Doom 4

Id Software's annual keynote by its co-founder John Carmack at QuakeCon 2009 ran well over two hours with Carmack seemingly not taking a breath as he unloaded on id's plans for the future, his own feelings on next-gen games technology, his rocket company and even his new electric car. Here are just some of the highlights:

• Carmack doesn't see id Software's recent acquisition by ZeniMax Media as a sell out. Indeed he finds it liberating because, "I don't have to attend any more board meetings" which means he can concentrate on doing programming work at the office. id Software has been an acquisition target for a long time; Carmack said that just after Wolfenstein 3D was released, id was almost bought by Sierra Online.
• Speaking about their upcoming game Rage, Carmack referred to it as a "people game". Unlike previous id games which were mostly about monsters trying to kill you, there are real characters that you interact with in the game.
• Carmack is a big believer in the iPhone for games. Indeed he said its likely that all of id's mobile game products will be exclusively made for the iPhone. Carmack sees id making three kinds of mobile games; the classic id game ports, the variant RPG games like Doom RPG and Wolfenstein RPG, and all new original products. Carmack said in that latter category you can expect a Rage tie-in game. Carmack predicted that id will release a new mobile game every other month for the next year or so.

Check out more tibits after the jump:

As the days get closer to the launch of E3 2009 in early June, Big Download has been compiling wish lists of games that we would like to see during the revamped and larger trade show. We start out with a long list of first person shooter games. Some of the games on this list are indeed confirmed as being at E3 this year. Other games on this list are titles we think will be there. There are ever a few that we are just hoping might make an appearance at the show.

With that in mind let's head over to our list. Next time we will give our E3 2009 wish list over to the action game genre

Click on the image to continue reading Countdown to E3 2009: The FPS Games We Want To See

id Software has been promoting it's id Tech 5 game graphics engine as a solid way for third parties to have high-end graphics and features for their future game titles. However it's not planning to go all out to become a huge game engine company like Epic with its Unreal engine business.

In a new chat at Gamasutra, id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead states, "Working on Rage and working on Doom [4], which are both id Tech 5 games, are certainly our top priorities." The game engine supposedly works seamlessly across PC, Mac, Xbox 360 and PS3 platforms which should allow anyone who uses it to create a multi-platform game with little effort in the game engine department. Hollenshead said they have already "seeded tech out to a few licensees" but there's no word yet on which third party game developers are using id Tech 5.

When we first launched Big Download about 10 months or so ago, we knew we could be covering all sorts of titles, from large publishers and developers to small one man indie games. However we also knew there would be games that we, and we hope our readers, would spend more time in covering and playing over the next several months. These games came to be known to us as the BigAss 25.

This list has remained something that's only been known to the Big Download team . . . until now. Today in a special two part article we reveal what games are included in our BigAss 25 list is for the current time period. Our aim is to revise this list every few months, taking some out and putting new ones back in, so that it remains a fresh and relevant look at where the PC game industry is headed.

While we will still cover the entire PC game industry, this list of games represents what we think will be of special interest to us and our readers. You may notice that this list contains games that have already been released. Why? Because those titles continue to generate interest, especially if they have had or will have new downloadable content and expansions that will keep their games fresh in our heads.

Today we are revealing the first 13 games on the BigAss 25 list in alphabetical order. Stay tuned tomorrow as we reveal the other 12 games on our current list.

Click on the image above to continue reading Big Download's BigAss 25 - Part 1

Today is the 15th anniversary of the release of Doom, the sci-fi first person shooter from id Software. On Dec. 10, 1993, the original shareware version was uploaded to a single FTP server. That's all it took for the game, about one space marine fighting an invasion from Hell on the moons of Mars, to spread across the world like wildfire on tens of millions of PC hard drives.

While the game wasn't the first FPS ever made, the release of Doom arguably launched the genre into the mainstream of gaming. The PC shareware version of the title became a massive hit with some people saying the DOS version of the shareware were installed on more PCs at one point than Microsoft's then current version of Windows.

