Interview with Todd Hollenshead doom

[Fatty]

Found via the doom3 site:

 

The story, interactive environment, and why the PC has no co-op. These answers and more inside.

 

May 10, 2004 - DOOM is a name every gamer is familiar with. The classic twitch shooter that spawned a generation of gamers is finally coming back and in a big way. Unless you've been trapped in the darkest pits of Hell, you know that DOOM creator John Carmack and the folks at id Software are bringing DOOM 3 to Xbox and PC later this year. Now that it's getting closer to release, it's time to get serious about DOOM 3. Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software, sat down with IGN recently to discuss the origins of the latest DOOM. Find out what classic weapons to expect in this retelling and get a definitive answer on why there's no co-op play on the PC. Once you're done reading, be sure to check out the brand new DOOM 3 Xbox Trailer.

 

 

IGN: What is the concept behind DOOM 3?

 

Todd Hollenshead: To go way back, after we finished up Quake 3, John Carmack was looking for what he was going to do with his next rendering engine. He has the ability -- not only through his own insight, but also through knowing what direction the hardware companies are going with respect to the visuals that the graphic cards, as they come out, are going to be able to present. John made the decision early on that, basically, it was time for a paradigm change. If you go from a technological standpoint from Quake to Quake II to Quake III, fundamentally the improvements in graphics technology were about more polygons and more colors.

 

John looked at what was coming on the horizon with hardware acceleration, with geometry acceleration and lighting calculations being able to be done on the graphic accelerators and realized that lighting and shadowing in real time was going to be an impressive visual impact. As he came to that realization, he also realized, hey, not only can we do something that's really cool visually, but this is something that, in terms from an atmosphere standpoint -- because lighting and shadowing can be so moody and atmospheric -- for a scary game, this is an ideal mate.

 

That is how the idea gathered momentum going forward. Then as we started putting gameplay to marry that with the technology aspect -- you know, we could of done a sequel, or what have you, but we decided, just as John had thought, "Well this is sort of the game I really envisioned in my mind's eye when I was thinking about what DOOM really would have been like." We said, instead of making a sequel to DOOM II or, you know, Really Final DOOM, how about we just retell the story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the first things in the meetings, John said, "You know, there's no gravity on the moon, so we're gonna ditch that ridiculous idea and it's all going to be set on the planet [Mars]." Remember, [originally] it was a teleportation experiment between Demos and Phobos. So, the story is effectively the same, but just retold. You again play a marine who's sent as part of a security detachment to the Union Aerospace Corporation's research facility on Mars. They're conducting teleportation experiments. Fairly soon after your arrival, you're sent on a routine mission and while you're away, literally all Hell breaks loose.

 

You come back to the base to find all your buddies -- who are marines -- are either turned into zombies, or they're lying dead across the floors and the walls and the desks and everywhere else. You realize that your first mission is survival. You are in contact with your commanding officer, who's a character called Sarge in the game, who has the ability to give you radio instructions. In a nutshell, your mission is to stay alive, kill the demons that you face, try to figure out who [are] the good guys and who [are] the bad guys -- because not everybody is necessarily what they seem -- and ultimately to stop the demons and the forces of Hell from their mission, which is to not only take over Mars, but then to move from Mars to take over Earth. So, literally, the weight of the world is on your shoulders as you play the game.

 

IGN: What we've seen of the game so far is solely interiors of the base. Are there going to be other areas that we haven't seen that will really blow our minds?

 

 

Todd: There are different areas in the game. What [we've shown at E3] is a part of the game that's fairly early on that's called the Alpha Lab. That's all indoors, it's in a laboratory environment, so it's fairly claustrophobic. The game experience throughout, we try to make very atmospheric. A lot of that is done with lighting, a lot of that is done with sound, and of course the whole universe of demons and Hellspawn -- we're trying to set up an experience that's like an interactive horror film, so that as you play it, you are literally terrified to go forward, but it's so fun, because it's scary, that you want to go forward.

 

With respect to the environments, they're really hyper-realistic in nature in terms of the indoor environments within the UAC facility. Because you're on Mars, there's no atmosphere, so there's not a lot of opportunity for you to go outside, but you do get to see what the landscape of Mars looks like outdoors. There are some limited missions where you spend some limited time outside, but because of a limited air supply, you're not roaming the surface of the planet, because it's barren and there's not a lot to do there and the demons are taking over the base anyway, so you sort of would be wandering aimlessly.

 

In addition to what we've shown inside the base and different areas within the base and some of the limited outdoor stuff and some of the cool scenery you'll be able to see -- maybe you've seen some of it in the screenshots we've released -- you also do actually go to Hell at one point in the game. There is an artifact there that you have to have, basically, to be able to be able to prevent the demons from migrating off of Mars back to Earth. Not only do you get to see the UAC base, Mars, but to Hell and back. That's how we conceive the journey.

 

IGN: Since this is a retelling, can we expect to see all of the weapons we enjoyed in the original DOOM return in DOOM 3 in some fashion?

