DOOM 3 Gone Gold

Todd Hollenshead’s .plan (Shack News) has the full announcement. It shows up in the US anywhere between the 3rd and 5th of August, Europe on Friday, August the 13th and … everywhere in Russia and Asia probably around August 1st or so.

PC Gamer has a review of one of the last few release candidates of Doom 3, and there are illegal copies of the text floating around, like this one: PCGamer Review − September 2004 Issue − 94% (NV News). id has stuck to their promise to make a better gaming experience and “those expecting a “classic” run and gun Doom gameplay, the biggest surprise may be just how substanial this game is.”

“If you try to blaze through any of these 28 missions you WILL be humiliated. Instead the only route to access is a slow and steady one, sticking to shadows, searching every nook and crany for health, ammo, and access keys, and generally advancing as methodical[l]y as you can. … But theres no need to worry that Doom 3 is as slow as splin[t]er cell − hardly a minute goes by without a furious exchange of hostiles with some manner demonic beastie”

So that’s the gameplay; the demos always hinted at a game that would deliver pants-shitting terror, and id apparently delivers a game in which you can “say goodbye to sanity for the next 20-odd hours” while you’re playing it. The single player mode sounds great and there is also multiplayer, including “[a]ll varieties of Deathmatch − 1v1, DM, Team DM, and Last Man Standing. There are 5 DM maps shipping with the game.”

The graphics are, as expected, just as good. Apparently, it’s nailed the photo-realistic look games have been reaching toward for years, where, in one scene, “[d]ust blew around the martian surface and the dull brown/red hue of the sand and the twisted metal of shredded structures all semed so perfectly plausible.” As you swing your standard flashlight around the empty base, “light floods through a room, swinging back and forth, shadows are cast perfectly; dust particles gently drift into the cone of the flash light, eerily visible”.

Carmack and Co got ahead of even the latest, richest gamer, by building an engine that has a “A higher level of quality and resolution is available, but the PC to run it well isnt”. Excellent. The sound engine and sound design are so good and so frightening that “[y]ou [are] basically subjecting yourself to a 20 hour car[d]iac episode. At times, death brought sweet, momentery respite from the fear drenched mayhem.” And once you get to Hell? The review describes it as a “balls shriveling nightmare netherworld”.

It is definitely time to upgrade.

But to what?

Let’s see … surround sound speakers seem to be a must. The sound engine is CPU-dependent, so no need to get a fancy card there. CPU should be at least 2GHz to play without hiccups, the higher the better. 512MB of RAM is perfect; 1GB is slightly better, but not really noticeable.

There are four graphics render paths within the DOOM3 engine itself. “ARB2 path is the “full package,” and is used for the R300+ and Geforce FX+ cards”. 128MB of VRAM should be good (textures are compressed in that case. 256MB doesn’t compress textures, but that shouldn’t make a noticeable difference. “a 500mb card is needed to run the game in Ultra Quality mode.” That’s the mode that no PC can actually run well yet.