John Carmack on Doom III, add-ons, Q3A open-source and id's next game
"I have high hopes that it won't be another four year odyssey," id man says of the developer's next project. He also talks about Doom, as you might imagine.
John Carmack, id Software's... well, you should know who John Carmack is by now. Let's start again. Addressing an audience of Slashdotters this week after Doom III hit retail, id Software's John Carmack said he was "extremely proud" of Doom III, mentioned expansion pack possibilities, and said that Quake 3 would hopefully go open source by the end of 2004. He also touched on his plans for id's next project.
"I am extremely proud of Doom 3," he began. "I think it is the best game we have ever made, and it exceeded all of my expectations. That is a rather trite phrase, but it is literally true - I had a good set of expectations for how the game would turn out based on the technologies that it was built on, and it wound up being just plain better than that."
"We think a lot of people will like it," he joked, although he admitted that he was avoiding gaming message boards because "at its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can't win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behaviour. This slashdot story is about as close as I want to go..."
Carmack went on to discuss the future. "Amidst all the various Doom ports and expansions, we are starting up on our next game," he said, which is such an exciting sentence for so many reasons. Besides ports and expansions, he also confirmed that we can probably expect to see the Quake 3 engine go open source "By the end of the year," although "There are still a lot of higher priority things."
Back to the future, though, and id's next project: "It will have a new rendering engine, which will be keeping me busy for a while, but the only other thing we are saying for now is that it won't be a sequel to any of our previous work."
However he did add one thing. "We have a really solid team that did a lot of maturing through Doom's development, so I have high hopes that it won't be another four year odyssey." You and the rest of the world both, John.
Doom III is due out in Europe on August 13th.