 

Todd: In terms of the specifics of the weapons... some of this stuff is new and different. We didn't say, "Well DOOM is our roadmap, so we have to stick with this." We felt like we had, since this was our property anyway, complete creative license to change and improve and augment where we thought it was cool for the game and fit and really could take advantage of what we could do today visually verses what could be done 10 years ago.

 

At E3, in terms of the arsenal, [there will be]: Fists, the flashlight not only is a real-time light source but you can use it as a melee weapon to knock bad guys over the head, you've got a pistol, a single-barrel shotgun, a machinegun, and a chaingun. Also, within the game there's a plasma gun, a rocket launcher and a new and improved BFG. So, some changes on some of the old ones, some improvements here and there, but we like the BFG id did too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

IGN: How has the approach been to the AI to bring DOOM 3 beyond the typical twitch shooter?

 

Todd: There are some fundamental aspects of how the characters interact with the environment. To some extent the AI has to be tailored to what they're going to do. Whether it's guys that walk or guys that fly or guys that have a melee attack or what have you. All of that has to be [somewhat] scripted. We have higher order demons that are tougher to fight and are smarter and we have the lower order guys, like the zombies, who aren't very smart at all and basically, if they see you are just going to march right at you and really don't have a lot of concern for their own safety.

 

[Then there are] the zombified security guards called Z-Sec. Those guys have more tactics. They will take cover, they will dodge, as opposed to walking forward and bludgeon you to death with their hands or get on top of your head and eat your brains or what have you. They've got shotguns or pistols or machineguns -- the same stuff you can use. Meanwhile the demons really don't have a lot of use for weapons, because if they don't have their own magical attacks, they're really only concerned about killing you, they don't have concern for their own safety. When they die they go back to their realm, so it's not like you really extinguish them anyway.

 

IGN: Is everything in the environment interactive?

 

 

Todd: Everything in the environment can be interactive, but not necessarily everything is. There's something that's real fundamental to what [DOOM 3] is that's cool about that sort of equation that everything can be interactive or that everything can be movable. There's what John called -- and I'll borrow his term -- the Hannah-Barbara effect in games where you had, with lights maps, you basically had this two-by-two matrix of how lights interacted with surfaces. You had static lights and static surfaces and dynamic lights and dynamic surfaces. So there are basically four ways things could interact with each other.

 

So if you had dynamic surfaces and dynamic-aesthetic lights, astute players could tell, "Oh, I can see the edge of this wall that can be blown up or something's going to come out" or what have you. Because the rendering in DOOM 3 is unified, dynamic and static surfaces react identically. It's all treated the same with static and dynamic lights. There's no more two-by-two matrix, everything happens within the same construct. We can have demons come out of walls and there's no visual cue to tell even the most astute player that this is where they're going to come from.

 

The environment, although it's not completely interactive, we try to leverage the ability of making parts of it interactive to make it matter from a gameplay standpoint. Not every box will be a physics object, but any box can be. There may a shelf with some boxes on it that [don't] move, but it's not really relevant to a path, then we may not turn those into physics object. Whereas, if we have a shelf with cardboard boxes on it and there's a demon behind it, then you shoot and the boxes move -- you're getting bang for your buck in terms of what you're spending your processor cycles on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

IGN: Last question. There's co-op offline and online for Xbox, but not for the PC. I doubt it could be a technical concern, so what's the reasoning for that?

 

Todd: That's a good question. The Xbox version, because it's in contemporaneous development with the PC. When it was started, basically was conceived as a console implementation of what we're trying to do on the PC, as opposed to a port where they take whatever we do on the PC and "boom" slap it on the Xbox. The Xbox version was designed from the ground up to support co-operative play over System Link and Xbox Live. There [were] some changes, concessions, considerations that had to be made from a lot of different standpoints in terms of stuff as mundane as how narrow the hallways are to the ability of the AI of the enemies to focus on one versus two players -- because it's no fun to play the co-op guy that the world seems to ignore -- to how the narrative of single-player story is told.

 

On the PC version, it was always conceived of as a purely single-player experience. The whole, "you're alone in your room and all the lights are turned out." It's an experience where we want you to be afraid to get up and turn the lights off because you're alone. Whereas, because the console market is different, because people like to play together. Now, we won't have the ability to do split-screen, but the console consumer is more, "Hey, we love co-op" and it's all supported within the Xbox with Xbox Live and System Link. It made a lot more sense for us when we were designing [the game] to include that feature, [which] was never considered to be a critical feature for the PC [version], given that our goal from the start with the PC version was to make it the best single-player game that id had ever made.

[Birdman]

You realize that your first mission is survival. You are in contact with your commanding officer, who's a character called Sarge in the game, who has the ability to give you radio instructions. In a nutshell, your mission is to stay alive, kill the demons that you face, try to figure out who [are] the good guys and who [are] the bad guys -- because not everybody is necessarily what they seem -- and ultimately to stop the demons and the forces of Hell from their mission, which is to not only take over Mars, but then to move from Mars to take over Earth.

 

I'm guessing Sarge becomes a demon.

 

Hate to ruin it for everyone, but they kinda laid it all out there.