Slashdot Mirror
Doomed: How id Lost Its Crown
bonch writes "Steve Bowler, lead animator for Midway Games, has written an article for Next Generation called Doomed: How id Lost Its Crown. He talks about id no longer being the king of the hill in the FPS genre, losing the multiplayer gaming wars to Counter-strike and the engine licensing wars to competitors like Unreal 3.0, and focusing too much on rendering realistic environments at the expense of modern gameplay features. From the article: 'It's hard to stomach having to shoot a zombie in the head the same number of times as in the body (six rounds from a pistol, thanks for asking) to dispatch it, when you can shoot a light fixture and watch how realistically light dances around the room.'"
Dupe...original article can be found here.
Almost the same title, too.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Dupe: How Slashdot Lost Its Touch
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
This sounds so familiar...
You probably shouldn't click this.
Zombies can remain animated independant of if their head is intact or not.
Who writes these things anyway? Honestly folks.
RTFA again for the best results.
Light dancing around the room?
We're talking about doom 3 right?
Light?
Umm.. maybe how nice it looks when you shine your flashlight around the room... unless you have your gun out...
One of the real reasons Doom3 never took off is because I needed to buy a new computer to use it. And so did everyone else.
Counterstrike runs on crap hardware, and basically, a crap internet connection. You'll get called a lagger, a newbie, and a lamer, but it will work, and you can play, and have fun.
Gameplay is extremely important, but so too is availability.
Duped story so I'll dupe my comment.
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
--insert obligatory bit about being able to hold a one handed weapon and a flashlight at the same time, or perhaps using duct tape, here--
"We are the Dyslexia of Borg. Your ass will be laminated. Futility is resistant."
FPS games that are single-player only never last. The last good multiplayer FPS that id put out was QIII, which was put out over 5 years ago. Doom III's multiplayer was just...bad.
Everyone plays ut2k4, hl2, CS, whatever because it's fun either sneaking around and sniping people, or jumping around flinging rockets. Doom III kinda mixed them, and failed to create a fun multiplayer experience.
I'm still looking forward to Quake 4, however.
Veteran animator Steve Bowler (pictured) got pretty angry when he bought Doom 3. And he's still a mite agitated...
What was it, 12 years ago, that we first laid eyes on the original, the dark new 3D world that was Doom? Even before that, a select few of us recall with wonder the revival of one of our favorite gaming franchises, in a bold new direction, when Wolfenstein 3D hit the shelves.
For a dozen years Id has been the top dog, the guy to beat, the pater familia to the first-person shooter. It can look back on a legacy of six games, each one an unstoppable sales juggernaut, a technological milestone. You didn't need to know what the review score was for an Id title. You only knew that you needed to buy it.
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.
Some have even argued that Doom 3 is a step backwards in FPS gaming, that even when it hit the shelves we were already years past where it hoped to position itself.
The problem, it seems, lies at the core of where Doom came from, and the hopes we had for Doom 3. It was a tale of gameplay, graphics, and mistakes.
Zombie shuffle
We're all familiar with the helter-skelter breakneck balls-to-the-wall pace that the original Doom set. So where is it in Doom 3? I can appreciate the slow zombie shuffle as much as the next guy, but when Halo's Flood race existed years before Doom's sequel, one has to ask why exactly we're experiencing only one or two imps at a time.
Obviously, there's a reason why we don't have a dozen imps chasing us down a corridor, and I'm inclined to say that it's because of the graphics engine. So much attention has been paid to rendering a realistic environment that there just isn't a lot of room left for that many bad guys. This left the guys at Id with a bit of a conundrum: How could they still make the game tense and as terrifying as the originals?
The answer, evidently, is to have shit jump out of the dark at you.
Yes, I jumped. I was scared. And then I got tired. Tired of having secret panels open behind me after I'd already cleared the room of any possible beasts from hell, only to get clawed in the back. Who knew demons were capable of such stealth and chicanery? Hey, maybe I'll open this door and--surprise!--here's yet another instant 25 hit points removed from my health because an imp was waiting patiently for me to open a door. This isn't gaming. This isn't the Id I know. This is scripted nonsense.
And yet, in the face of such scripted trickery, the A.I. then proceeds to fall flat on its face when given an empty room and a box to hide behind. If it doesn't have a gun, the A.I. just comes straight at you trying to claw your eyes out. If it does have a gun, it hides behind corners and boxes, but since the game lacks a headshot--something which has become so common in FPSs now that it's no longer a boastable feature--it takes an implausible amount of time to dispatch them.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I recall levels in the original Doom where you were downright encouraged to trick the A.I. into fighting itself. Yes, it was a primitive A.I., but I recall being impressed by it. Hell, even the famed Reaperbot for the original Quake is still 10 times more entertaining than fighting drones in Doom 3.
I guess what it all boils down to is the fact that the gameplay is just too simplified for the graphics. It's hard to stomach having to shoot a zombie in the head the same number of times as in the body (six rounds from a pistol, thanks for asking) to dispatch it, when you can shoot a light fixture and watch how realistically light dances around the room.
And don't
"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.
And this is based on your real world experience with Zombie's I presume?
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
For a dozen years Id has been the top dog, the guy to beat, the pater familia to the first-person shooter. But one day, the industry changed. The consumer changed. It's hard to put one's finger on it.
Doom 3? Anyone who has played CS at a LAN party can tell him what's changed.
Id hasn't really been a player on the FPS game market in a while. Their recent games (Quake 3, Doom 3) have basically been technology demos. They sell well because we nerds think it is cool, but the actual games leave much to be desired.
We know that Id makes its money from licensing its engines to people. Half-life made Id some money. Keep that in mind. I'm not sure if the Source engine takes anything from one of Id's engines.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Now that's something I've never understood in the movies or in the games. I mean, if you're a zombie, you don't have a brain. Period. It's all mush and all you want to do is to eat the brain of someone else for some obscure reason (protein content, perhaps?). So, why would a headshot be more effective against a zombie than a bodyshot? It just doesn't make any sense. If I were facing a zombie and I had a shotgun, I'd just shoot his bloody legs off and run away bravely.
The owls are not what they seem
It's hard to stomach having to shoot a zombie in the head the same number of times as in the body (six rounds from a pistol, thanks for asking) to dispatch it, when you can shoot a light fixture and watch how realistically light dances around the room.
You are forgetting about the BLOOD SUCKING LIGHTBULB MONSTERS!
In a startling development, /. has run today's story just last week.
/. editor now?
Almost the same title, too.
Am I qualified to be a
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
from the duped-from-our-own-department department...
Insert Sig Here
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.
headshots are the worst thing ever to happen to multiplayer gaming.
Or perhaps there really IS more to a game than just how good it looks.
.
.
.
.
(you too can be part of history, and help reconstruct the entire first thread under the original story)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
"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.
That's how I lost mine. They'll shovel anything into a bag of microwave popcorn these days.
It seems somewhat better than, say, Delta Force (Novalogic), where you can kill with one round to the foot from a .45, anyway.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
While the game looks incredible, id's not hiding the fact that they're just selling you a glorified SDK anymore. It looks nice though. And it has zombies. yeah. zombies. think about it.
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
HA! I caught you! View Original Comment
I mean, really, the editors don't dupe on purpose, so why dupe a comment on purpose?
If any of you miss the fast-paced action of the original DOOM games, give Serious Sam a try. It was exactly what I was looking for. The graphics aren't up to DOOM 3 standards (although they're damned good!), but the gameplay is more what I was hoping for.
Even when using the flashlight I couldn't see what was going on half the time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Its hard to stomach how unrealistically the environment acts to shooting a light when you can shoot a zombie in the head and have a more devestating effect than just shooting him in the arm.
Doom 1 was the game that made FPS what it is today. Doom 2 was still awesome and one of the best games when it came out. Doom 3 lacked due to - lighting (whats so hard about a flashlight mounted helmet) and no real multi-player.
/. is still king when it comes to dupes
Hard core gamers tend to finish these games in one-three nights - after that they want to play their friends...People play games like CounterStrike all day long (sometimes on servers dedicated to only one type of board) and do it over and over and over...why? cause multi-player games are more fun then single-player.
The point of this article was to help prove that
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Is that the engine only seems to be able to do dark well. Something always seemed wrong when I played the game, it seemed too dark. Yes, I know it's supposed to be dark, but something was off. I couldn't put my finger on it, but later someone pointed it out to me: The game doesn't have any kind of radiosity.
Radiosity is the property of multiple light reflections. When a light shines on a surface it reflects, of course. However that light can then further reflect off another surface and so on. That's what leads to soft shadows, and is the reason why when you turn on a flashlight, the whole room is slightly illuminated, not just what oyu are pointing at.
