Doom 3 - On this day
The series of shooters called Doom largely defined the "rules of the game" for the FPS genre. However, that was in the first half of the nineties and the game received "only" one sequel, which was atypical for those times. id Software turned to the new Quake series, and Doom was put on hold.
At the beginning of this century, John Carmack came up with the idea of reworking the original Doom using new technology. However, not everyone in the team agreed to it, so a compromise was made by agreeing to start the development of the third part. One of the goals during the development was to orient the game according to the story and present it through several characters, that is, acting. On the technology side, the id Tech 4 engine focused Doom 3 on a game of light and dark.
Development started at the end of 2000 and took longer than planned. In the
middle of the development, an alpha version was leaked on the Internet,
which was presented at the E3 fair in 2002. Some claim that this is exactly
why id Software forced certain parts of the game to be changed in its final
release, which came out in 2004.
Doom 3 delighted fans of the
series upon its release, but fans of the FPS genre were not completely
impressed. Although the game had a great atmosphere and respected the
tradition of previous Doom titles, it came out after Far Cry, which
moved away from the previous format of closed corridors and linear movement
through the levels. Design-wise, Doom 3 felt a bit dated.
However,
that year Doom 3 was a "hot item" on PC because of its graphics. At
that time, not every computer could run it, and here's what he was looking
for: Pentium 4 with 1.5 GHz, 384 MB RAM, and 64 MB graphics card. Eh, those
times!
The game ultimately did well in the market. The PC version sold
more than half a million copies, and by 2007, together with the Xbox version, 3.5 million copies of Doom 3
were sold. A year after its release, the Resurrection of Evil expansion came,
and in 2012, Doom 3 became available on digital platforms through BFG
Edition.
As you already know, Doom 4 was in development several
times, but under Bethesda, it finally got a reboot in 2016, and a sequel
called Doom Eternal in 2020.