The problem with going just retro with Doom is that id would have to compete with all the modernized source ports of the original games.
They always tried to avoid modernizing their old Dooms when they were re-releasing them and i'm sure that is exactly the reason.

The next problem is that even when you keep the design as retro as possible, producing a visually pleasing game for today's hardware needs way more resources and invested money than in the early 90s.
I assume it is unlikely that you make a single buck on a oldschool Doom interpretation when released today.
The sales potential is just to small.

Btw.: My Atari 2600 (including my copy of ET! ) is still running. After all those years....

Perfectly nailed.


This leads me to the thought that it might be a good idea not to try to anolyze the Doom series in detail and try to include the basic core elements into the next Doom but to try it the other way around:

Id should consider recreating just the feeling players had when playing Doom in '93!
So what would be necessary to give gamers in 2013 the same wow effect gamers in '93 experienced when they first played the original?
Certainly not a reboot of a 20 year old game design....

That's what I've been trying to say. Literal re-interpretation is definitely not going to be a win win situation.

Of course.... I don't mean that they should actually use Id-tech 1 or 2 to make the game ~or design the graphic assets to look like it did. I would expect DOOM 4 to look comparable to Rage or better. I just would expect [hope] that the gameplay itself was more akin to DOOM2 than COD.

Well I'd say it's pretty obvious that will happen, since they scrapped their Call of Doom

I had this in the Rage section but though it really should be here. Cross post:

Rage was the first time, ignoring the Wolfs, that id stepped away from Doom and Quake. It was not a flop but it is a disappointment to both id and Zenimax. It does not compare well at all with the AAA games that sell far more and garner massive fan bases. Now Zenimax has several of those games already with Skyrim being a pretty good example and Fallout 4 starting to cause salivation in many.

I'm pretty sure with what I know about the company they will do what they can to get id into the same league. I doubt they will toss id easily, it will have to actually threaten their financial base for them to do that. I think Doom 4 is quite crucial to the company's future but doing better than Rage will, I think, give them some time to reintegrate their business. How much better sales Zenimax will require is difficult to guess, but twice will do the trick I'm pretty sure. That should be achievable.

It's obvious that there is a far larger audience for RPG games than straight up run and gun shooter games these days. It became obvious when Fallout 3 'swept the ocean' (Frank Zappa). That very many people would play and enthuse about the game gave it momentum that Fallout 4 will float to victory on. Now id is not stupid and it was obvious to them too, and as well of course Zenimax. So that's where the RPG element of Rage really came from.

Now you really gonna hate me. id's salvation is a killer RPG with excellent combat. Coincidentally, exactly what I wanted all along.

Oh yeah, why is Willets still there?

lol what? CoD, Battlefield etc all disagree, a lot

Because they have such an amazing track record with RPG's? id don't make RPGs, Doom isn't an RPG

If id want to make an RPG they can make one and it might even do well, if they make Doom an RPG I definitely won't be happy and I'm pretty sure everyone else just will just consider it pandering and not bother with it

All first person, and I guess third person too for that matter, video games are RPGs. You put it quite well :

"I'm a demon skull crushing space marine, why do I care if tech support don't like me".

It's the amount of role playing mechanics available that differ. If you can't at least pretend to be the guy with the gun, what's the point? Now what most of you run and gun guys seem to hate is having to do more than run over a health pack or cannon to pick it up. That seems appropriate for a death match game, but really a single player game that cannot come up with a fairly quick and believable way to do those things well, is not trying.

BTW the CoD and the Battlefield games are all multiplayer. That's where the fan base comes from. We are discussing a single player game I believe, although we don't know what Doom 4 will offer, it's true.

Rage isn't an RPG, just because NPCs speak it doesn't magically make a game an RPG. Rage is a more like a mish mash of Legend of Zelda style adventure games and good first person shooters like Doom. Even the Rage wasteland hub world with surrounding FPS 'dungeons' support it.

Games don't have to be believable, no mechanic in a game needs to be believable

I like RPGs, but that doesn't mean I think every game in the world needs to be one, and it definitely doesn't mean I want Doom, the definitive first person shooter, to be one.

There's never been a Doom game without multiplayer, why you think they'd suddenly stop now that competitive FPS multiplayer gaming is so massive baffles me. Especially considering the beating Rage took for not including it.

Aside from disagreeing about the audience sizes... this shouldn't matter or even be relevant to the design of a DOOM sequel; aside from the ill named mobile phone game, DOOM is not an RPG and has [needs] mutually exclusive (and even incompatible) game mechanics.

I used to say that FPP was not the great panacea to lift all games into greatness; but now I find (unexpectedly) that the same needs to be said for RPG mechanics. DOOM RPG would be a worse shooter than Fallout 3 ~except FO3 wasn't [officially] trying to be one; let alone be a sequel to the grandfather of modern shooters.

So multiplayer runs well on id-tech 5? I had thought perhaps with the large amount of baked in stuff and the the whole megatexture thing it might be difficult to implement. I know we have a COOP game in there but it's just two against the world.

Rage has multiplayer, it works well, it's just vehicle combat though. (Apart from the coop wasteland legends obviously)

The baked in lighting and shadows isn't an engine constraint, it's a decision they made to keep Rage running well on consoles. And megatexturing makes no difference to multiplayer either, ET :Quake Wars was one of the first games to use it.

Edit: Though if you mean the Virtual Texturing system in idTech 5, Brink used the same tech

Cool. Hmmm Brink is almost cheap enough for me. A Steam sale should do the trick. It has that fancy movement stuff right?