Doom 3 doesn't do this, a light hits a surface and will reflect to the screen, but there's no multple levels of reflections. The net effect is hard shadows, corners that are always dark. You can't get a good brightly lit scene.
Now I don't fault them on this, doing radiosity in realtime isn't feasable at this point on most cards. However other games can deal with this, the don't do all their lighting in realtime. Some is done in realtime, some is a precomputed light map. That allows for a global illumination, but one that doesn't have to happen in realtime.
That is my big problem with the engine. Sure it's more accurate than the UT2004 engine, technicly speaking, but it doesn't look as good. UT is "faking" the lighting and shadows, but they look good, and you can have a nice brightly lit outdoor map, or a dark indoor map, and they both work. You can have a light source that casts light on to all surfaces, even those it doesn't directly hit, since it's calculated before hand.
Personally, I'd rather have a game engine that looks good rather than one that is more accurate.
My general complaint about Doom 3 is that although one of the most breath taking pieces of technology available, it is an entirely unfun game. If a game is unfun what is the point of playing it?
Doom 3 suffers from many of the problems stated in the article as well as too many other games are trying to follow suit. It is not fun to be constantly assulted by strange noises. It is not fun to die to things you can't see. It is not fun to die when when the player does nothing wrong. Players like to rise to a challenge but when a game so ludicras that you can count on being attacked from behind after you enter a room that you open the door and walk in backwards that just shows how idiotic the design turned out to be.
I think id got too enamored by making the best looking game possible which they did in spades. They forgot to make the game fun. I shouldn't be too surprised though...game producers fell for the same trap Hollywood movie producers has for years now. Hollywood and the game industry know they can make some of the best SFX with the tools and talent available. The problem is they both seemed to have forgotten the story along the way.
Doom III was a very dark game
lol flashlight joke
I don't get it if its a dupe why is the site still slashdotted? Don't people trust any one anymore?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...and irrelevant rant about Doom 3. It's clearly not everyone's taste, but the hell, I really enjoyed playing id's final version of what the original Doom was meant to be, but could not become, due to technological drawbacks back in time. So this guy, while providing you mit wrong "facts" about "no headhsot in teh g4me 'n stuff dud3!12" (in fact, the Doom 3 engine FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER featured collision-detection based on the actualy polygonal structure of objects, NOT just el-cheapo-hitboxes, and definately recognizes different body-zones of its models!) basically just spills biased mud in the company's face that will get Enemy Territory: Quake Wars as well as the sequel to Quake 2 delivered soon, constantly innovates the industry in the field of real-time 3D-graphics, and sold its latest and greatest groundbreaking engine to be incorporated into some of the most eagerly awaited games in the genre.
Yeah, I see clearly now, id is doomed.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Even though the gameplay itself for D3 was far below what it should have been, I have to say I must give them credit for being able to create such a powerful and frightening environment as they did. D3 was the first game I've played since the Marine campaign of AvP that actually made me scream, jump out of my chair, and have to leave the room. (Yes, I'm a sissy.)
Everyone craps on D3 so much, and it bugs me. Yes, gameplay is probably the most important quality in a video game, and I admit it was severely lacking in D3. But dammit, they really really excelled in other areas and did a few things other video games just don't do. They do deserve some credit.
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
Morrowind, of course, was an RPG, but it wouldn't be impossible to remake Doom 3 or UT2004 to look and act like it.
The thing is, non linear games where your actions determine your standing in the game, as well as its path and outcome, are the wave of the future. Especially games with thousands of mini adventures on the side. Also, in Morrowind you interacted with practically *everything*.
If Morrowind were not done years ago and were done today through the Doom 3 *or* Unreal 2 Engine (either of which would imply far fewer bugs than Bethesda's own "engine"), it would eclipse all other games in popularity for 2 years. I say that because Morrowind appears to be almost the single player's equivalent of Starcraft in popularity and longevity.
The lesson: forget the graphics arms race, achieve Doom 3 or UT2004 level graphics and leave it at that, and concentrate on a deep, complex, non linear, "easy to get into it quick" story lines, and endless paths of quest resolution. Give FPS players a world to explore, tweak the outcomes, and generally have fun in.
ID somehow appears to be furthest behind in pursuing this goal, even though Doom 3 is no more linear than HL2 or Unreal 2.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Ill TELL you how iD lost it's crown. One dark night when the moon was purple and the grass was shiny, iD decided to go bar hopping after work, but rather then visit the lavish establishments surrounding the workplace, he decided to meet some new people, and walked to the more shady side of the tracks. Passing many of the local, dirty, cross-dressing prositutes junkies, he wanders into a joint called "The Bitch Slapper". He sits down, orders a brew, and takes a swig, starting to realize that all eyes were upon him. This didn't bother iD initially, that is, until an obese, hairy fellow, who smelled of urinal cakes, sat at the stool beside him and started staring. Trying to ignore the stanky fellow, iD orders a shot of Crowne Royal. Meanwhile, Mr Gorilla kept inching closer and closer to iD until finally something had to be said... "YOU GOT A PROBLEM, FELLA?". "Your mouth am purty" replied the sasquatch. Knowing where this situation may eventually lead, iD got up and started beating the living bejesus out of the hygenically impaired patron. Not paying attention to his surroundings, as the final blow was coming down, iD smacks his undrank shot glass clear across the bar, having it shatter into pieces just inches in front of the bartender.
When the turbulance of the former situation subsided, iD found himself without his drink... without his Crowne.
The End
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I'll probably get modded redundent for this, but seriously, don't the editors read /. themselves! They should really at least put stuff about an artical they're about to make in the little search area and that would at least stop some duping. I'm begining to think I should start marking editors as foes every time they make a dupe, only I'm not that bored.
Could they be the miners?
Sure they're like 3 years old.
Miners, not minors!
Another of many duplicates that seem to have been posted in recent weeks...
I read the other Slashdot thread. But one thing I found missing there (and in the article itself was) - how did ID really loose the crown of engine linsencing? As the article noted the Unreal3 engine is all over the press, but you see no sign of other companies moving to use the Doom3 engine for other products.
Is the Doom3 really not as capabile of expansive environments, really not as easy to program? How did ID let that slide by?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"And while id was looking down.
Unreal stole its gaming crown..."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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.
... of sarcastic, obnoxious comments equating CmdrTaco with a zombie for posting a dupe.
Seriously, though, Id lost it's crown the moment Doom 3 started to be more about hyped graphics than superb gameplay (enhanced by good graphics). I played the entire game without feeling the need to get the ducktape mod, and thought it was a decent experience (there are definitely a few well scripted sequences that'll make you jump, as Bowler notes, but the cooler parts for me were in general creep-out factor -- that disembodied voice asking for help for example) but nothing remarkable. Sure, the graphics were great for an indoor game, but as everyone and their mother knows, graphics are only a tiny part of a good game.
Carmack et al are on record as saying that games don't need story. Romero (that other one) was booted out of id after he tried to get them to focus on gameplay and design, not just graphics. Admittedly he failed spectacularly, but from that point one id was a one trick pony. They make pretty looking games where you kill zombies/cyborgs and collect keycards.
Is this behind the times in terms of gameplay? Sure. Imo, Deus Ex and System Shock 2 both beat the pants off DOOM3 (and Painkiller and Max Payne) in terms of gameplay and design. And they're more than five years old!
Frankly, DOOM was only "revolutionary" because it was the first game that really nailed how to do graphics good enough to make an FPS game work. Expecting fabulous gameplay out of id is like expecting a Terminator movie to bring you to tears.
DOOM3 is about shooting things. Period. Don't like it, okay, I can relate, but don't try to act as if this is a surprise.
now they get slashdotted on the dupe, too.
Holy cow, that's gotta suck.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/08/ 1936236&tid=204
Here's another article we just had 3 days ago with the same title but a different summary. Are we tryin to pump iD sales or something?
Where did all these people come from the last few years, who think that just because you can make gameplay more realistic, that you should?
I choose Doom 3 gameplay over Half-Life 2 or Unreal whatever-version-it-is-this-month any day. Some of us actually enjoy adrenaline being released into our systems while we play computer games. I've pretty much completely stopped playing FPS games these days because they're all so high on realism and short on fun that they put me to sleep. The slow, campy gameplay of Counter Strike and the random trajectory of the bullets makes me want to drop my giant CRT monitor on you, which I keep because of it's lack of motion blur at the speeds at which I like my gameplay to flow. That is, really god damned fast.
Kudos to id software for choosing to make better games as opposed to pandering to the newbie masses, like the author of the article. That's what makes them the reigning kings of FPS games.
