Some new Doom III shots are appearing online as Quakecon has opened its doors. Not many details out yet with the exception that since its based on Mars if you shoot outside glass windows that the air rushes out of it a la Total Recall, and areas get sealed off.
Vanilla Deathmatch - quick impressions from an excited chap
Right, here we go, our first in-depth look at Doom 3 multiplayer - well, deathmatch - via a feverish report back from our crazed first-person shooter nut currently recovering after a bout with id Software's FPS yesterday. Allllll-riiiight!
And just to remind you before we go any further, Doom 3's multiplayer maps are being designed by Splash Damage of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory fame.
OK, first things first - how good is Doom 3 deathmatch? Only one map, with no name, was playable, supporting four players (we don't know yet if this is the maximum number of players in deathmatch), but how good is it?
"It's f***ing cool, it's really cool. It looks superb. Everything in it looks superb, just like the screenshots really," spouted our man at the event. Cool.
So what was the one map like, then? "OK, it's a big map and it's got this central kind of laser thing that fires periodically. And that's kind of the focus of the whole level." Right-oh.
It's more or less your classic room-corridor type level - a lot of it is really tight corridors. In the one level on show there's the main central chamber where the "laser thing" resides, which is on several levels. "There's the top platform, where you have to jump down - so you're on the top there, and you have to jump down into the centre."
Apparently you have to jump down a series of rotating platforms, which are in the central chamber, each of which is three quarters of a disc, and you have to jump through the holes to get right down to the bottom. Which is where a power-up lurks. But more on this in a second.
"It's definitely the same sort of atmosphere as we've seen in the single-player game," says Holden. Everywhere you look in the level there's industrial machinery moving, much of which can kill you - pneumatic spikes shooting out and piercing your body - you get the idea.
There are loads of effects, such as steam coming out of the walls. There's just so much going on: there are flame effects, steam, and when the laser thing fires the whole room glows red and little bits of plasma stuff flies around.
To give you some idea, it's much like the scene in Aliens when Ripley goes back into the colony complex to rescue Newt.
Also there are small parts of the level that have been taken over by the demon realm - it's the only way we can describe it. So, you'll turn a corner from a moon base-style, metallic corridor, for example, and you'll be in the hellish sort of area where there's dead bodies embedded in walls and other gruesome images.
Industrial machinery is ubiquitous, which moves and can kill you. There's one part where you get one of the weapons from where you have to wait until these pneumatic spikes retract. They can spike you on the way past when they come out. Ouch!
On to the power-up then. When you get to the bottom of the central chamber there's the main power-up in the level, which is the Berserk power-up (as yet we don't know if other power-ups will feature in the level).
The Berserk power-up increases damage and movement speed. Basically, it doubles your movement speed and gives you 2x or 4x damage (damage multiplayer isn't clear yet) with ranged weapons.
But mainly it gives 30x damage with melee weapons. So it's basically instant kills with your fists when you're Berserk. And you also do melee damage with the flashlight - yep, you can twat people with the flashlight. Result.
The Berserk power-up is really cool. When you grab that you scream for the whole time you've got it, making a "Ooaaaaarggggghhhhh!" noise. Or thereabouts. And because you're also moving twice as fast there's a vision blur effect on that as well. It's really disorientating. And it's quite hard to go on a rampage, but the instant kill thing helps.
When you grab the Berserk power-up, you teleport through this tunnel, like a hellish sort of tunnel, and you pop out in another part of the level. And when you pop out of there, you're just a skeleton and all of a sudden your body rebuilds around you. Also, when you die you dissemble down to a skeleton, and the skeleton rag-dolls onto the ground.
It looks really awesome.
Other pick-ups in the level include armour, combat armour that gives you +50 armour, and then there's armour shards and health packs, and of course ammo packs.
As for weapons, you've got a Pistol that holds 12 bullets, a Shotgun that holds eight scatter shells - it's really meaty, the Shotgun - the Flashlight, the Machine gun and the Plasma gun - which is mint, looks the mutt's nuts and is really deadly - cells contain 50 rounds. And then there's the Rocket Launcher, which holds up to five rockets. Boom!
One point worth noting is that, from what we've been able to tell so far, there doesn't seem to be that much splash damage from the rockets.
