Graphics gameplay and sound

After reading the articles on Doom 3, I reminisced back to the days when I was eagerly awaiting its much anticipated release. These articles did a great job on informing gamers what they would need to experience the true Doom 3 experience. I even liked how they emphasized how sound was going to play a key role in the gameplay. I read in my old PC Gamer magazine that you should forget about playing Doom 3 with anything less than a 5.1 speaker setup, unless you use good headphones. already having a 5.1 speaker setup I began playing the game, but decided to try the headphones just to see what the difference was. I personally liked the game better with the headphones just because I could hear more and tune out everything around me, like the time I was playing late at night with my dad's noise cancelling headphones and my mom was trying to get my attention so she decided to grab me... yeah, at the time I was hunting for an imp somewhere in the vicinity and I could hear him clanking around the metal space station. Needless to say, combining the two is NOT a good idea (I pretty much freaked out and dove under my desk)

I also recall an older LAN we had shortly after the games release in a barn. After having huge frag fests in quake 3 and other classics, the night began to die down and some of the people with more beefier machines decided they wanted to see what all the hype was about with Doom 3. I leant out my game to a friend sitting a few seats away from me. After about 20 minutes he jumped out of his seat and was about to kill the hosts mastif who had decided to sniff the back of his neck.

As we approach newer and better looking games comes newer and better ways for immersion. I think the first game we can really say actually immersed the player would be Castle Wolfenstien (also released by ID) This was the first game to put the gamer in the perspective of the character they were controlling. before we had text based games and side scrollers but now we were inside the character.

I am predicting that we will see more and more of the articles being published with the upcoming release of Crysis and Unreal 3. Games have made incredible advances in the 4 years that even Doom 3 has been released, and 4 years before the release of Doom 3, we would have laughed at the thought of a game actually looking THAT good. After the next 4 years we will see another bold paradigm shift to a new type of game engine that makes even Doom 3 look embarrassing. I am eagerly awaiting the future... who knows, maybe Final Fantasy 15 will have in game cinematics that look 50x better than any of the past prerendered ones.