Yeah... it sounds really fun to me. Although sneaking around and killing people in DM is great and all... but sneaking around trying to accomplish an objective would be *AWESOME*. Hopefully Splash Damage will come up with something good.

I think they are choosing 4 because it's not a twitch fest, like how you say in certain games. They described once the new gameplay with using shadows and dark areas to hide and move in stealth in multi. Plus, you yourself can tell if someone is coming if their shadow is thrown down a hallway.

I think the multiplayer will be much slower and realistic. And 4 players sounds fine for this. If you had 32 players running around, there would always be someone on your back and you could never use any skills or sneaking around in the shadows. But I'm sure they'll have larger maps with more players. It's not going to be as fast as quake or Unreal 2003.

They once said that because the game looks real, having character run at unhuman speeds would look odd and fake. So 4 players in a slower tense realstic match sounds like fun. That's what I think they what to show right now, not a mindless deathmatch with you being shot at from every angle.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the 4 player limit was because they were leaning more towards a peer-to-peer style network model rather than use a client-server model.

jup, peer2peer is one reason for the 4 player limit and the other reason is, as someone already pointed out, that current hardware cannot handle the lighting and shadows of 16 players in close fights at reasonable framerates...

Of course the official reason remains p2p and design decision although also p2p supports more than 4 players
--> c&c

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the 4 player limit was because they were leaning more towards a peer-to-peer style network model rather than use a client-server model.

Four-player DM will be perfect for me and a few of my friends to go at it uninhibited by oversized maps.

Sort of like the console experience only with better graphics and your own screen.

Supporter of the "a happy fredster is a fredster doused in gasoline and smoking a cigarette" fanclub.

i would go but ill be upgrading my pc that weekend so i can run HL2

4 Player DM? That means they're porting the Xbox version to the PC. M$ wins again.

Xenopulse, you need to play Natural Selection for HL. It's exactly what you've described.

Anybody here going to QuakeCon?
If so, can I come with you? I'm a really nice guy, I won't get in the way. I have been told I give really good he....errr...SO can I go?

hah

Alright, I know squad based MP is in. I know teamplay is in. I know action is in. But I am hoping that D3 MP will be more like I always wanted AVP DM to be: Careful and Scary.

Imagine this: Instead of simply running around, shooting wildly at everyone with a different color (or uniform), you're sneaking around a dark base. Your opponents could be hiding in that volumetric shadow over there. They could drop from above behind you. I want the feeling I had in the origilal Doom SP in MP! That is, being scared shitless of the flickering light and the dark corner behind it, and shooting at walls because I was on the edge all the time.

4 player MP could be good for that.

Would be great for co-op (makes me shiver as I remember System Shock 2 co-op), but for deathmatch? They must be having problems getting their servers optimized.

>> Then again, most modders may be burried deep into the Source engine, which will likely be 100 times more mod-friendly.

Em, why? The source engine looks like it's got some good physics stuff in there and the water effect and glass distortion look very nice, but apart from that I haven't seem any shots or movies of it rendering anything the Q3 engine couldn't render. Animated face look good but them so do the hand animated faces in the Doom3 movies.
BTW do those years of writing facial expressions routines also mean the body movements are animated at the same time or do animators need to do those by hand still?

The next big leap in graphics is true real time lighting and D3 is the only engine demoing it at the moment( not seen any movies from Thief III yet ).

4 players in multiplays is a limit because of current hardware, due mainly to the number of complex shadows needing to be rendered. Think 5 light sources, 4 players, thats 20 complex shadows of diffent depths, angles and shades, with possible overlapping, not to mention all the other objects in the room that may be casting shadows, then you get the spectual maps & bump maps for every single texture visible ( including player skins ).
Then you have mussle flash and tracers from gun fire.

Maybe, just maybe, this time next year some of us ( those with the money ) will have the hardware required to handle 16-32 players.

Of course you could just disable all the real time lighting and go back to lightmaps, but then it would be no better then UnReal, Source, Q3 engine games.

I had a bad dream involving quakecon and now this announcement today...:) W0w! Freaking me out. Anyway, this is sweet news to all quakecon attendees ! (...like me )

Okay, stupid newb question time...if it can do more than 4 easily...then why limit it to 4?

Personnally i think the original descion behind this was time constraints, in that they wanted the game done by christmas and wanted to mainly focus on the single player side.

However as i posted below i think with Splash Damage having proven themselves with ET ID has handed them the source, textures etc and said "ok here it is, were pushing the time frame back a bit for the single player, see what you can do with the multiplayer"

Also to my knowledge there hasent really been much talk about the multiplayer recently so I think they are aiming for a solid all round game.

http://www.poorintern.com
- The Voices In My Fruit Loops Tell Me that a happy fredster is a fredster being force fed hot broken glass,...

Why should the source engine be any more modable? The mod community was born with an id game (Quake 1, although DOOM had some mod capabilities) and most of the modablity of HL came from it's Quake 1 origins. Seems a lot of people are deciding on unknown Doom3 and HL2 issues long before either game is out.

Cheers,
Quboid

4 player may appeal to some, but it certainly won't to me, or many other clan oriented players. I remember reading that the DOOM3 engine is capable of supporting more players, of course, but it will take a mod and new maps to enable it. Let's hope some glutten for punishment programmer decides to quicly write a 16 or 32 player mod.

Back when "Quakeworld" (Quake 1 for Windows) went 32 player from the "stock" 16, there was a lot of stoked people out there, and a lot of busy mappers.

Then again, most modders may be burried deep into the Source engine, which will likely be 100 times more mod-friendly. Will be interesting to see.

the engine can do more than 4 easy, so mod makers go nuts.

Okay, stupid newb question time...if it can do more than 4 easily...then why limit it to 4?

-----------------------------------------------------
http://nicebreakers.gotdns.com
Cry 'havoc', and let slip the dogs o' war!

4 Player deathmatch? Please. That sucks donkey.

Not neccessarily, if done right. And remember what Willtis said post-QuakeCon last year - the engine can do more than 4 easy, so mod makers go nuts.

Only three weeks...

I strongly suspected that id would have something playable for QuakeCon this year. That's why the rumors of a Doom 3 delay seem so odd to me. Having seen the game in person at _last_ year's QuakeCon, the engine and development tools (I just LOVE the in-game-engine map editing) should have been quite polished for at least a year now. Surely they can have this guy ready to ship by Christmas?

I think the delay is to not go toe to toe on the shelf with HL2 and to use that time to improve the multiplayer.

My $0.02