Unfortunately the chainsaw wasn't in the game itself, but it is an option in the menu. Other weapons to feature that weren't available are the Chaingun, Grenades, the BFG and something called the Soulcube. We've no idea what the Soulcube is, but it sounds like it should rock. Gravity well-type thing, perhaps?
When you get shot in multiplayer, you get a vision-blur effect, which really messes things up for you, makes it an onerous task indeed to shoot back. Your vision blurs and wobbles around as well, so you're not looking at the target anymore. Generally speaking, a great deal of blind panic is caused by these disorientating effects.
There are other cools things, for example when you shoot someone who's in front of glass they'll fly back and smash the glass. Nice. And in the map there are numerous places where you can fall off ledges into death traps. Not so nice.
Because of the technology used in Doom 3, the characters no longer have the invisible bounding box that you can shoot - it is actually per-ploy hit detection. It also employs regional damage, so headshots and so on are perfectly possible.
Presumably because of the per-poly hit detection, characters in multiplayer will all be of a very similar size, otherwise it just wouldn't be fair. Hence we can't imagine they'll have too many crazy player models.
In terms of general impressions, it's a far cry from Quake III - it's not like pure skill-based deathmatch. It's set at a much slower pace, and there's so much going on that it's also quite disorientating. There's really is an enormous amount happening at once in the environment.
It's intense. You're still running, but not as fast as you do in Quake III; but when you do run into someone it goes a bit crazy. It's very hard to achieve headshots and so forth. But it's all just so incredibly detailed. Not that we ever doubted it, but we must stress again - the game looks awesome.
There's very little of jumping as well, another thing that sets it far apart from Quake III. The only times you have to jump is across a gap to get the Rocket Launcher, say, or from one platform to another. It's not that you're jumping to make yourself harder to hit. It's more random, intense and crazy.
It's also dark, very dark, according to our man at the scene. Robert Duffy, programmer at id, commented: "It's a lot darker than any game you're used to, and that's deliberate".
"He says you need to use your flashlight, but I never did," says our man. "There's probably some hidden stuff that I didn't find."
Looking beyond deathmatch, can we expect any other modes? Well, as yet id Software hasn't confirmed any other modes, but we think there will be team deathmatch. A bind for a "Team Chat" key certainly appears in the controls menu. And, Robert Duffy was overheard mumbling about this very feature. What did he mean? No doubt we'll know soon...
enjoy...
Vanilla Deathmatch - quick impressions from an excited chap
Right, here we go, our first in-depth look at Doom 3 multiplayer - well, deathmatch - via a feverish report back from our crazed first-person shooter nut currently recovering after a bout with id Software's FPS yesterday. Allllll-riiiight!
And just to remind you before we go any further, Doom 3's multiplayer maps are being designed by Splash Damage of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory fame.
OK, first things first - how good is Doom 3 deathmatch? Only one map, with no name, was playable, supporting four players (we don't know yet if this is the maximum number of players in deathmatch), but how good is it?
"It's f***ing cool, it's really cool. It looks superb. Everything in it looks superb, just like the screenshots really," spouted our man at the event. Cool.
So what was the one map like, then? "OK, it's a big map and it's got this central kind of laser thing that fires periodically. And that's kind of the focus of the whole level." Right-oh.
It's more or less your classic room-corridor type level - a lot of it is really tight corridors. In the one level on show there's the main central chamber where the "laser thing" resides, which is on several levels. "There's the top platform, where you have to jump down - so you're on the top there, and you have to jump down into the centre."
Apparently you have to jump down a series of rotating platforms, which are in the central chamber, each of which is three quarters of a disc, and you have to jump through the holes to get right down to the bottom. Which is where a power-up lurks. But more on this in a second.
"It's definitely the same sort of atmosphere as we've seen in the single-player game," says Holden. Everywhere you look in the level there's industrial machinery moving, much of which can kill you - pneumatic spikes shooting out and piercing your body - you get the idea.
There are loads of effects, such as steam coming out of the walls. There's just so much going on: there are flame effects, steam, and when the laser thing fires the whole room glows red and little bits of plasma stuff flies around.
To give you some idea, it's much like the scene in Aliens when Ripley goes back into the colony complex to rescue Newt.
Also there are small parts of the level that have been taken over by the demon realm - it's the only way we can describe it. So, you'll turn a corner from a moon base-style, metallic corridor, for example, and you'll be in the hellish sort of area where there's dead bodies embedded in walls and other gruesome images.
