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How id Lost Its Crown
The Next Generation site has an editorial up by veteran animator Steve Bowler discussing the loss of prestige id has suffered, at least in his eyes, as a result of the latest incarnation of Doom. From the article: "But one day, the industry changed. The consumer changed. It's hard to put one's finger on it. Maybe it was Counter-Strike. Maybe Unreal Tournament. Something happened to the genre between Quake III and Doom 3, and Id somehow didn't take it into account. Call it braggadocio, or hubris, but Doom 3 is no longer the top dog in the FPS market. Yes, it's upsetting. I tried not to admit it either. But it's undeniably true."
Doom III was a very dark game, not something the bright people in Capitalist America would find entertaining.
"Doom 3 is no longer the top dog in the FPS market."
I never realized it was ever top dog. It came out, I played it, then it went on the shelf. It wasn't really that impressive and it certainly wasn't good enough to be called top dog. My kids watched me play it for about a half hour and that was enough for them. They never felt the desire to play it. Yeah it was pretty and it had some nice eye candy, but what's that got to do with the value and quality of a game? If you don't have the desire to play it more than once then it can't even be considered top-10.
I'm lost on the point of this article.
The problem with id, and even valve, is that they take way to freaking long to come out with their next game, and then what is it? Its a sequel to an eixsting game.
While I am not knocking their capabilities of offering state-of-the-art 3D gaming engines, do we really NEED a Quake 4?
While games like HL2 definitly has improved the gameplay over the original HL, by the time you get to the 3rd or 4th iteration of the same concept, how original is it?
I think id should stick to making game engines, and let other, more creative companies designe the game content, and STOP making sequels in general. Develop some new story ideas, and heck, some new gameplay features instead of just offering an new improve clone of the same ol' game
Also, don't hype about a game 4 years before releasing it, then push back the game release for another 8 - 12 months. The game doesn't have to be perfect, just playable. It makes more sence to get a large audience of players running the game, and finding bugs, then fixing them quickly, rather then waiting while a smaller team of people Q/A the product and take years to clear all of the bugs
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Doom 3 is a tech demo for Carmack's engine just like most of his games are. Nothing's changed to make id's prestige go any higher or lower than it always has been.
Rob
Doom 3 was a great game, imo, however people's complaints about the whole flashlight mechanism were justified, and I can see how it would detract from the entertainment value. Id's goal was to make a scary game, and if you played the game with the swapped-in flashlight as they intended, it was indeed scary. The lighting was better than in any game I'd played at that point and created an unparalleled atmosphere of creepiness.
That being said, the idea that in "the mysterious future" you wouldn't be able to hold both a flashlight and a gun hurt the game's credibility. And going for the cheap scare so many times did tend to get old.
They were also determined to make D3 a single-player game in a field now dominated by multiplayer and massively-multiplayer games. I would have thought that they'd have realized this better than anyone, given that they practically created the market for multiplayer FPS gaming, but they chose to make Doom 3 a single player game, and between that and the whole flashlight deal, many people decided the game was a dud, and thus its fate was sealed.
I still thought it was a great game though!
rooooar
The FPS market dried up in about 2000 ,well atleast in inovation (perhaps 99). .
Doom 3 was fun and so was Half life 2 , but neither compared to their previous incarnations , they were better only due to the fact they were released several years after the origionals
ID no longer has the crown as there is no real crown to have.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
All is not lost for id. This just means that the competition has caught up to and surpassed the ones who'd set the bar for so many years. Now it's time to bring something new to the table. In the end it's all good for gamers. One place to start might be to start focusing more on consoles since like it or not that's where the great mass of the market is going. There must be something to this Halo thing. I still prefer mouse and keyboard, but kids today, well you get the picture... Anyway, the console would be a good place to bring something new to the FPS genre that people would sit up and notice via a new peripheral like the eye toy or something else. Pushing more and more polygons or turning out the lights is not the answer.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
maybe people have started taking an extreme liking to more life-like* FPS. factors like recoil, spray, real-world guns...
