id Software Interview
Over at the Game Informer website you can find an interview with John Carmack And Todd Hollenshead of id Software. The two are asked about their Emmy wins, engine technology, use of DirectX 10, Microsoft's attempts to make Vista a gaming platform and bringing Xbox Live to the PC, working with Vista, developing for multi-core systems, and thoughts on the Playstation 3 and Microsoft's XNA platform.
GI: After Enemy Territories: Quake Wars ships with the highly modified Doom 3 engine and the MegaTexture support, is it time for you guys to move on from that engine? Carmack: Yes, the in-house development project that we've been working on is all new technology. It still has some roots in the Doom 3 technology, but almost everything is new in there. We're still not talking about exactly what the project is, but it's a new IP, it's diverting a little bit from the standard id formula and it's not just a first-person shooter. Technically, it's build around an advancement over the MegaTexture technology from Quake Wars. Where that was applied just to the terrain, the version of the new technology applies it into everything, so we can have that level of rich detail on all the surfaces on the entire world. That's the push that we're making with graphics technology. The gameplay is somewhat different from anything that we've of done before. The company is pursuing Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake franchises with other partner developers and all, but we're trying to develop a brand-new franchise with this new one. Hopefully, we'll be talking about that sometime this year, and we'll be able to go ahead and come out of our own little cone of silence about it.
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Would anyone be surpsised if it's an MMO project?
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Quest was more of a Neverwinter Nights type game than an MMO. Individual 3rd party servers running smallish (smaller than MMO-size, anyway) groups of players through coop campaigns.
All they've really said about the new game is that it has really big levels (several times larger than an ETQW level if I remember correctly) and lots of human characters.
They also developed level streaming tech for the new Wolfenstein game, so it's a safe bet that will see it's way into their new game as well.
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I'll play predict the next id software game game!
We know the game is going to have HUGE environments, potentially some of the largest ever seen in a FPS (~16 square miles per level or something I think, and they'll probably have level streaming as well).
This doesn't lend itself very well to the linear, interactive movie style game that I think most people think of as an id-style game.
At the very least, they'll need a compass to guide you around, and if they actually want to get any use out of all that space, they're going to need some type of quest or mission system that will send you different places in this world, which means you're going to need the "lots of humans" they mentioned at Quakecon to give quests to the player.
I don't think it's going to be an FPS/RPG hybrid, necessarily, but it will probably have a mission system that many people will associate with RPGs.
I think a nonlinear FPS in an open world style setting with an RPG-esque quest system would qualify as "something different" from id.
That would open up some crazy possibilities for multiplayer as well, from vehicle based stuff like ETQW to coop missions that feel almost like MMO encounters (minus the thousands of simultaneous players, of course).
Or maybe I'm completely wrong, I don't know.
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