Listen carefully. Go on. Listen. Really concentrate. Hear it?
The curious sound you can detect floating across the breeze is that of the world's PC hardware vendors wringing their hands with glee at today's news from id Software. You see it turns out that the House of Doom has got a brand new franchise on the way, and once again, John "Gaze upon my minimum spec and weep" Carmack is at the helm. At the moment there are no details other than the project's existence (Anyone willing to take my bet that it's an FPS? No?), but Id honcho Todd Hollenshead had this to say to GamesIndustry.biz :
"We are working on an all-new franchise: it's not Doom, it's not Quake, it's not Wolfenstein, it's not Enemy Territory, it's not even Commander Keen!"
(Editor's note: Damn.)
More after the jump.
"It is a new id brand with an all-new John Carmack engine and I think that when we show it to people, once again they'll see, just like they saw when we first showed Doom 3, that John Carmack still has a lot of magic left.
Our first task at id is as a single studio developer. That's really where everything spawns from. Because John Carmack is a programming genius, who in my opinion is unequalled in video games today, he makes a great technology that we can use across a wide range of applications and different games within our suite of franchises.
The new stuff that we're working on does have a brand new engine that John has been working on, actually is still working on today. We can’t really talk any details about it; we'll see about when the timing is right for an announcement. We like to be able to talk about stuff that we can show at the same time and it's not really ready to show yet."
All joking apart, this is probably going to be good news. While id's in-house game design has made some of their big releases more impressive as extended tech demos than games in the past (Doom 3, I'm looking at you!), once that tech's been franchised out to other developers, we've often seen some fantastic results (Quake 4 and Quake Wars, take a bow, I'm now looking at you.).
More news as we get it. Until then, start fashioning weapons and collecting together supplies. It looks like we might soon be in for a repeat of the great upgrade frenzy of 2004 ...
Contest:
10:56 AM on 05.31.2007
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I'd like to see this game before I have grandkids, so Johnny would do well to license something that's already done or use Doom 3's as I doubt anything he'll make will be able to blow our socks off much more than Crysis or Unreal 3's has.
dvd: I wouldn't be surprised if a new id engine was a reaction to Crysis and U3. Still, the more the merrier. I'd rather have more options than less.
I think you're underestimating the power of the force that is id. It's a *new* engine by the guy who pretty much invented FPS as we know it today.
Why license something that's already been done? Isn't that taking a step backwards? There's always room for an id engine and given the advances that the CryEngine has undergone, alongside the blisteringly beautiful U3 engine - I'd expect Cormack to be tweaking away at this to give some features that these "newer" engines don't have.
I'm pretty confident Carmack is going to blow our minds again with this one. There are some pretty recent developments in the real-time graphics world that not even CryEngine2 has taken advantage of, so I think it will still be impressive.
Case in point: As awesome as CryEngine2's lighting engine and polygon count are, it still uses normal maps rather than subdivision surfaces, which have existed in CG for years and don't look like crap when viewed close up or at an angle. Neither does it have global illumination, which was previously thought impossible to do in real time. And this stuff was done by a tiny company no one's ever heard of. So rest assured, there's plenty Carmack can do to impress us here.
1.-Doom 3, was REALLY scary.(for an FPS)
2.-Without the doom 3 engines, engines such as the one in Halo 2, Splinter Cell 3, Unreal even Crysis just wouldnt have been possible.
According an old article I read about carmack's new engine, it will feature ultra realistic soft shadowing and self shadowing as well as advanced (very advanced) hair and soft body rendering, in the words of carmack:
[i]
"Our latest engine make games look a little more like toy story, the new engine will make games look like Monsters Inc"
[/i]
(ps is an old comment, and Monsters Inc was pretty recent at the time)
I hope is a horror D&D RPG/action game thats exactly the kind of game Carmack has always wanted to do. (Quake was close to that but not quite)
Btw, you can save your pennies, in this day and age is almost certain the game will be almost immediately ported to consoles.
But I was very impressed with what he did with Doom 3, so a new engine could be even more amazing. It's a shame I won't be able to run it most likely...
i think that would go down as the best news of this decade.
Not fans of Quake 4? I know a few people slated when it came out, but I've never got that. It wasn't ground breaking in structure, sure but as a pretty epic, cinematic FPS, I thought it was a winner.
I agree, I had Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 around the same time (thus my desktop had the same specs for both games) and Half-Life 2 always ran SOOO much smoother on the highest settings, yet Doom 3 always ran like complete shit on the LOWEST settings (which looked worse than Half-Life 2 on highest settings looked), and I always hated how non-scalable the Doom 3 engine was, from that experience. I think that any good 3D engine developer should make their engine scalable, so a larger number of people can enjoy a new PC game without multi thousand dollar upgrades. I think Valve succeeded in scalability, but id didn't. Here's hoping the next id engine will be scalable, even if it's looking like it'll be even WORSE than Doom 3.
They have 1, 4, 6, and Dreams. I don't know if you can actually get them to run on XP and probably forget them ever working on Vista.