...the kind of ppl with whom u play.
i have no preference in this coz either type can be as entertaining. for multi-player, it depends entirely on the kind of ppl u play with**. interesting story lines help (though not for repetitive gameplay).
* i don't mean ppl actually going around killing each other...like they do in real life.
** (for the really anal)
Id arguably peaked with Quake II in terms of pure enjoyment to play, especially multiplayer.
Quake III was prettier but nowhere near as responsive. It was good, but not the same, and not better really despite the major engine overhaul and drastic change in focus. Pretty much all just stand alone arenas. Yes, I know that was the point, but for me this is where they started to miss the point.
Doom III took everything they did wrong with Quake III and then some and forced it onto a single player game. It was certainly NOT like anything tried and true Id had produced before. It wasn't Doomlike in how it played. It also wasn't like most other current FPS'. It's just not that good, that's all.
Somewhere the shift went from making greatly enjoyable games to making candy filled games.
No Comment.
From TFA:
"...and the upcoming Unreal Tournament 3"
So if he is talking about Unreal Tournament 2007, that would be Unreal Tournament 4 in the numbering scheme of how many Unreal Tournaments there have been. 1 would be Unreal Tournament (1999) 2 is Unreal Tournament 2003, 3 is Unreal Tournament 2004. Finally 4 is Unreal Tournament 2007.
Steve Bowler is certainly entitled to voice his opinion on whatever forum he likes; but I know I enjoyed Doom 3 and the expansion pack. If he didn't, well, too bad. The game isn't going to appeal to the kid who plays counter-strike solely (not that CS and CS:S are bad, they just aren't the only type of game), and it isn't going to appeal to the most jaded gamers. Monster closets are obviously a problem with Doom 3, but that is about it. It does something modern new games like Battlefield 2, and all of the Unreal Tournaments don't do; deliver a single player experience with a good modern engine. BF2 has bots, and UT2004 has better bots, but they don't have any kind of good linear single player experience. Far Cry might, I haven't played it beyond the demo. HL2 certainly does deliver on that. Show me another modern engine that runs on your computer and delivers a reasonably good single player FPS experience right now, I'd certainly point to HL2 and Doom 3.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
Fist of all- what a tool, this author. The core of what makes Id important (very different from popular, i might add) is STILL there.
Carmack and Id have always seemed, to me, to be interested in pushing themselves and the technology first, and at one point that made them very popular.
Ok, they're not on the tip of the tonge of every teenager from here to Tacoma, like, say, Rockstar. But does anyone TRULY into games give a shit?
The advances in engine tech from Quake 3 to Doom 3 are probably going to be unnoticed by the unwashed masses. As Call of Duty running on the Quake engine showed us- it's really hard to gauge the full potential of an engine at the start. Methinks the same will be true of the Doom engine.
IMHO the problem with Doom3 is the engine. The graphics where ok, but if all it can render are five foot long corridors its just isn't much impressive in the long run. In UT, Farcry, Battlefield and a bunch of other games you have huge outdoor scenarios, in Doom3 you don't have any of that, even so it would have fit the scenario quite well. Beside from that the graphics also where not that impressive, they were good, but not really much better then other games that released around the same time. Doom3 ended up being one of many games out there, neither the graphics nor the gameplay set it much apart from the rest.
The problem is simply that basically all games today look great, full 3d, shaders, bloom and stuff, so it gets a lot harder then in the old days to look special.
I left id Software in early 2000 about six months after Quake3 came out. Counterstrike was starting to really catch on and I personally don't enjoy "realistic" weapon based first person games. I really like playing with completely unrealistic rocket launchers, laser guns, etc. Counterstrike never appealed to me as there's only so many variations on hit scan weapons (such as glocks, rifles, etc). With Quake3 done, the next game was Castle Wolfenstein with the Quake3 engine. The entire industry was headed for war simulation games, mostly fueled on the popularity of Counterstrike. I didn't want to work on these games--they weren't something I was interested in. I like an arcade game like feel to the game, not a slow tactical game. I'm not saying these were bad games, just not the type of games I enjoy playing or making.
id excelled at making amazing technology and simple addictive arcade like gameplay with that technology. The original DOOM is an arcade game--its incredibly fast with dozens of monsters on the screen. Quake and its sequels were also arcade games, except you can play over the internet against other people.
