At long last, id Software’s third installment in the Doom franchise is arriving tomorrow afternoon. Coming a full 10 years after Doom II, the second sequel is pushing some major technological boundaries. Preliminary reports (and even video) from some lucky gamers who scored copies of the game from certain Best Buy stores (before said stores’ managers became aware that the game had been put on shelves without authorization) are demonstrating that Doom 3 is going to be a game for the ages.

It’s no secret that Doom 3 requires some major hardware to run at high-quality settings. What many potential players do not know, however, is the huge range of hardware that will actually run the game. You may not get all the massive eye-candy effects on your old 1.3 GHz P4 and your GF4 Ti4600, but amazingly, the game experience is not all that different between such a system and, say, a 3.2 GHz P4 with a brand new GeForce 6800GT. Because unlike most games, Doom 3 still looks astounding even at its lowest-quality settings. It’s still easily playable and incredibly immersive, even at 640×480. And aliasing at low resolutions? It’s barely being talked about. It’s quite possible that most players are just too excited to worry about something like aliasing, but low-res screenshots prove that there just aren’t that many jaggies to be seen.

Okay, so John Carmack and his team have taken another massive step for PC gaming technology. Who’s surprised? The big question was whether or not Doom 3 was going to be an immersive game, with a story that actually mattered. Not since Quake II has an id game actually had any semblance of a story to it, and in recent years many have faulted id Software for being a “creator of engines,” not a creator of games. From the sound of it, Doom 3 is a step away from that reputation.

There actually is a story here, and even better—it evolves as you play, something I can’t say for any prior id Software game. Our story begins with the same basic tenents as that of Doom 1—you’re a marine stationed at a Union Aerospace Corporation base of operations on Mars, having arrived just in time for something to go Horribly Wrong™. In the classic Doom, scientists experimenting with teleportation technology accidentally opened a gate to Hell itself, and the base became overrun with demons and hellspawn that you, the player, had to single-handedly wipe out.

But where Doom’s story largely ended there, Doom 3 picks up that baton and carries it further. Now we learn that there’s a lead scientist involved on the project who has actually masterminded the opening of these hellish portals. It’s all part of some kind of evil scheme, perhaps perpetrated on behalf of the UAC, to do—something, something that won’t be clear until later on in the game itself. While sounding somewhat cliched, this does successfully add a sinister element to the proceedings—now the UAC isn’t simply a helpless bystander in the mess they’ve created, but an active participant—and, it seems, a central cause.

Further, Doom 3 borrows a page from the book of games like System Shock 1 and 2, in that the player is exposed to a number of log entries, audio recordings and written records as he/she progresses through the game. You get to hear the voices of dead soldiers and personnel in their notes and journals, some of which will have been recorded even after the whole catastrophe was going down. Some of these clues will help to advance the plot, while still others will serve up crucial bits of information that you’ll need to finish the level or unlock the next sector. This Doom isn’t just a simple hunt for the red keycard or the blue skull key; it’s about specific tasks and goals, like many modern shooters. It’s not that Doom 3 is charting new ground here—after all, the simple fact that I compared it to System Shock 2 is evidence that these concepts have been done successfully already—but when you take these concepts, which admittedly work and work well, and mate them with a technologically groundbreaking new engine from John Carmack, then throw in gobs of atmosphere and fantastic production design…well, you wind up with something very, very sweet.

I figure I’ll wrap this up now, since I don’t actually have the game myself and to ramble on further would be somewhat pointless. Suffice it to say that you can gather many more details from plenty of message boards on the Web, which are teeming with people who were either lucky enough to get the game from an ignorant store, or who have downloaded it through illicit channels. As hard as it is, I’m trying to stay away from that kind of stuff, such that I don’t have most of the game spoiled for me before I even install it. As beautiful as Doom 3 is, I’m sure it’s heavily scripted, and as such will be sweeter the first time through than any other time, just like a really good suspense movie. It’s always fun to watch again and again, but after that first time, you always know where the next baddie is going to jump out, and when.

I’ll leave you with one last thought. It’s been lamented that the PC version of Doom 3 won’t ship with co-operative multiplayer capability, which was one of the most entertaining modes of play in the original games. However, I have seen a couple of videos from an as-yet-unlaunched website which appear to showcase a two-player co-op game on the PC platform. Suffice it to say, I’m sure a co-op mod is already in the works—and speaking of mods, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what can be done with this game’s engine. For instance, I hear they’re already working on a sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and it uses the Doom 3 engine too…