Dear John

We still love you. Nothing can take away the perfect escape you gave us with the Doom and Quake games. It's been a long time. Technology has changed. With Doom I entered the level and I knew the demons were all there, already, waiting for me. That knowledge makes all the difference, it creates immersion, it facilitates the suspension of disbelief. With all these CoD clones, I'm being led by the nose along a carefully prepared script, and when the game judges I should have x number of enemies, they pop into existence, just out of sight. That was what was wrong with Doom 3 - don't get me wrong, I love Doom 3, it made me feel like I was entering hell again, and it felt like coming home, but when the Imps just appeared in front of me I was dragged back out to thinking about the game as such, as a game - meta-game thinking is the contrary of immersion, and the FPS is all about immersion.

What I want to ask you is to make Doom 4. Will all the flak Rage is taking you may not want to. But we, we faceless marines, we voiceless shotgun guys stranded on Phobos, we need you to make Doom 4. But what we need is for you to restore detail. Just as spawning enemies destroy immersion, so does a lack of detail, especially when you are surrounded by beauty, as we are in Rage. We see beauty in the sky and in the dust and ruins, but when we try to approach it and touch it, we see 'the game', 'the texture', not the signpost or the pipe in the wall. And it is that contrast between beauty at a distance and crudity up close that breaks immersion in Rage. That's why I can still play Doom - everything is crude by today's standard, but everything you look at in that pixellated hell is consistent in appearance.

So I wait and hope for the day when I can go home, to Hell, to a hell of futurist beauty created by you, a hell with a layout designed by Tim, with only a shotgun to tell me who I am in this burning hopeless place, with a vacant faceless identity there for me to fill (you preserved that in Rage, thank you!). And the last thing I want is someone there to save me or help me or be my friend, even if he has the voice of John Goodman. For perfect immersion and escape, I must be alone in Hell, with no squad, no 'NPC', and no 'vendor' to help me. Let Blizzard give us fedex quests and grinding. Give us the nakedness of hell and a shotgun.
But whatever you decide, let me repeat. We still love you. We will always be grateful. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, John, thank you.

Bitterman