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What's wrong with dark, depressing and dystopian? I like dark, depressing and dystopian!

It is true that many mind-less first person shooters have spawned into existence since the release of Doom, but certainly this is not the only sort of game that is unleashed upon humanity today.

As for 3D adventure games, I liked Under A Killing Moon a lot. It has a compelling storyline, great graphics and yes, a dark, depressing and dystopian 3D environment. It's awesome!

More recently, I finished Sierra's Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. It too has beautiful 3D graphics (for its time) and a great in-depth plot. Lots of things to explore and figure out, and I think it does justice to the old adventure genre in that respect.

As for RPG's since Doom, you may have forgotten about Baldur's Gate, which is-- God forbid-- a 2D game, as is it's successor Baldur's Gate II, but if you want 3D exploration, let's have a look at Neverwinter Nights or maybe you've got more interest in mindless hack & slack ala Dungeon Siege. Let's not forget the more recent hits in mindlessness; I think good fun can be had with Grand Theft Auto 3, despite it being mindless, but if you want something more intelligent in that vein, have a look at Mafia.

So, no. I don't think the gaming industry is totally down the drain. It could be better, it always can be. There's no such thing as the perfect game for everybody.

You can download DungeonSiege. I never got the IP address of a friend to play with though, so I can't swear multiplayer works. (To play via their servers you have to pay.)

I was very impressed with this game - sure as anyone can tell you it is no Diablo II. D2 is a more rounded game BUT with modifications that are available you can add so much more so easliy to DS. Even the GUI is now configuraable using a scripting language.

The company is creating its own mod tutorials and making the tools available for free. I am very impressed - almost

Oh yeah, and of course Microsoft does have some interest in it... so that may be a reason we haven't seen more on it here. A smart thing they did by buying an interest in Gas Powered Games back in 98.

http://www.packmule.org/
http://www.dungeonsiege.com/siegeu.shtml
http://www.dsnetguide.com/ - awesome rsource

I just boght the game a few days ago and I have spent too many late nights on it. The number of mods out there is staggering.

Hehe, yeah, maybe that was going overboard. Didn't even notice. Guide for the uninitiated:

IWD = Icewind Dale
IWD2 = Icewind Dale 2
IE = Infinity Engine -- powers BG/BG:TotSC/PS:T/IWD/IWD:HoW/BG2/BG2:ToB and IWD2
NPC = Non-Player Character
NWN = Neverwinter Nights
DS = Dungeon Siege
TA = Total Annihilation
OP = Original Poster
TotSC = Tales of the Sword Coast. BG1 add-in adventures
PS:T = Planescape: Torment
ToB = Throne of Bhaal. BG2 expansion.
HoW = Heart of Winter. IWD add-in.

Check out Dungeon Siege from Gas Powered Games and published by Microsoft. This is the latest RPG and they knew in advanced about player supported expansions and I think will benefit greatly from it. I am already looking forward to some new mods. Several Ultima titles are already in the workings. Check out www.planetdungeonsiege.com for more info on modding Dungeon Siege if you are interested.

• ZERO loading once in game. You can walk from one end of the earth to the other, up the highest tower or to the deepest dungeon, without ever seeing a load screen. Perfectly seamless.
  
• Control up to 8 characters, you can hotkey different weapon configurations and party groupings. Multiple, expandable formation types. 27 combat AI options (3 movement settings x 3 attack settings x 3 targetting settings)
  
• Packmules!!! You can buy mules that follow you around. They are like regular characters, but with no stats, and 3 times the inventory space. They try to stay out of combat, but will kick with hind legs if they get cornered.
  
• The map is so good you can play the entire game from it... it's like a subset of the graphics engine that just looks straight down.
  
• No classes. You just choose what your character looks like and start playing. Whatever you do, you get better at.
  
• It actually runs smooth at 640x480x32, low detail on a Celery 400 + TNT1. (But runs much better on my Athlon 1200 + GF2 :)
  
• Co-operative campaign multiplayer
  
• Extremely moddable. The community for this game is going to be HUGE. They're releasing all the tools they used to build the campaign for free in May. AI scripting language (Skrit), even a scriptable special effects engine (Siege FX)
  

I bought Total Annihilation back in late 1997 and have been hosting lanparties since then with TA as one of the featured games. We have a small, dedicated group of about eight TA players.

I enjoy RTS games and have played most of them. Nothing I've seen comes close to the scale and grandeur of TA. In my opinion TA is simply the best. What other game can you have battles with hundreds of units at a time?

The source code should be released so that badly needed features can be added, lingering bugs can be fixed, and maybe the game can be optimized to run better. Anyone who has seen Switek's TA Bug Fix can get a good idea of how buggy the game was when it shipped.

A group called the Swedish Yankspankers wrote a program/modification for TA called TA Demo Recorder. It adds external functionality to the game which dramatically enhances its enjoyment.

