Carmack on New id Game, Game Theory

An anonymous reader writes "CNN/Money interviewed id Software wizard John Carmack at the recently completed QuakeCon. Among the topics discussed is Nintendo's recent announcement that today's games are too complicated and hard for players. Carmack, surprisingly, agrees, saying 'I agree strongly with that point of view, but I'm in the minority in the PC space. I want a game you can sit down with, pick up and play. [Role playing games], for example, got to where they had to have a book ship with the game.'"

Comments

Re:disagree

[Osty]

If I wanted a simple lets see how fast I can press buttons, then I would use a ps/2 or xbox and not a pc.

If you really want a game where you see how fast you can press buttons, you should try WarioWare, Inc..

Better interview

[trite]

There is a much longer and more in-depth interview with the Carmack over at Gamespy. Basically the source for the CNN article.

Re:Too complicated?

[Overly Critical Guy]

If you "slightly twitch the joystick," Link doesn't jump. He hangs off the edge. If you ram the freaking joystick, then yeah, he'll jump. It's pressure-sensitive.

Re:Too complicated?

[_xeno_]

He was talking about Zelda 64, where Link was a moron when it came to not jumping. There was this section in the very beginning where you could walk across this bridge to talk to some girl for no real reason (she'd teach you about first person view - yay). The bridge was just wide enough for Link to walk on. You had to walk very slowly in order to avoid triggering the auto-jump. If you did that, then Link would grab on when he inevitably fell off the bridge.

Part of this was exacerbated by the fact that the camera was "active" so "straight forward across the bridge" kept on moving slightly. The solution was to repeatedly "Z-target" or whatever to bring the camera back behind you so that forward remained up on the joystick and you didn't accidently find your "move forward" joystick position become "move slightly to the right and off the bridge."

I can't recall being quite as frusterated with the Wind Waker controls, so I think they improved it for that game. But in Zelda 64, Link just loved to jump off ledges into bad places.

In any cases, I wish game designers would remember that jumping puzzles suck. They're just frusterating, especially in third-person games when the camera likes to move and change your "run straight across the bridge" to "run straight for a bit then veer right and into the lava." In the case of the Wind Waker, this means no more stupid rope swinging puzzles. Nintendo: I'm glad you think manipulating the camera is an important skill, I find it to be a big nuisance!

(Also annoying are FPS games where it's hard to judge when you're at the ledge so you can make your best leap across the gap, instead of falling into the lava below.)

Any, the basic point I want to make, besides that jumping puzzles suck, is that the control in Zelda 64 and some of the puzzles were such that even moving the stick very little could accidently cause Link to jump off a cliff into the raging river below - mainly due to the camera having this annoying tendency to pan when you're moving slowly.

Re:It's all about choices

[Sparr0]

ry Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. with both expansions. as close to an RPG as youre going to get. the least linear story line (to the point that you can forget what story line youre on) of any RPG ever. the interworkings of the guild memberships, reputation, stats actual affects on the game, and a few other key features make the story the most diverse ever. Yes, in the end the conversation and story options are static, but they are so diverse that you might never notice it even if you play through the game 3 or 4 times (it takes hundreds, if not thousands, of hours to complete the entire game, but you can 'win' after playing only 5%).

Re:Why use CTRL for shooting

[freeweed]

Exactly right, and keyboards essentially work the same today.

Try setting up a MAME cabinet using keyboard-based input only, and a game such as one of the later Street Fighters. You'll have a field day with all of the multi-button combinations - keyboard simply cannot distinguish all of those individual keys being pressed at the same time.

In fact, it's actually a bit worse than you describe. Because of how input signals are pulled from a keyboard (think of a big matrix of crossed wires), if you mash enough keys together, you can end up with keypresses detected that you never actually hit at all, a phenomenon known as 'ghosting'.