Multiplayer & Xbox

Resurrection of Evil will finally offer official 8-player support, as well as Capture the Flag. CTF goes quite a way to solving many of the outstanding issues with Doom 3 multiplayer - namely, it forces players to move. Doom 3 was possibly the most camp-friendly game ever, thanks to its loud footsteps and dark maps. With CTF, teams need to move to defend their flags and capture the enemy's, creating frantic action along the map.

Hell Time Hunter

Hazmats

Vulgar again

Predictably, the double-barreled shotgun was a favorite tool in the relatively cramped quarters and hallways of the maps, but its terrible dispersion at even medium ranges made it next-to-useless in the large flag rooms, for example. The auto-reload on it, meaning that players have to wait for it to reload before switching weapons, is another way of balancing the item out.

Xbox

We came away most impressed, yet again, with the Xbox version of the game. Though it's clearly inferior to the PC version in terms of graphics fidelity, it is far and away the most impressive Xbox title we've seen. Key changes between Xbox and PC version include much more limited shader and bump mapping use, as well as reduced texture sizes. However, all things considered, it is remarkable how hardware one third as powerful as the recommended system requirements for the original game is capable of running Doom 3.

As nice as the graphics are though, the main benefit is it co-op play. We managed to squeeze out more details from Activision on this, and it seems that about 2/3 of the game is available in co-op. Most of the segments that have been removed are those that feature Swann and Campbell. Otherwise the co-op mode is remarkably faithful to the singleplayer game, and to co-op in Doom and Doom 2.

As in the original Doom titles, the players have unlimited lives and spawn automatically after dying. They need to recover their backpacks after dying, which returns all equipment that was lost. The game has been re-balanced for co-op and is sufficiently challenging without being frustrating. Finally, collector's edition boxes of the Xbox version will include Ultimate Doom and Doom 2 with split-screen multiplayer!