Q&A: id Software's Todd Hollenshead and Tim Willits (Features)

Dan Elektro, GamePro

04/11/2003 11:33:46

Doom 3, due out on the PC in 2004 from id Software and Activision, is easily one of the most anticipated games of the year. GamePro got to talk with id's CEO, Todd Hollenshead, and Doom 3's lead designer, Tim Willits, about hardware requirements, how Half-Life 2 does or doesn't affect Doom 3, and the status of the Xbox version.

GamePro: Why go back to Doom now?

Tim Willits: John Carmack had a vision of Doom when it he made it in 1992. He felt that with this technology, he could really create the scary, terrifying world that he envisioned with the original Doom. With the real-time lighting, the dynamic shadows, the bump mapping, the cool blood, the great gore, the incredibly detailed models, his nightmare vision of Doom could be a reality with this technology.

Todd Hollenshead: Plus, everybody at the company is a fan of the original series, so this was like the Holy Grail of gaming. A lot of guys, Tim included, got their starts in the industry making Doom WADs [levels].

TW: Every level designer we have is a community guy.

GP Why wasn't Doom 3 shown this year at E3?

TH: A couple reasons. We did have our eye on QuakeCon in terms of the multiplayer unveiling. We really felt it was a better reward for our fans who come to QuakeCon every year to have Doom 3 multiplayer unveiled here versus at a trade show like E3. So we could have done something like that, but we just chose not to.

The other aspect of it is that presentations and those sorts of things take so much time away from the development schedule. Now we're out of 2003 for the time frame, so our focus is on making the best single-player game that we've ever made and really trying to get it done. Luckily, the areas of the game that you saw here are fairly complete in terms of a status standpoint. So we're just taking a couple of snapshots of the game that aren't really a big foray into doing something that was just created for press presentations and what have you.

TW: Todd told me that I needed to come up with a demo for QuakeCon, and I said "All right!" I picked some great areas, zipped it up, and went.

GP: What is the biggest challenge for the team right now?

TW: This technology is so new in every aspect that we have no one to follow and no precedent to look to. We're blazing our own trail. There is so much that we can do with the technology and so much learning that we've done that, to be honest, it's taken us longer than we thought. We have all this power, all this creativity…whatever we can imagine, we can do in this engine. And that's what we're trying to push.

GP: Does hearing hype on a game like Half-Life 2 change what you do? Does it motivate you or make you say, "We can't be concerned with what they're doing"?

TH: Valve has been very successful—obviously Half-Life was a great game, and we're happy that it was, because they were a licensee of ours! [Half-Life was built upon id's Quake II engine—Ed.] I think in general that it's a good thing for video games for there to be more good games, and Half-Life 2 certainly looks like it will be a good game. But we really don't focus on what other people are trying to do. We're fans of games so we're looking forward to good ones, but our job is to focus on what we need to do for Doom 3. If we focus on making Doom 3 the best game that we can, because of what Doom is, the brilliance that John has demonstrated in blazing the new paradigm of what 3D rendering is going to be going forward--in terms of bump-mapped surfaces and real-time lighting interaction with surfaces—if we accomplish those goals, we really ought not to worry about what somebody else is doing, because Doom 3 will be a great game.

GP: A lot of our readers are interested in the Xbox version of Doom 3 because they don't think their PCs will be able to run it. Is an Xbox version still on the horizon?

TH: The Xbox version of Doom 3 is actually in development now. We have the technology up and running on the machine. We don't have any plans for shipping concurrently with the PC version, so it will come afterwards. The challenges there are the 64 megs of RAM versus what we're looking at on the PC, 256 megs. We're going to have to make some concessions to that memory bandwidth, just in terms of the number of textures that we use, the texture resolution, and some other things. On the PC, we are looking at a 1-gigahertz processor versus a 733 PIII from the Xbox. But the Xbox is a full-impact platform.

GP: So the base is a 1 Gigahertz processor for playability on PC?

TH: Yeah. Really, the gating factor for most PCs will be the graphics card. You have to have geometry acceleration on the board. Basically, we're looking at it as you don't have to start turning stuff off to make it run at an acceptable framerate. The framerate taps out at 60 frames per second—it won't ever run faster than that. We believe that everybody will be able to enjoy the experience at 30 frames per second. So there are going to be some differences depending on what system you have, but basically, a GeForce 2 class of card should be a full-impact experience at a reasonable frame rate.

TW: Until we're finished with it, it's impossible to nail that down.

TH: Yeah. The minimum spec, literally—when we're weeks away from being completely done and we start testing it on system, that's when we come up with "This is acceptable performance" or "Wow, we need to optimize this," and we haven't gotten to that point yet.

GP: Thanks for your time!