The Making of Doom(r) III: The Official Guide

Comment: Great book with impressive quality pictures and great information. Any Doom buff will love it.

Comment: Great book by the writer Mr. Kent! The only problem that I came across was the that the pages fall out with minimal use. Warnig!!! Don not treat this book as a standard book!

Comment: This book was an utter let-down. I was pumped up ready to dive into this book after reading the previous reviews here on Amazon. The reviews made it sound like it was a solid book with a lot of detailed information regarding the actual "making of doom 3". This book in reality is a half-assed, piece-mailed collage of hype and fluff. There is no meat here. Steven Kent is not David Kushner, and this is not "The Masters of Doom" (part 2)... very unfortunately.

What I was expecting from this book was stuff about how the team created what they created (which the book does, to some extent), but more importantly, WHY. What were the reasons for making certain decisions, what were the challenges they had to overcome, what technological barriers did they break, and how did they persevere together, as a team? I also wanted to know about the personal stories and the inner happenings of the game in production. I wanted to learn about the conflicts between the developers and the motivations for doing things they way they did. I wanted to know what kind of pizza they ordered after working 80+ hours a week, and how many liters of Mountain Dew they consumed as a whole. None of this was even pretended to be addressed.

What the book does is a cheap, glossed-over summary of doom 3. It talks about the doom story mostly and tells some basic information about how things were created. (Anyone already in game development will surely recognize the provided information as elementary and immediately self-evident.)

About the only good thing in this book is the Question and Answer Section with John Carmack. As always, John provides a real treat by articulating his knowledge of technical issues and world view opinion in the most elegant way. The author, Steven Kent, gets one point here for not editing Carmack's dialogue; for Carmack, on a number of occasions, seems to poke fun at the interviewer's most obvious lack of game development knowledge.

Get this book if you are interested in game design (but have no previous knowledge) and/or if you are a die-hard id fanboy.

Comment: I purchased both this book and the Half-Life 2 'Raising the Bar' book together for a discounted price. Both are exceptional and both I HIGHLY recommend owning.

The Doom 3 book is far heavier on word count and focuses on the entire production of Doom 3 as opposed to the sporadic comments and captions grouped with pictures in 'Raising The Bar'. Having said that both are different and will appeal to everyone interested regardless.

Both are printed on very high quality paper, 'Raising The Bar' even having a hard cover, a sore omission from The Making Doom 3. The content is brilliant with hundreds of images gracing throughout and insights into the making of these games. I particularly liked reading about the ideas, monsters and objects that were cut from the final games. Seriously, every gamer or visual artist/designer should own these, awesome and inspirational 'picture' books to have laying around.

SO! If you are a fan-boy or girl of either game, get both, they are EXCEPTIONAL READING and I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Comment: This book gives a great insight on the inner workings of ID software. The paper used in the publication of this seems to be extremely high quality. My only gripe is the book is not hardcover. Overall Steven Kent does a great job as usual. If you want to understand how ID works this book will explain alot.