anything, no matter the source, they will believe it.” So says Doom designer John Romero on the subject of his relationship with John Carmack. Together, the pair built id Software and the FPS genre as we know it - before the cracks started to show during the difficult development of Quake, ending their professional partnership.
Yet any lasting acrimony has now dissipated. That became apparent when Romero’s new autobiography, ‘Doom Guy: Life In First Person’, showed up on shelves with a glowing back cover quote from Carmack. The latter praised Romero’s “remarkable memory”, and waxed wistfully about their shared impact on the gaming medium. “For years, I thought that I had been born too late and missed out on participating in the heroic eras of computing,” Carmack wrote. “Only much later did I realise that Romero and I were at the nexus of a new era - the 3D game hackers.”
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
In 2005, Doom wasn't cool - perhaps for the first time ever. Though criticisms of it are invariably exaggerated, Doom 3 had not been the game the world was waiting for, and was left standing in the tall, more ambitious shadow of Half-Life 2.
Expansion pack Resurrection of Evil was an odd riposte, to say the least.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Much of last year’s FPS love may have gone to capslocked DOOM but spare a thought for the try-hard, cliché-fueled darkness binge that was Doom 3. In 2016 the franchise had become self-aware enough to indulge its overblown past, yet back in 2004 the bad penny still hadn’t dropped. There were experiments gone wrong, there were zombies, there were messages on the walls written in blood. I have mixed feelings about it all.
]]>"Those murders are alright," claimed Alice, and she spends half her time worrying that there are murderous clowns living in her basement, so I guess she'd know. Perhaps this bodes well for Bethesda's Doom [official site], the game we're not allowed to call Doom 4, whose multiplayer closed alpha kicks off tomorrow, and some advance footage of which can be seen below. And she's right - I don't know that I'd say it looks especially Doomy, but those murders are alright.
]]>Doom Reborn is a mega-mod, with the sole aim of proving that the shotgun sound effect in Doom is more exciting than the entirety of Doom 3*. To achieve this goal, a team of modders (currently consisting of the contrarily named duo, GameHacKeR and Brent) are reconstructing Doom and Doom 2 in the idTech4 engine. I think they might be on to something. During the hour of footage below, edit: the shotgun can be heard punctuating the action with its signature 'BOOM CH-CHCK' the shotgun sound hasn't been replaced at all**. Some would argue that the shotgun sound was outdone by its own sequel, Doom 2's super shotgun, which went 'BOOOM CA-KLUNK-CA'. If memory serves, the Doom 3 shotgun went 'PFFFFFFFFT' and the pistol simply uttered quiet apologies whenever the trigger was pulled.
Doom Reborn is pre-beta is available now.
]]>The now Zenimax/Bethesda-owned id have been eerily quiet since Rage met a mixed reception and underwhelming sales. I quite liked it, non-ending aside - it might have nothing on BioShock Infinite's visual majesty, but the people-filled non-combat hubs between its more tunnelish combat were more convincingly alive than Columbia's Auton population. In any case, Rage wasn't the combeback Carmack and co needed, leaving us hoping that the in theory forthcoming Doom 4 would be. Half a decade on, there's neither hide nor hair of it to be seen, and alleged sources close to the project have told Kotaku why that could be. Clearly there's something in it, as it prompted Bethesda's Pete Hines to acknowledge that id had indeed switched to making "a new version" of Doom 4 after an earlier one "did not exhibit the quality and excitement that Id and Bethesda intend to deliver."
]]>OH GOD IT'S MONDAY KILL ME
In happier news, Bethesda's vexing, mod-screwing decision to remove the original Doom 3 and its expansion from Steam following the release of the confusingly pointless BFG Edition has been reversed. So, you can now lay hands on id's divisive (putting it mildly) 2004 shooter once again, which must be great news for projects such as Thief recreation The Dark Mod.
]]>Yesterday, we brought you word of a really neat Thief total conversion mod for Doom 3. You probably gazed upon it, felt your excitement glands emit a mucus concoction of pure glee, and downloaded it as quickly as your lovestruck heart could handle. But then you remembered something: Doom 3 was released back when games still came in boxes. Your copy, unfortunately, has probably been devoured by this cluttered meatspace we call reality. Now normally, this would be the part where Steam comes to the rescue. There is, however, one teensy-weensy little problem: vanilla Doom 3's been abruptly pulled from Steam. You can grab the BFG Edition, but it takes to mods like a Cyberdemon face to, well, a BFG. So I got in touch with id/Bethesda about the issue, and here's what they said.
]]>With Dishonored reactivating long-dormant stealth glands the world over, now seems a fine time to revisit perhaps its primary ancestor, the Thief games. Doom 3 total conversion The Dark Mod is a mightily ambitious attempt to recreate Thief - its mechanics if not its actual missions - in a more modern, and very much darkness-orientated, engine. It's just had a major update and a promising new mission added too.
I'm going to insert a 'Read the rest of this entry' link now, if that's okay.
]]>Doom 3 BFG is out in Europe tomorrow. Pulling something of a Dishonored, Bethesda have once again chosen to put out its "launch trailer" in the gap between the US and EU release of the game. So, can you find the love for a game that lacked it all those eight years ago?
]]>"A People's History" is a three part essay series that argues for a long-standing but suppressed tradition of non-industry involvement in the first person genre. This is part three. [Part one. Part two.]
]]>So the idea of building a mod all on your lonesome seems like folly, right? We all know mods are basically games that don't have money or offices or rooms full of snacks. Please just agree with my blanket statement so we can move on to my real point. Anyway, if the very act of making mod is folly, what about making a mod based on Prometheus, when Prometheus is the folliest of follies? It was folly in 3D. It should have been called "Follytheus". I'd say the act of a single person making Doom 3 Prometheus total conversion is folly squared, which is the right amount to get me interested.
