Bethesda E3 Conference - DOOM4 Unveiling

[Tetzlaff]

AwesomeO-789 said:

The archvile has a great redesign, I honestly didn't know it was him at first, but I really like him.

Where can you see the new arch-vile? I didn't notice any monster in the videos that resembles him.

[pro_zealot]

I also have not seen the new Arch-vile its a joke or what?

[DooM_RO]

Yeah, what Arch-Vile?

[Quasar]

I tweeted "hoping for arch-viles" with #BE3, I don't think anybody saw it or cared :P

[TheGamePhilosophe]

Marnetmar said:

I'm guessing it the original was built as too much of a tech showcase, knowing John Carmack.

Source

Looks like Tiago Sousa, in the year he's been at id, remade the Doom engine into something more like Crytek. That was definitely the vibe I got from the demos, especially the foundry level.

From what I've seen, I don't like it. Crytek is too clean and sterile for me. Everything looks bland--and boring.

I think id tech 5 (or a refinement of it) would have been perfect for the new Doom. Megatextures give the world a graphic novel aesthetic. I feel this would have been great for creating really interesting looking hellish environments with lots of artistic flourishes. It would've also have let them make monsters more reminiscent of the classic Doom, with cartoon-like, exaggerated features--not the overly slick, generic, cgi looking things in the demo. The Cyberdemon would have looked amazing with megatextures.

[Antroid]

TheGamePhilosophe said:

From what I've seen, I don't like it. Crytek is too clean and sterile for me. Everything looks bland--and boring.

TheGamePhilosophe said:

It would've also have let them make monsters more reminiscent of the classic Doom, with cartoon-like, exaggerated features--not the overly slick, generic, cgi looking things in the demo. The Cyberdemon would have looked amazing with megatextures.

You can't seriously believe that things like this are dictated by the engine, can you?

[TheGamePhilosophe]

Antroid said:

You can't seriously believe that things like this are dictated by the engine, can you?

Not dictated, but enabled, yes.

Megatextures allow artists to add a lot of hand drawn detail to the world. This can give the world a lived-in, grittiness that isn't really possible with non-megatexture tech. Megatextures don't force/dictate to anyone to do this, they just make it possible on a scale that wasn't before. Unsurprisingly though, the games made with it (RAGE, Wolfenstein, and The Evil Within) all take advantage of this feature of the engine (which is one of its greatest strengths).

Absent megatextures, games to date made on other engines look sterile and clean by comparison. By sterile and clean I mean not just as an artistic choice, but that the environments lack the fine texturing made possible through megatextures. This makes them look plainer by comparison. This is what I'm seeing in the new Doom.

The detailing difference also extends to character design, so same points again on that issue.

The fact that id tech 5 enables so much hand drawn detail and texturing has led to its games having a more painterly quality to them. Again, it's a refection of the engine's unique properties. There is a logical connection between engine and graphics here.

[Jaxxoon R]

Reliance on Megatextures disallows extensive dynamic lighting, which is what the team wanted. And Megatextures are also for environments, characters have used a giant texture mapped up and down and all around every part of them since Quake.

[TheGamePhilosophe]

Tango managed to get a pretty good dynamic lighting system into The Evil Within, which ran on id tech 5. So it's not impossible. But, yes, lighting is not its strength.

Obviously, the post-Carmack team at id felt strongly that megatextures were not the way they wanted to go with the new Doom. Seems to me that Sousa, as the new lead technical officer, steered the engine toward things he was more familiar with from Crytek (lighting, particle effects, etc.).

It should go without saying that this is my personal preference, but I would rather have megatextures with all its shortcomings than all the bells and whistles of Crytek and the like.

[DooM_RO]

I don't understand why they made their own engine. They should have just used Unreal 4 and used the resources elsewhere.

[Antroid]

The presense of megatexture tech has absolutely no bearing on character design. I'm pretty sure the characters don't even use megatexture, but even if they did, they're separate models with their own unique, non-reused textures either way - characters were always made like that. There is abzolutely zero connection to megatextures.

Also, artistic style is artistic style and the idea that a certain style isn't possible without megatextures is kinda rubbish. Megatextures were just a fancier, better optimized technology for large atlas textures. They still reused texture space all over the place, and the texture resolution suffered a lot as well. Nowadays it's completely possible to make something look exactly like that without megatextures. Most devs just don't try to.