----- sXe
I enjoyed the latest Doom. I do think though they could notch the engine back just a bit and increase characters. Serious Sam does it...
And I am really PO that the monsters don't fight each other. That was the best part of the old id series...
I remember when my gf brought home the shareware demo of Doom. I was blown away and played it until I finished it at the end of the weekend.
But I grew up and married, started a career, bought a house, etc. and I don't play games anymore. i haven't upgraded my desktop in years. How could the original id team be much different? If you don't play something compulsively as its creator then you are probably not going to have compulsive fans.
Hell, the id dude started a rocket company, right? Games are just an intellectual exercise in engine design for him now and a source of licensing revenue.
First you have to determine if it's a Romero zombie or one of the lesser known O'Bannon zombie's. Romero zombies will drop with one bullet to the head but O'Bannon zombie need to be hacked apart. Isn't there a Time/Life book about this?
But not good enough.
GG~
Dupealicious! :-
>> ..having to shoot a zombie in the head the same number of times as in the body.. ...In Doom3 you can also blow their heads right off and they still keep coming. Evidently a zombie's head isn't a critical organ, so the body should be more suceptible to damage than the head actually.
Perhaps some Slashdot editors are using Slashdot as a service to drive page views to sites? If they don't hit whatever the agreed upon traffic figure is the first time around they just repost the story until the desired traffic is met?
They really can't be lame enough to consistently do this by accident can they? There must be some reason behind it. I wouldn't think it would be for the humor, surely that would have worn off by now?
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
At least, now they do. The requirements for game development are increasing every day, stretching development cycles and requiring more resources.
id's games have always been about groundbreaking technology, so it's not surprising that as development costs expand, gameplay filligrees in id titles suffer (relative to the competition). id uses its games as technology demos. Don't get me wrong, I love 'em, but their focus is not on the sort of game logic that distinguishes the experiences this story refers to (no, I haven't RTFA yet). Let's face it: AI is an interesting area that needs improvement, but programming headshots is boring. Making realtime rendering engines as good as they can be is a real technical challenge, and something that id can do better than anyone else. That's what makes them unique, and consequently it's also what makes them money -- not from game sales, but from engine licensing.
Bingo...
Now if only we could convince more developers than just Bethesda Softworks that they should make a game like you describe that isn't online so people with, you know, jobs can play it at their own pace... It's also nice when the gameplay can be designed to reward something other than total hours played which is what seems to happen when the goal is to keep the monthly fees coming in.
See this comment
Morrowind failed because it was too open-ended. Daggerfall had that problem too, but the main quest was quite obvious at least for much of it. With Morrowind, much of the gameplay consists of literally wandering around looking for something to do. It might be realistic, but it isn't fun.
Games need a certain level of linearity. I remember the developers of Jedi Knight saying they'd chosen to make a linear game because making one good story is a lot easier than a branching story that probably wouldn't be very good anyway. A game and particularly an FPS isn't the most accurate possible simulation of real life, it's an entertainment medium. A game that puts you in a movie script with monsters to kill, people to talk to and a princess to save can be more enjoyable than a game that says "you can do anything", which ends up meaning there's nothing that feels like you're doing what you should.
I am trolling
Saying that Carmack doesn't know how to build a truly engaging game is like saying that Lucas doesn't know how to write a truly engaging script. [Rolls eyes]
I can afford a Corolla but not a Ferrari, no matter how much better and appealing the Ferrari is.
Unreal T. runs on my machine. Doom does not.
A little Doomed Poetry
Doom requires a GPU
that I can't afford anywho,
Cycles and Ram beyond comprehension,
Hardware upgrade is their intention.
Perhaps when I get that fat raise,
I will sing ID's Praise.
Until that Day with my Pay
I will stay with my current hardware array.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Never being the FPS partisan, I've found it extremely easy to enjoy a variety of games from a variety of developers because the fanboy trap was something I never wanted to fall into. You simply end up denying yourself too many good games that way.
We all know how difficult it can be to sort through the junk and find the real gaming jewels, so I see no point in going into something intended to be relaxing and enjoyable as gaming with a ton of prejudices. (Though I do make a lighthearted crack about the new cutscene collection being released when I see a PS2 RPG released, but I digress...)
I grew up on Wolf3D, Doom, Quake and Unreal. Enjoying them all, I was slightly disappointed when I discovered the next generation of games were going to be online-only. Sure, you could play the maps against bots, but that really isn't the same as a nice adventure through some hellish landscape.
Quake3Test had some issues with my computer, so I played the demo for Unreal Tournament instead. The demo stands to this day as one of the best demos for any kind of game on any platform...ever. They didn't give you a crippled experience, they didn't give you two maps and say "That's it", the developers instead adopted the philosophy that if you wow the shit out of people, they will buy your game. As opposed to the "Oops, you've been playing the demo for 3 seconds and have 1% of the features working, time to stop playing! Goodbye!" crap you so often get to this day.
Sure, there were features disabled, but they were minor. All of the basic stuff was there for free. To make things even better, the game was quite a step up from the online FPSs I had played previous. UT offered a multitude of new game modes and the maps all felt unique and very, very different from one another.
Fast forward a little bit and I start playing Quake 3: Arena. Things look nicer than they ever have, and the performance is superb even on my low-end machine. Then it hits me...it looks just a little too much like Quakes past. The maps, the textures...all of it seems like ground that id has covered before.
The id vs. Epic fanboys had escalated their rhetoric into near full-scale war by this point and I tried to stay above the fray. Not wishing to get involved in the flaming, I quietly stopped involving myself in discussions about it. I knew something had changed though, UT had clearly (in my mind) offered much, much more than Quake 3 in the gameplay department from the get-go.
From then on it seemed like id was never able to achieve the same level of quality in the content department. As I was told by many, their primary concern was the engine. However, when company had gone from offering so much across the board to a narrowly-focused operation that seemed to put out games just good enough to sell their impressive engines, it just left me feeling like something was lost. A design sensibility that I missed.
Maybe they post dupes to test us and see if we are on point at spotting them...
I agree, one of the problems with linear FPS's - aside from being quite boring - is the long time it takes to make the art and textures for rooms that are only seen once, and usually for a very brief moment. By making a world to explore, players could be coming and going through the same area multiple times on different missions without the need for a constant barrage of new environments.
Really, I'd like to see a GTA-style FPS. A story that drags you in, but also side-quests and free-form exploration available at any time. I like the idea of starting missions from the same HQ location each time, but with the action happening in a different area each time to which you can travel by foot, land or air etc (player's choice). New areas would unlock as you go, a la GTA, and familiar areas could subtly change along the way (bombed out, day/night etc..).
I think the tech's there, you could almost do something like that with the Far-Cry engine. One thing's for sure though, such innovation isn't going to come from id or Valve...
Sorry, but this article is pure crap. iD Software is king of rendering. Always has been, and probably always will be. That's what matters most if you are someone who uses FPS games for chat more than game play. The more interactive and realistic the environment, the better.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I remember when Wolf and Doom came out FPS was all people could talk about. It seems like there are a whole lot of non-FPS games that are getting more attention now, like GTA and Morrowind (while it uses a FPS engine I wouldn't say it's a FPS because it's not a "shooter"). Sure Halo got a lot of praise, but Halo 2 was hardly any better (understandable becasue it's for a console)
It just seems that FPS games haven't changed that much except for graphics while games like GTA push the envelope of whats acceptable and games like morrowind push gaming closer to a real world interactive enviorment.
PS I never liked FPS games so maybe my view of the scene is off center.
Actually, i remember reading a list of the top selling titles of the year in the newspaper. It said that D3 was above Hl2. However, they were all below the sims 2.
Fuck.
Besides. The shadowing and mapping effects in Doom 3 were awesome. Even on a ti4600. But i bought a 6800, and i was happier.
This guy tells it like it is. All id games have been pretty lame, and similar, in terms of single player gameplay... the reason id is legendary is their advances in engine technology and the cool multiplayer mods people made for their games. The same is more or less true of Doom 3. id makes the tools that other people use to make a good end product. Doom 3 had gameplay like every other id game created-- a shitty engine demo. Nothing more, nothing less.
#7 says get out of the car and onto a bike. Bikes can be tipped over easily and offer no offensive value. Now a truck with a suitably large bumper offers both offensive and defensive value. What better way to take out a dozen zombies in the road way than just making sure you got both hands on the wheel and preparing for a slight, momentary, loss of traction as you travel over crushed re-dead bodies?
As Interstate '76 said:
"Don't get out of the car, never get out of the car."