Industrial machinery is ubiquitous, which moves and can kill you. There's one part where you get one of the weapons from where you have to wait until these pneumatic spikes retract. They can spike you on the way past when they come out. Ouch!
On to the power-up then. When you get to the bottom of the central chamber there's the main power-up in the level, which is the Berserk power-up (as yet we don't know if other power-ups will feature in the level).
The Berserk power-up increases damage and movement speed. Basically, it doubles your movement speed and gives you 2x or 4x damage (damage multiplayer isn't clear yet) with ranged weapons.
But mainly it gives 30x damage with melee weapons. So it's basically instant kills with your fists when you're Berserk. And you also do melee damage with the flashlight - yep, you can twat people with the flashlight. Result.
The Berserk power-up is really cool. When you grab that you scream for the whole time you've got it, making a "Ooaaaaarggggghhhhh!" noise. Or thereabouts. And because you're also moving twice as fast there's a vision blur effect on that as well. It's really disorientating. And it's quite hard to go on a rampage, but the instant kill thing helps.
When you grab the Berserk power-up, you teleport through this tunnel, like a hellish sort of tunnel, and you pop out in another part of the level. And when you pop out of there, you're just a skeleton and all of a sudden your body rebuilds around you. Also, when you die you dissemble down to a skeleton, and the skeleton rag-dolls onto the ground.
It looks really awesome.
Other pick-ups in the level include armour, combat armour that gives you +50 armour, and then there's armour shards and health packs, and of course ammo packs.
As for weapons, you've got a Pistol that holds 12 bullets, a Shotgun that holds eight scatter shells - it's really meaty, the Shotgun - the Flashlight, the Machine gun and the Plasma gun - which is mint, looks the mutt's nuts and is really deadly - cells contain 50 rounds. And then there's the Rocket Launcher, which holds up to five rockets. Boom!
One point worth noting is that, from what we've been able to tell so far, there doesn't seem to be that much splash damage from the rockets.
Unfortunately the chainsaw wasn't in the game itself, but it is an option in the menu. Other weapons to feature that weren't available are the Chaingun, Grenades, the BFG and something called the Soulcube. We've no idea what the Soulcube is, but it sounds like it should rock. Gravity well-type thing, perhaps?
When you get shot in multiplayer, you get a vision-blur effect, which really messes things up for you, makes it an onerous task indeed to shoot back. Your vision blurs and wobbles around as well, so you're not looking at the target anymore. Generally speaking, a great deal of blind panic is caused by these disorientating effects.
There are other cools things, for example when you shoot someone who's in front of glass they'll fly back and smash the glass. Nice. And in the map there are numerous places where you can fall off ledges into death traps. Not so nice.
Because of the technology used in Doom 3, the characters no longer have the invisible bounding box that you can shoot - it is actually per-ploy hit detection. It also employs regional damage, so headshots and so on are perfectly possible.
Presumably because of the per-poly hit detection, characters in multiplayer will all be of a very similar size, otherwise it just wouldn't be fair. Hence we can't imagine they'll have too many crazy player models.
In terms of general impressions, it's a far cry from Quake III - it's not like pure skill-based deathmatch. It's set at a much slower pace, and there's so much going on that it's also quite disorientating. There's really is an enormous amount happening at once in the environment.
It's intense. You're still running, but not as fast as you do in Quake III; but when you do run into someone it goes a bit crazy. It's very hard to achieve headshots and so forth. But it's all just so incredibly detailed. Not that we ever doubted it, but we must stress again - the game looks awesome.
There's very little of jumping as well, another thing that sets it far apart from Quake III. The only times you have to jump is across a gap to get the Rocket Launcher, say, or from one platform to another. It's not that you're jumping to make yourself harder to hit. It's more random, intense and crazy.
It's also dark, very dark, according to our man at the scene. Robert Duffy, programmer at id, commented: "It's a lot darker than any game you're used to, and that's deliberate".
"He says you need to use your flashlight, but I never did," says our man. "There's probably some hidden stuff that I didn't find."
Looking beyond deathmatch, can we expect any other modes? Well, as yet id Software hasn't confirmed any other modes, but we think there will be team deathmatch. A bind for a "Team Chat" key certainly appears in the controls menu. And, Robert Duffy was overheard mumbling about this very feature. What did he mean? No doubt we'll know soon...
enjoy...
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