DooM_RO said:

I don't understand why they made their own engine. They should have just used Unreal 4 and used the resources elsewhere.

They probably custom-fitted their engine for exactly Doom's needs. Unreal 4, like most engines that try to be universal, is bound to have shortcomings that their engine probably works around.

[DooM_RO]

Antroid said:

The presense of megatexture tech has absolutely no bearing on character design. I'm pretty sure the characters don't even use megatexture, but even if they did, they're separate models with their own unique, non-reused textures either way - characters were always made like that. There is abzolutely zero connection to megatextures.

Also, artistic style is artistic style and the idea that a certain style isn't possible without megatextures is kinda rubbish. Megatextures were just a fancier, better optimized technology for large atlas textures. They still reused texture space all over the place, and the texture resolution suffered a lot as well. Nowadays it's completely possible to make something look exactly like that without megatextures. Most devs just don't try to.

They probably custom-fitted their engine for exactly Doom's needs. Unreal 4, like most engines that try to be universal, is bound to have shortcomings that their engine probably works around.

Yes I know but what are they working around? The game didn't seem revolutionary or anything. Solid and potentially great? Sure but not revolutionary.

[s13n1]

Megatextures would make a noticeable difference to outdoor areas, but not corridor areas. For real big open vistas where you can see lots of terrain at once, it allows for truly unique texturing, so it looks more natural.

For idTech6, they can just use decals everywhere to break things up and make it look unique.

The engine will probably have far greater support than any previous id engines for geometry objects. Hell looks to be made up of a lot of unique looking rock objects. These can then be blended together with decals to make it all look seamless.

This new engine is a good thing for us, as it increases the chance of us getting editing tools.

Megatextures would make no difference to the character models.

If it's variety you think it would provide, then you can simply not mirror the skin to create unique sides, and then you could create multiple skins with unique details so each enemy is slightly different.

I think Its funny how picky some people are about this stuff, yet we're all here on a fan site, still playing a 20 year old game, who's characters have less pixels than most company titles screens.

When your actually playing games and enjoying them, this stuff matters little.

[Antroid]

s13n1 said:

Megatextures would make a noticeable difference to outdoor areas, but not corridor areas. For real big open vistas where you can see lots of terrain at once, it allows for truly unique texturing, so it looks more natural.

For idTech6, they can just use decals everywhere to break things up and make it look unique.

Once again, it's completely possible to achieve the looks of idtech 5 without the fancy megatexturing nowadays. They could always use a material that works like a typical landscape, with blending together many textures seamlessly. No technical reason not to, they just aren't encouraged to do so when it's not megatexture. But there's now usually unique baked lighting with all the AO and light bouncing and whatever you might want on everything anyway, and that was a big part of megatexture's appeal - now it's obsolete. Shit, you can pretty much recreate a ghetto version of megatexture in unity now. I know because I'm working on a unity game with a small team and we've been constructing a good shader just like that to use for large-scale objects (although our visual style is super cartoony).

s13n1 said:

If it's variety you think it would provide, then you can simply not mirror the skin to create unique sides, and then you could create multiple skins with unique details so each enemy is slightly different.

I think Its funny how picky some people are about this stuff, yet we're all here on a fan site, still playing a 20 year old game, who's characters have less pixels than most company titles screens.

When your actually playing games and enjoying them, this stuff matters little.

Sure would be nice to know what exactly are you talking about here. Seems like each paragraph in your post was replying to a different statement, but with no indication of which.

[Deleted_Account]

Quasar said:

I tweeted "hoping for arch-viles" with #BE3, I don't think anybody saw it or cared :P

Looking at the Doom 4 wiki, I noticed 3 "new" monsters. The Unwilling, Skeleton Knights and Undead Marines.

The Unwilling are those strange looking "cyclops" zombies, which I assume are mutating into imps or some other demon. The Undead Marines are probably those strogg lookalikes which fire red laser beams, but I'm interested in the Skeleton Knights. Which creature is that applied to, we have Revenants is there going to be another class of Revenant creature?

