What's Doom 4's Future?

[DooM_RO]

Ooooh boy, I don't envy Id. Because of how abstract the game is every fan has a different interpretation of Doom and the funny thing is that all are correct to some extent.

No wonder they restarted so many times.

[Marnetmar]

Shaviro said:

I haven't seen the movie either.
It's difficult to say really. They could go a few ways.

First they could try to cartoon it up in order to an absolute copy of the old style. This would effectively cut off a large portion of its potential audience and leave the "realistic" graphics arms race which Doom was always a part of. It's not that a "cartoon" styled game can't be great and look amazing, it's just not what most people would expect form a Doom game and it is my estimation that it for this would be panned by the general audience.

Another way to go would be to disregard everything Doom and find a completely new style. I would expect this to alienate a lot of the core crowd for the game, leaving mostly newcomers and people who don't care about id software in general or Doom specifically.

The only viable route (and this is a broad spectrum of course) I see is to find a style that works with slightly exaggerated creatures (like seen in classic Doom), but is still grounded in the realm of graphical realism. It has to be colorful, but not cartoonish. As I've stated before, I think they weren't too far off with the leaked screenshots from 2 years ago.

I am pretty sure they're going with this (broad) 3rd option, so his task will as far as I can tell be to nail the design with those specs in mind. From what I saw of his speech at QuakeCon last year, he has a great eye for detail and practicality. How that exactly will bleed through in his work I don't know, but it struck me (to the best of my recollection) that he put a lot of thought into the design. Much more so than the standard "this looks cool" argumentation that id software has often used. I think he could be the right man for the job.

Or just hire this guy

[Megamur]

Giger's "biomech" style would only really properly suit a handful of enemies and locations.

[Koko Ricky]

As far as monster design goes, it would need to be a combination of Giger, Hellrasier, Bosch and classic death/black metal album art.