Slashdot Mirror
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 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
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!
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.
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."
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.