Doom3 wasn't an arcade game. id attemped something different by building a game that followed a story and because of limitations of the engine, could only allow interaction with a few creatures at once. They tired to do this with some the mechanics from the older single player games (such as monster closets) and while the game is both incredible from a visual and technological standpoint, the gameplay to match this just isn't there. Much of what Steve says is right, when the level of graphics and presentation presented called for realism, old models of spawning monsters behind you when you pick up something doesn't work anymore. That worked in an arcade game, but not in a story driven game focusing on realism.
I hope id realizes their strengths and return to focusing on games with great visuals and technology with simple and addictive arcade like gameplay. That's the id I know and want to play.
/// Zoid.
Both of the 'flagship' games out - Half Life 2 and Doom 3 - had a couple things in common. Both had absolutely stunning graphics and the potential to interact with the environment. Both games were about as linear as a ride at Disney land... Both wanting stupid ($60ish) amounts of cash.
At first, Doom was a bit scary - but there were just not that many different monsters about. Did not take long for things to get old. Even worse - the step forward, closet open behind you, and random monster jump out at you got very old. No multi-player? Come on! Talk about zero replay value there... Skipping whatever expansion gets put on the shelves as well.
With HL2, I heard the same 'linear' complaints and they were right. Could they make fewer options for how to make an objective? I eventually picked it up for $30, and that was largely due to CS: Source rather than the HL game itself as the driver.
With all the millions of dollars spend on the technology, HOW BLOODY HARD is it to find a decent story writer. Really? When they say games are becoming the next Hollywood, guess that applies to budget for scripting as well.
Anyhow, ended up getting small pile of games that were bundled with hardware and one of the more pleasant surprises is FarCry. Graphics and physics seemed comparable to the games going for three times the amount. The gameplay is fairly unrestricted - lots of different ways to go about meeting the objectives. Don't know why it missed out on the press.
Looks like I'm standing on a soap box here... The Doom 3 was the last game I will ever spend $50 on without 'stars shooting out of it's ass' positive reviews by people who actually parted cash for the game.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Doom 3 was looking good, as was Halo 2. Then I saw the physics demo for Half-Life 2, and promptly stopped paying attention to anything else.
Computer (more specifically, GPU) processing power has increased so much in the past few years that game companies can no longer simply rely on "Uber-realistic graphics!!!" to sell their games. Everyone can do that now. It's old news.
That was id's mistake. I think that Valve properly recognized the "Uber-Graphics" wall in the industry and instead focused on game physics and AI. The result was Half-Life 2, and one of the first (if not the first) FPS games that you could really interact with any aspect of the environment, beyond scripted "push this crate here to open the door" elements. Don't get me wrong, Doom 3 is pretty. But gamers are bored of "just pretty graphics". Doom 3 didn't bring anything new to the party; Half-Life 2 did.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
You can't make the same game 7 times in a row without it getting boring after awhile.
It's not being done by id. Quake 4 it primarily being done by Raven, with id mostly providing the engine (doom 3). I'd say that Raven probably qualify as one of those more creative companies you mentioned.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
I liked Doom 3 actually. Of course it did not have the brains and braun of a Half-Life or mulitplayer of Halo 2, but I really dug the game. I own it on the Xbox and I enjoy playing it in casual spurts. Maybe its just me, but I like shooting games every once in a while to NOT require solving puzzles or having some fleshed out story. When I just want to shoot stuff, that is where Doom 3 fits the bill.
I love the online co-op via Xbox Live and even the so so deathmatch is good once in a while. What makes the game best for me is a surround sound system and sufficent TV.
