Kikizo: Would you say there were any weaknesses in Doom 3 that need to be corrected?

Matt: I wouldn't call them weaknesses. We had very specific goals in mind, and we had a relatively small team with brand new, state-of-the-art technology, and I think we took advantage of that really well. I think the sales show that. So design wise, because our focus was narrow, I don't have any regrets there.

Todd: I think there are three people on the internet that keep making these posts that Doom 3 was "bad", and they get no credibility from any other people... there's some mass-misperception out there. I get this occasionally - why don't I think Doom 3 was successful? We sold over three million units! It's the most successful game in id's history.

Matt: The things we're doing with id Tech 5 have really opened things up design-wise. I work closely with Tim Willits who's the creative director on id Tech 5 and the guiding force on Rage, and we're going to do some things which I think are just going to blow people way - it's just going to be on a whole new level. Things that you have never seen in any game before, some things borrowed from different games, really action focused. Just as a designer we can do things in these giant worlds and with these vehicle systems and still maintain the things that people love id for, which is that control and the FPS action combat, but now we can introduce all these other elements, so it's really opened things up. On the design side, we've never had more energy, it just makes us giddy to be able to use this tech.

Kikizo: What will the trend in gaming be for the next ten years?

Todd: I still believe that the industry over the next ten years is going to be driven primarily by technology, and I think that it has been since its existence over 25 years or however long you want to say it's been around. The chief innovations have been enabled by the rapid pace of technological progress on the hardware, and then by what engineers like John and others have been able to do on the software side. And I think that is the enabling factor that allows us to do all these things like a higher art form so you're not just moving white blocks around a screen or chasing dots through a maze. All that stuff is fun, but when you talk about emotional aspects of games, or better storytelling, or more interactivity in the environments, just more visual richness, all these things are constraints put on the industry that we work within. So I do see the future being driven by what the pace of technological change is, and when John talks about that stuff - and he's been right for fifteen years so I'm not going to swim against him on stuff like this - when you see what he's done here at the texture level, and being able to make the perfect level - glorious, unique, huge, vast and at the same time incredibly detailed - and then when he talks about the next horizon is geometry, I think you start to talk about things that you've really only been able to do with massive offline render farms, being able to be done and realised in real time. What sort of characters, worlds and interactivity you can develop, is being driven primarily by what technology enables. So it's a technical question, but I think ultimately the answer is that the industry will be driven by that. It will allow the artistic side of the industry to shine through.