]]>Lost? Or did this level just forget to get out of bed on the day Doom 3 was released? Either way it's turned up eight years on for the re-release of Doom 3 dubbed "BFG Edition." The Lost Mission apparently consists in eight new levels of the full game, although I've no idea how long one Doom 3 level actually lasted, so I'm hard pressed to say how much game time that actually adds. I believe there were 26 levels in the original game.
BFG Edition is arriving on October 19th for £20. There's a trailer for the Lost Missions stuff below.
]]>Aha, I was a bit worried this might not see a PC release. Weird on both counts, given PC was originally its lead platform and, well, it's a pretty boring game so it's strange that I'd care. Absent makes the heart grow less exasperated, I suppose. Yes, Doom 3 BFG, complete with new sections, improved levels, tuned controls, added checkpoints and sweet mother of God a mounted-flashlight, will be out on PC. When? MAYBE I'M NOT GOING TO TELL YOU.
]]>Bethesda send word that they're re-releasing Doom 3, with a few changes. It'll release with Doom 3 itself and expansion Resurrection of Evil, but there will be seven new levels - constituting "The Lost Mission" - and the feature we were all crying out for the first time around: the "armour-mounted flashlight." Now you'll be able to illuminate stuff and shoot at the same time!
BFG Edition will arrive in the Autumn. Trailer below.
]]>Thief-inspired Doom 3 mod The Dark Mod has received an extensive new update over here. What's most interesting about this appears at the end of the announcement, saying that the build does not utilize the recently-freed Doom 3 source code (and as such requires Doom 3 multiplayer to be installed), but that the team are going to try and start integrating the mod using it, so that they can create a standalone game. The team have asked for help in making this happen: "The Dark Mod can not be a standalone release until all the Doom 3 art assets and animations have been fully replaced. If you wish to help with that effort, please visit The Dark Mod forums and post in the "I Want to Help" sub-forum."
]]>Do you know, it was probably to me that John Carmack first revealed he was intending to release the Doom 3 source code. I'm pretty sure. During an interview for PC Gamer in late 2008, I asked him if he'd be continuing his practice of making previous code available once the next big engine was out, and he explained that with Bethesda now owning id he didn't know if it would be more difficult, but he was "almost certain we will wind up releasing the entire Doom 3 code base once Rage ships."
So, with Rage safely released, it's finally happened, and published under the GPL. Not before an emergency recoding of the shadow tech, after BethSoft lawyers got the squits over a possible patent issue.
]]>So on the ball is RPS that the first post even slightly related to spooky goings-on we've run this week comes a full day after Hallowe'en. That's just our shtick - spurning pagan festivals is what we do, as is being too lazy/non-cynical to compile 'TOP TEN SCARIEST NOSES IN VIDEOGAMES' posts to farm traffic.
]]>I do believe I promised something a bit more action-packed this week, although now that I think about it Mount And Blade has plenty of action. But I meant monsters jumping out of shadows and guns firing a staccato of panicked percussion. There are almost a million games that could scratch that particular itch, the one on your trigger fingers, but with the age of Rage almost upon us, I’ve decided to take a look at some mods for Doom. Or should that be Dooms? To the past, gentlemen and ladies, to the past.
]]>Quakecon 2011 kicked off yesterday, and included another of John Carmack's traditional incredibly long and bewilderingly technical talks, delivered at an audience primarily there to repeatedly frag each other but prepared to sit through all this talk of doohickeys and megawotsits due to their sheer love and respect for the godfather of FPS. If they were also primarily there in the hope of Doom 4 being unveiled at last, they were disappointed. Carmack made it clear that 2011 is all about Rage - which, all of a sudden, is due for release in two months.
Soon after that, he revealed, id will release Doom 3's source code to the world.
]]>Hurrah! Over the weekend, the previously discussed The Dark Mod released. It's called 1.0 but they're also calling it Beta, so what's a guy to think? Well, a guy's to think this is splendid. It's basically for playing Thief-esque levels entirely in the Doom 3 engine (As created with DarkRadiant). You can download the full thing from the site -which includes a training mission, and get any of the three already completed missions from here. And I've been playing them all, so some thoughts on the Dark Project and the levels are hidden in the shadows nearby...
]]>Everyone loves an underdog - but Doom 3 is in the curious position of being an underdog whilst simultaneously being big enough to be widely loathed. Arguably, only Bioshock has stolen its crown as king of the PC FPS whipping boys - both being heavily-trumpeted games that didn't live up to their own enormous hype, and suffered a disproportionately vicious backlash as a result.
Doom 3 -which I found bland and repetitive but often fun and certainly atmospheric, its major crime being stretching its few ideas over too many hours - however, has managed to enjoy a huge and enthusiastic modding scene nonetheless. There's everything from extensive co-op versions to an infinite array of flashlight tweaks and assorted mini-campaigns, maps and graphical upgrades. It may not enjoy the profile of the big Half-Life 2 mods, but its scene remains alive. Hoping to throw this underdog a bone (I have no idea why - these cursed whims of mine), I've spent today wading through a few of them.
]]>Whatever you want to say about Doom 3 (and usually it's either "boooooooring" or "oh c'mon, it wasn't that bad"), it's fairly safe to say that it didn't really capture that classic Doom feel. That classic Doom feel being "aaaargh shoot everywhere all the time wheeeee boomboomboom", of course.
There're a few mods around that try to pull D3 back into the good ol' dark ages, but top-down singleplayer shooter Z-Hunter's an entertaining new kid on the block. A very stupid new kid for sure, but stupid often = fun.
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