[s13n1]

Antroid said:

Sure would be nice to know what exactly are you talking about here. Seems like each paragraph in your post was replying to a different statement, but with no indication of which.

If only you had quoted the line before.

It was in regards to mega textures and character models.

[TheGamePhilosophe]

Antroid said:

Once again, it's completely possible to achieve the looks of idtech 5 without the fancy megatexturing nowadays. They could always use a material that works like a typical landscape, with blending together many textures seamlessly. No technical reason not to, they just aren't encouraged to do so when it's not megatexture.

How about some actual examples then? If your claim is that the kind of texture detail achieved by megatextures can be achieved by numerous other engines today, then let's see the proof.

To be concrete on my end, here are some examples from RAGE: http://imgur.com/a/Gnw1e

Also, your comment about how "they just aren't encouraged to do so when it's not megatexture" is circular. If the other engines don't encourage the quality blending and detailing of megatextures, then they obviously aren't as effective in this regard. It doesn't make a real difference to me if (according to you) this is all theoretically possible in other engines. What matters are the practical results that these engines produce. If one engine encourages one set of attributes, and another encourages a different set, then that's a meaningful difference that will impact the final product.

[GuyMcBrofist]

I would really enjoy seeing megatextures used to make detailed and unique environments in the new Doom. I spent a lot of time in Doom 3 just looking at stuff.

But with fast relentless combat being the core of the gameplay design, as well as the emphasis they're putting on Snapmap, and they want the game to run 60fps at 1080p, I have to understand and agree with the decision to use a more robust crytek-like engine. Decals are good enough. It looks awesome, I don't see bland and boring at all.

[Unterspahgenzich]

Tetzlaff said:

Where can you see the new arch-vile? I didn't notice any monster in the videos that resembles him.

The Arch-vile is that demon with the blackish-brownish rocky skin with the fiery red/orange "stripes" going up his back. I'm not 100% sure it's him, but we saw him trying to throw a fireball before he got fucked up by Doomguy and he takes 2 hits with a rocket launcher to kill.

He could also be the skeleton knight but I have no idea.

http://imgur.com/a/NpbL6

[LANEGRACABRA]

Thats some kind of possessed marine or human. He has same animations and attacks as the zombie gunners in first demo. My initial thought was that they are the tougher zombie/demonized human trooper.

[Tetzlaff]

Ah okay, that monster. I don't think it's an Arch-Vile, the shape and movements are too different.

[Quasar]

Piper Maru said:

Looking at the Doom 4 wiki, I noticed 3 "new" monsters. The Unwilling, Skeleton Knights and Undead Marines.

The Unwilling are those strange looking "cyclops" zombies, which I assume are mutating into imps or some other demon. The Undead Marines are probably those strogg lookalikes which fire red laser beams, but I'm interested in the Skeleton Knights. Which creature is that applied to, we have Revenants is there going to be another class of Revenant creature?

I am trying to proceed cautiously with the vast amount of speculation that's currently going on. Until Bethesda or id release some more details, it's hard to know what we're really looking at and what they want to call it.

"The Unwilling" is a term referenced in Bethesda's official press release referring to the zombie-like monsters who appear to be unarmed, some of which have a skull for a head and others have the "one-eyed appearance" (though I believe it's actually just a large hole in their skull where the face should be). I believe this is what the unarmed zombie types will be called, "unwilling" referring to them being forced to do things against their will through demonic possession I suppose.

"Undead marine" seems to be a fan assumption, I cannot find a canonical source using that term. Same for "skull knight;" unless somebody who attended QC 2014 can elucidate on this, it's not entirely clear what these things are. Are they distinct from Hell knights? They appear very similar in body shape but seem to attack almost if not entirely exclusively with very fast melee attacks (interestingly they seem to borrow some sound effects from Resurrection of Evil, particularly from the Helltime Hunter, unless my ears deceive me).

The existence of Barons is totally conjectural right now. We have one super blurry shot of what people think looks like a horned demon. Not enough to go off of at all.