Yeah kind of a weird game, but it's good if you can get a good game going, though the same could be said for any multiplayer game really.

Here in the UK it's ￡10 on Steam, which is the same as about 3 beers so it's not exactly expensive

If id would do a reboot of Doom II on idTech 5 with new maps but true to the original visual design and gameplay, i'd be the first to buy it.
Lots of my old Doom buddies who grew old with playing Doom would love to see that.
"Insane graphics and original Doom II gameplay and atmosphere" is the common wish.

But sadly that is not going to happen.
We're to few to justify an oldschool gamedesign like this....
As i said, even with a simple game design like the old Doom, creating a game with modern rendering technology is way more expensive than it was in 1993 and needs lots of sold copies to be profitable.

And believe it or not:
I noticed that the majority of gamers today actually prefer regenerating health over the classic healthpack system because they simply can't handle the complexity of searching for healthpacks and keeping their health up.

And these are the people who'll buy the game....

As for the discussion of what Doom should be like:

There's two kinds of first person camera game types that sell well today:

1.The scripted "Michael Bay" military shooter (COD)
2. The open world RPG (Skyrim)

Doom fits into neither of those categories.

In my opinion, the ridiculously underrated (or better: misunderstood) Wolfenstein nailed it with bringing an oldschool game franchise into the next century.
Oldschool visual design with good gunplay, a surreal atmo, a good amount of exploration and a new and well implemented gameplay element: the veil.
And the multiplayer servers on Xbox live are still heavily occupied. You never have any problems finding a game.

But it seems like the market potential for such a game is limited. As far as i know, the sales weren't anyway near COD or Skyrim.

Maybe id should understand that the audience for their games is smaller than the audience for big blockbusters and act accordingly.
That would interfere with Bethesda's wish to make the Doom franchise as big as Skyrim though.

But I'm sure they'll fail with that undertaking because selling games is the same as selling movies:
The Lord of the Rings movies (like Skyrim) appeal to a wider audience than hardcoe horror movies like Dawn of the Dead (Doom).

This is totally correct. In all of the hate-frenzy surrounding Rage, one thing often used to try "prove" it "svcked" was it's apparently low sales. But when you actually look at it's sales figures, and compare them to sales for other id games, a different story emerges: Rage actually had quite high sales by id standards (it was one of their highest selling games) and id just don't make games that sell in the same amounts as a CoD or a Skyrim. They never had.

The old chestnut about Doom being on more computers than Windows refers to the shareware episode of Doom, which was not a sale, and was the only part of Doom that the vast majority of people would have ever seen. Even Doom 3 - id's highest selling game - only hit about 4.5 million, and that's nowhere near CoD/Skyrim levels.

Talk of attempting to raise Doom 4 sales to those kind of figures just tells me that Bethesda/Zenimax themselves don't quite understand that. id don't do billion-selling blockbusters, they do games that sell phenomenally well to smaller, more hardcoe communities, but that look poor when compared to sales figures for other, more populist titles. Down through their history that's always been the case, and trying to change that has a huge risk of destroying something fundamental that makes an id game what it is.

The other old chestnut is equally true: The top ten Burger restaurants in the world cannot compete with units sold at McDonalds.

As we know: Cash sale results do not equate with nor guarantee the best quality. To get [my opinion of] a quality product they would have to aim lower on the mass sales target.

Get real, nothing sold CoD/Skyrim levels back then. More people buy games now than ever before.

And yet there was no DirectX9/11 or incredibly good and [initially] free engines like UDK in 1993. The only reason it costs so much is that that's what they want to spend.

Myst would like to disagree.

It took Myst 4 years to shift 2.5 Million units, that's not even remotely close to the sort of figures Cod, Skyrim etc hit.

Edit: I mean Black Ops II is less than a year old and is sitting on 23 Million Units, Skyrim sold 3.5 million within the first 48 hours of release and was at 7 Million units sold by the end of the first week

Yeah, also it wasn't made back in DOOM days, so I think Jimmy was talking about previous games.
And I didn't buy it because it had health regen.
Sorry, but as history has numerously taught us, you can make a hit out of everything, if you manage to conjure up a perfect storm of good product and thought-out hype. Remember Pirates of the Caribbean? Prior to its release, NOBODY, and I repeat, in all caps, NOBODY would've thought that it will work. Pirate movies were not just dead, they were disasterous, with the latest one, Cutthroat Island, not only sunking, but taking the studio with it. Then along come Pirates of the Caribbean and changed the waters. Or Sci-fi? Fox executives thought George Lucas was nuts back when he wanted to make the original Star Wars. They had to hold other movies for ransom so theaters buy Star Wars because nobody wanted to show a sci-fi movie. Then it became one of the biggest franchises of all time, while also rejuvenating interest in sci-fi in general and saving franchises like Star Trek. And if we go back to games, people said adventure games were deader than disco, but look - The Walking Dead gets a second season and multiple GOTY awards, Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Al Lowe are all making new games. People said god sims are dead, but look, Peter Molenyeux successfully kickstarts one. Now, when developers and genres from the Nineties rise from the ashes, now is the perfect time for old school DOOM.

Myst? I'm pretty sure Myst came out around the same time as Doom

But the point is you can't look back at say the sales of the old Doom and Quake games and think they weren't monster successes because they weren't 10 million unit sellers like Skyrim today. To sell a million units in the 90's as a PC only game was a massive success let alone two million and have a few sequels selling millions too (Not to mention a dozen or so profitable ports). Even Doom 3's sales put it very high on the best selling PC games of all time list

Myst 4 was made in 2004.