With TA Demo Recorder you can:

1. Queue up units in increments of 100 instead of the default 5.
2. Execute multiple chat commands with a single keystroke. For example, execute +shootall, +noshake, +shareradar, +setshareenergy 10000, +setsharemetal 10000 with a single keystroke.
3. Share Line-of-Sight with allies (although covered by Fog of War). You can see what your allies see.
4. Instantly place your commander anywhere on the map at the beginning of a multi-player game. Great for allies who want to build close together without having to walk the Commander all the way across the map.
5. Draw lines of Dragon's Teeth or other structures with visible on-the-fly footprint resizing.
6. View resource production and storage of your allies (a floating bar graph which can be placed anywhere on the screen).
7. Place battlefield markers and attach a short text message. Good for coordinating attacks. Placing markers initiates a beep and spinning pointer to alert allies of the placement and location of the marker.
8. Using a "whiteboard" key players can actually draw on the battlefield using the mouse pointer as a pen.

TA Demo Recorder is the coolest thing I've ever seen for TA. The Swedish Yankspankers deserve high praise for their accomplishment. If you don't have TADR then visit their website and get it. Keep in mind that none of these features came with the game. They accomplished this on their own.

Other various hacks available include:

1. Increasing the unit max per player to 5000 from 500.
2. Multi-directional factories (helpful for players along the sides and bottom of the maps).

Various other features badly needed:

1. The ability to change game resolution from within the game itself rather than only from the menu.
2. Increase in the number of buttons per page in the build menus. Saves having to click through pages of buttons to find the unit you want to build. Also, the game has an internal limit of 8 pages I believe.
3. True Line-of-Sight sharing among allies.
4. Multiple chat macros so players can use a single keystroke to turn on/off resource sharing.
5. Ability to rotate factories in any direction prior to placement and construction so the exit faces whichever direction the player chooses. Since factories all face south it's kind of cumbersome for players along the bottom of the map in multi-player games.
6. Ability to assign units to groups with keys other than the 1 through 9 keys.

Understand that this is just a small fraction of what can and has been done. I'm sure there are many more things unknown to me.

Just some interesting factoids for the curious:

I presently have an Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53Ghz), 512mb DDR. My last PC was a Pentium 1Ghz with 384mb PC133. I play TA in 1280x1024 resolution and never experience slowdown even in huge battles. My old P3-1Ghz could run it in 1024x768 res but no higher without significant slowdown. At my TA lanparties we use the TA Demo Recorder features. I set the max unit limit per player to 1000 which is usually sufficient. We play TA once or twice a month with 4 to 8 people. When I bought TA in 1997 I owned a Pentium 166. Back then played in 640x480 resolution and the unit max per player was 200.

Chris Taylor now runs Gas Powered Games and his latest project is Dungeon Siege.

A group plans on utilizing the soon to be released siegelet engine for Dungeon Siege to remake "Ultima V: Lazarus."

You really believe delta-compression was invented with Q3, don't you? :-\

Sorry, but this is getting boring. Technically the engines are great, but... Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3/Quake 3:TA, "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", Doom 3, Quake 4... it's getting a little bit repetitive.

The Looking Glass people did it right with Thief. Red Storm built Rainbow Six around good gameplay, but a crap engine and the worst netcode I've experienced (well, that's a lie -- I'm not counting Operation Flashpoint since I consider it Beta). Couldn't ID take their tech to the tactical level?

I've been waiting for ID to whip up a real good CRPG using a state-of-the-art 3d-engine for some time now... I hope those people over at ID can enjoy games from some other genre than just straight action-FPS, or they'll fade away... I'm not seeing myself buying any of their FPS anyhow. <shrug>.

Ah well, guess we have Bioware and Gas Powered Games to refine and put out some great gameplay for us.

Chris Taylor and John Carmack teaming up, now that could be interesting. Or maybe Jane Jensen doing another Gabriel Knight using Carmack-o-tech. Anything BUT ANOTHER FPS!

As long as there are people around, there will be games. How long have Chess, Go, and even Gambling been around for ? For over a 1,000 years, or more.

It's true, a lot of games are just "the same game with nicer visuals". i.e. How far have driving games progressed? From Atari's Stunts up to the latest EA's "Need for Speed".

Now I don't see too many people playing Quake 1 CTF / ThunderWalker / Team Fortress / Mega-TF because the "majority" of gamers have moved onto newer games (which may or may not be better ;-) Old games don't die, they just become less popular. I see the same thing in the retro-gaming scene.

What new games ARE doing are becoming cross-genre experiences. e.g.
Majesty is a nice mix of Sim, RTS, and RPG.
Dungeon Siege is a sweet mix of RPG+Action. Even Drakan is a mix to a limited extent.

Part of the problem that we dont' see more new genres, is because of sales. When "gamers" snap up 2 million copies of Diablo 2, which is a just a rehash (allthough fun game!) of Diablo 1, what incentive is there for smaller developers to create a "new" game, when sales can barely even reach 100,000.
i.e. Thief was a interesting twist and great innovative game, but that didn't help Looking Glass Studios from running out of money.

We'll continue to see new games. It's just getting harder and harder to do.