The Doom open beta wrapped up on Sunday, and the response, at least from Team PC, wasn't entirely enthusiastic. The open beta page on Steam is gone, but the Google cached version tells an ugly tale: Of the more than 13,000 user reviews, 8200 were negative. That and a buck-fifty will buy you a cup of coffee, as the saying goes, but the criticism was sufficient to spur id Software CTO Robert Duffy to post a message addressing some of the concerns.
“We got a lot of feedback from the PC community with regards to capped framerates, monitor support, multi-monitor support and other PC features that weren’t emphasized in the Beta for various development reasons. So to clarify: At launch the PC framerate will not be capped,” Duffy wrote. “Further, the PC version of Doom will expose a comprehensive set of advanced game and rendering options that will allow players to dial the experience up or down based on their individual desires or hardware capabilities.”
Along with the uncapped frame rate, the PC version of Doom will support 21:9 monitors, adjustable FOV, and “a wide variety of advanced settings that allows any PC connoisseur the opportunity to make intelligent tradeoffs between visual fidelity and performance.” Current “expected” advanced settings include:
- Manually Lock Framerate (un-locked by default)
- Lights Quality
- Chromatic Aberration Toggle
- Shading Quality
- Post Process Quality
- Particles Quality
- Game F/X Quality
- Decal Quality
- Directional Occlusion
- Reflections Quality
- Depth of Field Toggle
- Decal / Texture Filtering
- Motion Blur Quality / Toggle
- Sharpening Amount
- Lens Flare Toggle
- Lens Dirt Toggle
- Texture Atlas Size
- Show Performance Metrics
- Resolution Scaling
- UI Opacity
- Film Grain
- Rendering Mode
- FOV Slider
- Simple Reticle
- Show First-person Hands Toggle
- Use Compute Shaders
- Vsync (support or triple buffering)
Duffy said more information about the idTech 6 engine technology, including “initiatives we have underway to broaden our minimum PC spec even further than our current expectations,” will be released over the coming weeks. System requirements for the Doom open beta were posted early in March, but the final, full-game requirements still haven't been announced. They have to be coming soon, though: Doom is set for release on May 13.