(tactic worked well in many places of GTA3)
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Actually, that's been one of the biggest complaints against it, that there is no real hand-holding through the main quest line, that it's easy to wind up with 50 simultaneous quests and losing track of which one you're doing. *shrug* Although, to me, that's the "Final Fantasy vs. Elder Scrolls" debate. You can also see the downside of such a massive world in that every Elder Scrolls game yet has been plagued with many nagging bugs. It's one of those games you have to play with console open to keep it on track. On the other hand, the sheer extensibility was simply amazing.
If Morrowind were not done years ago and were done today through the Doom 3 *or* Unreal 2 Engine (either of which would imply far fewer bugs than Bethesda's own "engine"), it would eclipse all other games in popularity for 2 years. I say that because Morrowind appears to be almost the single player's equivalent of Starcraft in popularity and longevity.
Check out TES4: Oblivion. No, Bethesda hasn't been sitting on their thumbs all this time. They just take a long time between games. I already know what my Christmas present to myself will be...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I mean really. This is the same Midway that bought out Atari Games Corp., ruined it, and then fled the arcade industry altogether.
What exactly do they make that's cool on the Playstation2 or the Xbox? And what exactly do they have that's cool set for the Xbox360 or the PS3?
Seriously, if it weren't for Sumner (Mr. Viacom himself) Redstone buying something like 70% of the stock, I wish Infogrames, ahem, Atari, would simply acquire Midway so *Atari* proper could be reunified. Maybe that would inspire something great. As it stands, the Infogrames Atari only owns the rights to the 1972-June 1984 Atari arcade titles, which was the time that Warner Communications severed the company in two (actually, three if you count Ataritel as another entity), selling the home division to Jack Tramiel and keeping a small stake in the arcade division while selling most of its stock to Namco (which was a brief tenure). Time Warner's later 1996 sale of Atari Games to WMS Industries (Midway) was a disaster which only contributed to the decline of the arcade industry into almost nothing today here in America. (Although most of the blame goes to all the clones that Capcom's Street FighterII ushered in and chased away all the casual arcade gamers for the hardcore tools in the process) which also led to chasing out the originality (which was the hallmark of Atari Games) from the arcade game scene.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
I would really like a somewhat non-linear FPS. It's one of the reasons that I am really looking forward to the release of STALKER, based on what I have read, they are trying to make something that is at least somewhat non-linear. If they haven't changed their design goals, it should be a great game.
It seems somewhat better than, say, Delta Force (Novalogic), where you can kill with one round to the foot from a .45, anyway.
Not fond of the Ghost Recon games, are you?
Excuse me? It sold several million copies, I'd hardly call that "failing". Obviously, many disagree with you.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
I am sure I am a minority here, but Doom III is one of the best game ever. So what if the gameplay is stupid? I don't care. I had tremendous fun playing the game, simply because of its atmospheric graphics. For the mindless shoot'em'up game category, it's the best game ever.
I must note here that I find multiplayer games incredibly boring. Competition of that kind is simply not stimulating enough. What is stimulating is trying to see the next level in games like Doom III.
Play it with lights turned down and you will see it's one of the best games ever.
That and you can't see whats going on.
:P
You mean the game, or the website?
I never understood how people got "lost" in Morrowind. From the moment you get off the ship, they tell you where to go and who you need to see to begin the main quest. All of the other quests are pretty self-explanitory, despite the fact they are not presented on a sliver platter. There is some work involved and that seems to throw some gamers off.
Far more people are used to "On-The-Rails" RPGs, where you must do this, then this then this, etc. Playing a game like Morrowind requires a mentality shift. The game is not in control of the experience, you are. I firmly believe that is the better type of game, but opinions differ.
The problem I see is that for too many gamers, the goals must be rammed down their throats before they can do anything. To suddenly say "Hey, we've created this entire world, have fun!" is too much for them to deal with. Not because they are stupid, but because it is so vastly alien to them.
Personally, I will be far less likely to buy an "On-The Rails" game because it is too frustrating. I have this great world around me, but it is very much like being on a train. I can see all of the potential, but everything is predestined. No getting off to enjoy the scenery and explore the world rushing past my window. I must fight this guy, I must go here...I get pissed. If I wanted to be led around, I would have put in a DVD movie instead. I want to go off on my own and do my own thing.
With Morrowind, I can slip in and out of the main plot at will, or ignore it completely. There is no forced-anything. From the moment I walk out into Seyda Neen, the options are virtually limitless. I can go anywhere, do anything and be any kind of character that I want to.
Choice is good, replayability is fantastic and having the opportunity to simply walk away for a while and pick up right back where I was in my "other life" is priceless. I've done marathon sessions before, but only because I've had a night where I had nothing better to do. You get sucked so far into the game and your character, but unlike Everquest and World Of Warcraft, myself (and other Morrowind fans that I know) find it very easy to put the controller down and not let it consume our real lives.
Being able to not just live one adventure, but continue on a lifetime of them, without it getting in the way of everything else (or costing money every month) just can't be beat.
Midway lost it's crown much longer ago
Id is still very small. Less than 10 programmers. Meanwhile all the big game studios have dozens of programmers.
I think Id chooses to stay small so Carmack can focus on making his 3d graphics engines. But to make a game nowadays requires lots of artists and run-of-the-mill scripting people.
OK I agree Doom3 sucks but Quake3Arena is still the best FPS out there. Better than half-life, unreal, or any of the other cheapo knockoffs.
I'm still waiting for someone to top id's cheat codes. I mean common, who can forget IDKFA? I still remember doom and quake cheats and console commands even though the games are so old. I'd be hard pressed to remember anything codes from any game that I'm not playing right now.
Call me crazy, with all these critiques about ID having lost it, I still love them very much. At a time I did not realize that I installed Quake 1 every time I wanted to play it (it auto started after being installed, nice DOS GUI) it was the first game I really liked to play.
However, in the current linux-destop general useable world (for me over 1 year now), I love ID for having Timothee Besset on board. This dude ported ALL of ID's engines to linux.
I am happy to be able to download the doom 3 demo on linux, trying it, not buying it and spending my time playing RTCW:ET all the time.
Everybody say thanks to the one game company having linux ports for ALL their game engines! Do not forget this!!
Dependency hell? =>
And I have a crappy gfx card that can barely run the game at all. Everyone is so obsessed with multiplayer, strategy, console fps, and "innovation" that they've forgotten the good old single player fps that is supposed to drag you into the game and hold you down paralized in pleasure, fear, or just clicking fun.
There are people out there who enjoy a good single player game. And Doom3 has that. You only play it once or twice, yes it sucks for replayability. But the game is so long; I only got to Hell and that took me a couple weeks.
Anyway, is anyone buying the Doom3 engine? That's the major question.
you'd think that the slash system would do auto-dupe checking for them at the rate that they are coming out these days...
i smell a feature request...
Gekido's Lair
I rented Doom III. I played it. And I really really enjoyed it. Specifically because it's not like other FPS of the current day. It's not about that run and gun mentality.
I would go so far as to put Doom III in a class of its own. It's a FPS, perhaps lacking in the typical conventions of a FPS. But I think if id had wanted to make a typical FPS, they are not lacking the talent to do so. They simply chose an alternative route. The goal, as I see it, of Doom III was not to provide a challenging run and gun atmosphere. It was instead to create an interactive cinematic experience designed solely for the purpose of scaring the hell out of the player.
I spent a good deal of time playing Doom III at night, and it was one of the scariest things I've ever done. There aren't many things that make me yelp in fear. I don't think I can remember any movies that have scared me as much as Doom III. The atmosphere was crafted perfectly. The darkness, the sound effects, the great monster models and animation. Everything came together perfectly. I think id accomplished exactly what they set out to do. If you went into Dooom III looking for action like Halo, you were bound to be disappointed, but that's not what Doom III was ever supposed to be about. It was a change of pace that I would welcome again.
I know it's a dupe, but this time I get to respond instead of just giving mod points...
I played D3 at a friends house for about an hour. Big screen, dark room, was fun. But the fact is, I'm not the gamer I was back in the early nineties; zombies just don't do it for me anymore. Doom was amazing because it was a technical tour de force; I still remember walking into some of those rooms and going 'that is so *cool*!' Frankly, the whole zombie/monster story was pretty old even then, but Doom was such a good game, I was happy to play the entire thing. Hell, I did the same for D2.
Quake was pretty good, but seemed like pretty much the same thing with a slightly mideval twist to it. By the time Q2 came around, it seemed like I was playing the "same-old-thing", even though, id never disappointed in the graphics level.
But in the intervening years I'd gotten married, had kids, played a lot of other games, and given the time I now have to play, I'm looking for something different and original. Id seems to think that they can coast on demonic bitmaps and licensing forever.
