Everyone who bitched and moaned about Doom 3 being bland or antiquated now has slightly less to bitch and moan about, as CVG confirms id Software has hired British science fiction author Graham Joyce to "help develop the storyline potential" of Doom 4. This fits in with their previous comments about taking Doom 4 in a new direction from the past entries in the series.
I know it was never cool to like Doom 3 after it came out, but damnit, I liked it a lot anyway. Sure, the overt monster closets were a little embarrassing, but otherwise I thought it was a seriously scary and atmospheric shooter with a halfway decent storyline. Then again, having an honest working writer plotting out Doom 4 can only help. It's certainly worked for Half-Life.
Joyce has won numerous awards and published plenty of material; I hope he can bring his chops to bear to improve the narrative flow of Doom 4.
In an era where it often takes 20MB to put in all the advertised features, they did it in less than four.
At a time where soundcard compatibility was a big problem, they added on Disney Sound Source as an afterthought for demonstrations. As many larger game companies are coming to terms with cross-platform development, to them it comes naturally.
They write games that would take larger companies 30 people or more, and the whole company comprises seven people. They are the programmers at Id Software, and what they are doing could change the PC game industry forever.
It sure did. The article goes to a pleasingly geeky level of minute detail, as in this quote.
Id’s main working environment is a series of PCs networked together, some of which run DOS. However, when it comes to programming, NeXTStep is the team’s weapon of choice. John Carmack has never regretted trudging through the snow in Madison to buy a NeXT cube. The level editor that Romero made for Doom took five human-months to make, but would have taken much longer on any other operating system.
Check out the full article if you're a nostalgic nerd like me.