It may shock some of the people in the industy today, but making a crap game then spending £6billion on making it look really, really pretty doesnt make the game any better.
How about instead of all the stupid gfx, they make something thats fun? Or, even better, something that runs on peoples computers?
I've bought every single ID game since Doom (which I got direct from Id way back when, probably one of the few Italian orders they ever received, I'm sure) but I decided to skip Doom3, it took me only an hour or so looking at it over the shoulder of a friend to decide that yes, the engine was cool but the gameplay just wasn't there.
Monster spawning behind you are not believable anymore, as it's not believable to have the whole game in the dark, as it's not believable to have every room look pretty much exactly the same.
I also didn't find doom3 scary at all, it looked quite boring as the endless variations of 'step over this and a monster appears behind you' were played out.
Ravenholm in HL2 *was* scary OTOH, and really, after finishing HL2 and Far Cry, Doom3 looked pointless: if at least it had the 'tons of monsters, varied environments, open spaces' formula of the original it would've been fun, but the way it is it's going to be the first Id game I won't be spending money on: I'd rather still play System Shock 1 (2 sucked in comparison) for a 'survival/horror' creepy slow paced game with an actual reasonable plot and great voice acting.
-- the cake is a lie
FTA: "Who knew demons were capable of such stealth and chicanery?"
I did. I don't think the author has much experience with real demons. Wouldn't one expect a little stealth and chicanery from an extra-dimensional being? I mean, the fangs and claws are just the parts of it that happen to land in the easily-perceptible parts of the EM spectrum. Demons fuck with you. It's what they are. Extradimensional beings that fuck with us.
I wonder what could cause a person to suddenly flip out for no reason and kill a bunch of people they have loved their entire life.
Reading the summary and seeing a comment like "Maybe it was Counter-Strike. Maybe Unreal Tournament. Something happened to the genre between Quake III and Doom 3, and Id somehow didn't take it into account" made my eyes glaze over and almost started moving to the next article. I got sick of defending Doom 3 from people who didn't "get it" before the game had even come out.
First of all, the comment above is ridiculous - saying Doom 3 is anything like Quake 3, CS, or UT is just an inherently flawed statement. The only thing they have in common is that they're first person shooters. Doom 3 is clearly exclusively a single player game, and ALL those other games are (for all intents and purposes) multiplayer games.
The rest of the article was just about the fact that he got bored fighting zombies. Zoid pointed out the same thing in his comment. Sure, I can see that. But Doom 3 was always a horror game. Everything id said on the way to release was that it was a horror game. It was about being scared. I don't really have much sympathy for those that bought it expecting anything else, just like I have no sympathy for every other gamer that buys a game without excercising any critical judgement about it (ie, the majority) - Battlefield 2 is another example of this, a horribly busted game that people have bought by the hundreds of thousands.
Anyway, these articles are everywhere and (imo) they're always the same - they're all people complaining because they didn't appreciate the game for what it was - a pure horror game. I played the whole thing with the lights out in a small room with surround sound set up (fortunately my sister had just moved out so I was able to steal her room and use it exclusively for a Doom room the entire game). I spent the whole time jumping out of my chair. Sure, I've killed enough zombies in my time as well, but it was about BEING SCARED.
He didn't say Wolf3D, he said Wolfenstein. Presumably he was talking about Escape from Castle Wolfenstein from the 80's...now that was a great game although technically it was a 3rd person shooter.
t
Can you please tell that to the guys who are making those Police Academy movies ?
Didn't Doom 3 come out like a year ago? Did the author of TFA just finally manage to get a "next generation" PC that's powerfull enough to play the game and enjoy it to its' fullest?
Doom III wasn't the same game at all. It left the arcade/multiplayer focus and went for a survival horror single player feeling.
Quake 4 is what should be actually looked at as next in the line of ID games even though Raven is making it.