Wolfenstein was the first FPS with non-abstract graphics. Doom was the first multiplayer FPS. id software had the fps crown because the made the games that defined the genre. You can't have a foundation any deeper than that. Everyone that came after is an imitator (even if in some cases the imitation is better than the original), at least id did something new once unlike the majority of FPS game producers.
they think graphics mean everything. lets see, doom 3 wasn't spectacular at all outside of the graphics, nothings changed except the graphics. now lets move on to wolfenstein, what happened here, instead of killing nazis you are killing nazi zombies, oh wait, and improved graphics. now lets see about quake. oh, they added a nice rail gun and improved the graphics, but that was about it, oh yea and they removed a real "singleplayer" mode with story (see: q3a) are you starting to see a trend here ? they seemed to be more obsessed with graphics than actual gameplay. they don't seem set on actually changing the parts where they fsck up, but rather putting up a graphical facade in hopes that players do not notice.
I think Doom3 would have rocked the industry if it wasn't delayed so long. If it had come out sooner sure the AI may not have been the best but the graphics would have made sure everyone bought it and loved it. When it did finally come out their were so many good innovative FPS games out there that it just couldnt stand up to them.
Brave Sir Robin ran away.
Bravely ran away, away!
When a zombie reared its ugly head,
He bravely shotgunned its legs and fled.
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Bravely taking to his feet
He beat a very brave retreat,
Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin
Look it up in Google Groups.
To Bethesda's credit they didnt write their graphics engine. They licensed the NetImmerse engine from NDL. Their usage/ability to work with the engine was the limiting factor in the initial release of Morrowind. This is the same engine used by Mythic in DAoC at its release. (Not sure if they still use it.)
Carmack was filthy rich after Doom 2. You really have to love your work to knock yourself out doing it if you don't need the money anymore, or alternately be really greedy so there is never enough. Most tycoons dabble at their work, and point and make other people grind code, they don't do it themselves.
Carmack has been spending to much time playing with fast cars, rockets, etc. which is what rich people do when they have a lot of money to burn and are desperate to keep themselves amused.
I also imaging after spending years grinding out the earlier versions it gets hard to gen up the enthusiasm for the third one.
He also likes to play with graphics tricks and Doom 3 he just took his fascination to an extreme level, with no regard for game play or that it wouldn't run well or at all on the hardware most people have.
So if Carmack was mostly a write off for Doom 3 you would need some talented and hungrier programmers to fill his shoes and maybe they didn't have that, especially in the area of compelling game play.
@de_machina
id Software had something very powerful in its hands - it had the idea of legacy. That's the reason we have Doom 3, Quake 4, etc. The more sequels you have, the more nostalgia you conjure up. What they did with Doom 3 is very simple, however: They took a game with a legacy of being a first person shooter, and they made it into a horror game. I played Doom 3 the night I got it for my birthday, and that was it. I didn't see the purpose of playing a game that was, literally, 50% black pixels. I missed running away from demons, planning an attack, things that made the first Doom games "fast-paced" - an adjective that seemed to have been lost when it came to developing Doom 3. People who work on 3D modeling and rendering faces will tell you something very interesting - the closer you get to achieving one hundred percent realism in a render of a human face, the worse it looks. It's all well and good that id is striving for something immersive, but if I want immersive, I'll play a Dreamcatcher game like Syberia or Rhem, or something. Now Quake 4 is being worked on, and it looks exactly like Doom 3 - to the point where the commandos on your team are basically wearing the same uniforms as the protagonist in Doom 3. Wonderful: another nostalgic legacy ruined by a quest to become something better and new.
Wow. What an original comment.
Parent post needs to be modded up, and grandparent down...
...I haven't laughed that hard in weeks!
Id should do some more Commander Keen games. Those were fun instead of dark and were excellent on gameplay. I'd like to see them do something new with the concept and blend it with their graphic pumping talents. It'd be a direction that they've done before and it'd be different than what the rest of the industry is doing. They could take the lead again.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Assume you meant 'DARK SUCKING LIGHTBULB MONSTERS'? That's how they work, you know. Suck in the dark. You can verify this by looking at one that's gone bad, it has a darkish tinge to it. That's because it's full.
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
In terms of gameplay Serious Sam was a better sequel to DooM than Doom 3.
I didn't want it to be like that but I didn't want it to be a supremely boring "Flashlight, open door, get damage in the back, deal damage, flashlight" game either.
The atmosphere was ok for about 1 hour but it got terribly boring for the remaining 7 hours (and that was on 'advanced' difficulty or whatever it was called).
And without any mod projects taking off I couldn't justify buying the expansion at all.
Sorry ID, you lost one of your most loyal fans with this horrible f'ing trainwreck of a game (which was fun to play for an hour mind you).
A game THAT shallow just isn't acceptable anymore.
One guy at work thought it was awesome. Incidentally, he's the least intelligent person I have met in my life.
There are either the FPSs that are heavily scripted (HL2 is the gloriously shining grail of those right now) or the unrestrictive ones like Boiling Point.
Doom 3 tried to go the former path but didn't manage to make the environment alive at all. Playing a couple of scary sounds now and then and having some scripted scenes of monsters tearing doors or people apart is laughable at best.
I don't even want to imagine what they were doing during the "design" stage... brainstorming: "OH MAN! And then...! And then there are those 50 rooms and they are so dark that you have to use the FLASHLIGHT, and when you get to a certain spot... BOOM a horrible screeching MONSTER comes out and jumps you from behind! Oh yeah... you have to find red keycards for some of the rooms too! That's my game idea! AWESOME, INNIT?"
WTF!
And that's why "choose your own adventure" books are so much more popular than traditional fiction books. Oh wait, they're not.
People don't talk about non-linear games. There's just no point to it. Everyone talks about that train sequence in HL1, the storyline of FF games, the end boss in DOOM, the bosses of Diablo 1/2 (but not the levels), etc. People wish to be entertained in a set story fashion.
The more you talk, the more you should try a MMORPG. WoW for instance offers thousands of quests, quite literally. There are so many that if you finish them all, I would think you've dedicated months of your life to the game if not more.
However, I think you're going to be disappointed that the majority of gamers don't care about non-linear gameplay. Even in a MMORPG setting with thousands of other players able to make each quest completition unique, most players powerlevel and grind their way to the top. After a while, you just don't care.
Sure in concept, you want that game to last you forever, but deep down, you want a finale and a definite conclusion, and above all a great experience to it where when you tell others, they know exactly what you were talking about.
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!
Zombies die quicker with shots to the head than shots to the body, at least with the pistol. It takes two or three shots to the head, as opposed to the correctly mentioned six body shots. And this is on the Normal difficulty. But honestly, if you're going to dis DOOM3, don't rattle on something that actually exists! If I recall correctly, it has per-pixel hit detection too.
You buy them for the engine, and the mods.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
...both Taco's hand and Zonk's hand are doing the same things.
Ron dies in chapter 9 of book 7.
And what is it with Caramack and poor visibility levels anyway? My main impression of Quake I; brown ceilings and walls set off by tasteful brown highlights, and featuring hidden brown monsters throwing brown bombs at you. Didn't look at another Id game after that until RtCW
After Doom 3, it'll probably be a while until I consider another one as well...
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
"Romero" - n. An undead human that exhibits no outward signs of intelligence and exists only to menace the heros and eat the extras. No one has yet determined what causes outbreaks of "Romeroism" in corpses. No skeleton Romeros have been sighted leading investigators to believe that the "Romeroism" is somehow linked to the brain/central nervous system.
Romeros initially appear to be regular zombies but differ in that they have no obvious master and can only be "killed" by destroying their head/brain.
Romeros differ from "ghouls" in that they seem to ignore any damage that doesn't destroy their brains and, once again, they exhibit no intelligence.
Oh no! Daikatana 2?
Overall, I find the FPS games as a whole aren't what they used to be: innovative.
;) ), was at least kind of fun. SOF II, didn't have a great plot. The technology was just better but it didn't make a great game.
I had fun, for instance, with the first Soldier of Fortune Game (SOF). The plot, though far feteched (not from my mercenary experience
Doom and Quake (all iD games) were always great for the technology. But they've never made fun games, IMO. SOF, which was based off Quake Engines wasn't all that fun either. Count (different engines here): Unreal Tournament, Delta Force and company in here too. In fact, its hard to tell the $20 to $30 budget games from their high-budget counter parts now.
GTA 3 - I haven't tried the later ones, is fun. Its different and might still qualify as an FPS. Same with Max Payne (II maybe not so much).
Frankly, Mario Sunshine is probably the best game I've played in years. This isn't to say the GC is better than the PC or vice versa. Simply, game designers have to *think* more before committing big money on a game. I admit too, that just because I don't think its fun, no one else will. But the FPS market is lacking innovation - except in the graphics department, which generally counts for less.