Then there is the demon/spectre/pinky - we don't know its official name, and we can't be sure how these monster(s) will work or how many distinct species of them there really are. I have a strange feeling that in this game, becoming invisible with the Predator effect will just be a natural skill that all pinky demons have, but of course, if the game retains enough id Tech 4 heritage (which it seems to, from the entity triggering system displayed in SnapMap being effectively exactly the same as entity triggering and references in id Tech 4), then monsters can probably exist in many subforms, ie. with different AI settings, or optional attachments (like how a fat zombie could have a wrench or a flashlight in Doom 3).

[Unterspahgenzich]

Quasar said:

Same for "skull knight;" unless somebody who attended QC 2014 can elucidate on this, it's not entirely clear what these things are. Are they distinct from Hell knights? They appear very similar in body shape but seem to attack almost if not entirely exclusively with very fast melee attacks (interestingly they seem to borrow some sound effects from Resurrection of Evil, particularly from the Helltime Hunter, unless my ears deceive me).

Do we know for sure that the skull knights are like the hell knights without projectiles? It could be a variation of the revenant without a jetpack/rockets? Just a thought, though.

Also, I thought I'd ask in this thread because there's a lot of activity here, does anyone know if there's a WAD for Doom 2 that is basically the Doom 1 maps with Doom 2 weapons/monsters? I like both games, but it's a chore to play through some of those Doom 2 maps. I want the weapons of Doom 2 and the maps of Doom 1. Any help would be appreciated.

Edit: Nevermind regarding my question, I think I found what I was looking for

[Antroid]

TheGamePhilosophe said:

How about some actual examples then? If your claim is that the kind of texture detail achieved by megatextures can be achieved by numerous other engines today, then let's see the proof.

"Can be achieved" doesn't mean "has been achieved". I know that RAGE is gorgeous, but if I provided an example of a gorgeous game (GTA V, Witcher 3 - just from the most recent ones I played), you'll just say something nebulous like "it just doesn't feel the same".

The fact is, since it's possible in modern engines, it doesn't matter if they're using megatexture or not. RAGE was obviously meticulously made as a showcase of the engine, noone will put the same amount of effort into an idtech 5 game again anyway. Wolfenstein and TEW were not nearly as unique (well, TEW I only judge from videos and screenshots, haven't played it yet, but TNO I've beaten). If they're not putting the effort required to make it look as good as RAGE in the current engine, they wouldn't have done it in idtech 5 either (especially considering that while megatextures were idtech 5's speciality, from what I understand they were notoriously annoying to properly take advantage of).

The only thing keeping devs from making games that look like RAGE is laziness/lack of necessity (people eat up the weaker stuff too so noone's gonna spend more money than needed). Although apart from some amazingly detailed cliffs and similar vistas, RAGE's look could be described as "everything kinda melted together". It was easy to look at but at a closer look most of the detail was drawn on very low-res textures, and while some was 3d, it still looked like it was just drawn on the textures. In a lot of cases it looked pretty bad and absurd in indoor environments (I'm actually playing through RAGE again right now, so it's all fresh in my mind).

[Quasar]

AwesomeO-789 said:

Do we know for sure that the skull knights are like the hell knights without projectiles? It could be a variation of the revenant without a jetpack/rockets? Just a thought, though.

Doesn't look anything alike. The revenant is very fleshy, like a fresh corpse, and skinny. These guys have jet black, extremely muscular bodies with demon legs, but a bare bone skull for a head, which the Doomguy likes to grab ahold of to snap their necks. From a profile, they have just about the same shape and size as a Hell knight. They've not been seen to throw projectiles, though their hands sometimes have a fiery or energetic appearance while they are attacking.

[LANEGRACABRA]

Does anyone else think the Doom3 hellknight was bigger and thicker?

[Zemini]

I think the "skull night" is probably just the new Hell Knight. They look almost way to close to the older hell knights so why would they make an entire different monster?

As for the Undead marines; perhaps the Strogg were enslaved? Kinda far fetched...

[Deleted_Account]

Found this on Tumblr, maybe it's looking to much into it, but it's still neat. The unwilling are bodily vessels for demons perhaps?

[Zemini]

I hope not. The Doom movie sucked and it would be better to avoid anything relating to it.

[GuyMcBrofist]

Maybe the unwilling are people who resisted being subordinated by the forces of hell, while the more lucid and dangerous former humans with weapons are people who were too weak-minded to disagree?