[20:36] wwwdot/.dotorg
id's problem has always been that they were a one-trick pony...i.e., graphics. John Carmack took what was at the time a largely theoretical specification, (BSP) first built two genre-defining games out of it, (Doom and Doom 2) and then went on to display an increasing level of technical mastery with it by adding full three-dimensionality. (Quake) As far as pure graphics are concerned, the man is without peer...he occupies a place fairly close to Einstein in my own head. (And he's a Texan, no less! ;-))
However, problems eventually arose from the fact that graphics alone are not what make a truly engaging FPS. It might have been the first engine to utilise OpenGL, but from a *gameplay* perspective Quake 2 especially was complete crap in my book. The situation got markedly worse with Quake 3 as well, from the point of view that the base engine was the only part of it which id actually produced themselves. Everything else (the AI, the cutscenes) had to be outsourced. Q3's credits list is very long...and id's own staff do not occupy a very large part of it.
Q1 was id's finest hour in my mind...I still don't think I've ever had a more immersive or atmospheric multiplayer experience since then. (and I've played my share of Q3 and UT 2003 online) I realise however that such is a completely subjective statement...but I've long tended to believe that the development of any technology follows a bell pattern, where it hits a peak of development/refinement, and then actually starts to come back down somewhat. (I don't include visual photo-realism as a criteria here either; quite the opposite, actually) For me, (purely in terms of multiplayer) the original Quake was the proverbial summit of the mountain.
The release of Unreal and Unreal Tournament certainly didn't help matters for id though, either...because not only were they beautiful graphically, (the original UT is still a completely acceptable visual experience in my book) but they also included all sorts of innovations where AI and gameplay were concerned...not to mention an extremely discoverable and user-friendly editor, which made it easy for any net-dwelling 14 year old to create their own scenarios as well. Epic might have been ardent worshippers of id, but they were probably more responsible for their idols' demise than any other single factor from what I saw.
So, yeah...that to me is the main issue. Carmack is/was a graphical genius...but they were only able to get away with graphics alone for maybe three releases. (Doom/2, Quake) These days, graphics alone aren't what sell a game...You need good level design, decent AI, and people generally like a strong storyline with a high immersion factor as well.
id were the first, and they will always have that distinction...but they were not able to reinvent themselves...and the world has moved on.
No John Romero means iD has lost the main guy who pushes for gameplay innovation. Romero + Carmack = a balance between gameplay and technology. One without the other just isn't as good.
Read the book Masters of Doom for insight into their dynamic, and how much Romero brought to the table at iD.
I didn't have much respect for him after the Daikatana debacle, but gained it back after reading that book.
Quakeworld (i.e., Quake 1 with improved netcode still has the crown IMO, when it comes to fast, furious hardcore deathmatch. Until somebody makes something better, I'll keep playing it.
I didn't think it was like the original doom. Now I didn't ever beat doom3 so i could be wrong but it just didn't have the killfest feeling of the original. I played the seriuos sam demos and those were closer to the original doom than doom3 was.
"The day id releases an answer to Counter-Strike or the like, is the day they've lost, in my eyes."
This I have to agree with. I just want great competative arcade games from id, not cashing in on the trends.
[20:36] wwwdot/.dotorg
With Doom3, it took about an hour or two before God mode got selected. With Far Cry, it was at the point where you're breaking out into an open area with lots of monsters. I happily made it through HL2 with no cheats.
Also in Doom3 I debated even finishing it, I was losing interest so fast.
Honestly how many times have you sat in a window on CS_Italy with an awp (or scout for you cool people) till you heard "Terrorists Win" ?
Yeah, you were a bastard. And you missed the actual best part of the game: One Life to Live servers. Nothing like NOT being able to respawn to force actual teamwork. I know, i'm in the minority in this, but OLTL games were way more interesting than standard games.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but didn't John Romero bring us Dai "I can't leave without my buddy Superfly" katana? One of the most heavily scripted pieces of boring software ever written?
I suffered through Deus Ex 2. I couldn't finish Daikatana.