"achieve Doom 3 or UT2004 level graphics and leave it at that"
... but as long as NVidia/ATI are making the Latest and Greatest, programmers will take advantage of that. Why stop with realitime lighting, specularity, bump/displacement mapping and such when you can add subsurface scattering, radiosity, finer mesh tessellation, etc...
People seem to say that with every generation of graphics engines.
Not picking on you
Who doesn't like free music?
"I'll bet money that there are still more people playing Quake 3 than all those games put together."
:)
Nope. CS has been by far the biggest multiplayer FPS. Unreal Tournament comes in a distant second.
See for yourself.
And from talking to other gamers, it seems that most of the Quake 3 players have moved on to either Painkiller, RTCW. And don't forget Call of Duty, Battlefield (1942,vietnam,2), and Day of Defeat...I think some one is a little behind on their FPS's
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
One of the real reasons Doom3 never took off is because I needed to buy a new computer to use it. And so did everyone else.
Actually, I remember playing Doom 1 on my 486 sx 25MHz. Without a sound card. I also had to switch the graphics to "Low". Boy was I happy when I upgraded to 8Mb of RAM, DX/2 66 and a sound card.....
So, back then, some had to buy new computers too.
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
I didn't see the article the first time it went around, so it was news to me.
Bowler misses the point of Doom 3 though. Doom was a game, not an engine. Doom 2 was as well.
Doom 3 is an engine. One that's available now (unlike UE3, which is what I believe he meant when referring to Unreal Tournament III). Is it as tech as UE3? No. However, it will be two years OLDER than UE3 when UE3 is available as in in-your-hands game.
The penny-arcade guys really said it best, over three years ago.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
well, it may look like the engine is only capable of doing dark well, but from these screenshots, it looks as if it can do light outdoor environments: http://www.shacknews.com/screens.x/et_quakewars/En emy%20Territory:%20Quake%20Wars/1/thumbs/051705_et qw_1.jpg
Exactly. If you're tried "The Suffering", no other game seems scary anymore - honestly. "The Suffering" is the first game to *really* scare the shit out of me.
Note, I tried "Doom 3" before I tried "The Suffering" and found it kind of boring, and definitely not scary. All you had to do, was to ready up your machine gun, shotgun or whatever weapon you were carrying whenever you were approaching a door. 4 out of 5 times there would be a monster behind the door, placed there to give you a shock effect. Well, I tell you. That just gets old really quick.
"The Suffering" is *so* much better in this area. It has a really *really* creapy atmosphere, and wasn't trying to scare you with monster jumping in your face. Actually I only noticed *one* single time throughout the entire game, where I was shocked by a monster jumping from around a corner, and I don't think that was even meant to happen.
To underscore my point, just look at the first time you actually see a monster in the game. The monster slowly crawls from around a corner with the camera slowly panning up. You won't be shocked, but it's certainly creapy.
Now although "The Suffering" is a great game with great graphics, it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that it has better graphics than "Doom 3". I agree with all the other points though.
// raz0
I really really enjoyed Far Cry. It was everything HL-2 and D3 was + much more.
Vehicle physics in HL-2 was so bad I almost cried. Levels where small with lots of loading.
D3 was just not a good game in my eyes. *shrug*
Hmm. Interesting talk about the engine, though I find it hard to believe. I have a medium-sized system (AthlonXP 2500+, 512MB RAM, R9800Pro) and whether I run the game in a low resolution of 640x480 or an ultra-high resolution of 1600x1200 I have the *exact* same number of frames per second? Also I only noticed a very small performace boost when going from a Geforce 2 MX to the Radeon 9800 Pro I have now. How can this engine be good if it doesn't utilize the hardware better?
// raz0
Back in the days of Doom 2 and Quake, there was no real competition to what ID made. In the days of Quake 2 there was, but ID was the one who made the best engine, and they were the first to sell a game based on it obviously. Quake 2 was just as bad a game as Doom 3 is when looking at the single player part of it.
What was good about Quake 2 was its multiplayer mode. While Quake 1 allowed multiplayer as well, the initial DOS version required either external tools for IP networking, or a nullmodem cable or modem connection for multiplayer modes.
Then came Quake 3, which never got a playable single player mode, rather, it concentrated on multiplayer mode almost exclusively. The engine however was capable of single player mode quite well as shown by for example Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
By the time of Quake 3, it was clear that ID could create a good engine, but needed third parties for creating good content, and one can argue that Quake 3 served more as a demonstration of the graphics capabilities of the Engine then anything else.
In the years to follow quite a few good games were build on this engine, including what I still consider one of the best multiplayer games so far, Enemy Territory. This resulted from finding a very good balance between complexity of gameplay (relatively simple) and realism (amazingly good for its time). You can get inmersed in the games without having to learn too much, and can quickly learn enough to have an enjoyable gaming experience.
It seems to me the mistakes with Doom 3 are in 2 distinct areas. First of all, the balance between gameplay and realism is not right (as the article suggests also). Second, and imho even more important, ID can't create proper content, and rehashing the same old content in a new engine is just boring. They saw this when making Quake 3, and didn't even try, but failed to remember this for Doom 3. They were making a demo for the engine and confused it with making a complete game with entertaining content.
To me this is quite evident from the fact that old (Doom 2) based games like terminal velocity and a game like Duke Nukem 3d are a lot more fun to play then anything ID ever made except maybe for the original Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein.
The Id/Activsion Return to Castle Wolfenstein series has spawned another creation: Enemy-Territory.
Splash Damage developed the Enemy-Territory Wolfenstein multi-player game (free download, release of source for modders.) According the Id CEO (Guy who did the G4 TV interview?) ET: Quake will use the Doom 3 engine. The demo looks awesome and lighting does not appear to be an issue. Wow. I will upgrade my computer for this one.
I have stuck with the RTCW and now ET series for online FP shooter/multi-player games for the last 5 years for two reasons:
1. I think the ET, and previous RTCW, series of games are fantastic for public and clan play.
2. They have always released/maintained a great Linux client.
... and furthermore
It always is annoying when someone spouts their opinion over and over again as if its fact.
Id hasn't lost its crown, they still have Carmack.
Id has made an awesome engine. Its nothing to dog. Ids games, even at their highpoints always had flaws. But the engines were the real power.
I cant wait for Quake 4.
Personally, I think one think which would have allowed for a much easier game experience would be to borrow a game mechanic from Mordor and Demise. They had a seer in town. You could plug in a name of an item or monster, and they gave you vague directions as to where you might find the object or creature. Similarly, I think that it would be handy in-game to have some way of getting a charm that at least let you get warm or cold indications, maybe vague directions to a specific item or place. For that matter, if it were portable, it could even be somewhat vague. "Hello, I'm looking for a Chas Verandas. Oh. You're Charles Verndesch. My mistake."
The other thing which I think Morrowind sorely needs is some environmental reaction. When I'm 25th level and sporting the Daedric Crescent, I want people to react. Sure, once you become the Nerevarine, greetings change, but as a legendary figure I want more. Heck, when you're carrying a named artifact, you should start having bands of adventurers assaulting you to try to "liberate" it. It would be annoying if it always happened, but if it only happened in cases where you'd been flashing it around publically... maybe start out by hearing about people asking around about it so that you could get the heck out of dodge, change clothing styles, start wearing a closed-face helm. If Bethesda manages their NPC AI they're promising, we might actually see this kind of thing. I'm certainly hoping we will, at least...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Sir Alexander Dane: Could they be the miners?
Fred Kwan: Sure, they're like three years old.
Sir Alexander Dane: MINERS, not MINORS.
Fred Kwan: You lost me.
Comment of the year
Just to do ID some justice: they have proven that they *can* do
proper (pretty awesome actually) gameplay with wolfenstein - enemy territory.
It's a free download (full version!) and there's even a linux version.
Oh and it's definately one of the best balanced out shooters ever - definately worth a try if you haven't ever played it.
The interesting thing, I think, is that Doom I & II were released shareware. Doom had to be a seriously good game or no one would ever have bought the full version. How many full versions of Doom3 would have been sold, I wonder?
The original versions of Doom 1 and 2 were called shareware, but they were not proper shareware. A possitive name for them would be 'demo', a less positive name would be 'crippleware'. ID used a shareware like method by lack of a proper and widespread distribution channel, but for the rest very little changed.
If you wanted, you could have downloaded a demo version of Doom 3, and looked at the game before buying it, just like I did.
What did make a difference of course is that due to the hype, more people got the full version of Doom 3 without ever seeing the demo.
Were Doom 1 and 2 good games? I think they were, but mostly due to being different from anything else at the time, and thus being revolutionary. Doom 3 just rehashes the same kind of content, and well, we have seen enough of it already.