Click on the logo above to continue reading Happy 15th Birthday Doom!

Download the Doom Shareware here at Big Download
Download the Doom III Classic mod (a remake of the original Doom in Doom III) here at Big Download

Those of you who preferred the frantic pace of Doom and Doom II when compared to the slower, survival horror-esque Doom 3 are in luck: the fourth Doom game (which will not be called Doom 4) will return to the more chaotic pace of the originals, Shacknews confirmed in an interview with id genius John Carmack.

Carmack acknowledged the primary complaints of Doom 3, admitting that not being able to wield weapons concurrently with a flashlight, as well as a constant stream of closet monsters, provided the impetus to cancel a survival horror game titled Darkness that id was developing.

Will the id Tech 5-powered Doom once again feature rooms filled with angry Imps and snarling zombies? Most likely. In Doom, players will certainly experience a few tense moments with only one bullet and hordes of enemies to kill, but overall, "you have to be blowing demons all to hell all around you," explained Carmack. The best way to do that? Guns. Lots of guns.

During his annual QuakeCon address, John Carmack divulged his reason for the resurrection of Quake III: Arena via the free web-based shooter Quake Live. Quake III represented the purity of an old school, deathmatch-oriented shooter, Carmack explained. While both fun to develop and to play -- Carmack proudly stated that he used to place first in the in-house Quake III tournaments, then humbly admitted he only survived the first round of a recent Quake Live session -- such a package would not do well as a $50 retail product.

Enter Quake Live, a free-to-play reincarnation of Quake III that can be accessed from any computer with a broadband connection and a web browser. But given Carmack's love of Quake III, Carmack answered the question he must have known was on the mind of all in attendance: might there one day be a Quake Arena 2?

Possibly -- but only if Quake Live fares well. "I'd say probably the success of Quake Live is going to determine whether or not we do another Quake Arena project," said Carmack during his speech.

Even if Quake Live does well, another Quake project would be far down the road. Though id is divided into multiple teams, Carmack has said that Rage is his first priority, and after that, the studio will no doubt gear up for a heavy marketing campaign revolving around its next Doom title. All that combined with Raven's focus on the forthcoming Wolfenstein equals Quake Live as the next big title for Quake-aholics.

Given the oft-mistaken view of Electronic Arts' as one of the industry's two evil empires (with Microsoft being the other company to hold the dubious honor), many gamers and industry specialists were quite surprised when id Software named EA as the publisher for their upcoming Rage FPS. Despite the view of EA, many were surprised due to id's longstanding publication relationship with Activision, who has published a number of the independent developer's most notable titles.

When asked about the publishing deal with EA during his QuakeCon 2008 keynote, id's famous lead engineer John Carmack smiled and said not too read too much into it and that, essentially, business was business. Carmack explained that id had shopped Rage to a number of publishers three different times. Each time, publishers such as Activision, EA, and Sega had been impressed and had offered high sums, but id had chosen to do more work and come back later with another pitch. Carmack noted his contentment that his company was one of the only independent studios who could afford to take such a position.

After reaching a milestone dictating the game could be sufficiently shown, Carmack asked all potential bidders to come forward with their final proposals. The result: EA won, plain and simple. Carmack made a special point of noting that the publishing deal only included Rage. EA could very well be signed to publish Doom, but id will likely repeat the bidding process with that title as they did with Rage.

In a chat with id Software designer Tim Willits during QuakeCon this week, Big Download has learned that Doom IV, the recently announced next game in id's flagship first person shooter series, won't actually be titled Doom IV after all. Willits revealed to us that the fourth Doom game will still have the name Doom in the title but that it will have some kind of subtitle instead of a number. Naturally that subtitle has yet to be announced.

