A Doom 3 Imp

Whether or not you liked Doom 3 the engine which drove the game was excellent. Doom 3 provided gamers with one the opportunity to actually see how effective light and shadow could be used in a game. Released before Half Life 2 the Doom 3 engine beat Valve to the crunch and provided id with some necessary kudos which showed that they were a "next generation" force to be reckoned with. Doom 3 was released in 2004 and it's engine has been used to drive a number of releases in past years, including Quake 4 and Prey. It has been officially announced today that John Carmack is working on a new engine.

The announcement of the new engine also complements another couple of news items associated with id this week. They have stated that they are working on a brand new franchise and it is also expected that Quake Wars will be released between the July to September quarter. While id maintain the line, "it will be released when it is finished" standard line there is a lot of speculation going on around the internet about Quake War's release.

id CEO, Todd Hollenshead, stated to gamesindustry.biz,

"It is a new id brand with an all-new John Carmack engine and I think that when we show it to people, once again they'll see, just like they saw when we first showed Doom 3, that John Carmack still has a lot of magic left."

It almost sounds, from the 'John has a lot of magic left' statement that there may have been some doubt. However, id's franchises are still going strong. Or, it may have been a manic form of inherent corporate backpatting as Hollenshead continued discussing things such as id's branching out in to mobile game software and the depth of his respect for John (which does start to sound a little creepy),

"Our first task at id is as a single studio developer ... That's really where everything spawns from. Because John Carmack is a programming genius, who in my opinion is unequalled in video games today, he makes a great technology that we can use across a wide range of applications and different games within our suite of franchises ... The new stuff that we're working on does have a brand new engine that John has been working on, actually is still working on today. We can't really talk any details about it; we'll see about when the timing is right for an announcement. We like to be able to talk about stuff that we can show at the same time and it's not really ready to show yet."

I can't imagine that id will fall of the wagon any time soon. Their intellectual properties have been driving the gaming industry and, more specifically, providing direct competition to companies such as Valve, Ubisoft and EA. The development of new technology to drive the software can only mean that the gaming industry is in a relatively strong position. While I do have some concerns about the similarity in style between some of the games which have been released using the Doom 3 engine, surely, id software will continue to be a powerhouse in FPS games development.