An entirely different question is what will happen with the engine on the long term. For example, I do run the Quake 3 engine a lot, but not because I play QUake 3 a lot... I did run the Quake 1 engine a lot, but not ecause of playing Quake 1 that much (tho I did play and finish it)
As I mentioned in another post, ID is not good at creating content, and ever since total conversions of Doom 2 started appearing, it became clear that they needed others to make good games based on their engines. They fully realized this when they made Quake 3, but failed to remember while making Doom 3 obviously.
I don't know if anyone else mentioned this, i didn't read the much of hte unshown replies, but killing a zombie in doom 3 takes way less then six shots. I know when I played through the entire game on nightmare it only took around 3 headshots to down zombies. Doom 3 doesn't use hit boxes, the shots are registered per polygon (which explains why netcode is horribly laggy). The only problem with zombies in doom 3 is the writers poor aim. The handgun only held 12 shots I believe, maybe way less, if a zombie took 6 hits irreguardless, it would require nearly 60 bullets to down a mere 6 zombies... that's completely untrue, I remember distinctly testing my own wits and aim by trying to never reload and always score headshots with the handgun. Perhaps I found this less difficult after 5 years playing cs, where hs's are all that matters. Anyways, shouldn't a guy from midway be busy making far worse games than doom 3? Mortal Kombat 2 was a long time ago.
How about the endless flood of knock-offs? It must get pretty damn tiring to try and find new content for a game sequel that's already been done 50 ways from hell and back. Even for the creative minds at Id, that's got to be a task. How would you like your boss to come up and say "I need you to design a FPS that hasn't been done before". There is not much left to do that hasn't already been done... more blood-n-gutz, bigger weaponage, sexier graphics, scary-er monsters, dolby-5 24-bit EAX surround sound - and it's been going on ever since Wolfenstein came out. Id tried to tailor doom 3 to fit into the most worn out area on the shelf and make a profit to boot. A pretty tall order these days. And *THEN* they even made it portable enough to run on Linux too! This guy's article just sounds like a lot of pissing and moaning to me.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Who needs non-linear single-player, when a group of humans adds a much greater degree of unpredictabiliity than state of the art AI? That is why MP games are taking off even when short on 'realism' and with less sophisticated engines and visual effects. This is why the Halo versions are so popular and why Q3 Arean is still somewhat. They are simply more challenging and unpredictable and, frankly, fun.
Resurrection of Evil was a pretty sweet add-on that overcame many of the routine criticisms (monster closets, small number of monsters at one time, lack of location variety) and was a lot more fun to play than the original.
I played Doom 3 for a couple weeks and I did love the scare factor. There were a couple moments that had me so creeped out I had to stop playing for a while. But in the end, most of the creepiness is something you get immune to by the end. So it has little if any replay value. "Oh yeah, this is the part where I step on the pentacle and the screen goes red, and I hear screams of, 'we took your 50 dollars muahahahaha', can be heard."
I think the big problem with most FPS games these days is that the story that goes into them always feels like a lame excuse to kill crap. You run into each bigger and badder boss of some level and you get some new uber weapon to kill him with. There's a story, but it's only to give some sense of logic to all these things you have to shoot.
Frankly, until the technology's evolution rate slows down, we'll have to deal with this crap. I mean, can somebody tell me what the plot is of far cry? I have no idea, I just know it has really realistic looking water. When the technology evolves to become more of a story telling medium than an R&D lab for rendering techniques, we may have something. Doom seems to forshadow that a bit, having effectivley ignored the multiplayer element in favor of atmospherics, etc, but it still seems too interested in graphics rendering navel gazing. In the meantime, the FPS genre will make up for it's utter lack of creativity by networking us so we can kill eachother and drool over the special effects wizardry.
Frankly the only game that I've seen recently that I thought was genuinely innovative was PlanetSide. I've been playing it for two years now and it's still way better than anything else out there. It's not that pretty and it's a massive resource hog, but it really is a good demonstration of where this goes. It falls a bit short, but it at least gives you a grander sense of some point to the fighting.
On most games, you fight a round and you kill, capture flags, etc, then the round ends and you start over. PlanetSide does get to feeling like a hampster wheel after a while because there is no win condition, but there's at least a larger sense of the battle always going on and that your contribution to it does have an influence. I think what comes after it should be really interesting, but we'll have to wait and see.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
So, let me get this straight - someone from the development house that produced the turd called "Area 51" is ragging on id design and game play decisions in Doom 3? Talk about a credibility gap.
Also, he is dead wrong -- Doom 3 has head shots, and per pixel hit damage. Its fair to talk about monster closets and the infamous "rear admiral" attacks, but Area 51 is also rife with woeful features such as these.
Pot, meet Kettle.
planet texture maps and more
They are concentrating on the RIGHT thing; realism. Always they'll be ahead.
I'd love to see id's take on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPU
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Jesh. I agree with most of the article. But seriously, this is just lame. The guy works for the competition, sure he will/should have that opinion.
I take it that you have some significant experience in non-realtime rendering, but it doesn't sound like you have much experience with game engines and how level designers use them.
Precomputed light maps do indeed have to do with the choice of engine, because the engine takes care of computing the lightmaps for you. Halflife 2 for instance, supports normal mapped radiosity calculations, in which the diffuse lighting components are added along different vectors during compilation, and then dotted with the normal map during the rendering. "Level designers" don't store them in textures, the compile tools that are associated with the engine do, and the engine takes care of displaying them appropriately.
Having precomputed lightmaps in the doom 3 engine would break all the internal consistency of the lighting. Mobile lights in engines based on precomputed lighting are treated differently from static lights. Doom 3 doesn't have this distinction.
The doom 3 approach allows lights to be much more dynamic, but when a light is that dynamic, you can't have precomputed light maps. You wouldn't have any way of updating them to reflect changing light conditions. Every time an imp warps in, all the lights dim. This couldn't be done realistically with precomputed light maps.
Adding precomputed light maps would require redoing all the internal assumptions about lights in the engine, and you would be basically writing your own.
Counterstrike sucks ass.
If you read the Carmack interview in PC Gamer from 1996 or so, Carmack said Romero was fired because he didn't do any work. Romero focused on playing deathmatch, not designing games. The book "Masters of Doom" mostly confirms this. While Romero did care more about game aesthetics than Carmack, that is not why he left id.
(Tih malyenki.)
... Windows fanboys over here, but yeah I have real world experience with zombies.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
uhh, i think not. every fan of zombie flicks knows that to kill a zombie requires to either separate its head from its body, or shot it 'till it stops moving.
feh. n00b.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
And, yes, that includes the flashlight. So sue me.
Id could've done something different with the flashlight, though. For example: You can use tape to put the flashlight on a gun. Sure, why not!
Except that you can do it on only one gun at a time, and it takes some time to switch which gun its on, so if you put it on your shotgun and you run out of shells, or you need the rocket launcher, you're pretty much SOL. Just a little bit of strategy to add to the game.
Should've been better, no doubt, but it wasn't that bad.
Beyond the Polygons : Because 50,000 polygo
Back in the beginning, id had Carmack making engines, Sandy Peterson writing levels, and Romero designing games (say what you will about Romero). For whatever reasons, all of these left the company except Carmack, and then some more left.
After Doom 2 (and Romero leaving), Carmack was in an interview about the Alien total conversion and he said they all loved it. It was the game they wanted to make. I remember thinking "Wha?" Doom was all about fast action shooting and strafing in a mortal dance with the hell spawn, big guns, and crazy power-ups!
Then Quake came out and it was relatively slow and dark. So why didn't id leave the Doom legacy alone and make Quake 4 instead? I dunno, but they seem to have a hard-on for ruining the Doom legacy and making it something it wasn't. I guess they just don't see what made it successful. I guess they hated the Romero days so badly that they will never be able to get over it subconsciously.
I saw another interview not too long ago and those two artist dudes were awfully smug about Doom 3, so I'm guessing they were in a coup with Carmack to take over and make unfun, "scary" games.
As has been pointed out here several time, the flashlight mistake is unforgivable. I say it that strongly because any designer worth a damn would have insisted on more light. You can just imagine the testers wanting a flashlight and being overridden by the current staff that just don't get it.
Steve's right, it's all about "Developers Developers Developers!" ..
Oh wait.. um Steve Bowler, not Ballmer?
Hi there, I'm the Chancellor of the Nashville Community College and the following is my objective assessment of how MIT lost their crown to us:
MIT offers all kinds of impressive courses in engineering, physics, and math. This is great for people who are interested in engineering, physics, and math, however in practice it is less valuable to know that stuff than it is to be able to repair cars.