Why did they decide to make this move? Part of the reason is that the fourth Doom game will not be a continuation of the storyline for Doom III, according to Willits. Doom III was basically a "reimagining" of the first Doom game's storyline (a la the revamped Battlestar Galactica). So willl the fourth Doom game be a continuation of, say, Doom II's Earth invasion? Willits wasn't giving up any story ideas yet.

For fans of the Doom III storyline, you can check out the recent novel Doom III: Worlds on Fire by author Matthew Costello who helped create the storyline for the game with id (Costello is working on yet another Doom III novel as well). Willits told Big Download that Costello won't be returning to help write the fourth Doom game but will be helping to write the story for id's other major interally developed title Rage. Both games will use id's new id Tech 5 graphics engine technology. We will have much more of our conversation with Willits in the near future.

Despite developer id Software's upcoming Rage and Doom 4 titles both being built using id Tech 5, famed developer John Carmack believes that Doom 4's aesthetics will outshine those of Rage, according to an interview conducted with Maximum PC.

"[Doom 4 is] going to be a 30Hz game," said Carmack to Maximum PC. "It's going to look like a totally new game engine on there, even though it's going to be built on the four years of effort that we spent developing this generation of technology."

One of the main goals with id Tech 5, the technological successor Doom 3's id Tech 4 engine, was versatility. "We knew when we were starting this generation of technology that the consoles were taking over the preeminence for the types of games we'd been making-the AAA media-rich blockbusters were on the consoles," says Carmack. "We needed a solution that would be portable across 360, PS3, PC, and OS X, but we didn't want to abandon our PC roots."

Such logical and realistic planning has resulted in Rage -- and presumably Doom 4 -- being developed for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 simultaneously. Such a scenario is all too common in the modern gaming industry, but id Software has taken their commitment to servicing fans of most platforms one step further: for the first time, id Software has committed a single team of experts to the development of all versions of Rage.

"We didn't want to have to go out to any other companies to produce these games," explains Carmack. "We wanted to say OK, here's the build and run the same build on the PC, the 360, and the PS3. We still have to go through one extra step to build it on the Mac. But it really does work that way on the other [console] platforms. Right now, you check the stuff in, the next day you get the build reports, which says, 'here it is [ready to go] on these three platforms.' So that's one of the core technical aspects."

Visit MaximumPC.com to read the full interview.

PC Gamer has released a Doom 4 most-wanted list, detailing six changes they'd like to see in id Software's other upcoming shooter. One must-have is, of course, the ability to use a flashlight and a weapon at the same time (if there will be a flashlight at all, of course). PCG writer Chris Holt admits that the flashlight "made the game creepy, but it also served as a crutch the designers could use to prop up a game that suffered from poor level design, redundant combat, and sub-par story telling."

To summarize, Chris would like to see Doom return to its PC gaming industry leadership roots. "The Doom franchise used to be synonymous with innovation. Instead of merely catching up to quality games like Half-Life 2 and Call of Duty 4, perhaps Doom can push the genre and its arsenal in new directions."

Wow! Wow! And an even bigger WOW! Just when you thought things couldn't surprise you in this business along comes id Software who today announced out of the blue that they would be developing Doom .... wait for it .... 4. Yes, the fourth title in the first person shooter series that launched id Software to the stratosphere in the game development industry is indeed in the works with the Dallas-based developer expanding its team to accommodate working on the game.

This is an even bigger surprise considering that id had already announced plans to develop Rage, an all new action game that was first announced and shown at QuakeCon last August. Little to no info on Rage has been revealed since then and indeed no mention of the game was made in today's terse Doom 4 announcement (Update: id Software's PR rep has told BigDownload that Rage is still in development and that id is simply expanding to hold a second team for Doom 4). No info, including a release date, publisher or platforms, has been revealed about the new Doom game with id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead only saying, "Doom is part of the id Software DNA and demands the greatest talent and brightest minds in the industry to bring the next installment of our flagship franchise to Earth." So if you are an aspiring game developer and have always wanted to work on a Doom game you now have a shot at it.