Interviews
id Software’s Matt Hooper talks about creating the Doom 3 expansion
“We knew we wanted to give the player more of the fast-paced action, more of the horror elements, more of the tension, but then wanted to throw a couple of new things at the player”
Matt Hooper was a Doom fan from the early days of the game. Imagine his delight when he was able to finally go to work for id Software as a designer and a title he got to work on was Doom 3.
“That was my birth in gaming,” he stated, during an interview in San Francisco at an Activision-hosted event for Doom 3 on the Xbox as well as the Doom 3 PC expansion, Resurrection of Evil.
Having been with id for 3 ½ years, when Matt was approached with the opportunity to work on the title, he was rather eager and jumped at the chance.
“I was excited about hearing them making it, as a fan, but when I got a chance to work on it, that was just great,” he said, a big smile gracing his face.
Of course, as a fan and as a designer, there is a fine line walked between have the fan’s perspective and being so close to the project that you lose that distance to give it the more critical look.
“It would have been really neat to play it the first time when it (Doom 3) was done,” Matt stated, “but you do get really close, it is hard to step back. But you actually have to force yourself to step back and look at it in a different light. We are down there in the trenches and at some point it becomes work. You are still being creative and things are still rewarding in that way because you are creating these worlds and people get to go through and decide on how to manipulate the player’s feelings as they go through the game, but sometimes you do get a little close.”
Of course, having a smaller company, like id Software, perspective is gained by bringing in outside viewers, to ensure the game is moving in the right direction. With Doom 3, it was apparent that id succeeded.
But that was then. Doom 3 launched in August of 2004. We are now into 2005 and id is back at it with the Doom 3 expansion, Resurrection of Evil, slated to release for the PC in the first week of April.
The expansion is introducing three new weapons – the artifact (recovered in the ancient ruins), the Grabber and the double-barreled shotgun and yet, thanks in a large part to the artifact, it seems as though each use of the weapons has been tied nicely or integrated with how you can use the others.
The Artifact
“That was actually a conscious decision,” said Hooper. “Later on in the game we have a bruiser, a new creature, a big hulking demon, and he has two cannons for arms and they fire really fast and he’s a tough guy. At that point, you have the Grabber and you have the artifact so you can use it and it kind of takes advantage of what the new creatures have.”
Was the new expansion a decision to go back and re-explore the territory of Doom 3 a little more in this format rather than create a Doom 4 for that?
“It kind of evolved, we had some parallel development time so we actually started on the expansion 16 months ago so it gave us a good 6-8 months of parallel development,” stated Matt. “And working with Nerve (Software), which is right down the street from us, we had all this opportunity to work a couple of story hooks. For people who pay attention to the story they will notice some of the characters in the expansion were hinted at in the original story line. And also, with just the evolution of the weapons and stuff, we didn’t have a conscious decision to ‘hey, let’s keep this from Doom 3 and put it in the expansion,’ it just kind of evolved from its own thing. We knew we wanted to give the player more of the fast-paced action, more of the horror elements, more of the tension, but then wanted to throw a couple of new things at the player.”
One of those new things is the weapon known as the Grabber, which more or less does what the name implies.
“We’ve always been able to manipulate objects in the engine, just as a development tool, to place objects around,” said Matt. “It’s just fun. There is something fundamentally fun about grabbing a rag-doll and tossing it around, so we were experimenting how to make that into a weapon. The other thing is Doom has this arsenal of weapons. How many more machineguns can you add? It was like – ‘maybe this would be a cool way to go.’ It just seemed like a neat tool (the Grabber weapon) to give the player. One of the cool things when we put it in we noticed was all the projectiles were physics fodder so we could grab them and it was ‘oh cool.’ At first they didn’t do damage, so we grabbed projectiles and threw them back at the monsters and that worked really well. And the next thing was ‘hey, I wonder if we should make some of the creatures grabbable?’ So we made all of the smaller creatures grabbable and you can throw them around. So it was this thing that evolved. It started where we wanted to move physics objects around and it ended up with this cool thing.”
The Vulgar
The artifact presents an interesting dichotomy in terms of its origin and how it is used. It sucks souls to power it and yet it is being used by a soldier who is trying to shut the gates of hell.
“It is essentially evil,” Matt said, “but you end up using it for good throughout the expansion. So you are doing good … it’s like taking the enemies weapon and using it against them. It’s similar to Frodo and the Ring. You are using this evil power against them, and they want it back, so you are being hunted down – like the ringwraiths in Lord of the Rings, that would be the parallel.”
The expansion does feature a lot more open areas, such as the first levels of the ancient ruins.
“We liked it in Doom 3 and towards the end we were developing these new areas but it was so late in the game,” Matt said. “but they were so unique looking and you could do some things that you couldn’t do in the base-style architecture. So that was a conscious decision. We said ‘hey, let’s get the player back into those ancient ruins and lets do it right away.’ So the story kind of evolved from there. We had some things we knew we wanted to do, but we liked the ancient ruins stuff and the things you could do architecturally, so we put that right at the start.
“The first third is you are in and out of the ruins … and then you go back to more base-type architecture, but in areas that you haven’t been in and then eventually, you have a small piece where you are overlapping from Doom 3, you go back into the Delta labs.”
How many hours does Matt imagine this expansion would take.
“We are estimating half to two-thirds of the gameplay of Doom 3, we think it is pretty expansive,” he said. “We think with that, along with the new base-line creatures, and then having the hunters, and we really focused on giving players something new all the way through, we think we have done a good job.”
Does the game totally immerse players into the thick of things, or does it allow them to get their feet wet before taking that full-on plunge?
“We tried to ease the players into the expansion, but then it ramps up from there.”
What about multiplayer? Anything new in that regard?
“We officially put 8-player support in, right out of the box,” Matt said, “and we have four new multiplayer modes, but the focus is single-player.”
The legacy of the Doom franchise obviously carries with it certain expectations from the fan base. Do those expectations add pressure to the id Software crew when they begin working on a title like Doom 3 and its expansion?
“There is definitely a lot of pressure,” Matt admitted. “Just really doing Doom is not enough because you are going to have to push it. There is some fundamental, almost simplistic, gameplay in Doom. It was very advanced for the time – just the control scheme and how it works – and we didn’t know how far to push the limit with the new Doom, so there was this constant ‘are we going too far? Are we making it too different?’ We didn’t know how far to push it in a new direction. We didn’t want to make a role-playing game, or a strategy game, so we tried to keep it at its core, fundamentally Doom, and I think we did a pretty good job.”
While there is nothing in the works for continuing the Doom franchise, Matt did smile and say that that “would be a pretty safe bet.”
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