A much smaller than usual crowd was on hand to listen to id Software's press conference followed by John Carmack's keynote here at QuakeCon 2008. The main highlights of the press conference were the official DOOM4 announcement and the announcement of Wolfenstien RPG and Doom II RPG from id Mobile, the cell phone gaming division of the company. Very little new information was given about id's upcoming title Rage. Compared to last year's very exciting announcements of Quake Live and the Wolfenstein movie, this year was fairly uneventful.
In John Carmack's keynote, the id Software president and technical director started off his keynote address discussing the issue of id's rapid growth. The company was tired of having very long development cycles as they did with DOOM3 and had to expand to keep up with modern development times. Carmack said the company will continue to expand even greater and hire additional help to complete Rage.
Most of the keynote was devoted to mobile game development and the rewarding feeling Carmack gets from completing a game in such a short period of time. He talked about the problems associated with getting a mobile game published properly on distribution channels and that using well know game titles such as DOOM greatly helps with sales. Carmack spent a great deal of time praising the iPhone, but was unhappy that id Modile does not have a game of the platform yet. The iPhone, which Carmack said is more powerful than a Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined, offers developers a SDK which provides developers a platform on which to design games with graphics on par with Sega's Dreamcast. John Carmack and fellow id programmer Robert Dufy even ported "Orcs & Elves" over to the iPhone to test out its capabilities, but were unhappy with the results. In the meantime, id Mobile is looking to hire additional programmers to work on future iPhone projects.
Carmack then moved on the talk about id Software's upcoming projects such as the single player focused DOOM4. The DOOM4 project has replaced the next QUAKE series game in id's development time line. Although DOOM4 will be single player focused, Carmack assured the crowd multiplayer support will be better than anything DOOM3 had to offer.
Discussing QuakeLive, discussed many of the same topics he has talked about in previous interviews in recent weeks. At the present time, QuakeLive has no plays for official mod support but will have support for custom maps. Concerning a SDK for developers, if one comes, will be over a year away. Carmack reiterated has he has many times before that he enjoyed Quake3 the most out of all the id title's and that QuakeLive is something that he has alot of faith in. Carmack said he hopes to see a new generation of gamers flock to QuakeLive and if they enjoy the game enough, he believed they would advance to the regular Quake3 and help grow that community.
After Carmack discussed mobile gaming and QuakeLive, he reverted back to the old days of keynotes where technical ramble was the prominent topic. In this section of the keynote, Carmack said that the hardware does not even exist yet for what would need to power idTech6. Yes, that's right, IdTech6! He also mentioned that currently the idTech5 engine is in the hands of other developers and that Linux ports of future games were very very low on their list of priorities.
Video and pictures will follow tomorrow most likely.