Bei Gamespy.com ist ein Artikel mit der Überschrift „Doom 3 – Possibly the worst idea in the history of gaming“ erschienen. Dabei werden einige Argumente aufgezählt, warum Doom 3 nicht mehr das alte Doom-Feeling erreichen wird. John Romero´s gone. American McGee´s gone. Sandy Peterson is gone. Sean Green is gone. That´s all (as in: 100%) of the level designers who contributed to Doom and Doom2 (Tim Willits made one map for „Ultimate Doom“). Sandy Peterson alone is responsible for nearly three quarters of the maps in Doom/Doom2. Tom Hall´s gone. He and Romero were at least 50% of the game design behind Doom. Diskussionen dazu im Forum.

Stomped hat die ersten Reaktionen auf die Ankündigung von id Software, Doom 3 zu produzieren, gesammelt. Unter anderem:

• Tom Hall, John Romero (Ion Storm), Scott Miller (3D Realms), Marc Rein (Epic Games), John Scott (Raven Software), Mike Wilson (GoD).

• Tom Hall: I´m pretty excited about a possibilities of a new DOOM. As long as it is fast-paced, has places of complete darkness, and has REALLY scary events, it could be wonderful. (And if they´re focusing on a single-player experience, there´s still that Tei Tenga story I did for DOOM1…conspiracy and death…the perversion of the normal…fun fun fun!) Heh, anyway, they are awesome developers–I´m sure it will rock the house

Das Verhalten der anderen Spielefirmen ist ganz interessant. Man darf nicht vergessen, daß die meisten von ihnen einstimmig Doom als DEN Shooter ansehen und wenn die Konkurrenz aus Mesquite nun ein neues Doom-Game macht, sieht es schlecht aus für die eigenen Verkaufszahlen. Allein der Name DOOM wird schon für gute Absatzzahlen sorgen, wenn id Software sich dann noch kräftig anstrengt wird es ein Megahit, bei dem die Konkurrenztitel (Duke 4 Ever, Half Life 2, Unreal 2) alt aussehen werden. Sich gegen Doom zu stellen würde bedeuten den Urvater aller Shooter zu beleidigen und das will sich natürlich auch keiner nachreden lassen ;)

Das Ex-id-Mitglied Zoid hat sich auch zum Thema Doom und den Rauswurf von Paul Steed zu Wort gemeldet.

Dazu ist hier einige Auszüge aus seinem .plan: DOOM featured rooms of dozens upon dozens of enemies. This was something that just wasn´t feasible in Quake or Quake2 with the limitations of the number of polygons on screen. I hope that JohnC has some solutions to achieving this.

• DOOM had one of the best musical scores of any video game.
• The monster design was amazing. I remember screaming when I first encountered the Cyberdemon and the fear he instilled into me.
• DOOM only had LAN based play (and modem one vs one). A proper client and server arcitecture for DOOM based deathmatch would just simply rock.
• DOOM had insane player speeds. The DOOM guy ran almost twice as fast as the Quake guy did in relation to the world. Such speeds aren´t really condusive to internet play since it makes prediction harder. However, I hope those insane speeds make it into the new DOOM. But there are some issues–when DOOM came out, people were new to the first person shooter genre and one of the reasons DOOM was such a fun game was as you learned how to play you started being able to kill monsters better. These days I (and most experienced players) can run rings around a Cyberdemon and toy with him. DOOM taught me how to strafe, dammit. :) It´s a shame to see Paul let go. He was certainly one who didn´t have any problem expressing his opinions. But he could sure pound out some amazing 3D models. His work in Quake2 and Quake3 was outstanding–it´s sad to see his art won´t be in the new DOOM.

Ein kleines Diskussionsründchen zum Thema neues Doom gibts im Forum.

Die Nachricht hat uns genauso überrascht wie euch:

John Carmack schrieb in seinem .plan darüber, daß id Software ein neues DOOM Spiel machen wird. Die ganze Spekulationen in den vergangenen Monaten scheinen also recht gehabt zu haben. Hier ein Ausschnitt aus dem .plan von John Carmack:

Several factors, including a general lack of enthusiasm for the proposed plan, the warmth that Wolfenstien was met with at E3, and excitement about what we can do with the latest rendering technology were making it seem more and more like we weren´t going down the right path.

I discussed it with some of the other guys, and we decided that it was important enough to drag the company through an unpleasant fight over it.

An ultimatum was issued to Kevin and Adrian (who control >50% of the company): We are working on DOOM for the next project unless you fire us

[…]

t wasn´t planned to announce this soon, but here it is: We are working on a new DOOM game

Eine weniger erfreuliche Nachricht ist, daß Adrian Carmack und Kevin Cloud Paul Steed gefeuert haben, hier ein Auszug aus John´s .plan:

It went smoother than expected, but the other shoe dropped yesterday.

Kevin and Adrian fired Paul Steed in retaliation, over my opposition.

Paul has certainly done things in the past that could be grounds for dismissal, but this was retaliatory for him being among the „conspirators“.

I happen to think Paul was damn good at his job, and that he was going to be one of the most valuable contributors to DOOM.

Man könnte den Eindruck kriegen, daß id Software sich wegen dieser Entscheidung zerstritten hat… es lohnt sich auf alle Fälle mal den neuen .plan von John Carmack zu lesen, einer der interessantesten der letzten Monate.