Harvard has made the big mistake of neglecting the fact that nearly everyone in this country drives a car every day. So the fact that they dont offer any courses in car repair is mind boggling. It is nice to know engineering, physics, and math, but knowing these subjects does not change the fact that thousands of cars break down every day with everyone, even engineers, physicists, and mathematicians driving them.
Q1 used a limited palette as a speed hack. you have to put quake 1 in its proper place in time... it was the first true 3D game. so of course the sprite 2.5D games looked better because the art is entirely hand-created and not limited by choice of color.
id Software has never been known for great single player games. There are two things the original Doom was known for: being the first truely immersive "3D" game and one of the best multiplayer games ever created.
with the exception of q2 (which I never fully played), every game after the original Doom was simply a variation of the Doom/Wolf3d game play. Yet there has always been something redeeming about the games. Quake1, for example, had the most amazing FPS action and feel you will ever experience. The online game play (Quakeworld) is so vast that people play it even today. The physics and feel of q1 were so good that id Software tried to duplicate it for Quake3, after seeing the physics style of Quake2/Half-Life/etc. just isn't good for fast-paced action. Quake3 was an updated Quake1, but with much different weapons and a focus on multiplayer. And, of course, 3D cards were finally popular with the arrival of Quake3 making for much better graphics.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
Because it'll take away from their ability to utilize CPU power (unless all said extra features are handled by the GPU) to do such things as manage characters and handle their "thoughts", etc.
It's a trade off.
Consider the trade off of using Quake 2 graphics which would leave the GPU handling 99% of all graphics work, thus leaving the CPU to handle a Sims 2 style character profile system for ten thousand townie NPCs in a major virtual city. Or the trade-off of having Unreal 3 level graphics and nowhere near enough CPU power left over to manage more than, say, the virtual minds of a dozen people on screen at once.
I'd take the former.
I would accept those low quality graphics since I could plug-in super high quality skins and textures, and perhaps smoother animations.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Play Alien vs. Predator 2 in the dark. When you're a marine and hunting around hallways for an alien, it's time to break out the Depends Undergarments.
It's a great book, but I take issue with the author's weapons advice.
.223 Remington (AR-15/M-16 ammo, aka 5.56). And its ammo also is notoriously ineffective at any range.
.30-06, 30-30, .270, .243) that are likely to be easily found at sporting goods stores and other places where you'd be scrounging for anything.
.223 Remington and the AK-47. An AR-15 based weapon has a ton of existing ammo (and compatibility with military weapons), is accurate and ideally powered for head shots at ranges most people can be accurate at.
.50 M2, Russian 12.7mm) would be excellent at stopping mid-sized mobs of zombies or clearing paths for armored vehicles to pass through. Even though only head shots are killers, a single .50 cal bullet will easily cut several zombies in half. Massed fire on a narrow field of zombies could grind them into a much less threatening mess.
Disparaging pistols and shotguns because they're close range weapons makes and promoting the epitome of close-range weapons, a blade, makes no sense.
I also think that the M1 carbine is a terrible choice for a weapon
While it might be cheap (or was cheap in surplus form at one time), the ammo would be nowhere as easy to come by as
The best weapon is likely to be civilian sporting weapons, if only for the widely available ammunition. 12 guage shotgun shells capable of blowing a head off at 25 yards could be found anywhere. There's also a half-dozen hunting rounds (.308,
The best rifle choices are likely to be M4-style AR-15s in
I think AKs tend to be less accurate, but they're also dead reliable, even when full of mud or rust. Ammo availability would be good, but not what the AR-15 clones would have in the US. Outside the US, the AK would be a no-brainer.
The author is mostly right about machine guns, but I have to believe that in some limited situations, a high volume of fire from a large-caliber gun (US
Handguns are more effective than the author claims, despite the difficulty in getting headshots outside of 35 feet or so. At panic ranges a handgun is indispensable and its size makes carrying as a backup a no-brainer.
Many hunting pistols (mostly 6" barrel revolvers) would be decent with scopes at ranges up to 150 feet and be more maneuverable than any rifle, and the ammo is everywhere.
You'll be then happy to know that Oblivion, the "under construction" sequel to Morrowind, is based on Havoc, which is Half-Life 2 engine IIRC.
Go to http://www.elderscrolls.com/ have a look, it seems REALLY promising !
ID is not a game company. It's a game technology company. Has been since Doom 2.
They made a fortune off the quake engine, they made a fortune off the Arena engine, and they're going to buy islands with the money they make off the Doom 3 engine when the XBox 360 and PS3 launch.
I've noticed that Half Life 2 has very fake looking reflections on its water. For anyone who does not believe me look at an object such as a sluice gate in the game that moves up and down, and then compare its current position to the position of the image in the reflection. Also look at objects such as crates, barrels, certain hills, etc that are missing from the reflections.
I'm not arguing that Doom 3 wouldn't do this too. I'm just pointing out a technical flaw of an ability by which a 3d game's graphics engine can be reviewed.
Does anyone know of any websites that review these kinds of technical aspects of these two engines?
Counter-strike is the most popular online FPS ever.
you won't need to know these lessons.
Homer: Spare my family. Take me!
*Zombies tap on Homer's head*
Zombies: Brah!Brains!!!!!!!! brains...
I think any PC gamer has known this for the past say 5 years lol, VERY old news, Id has been sucking balls for a long time, as far as many are concerned it happened the day Unreal 1 came out. Doom 3 was hopefully the nail in the coffin, the most overhyped game in the last 2 years, if anyone else had made doom 3 it would have gotten very bad reviews. it was a pretty good game, but so many others are better in many areas.
I think Ids downfall is its small team size, I don't care how tallented you are you can only do so much with 5 people, and the game clearly shows this, it will only get worse, games are so damn complicated these days it takes a 20+ man crew working 3 years to do anything.
As for the future I'm pretty sure Id will try another genre than the shooter (god they better) and will probably make a decent game, but it will be lacking in every category if they keep their small team, plus they have the worst diversification of product lines in the history of any game company (all shooters exactly like doom) thus making any other genre very difficult as it will be a totally new boat for them.
shooting a zombie in the head shouldn't do more damage than shooting it in the gut. It's a *zombie*. In D&D, they're immune to critical hits. In horror movies, they usually have to be dismembered. In Doom, they're animated by daemons from hell. What does it need its head for? Doesn't mean other enemies shouldn't have hit zones, of course...
Reading all of this material about zombies makes me wish that they existed to provide a bit of sport!
Anyone who hasn't seen Shaun of the Dead, check it out -- quite amusing.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
with apologies to Mr Don McLean;
A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How those zombies used to make me smile.
And I knew if they had a chance
That they would make me crap my pants,
And, maybe, I'd be happy for a while.
But february made me shiver
With every copy Id delivered.
Bad news on the Usenets;
What happened to my killfests?
I can't remember if I cried
When a zombie took me from behind,
I checked that fucking room ten times,
The day that Id died.
So bye-bye, Mr Developer guy,
My new system isn't ready,
So the frame rates are dry.
Those good old boys were enjoying Far Cry,
Singing "in this game, give a headshot, they die",
In this game give a headshot, they die.
Did you get the flashlight mod,
Cause your character's a dumbass sod,
Has to always let one go?
Do you believe these zombies spawn,
Repetition, boy it makes you yawn,
And can you teach me how to save and load?
Well, I know I put a bullet in him,
It went in right above his chin,
But you need five more to use,
And that means that you lose,
I was a lonely teenage fraggin' fuck
With a with a pr0n collection of Kirsten Kreuk,
But I knew I was out of luck
The day that Id died.
I started singin',
"bye-bye, Mr Developer guy."
My new system isn't ready,
So the frame rates are dry.
Those good old boys were enjoying Far Cry,
Singing "in this game, give a headshot, they die",
In this game give a headshot, they die.
The brain still controls the simple motor functions.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Perhaps, but Morrowind had one of the shittiest, buggiest, and inconsistent game systems ever developed. It was clear from the get-go that whatever playtesting had been done was minimal at best. Sure, they absolutely excelled at the open-ended environment, the story, and most (not all) of the quests; but the game system itself was an abortion the moment it hit the shelves. Even massive modding of the game simply could not fix most of the "what the fuck?!?" elements of that system.
I know, I tried. Would that I hadn't wasted the time.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Lost the crown? :) Yeah right, talk to me "after" we see what new things Quake 4 brings to the table. I wouldn't count Carmack out just yet...
I played practically all computer games since the hugo house of horror, superfly days. The only ones I missed were the ones that scored 7% in PC Gamer lol. Although D3 is seriously boring after a while (hence I didn't finish it but stopped at delta labs), I must admit that everytime I see something new, something that the other engines didn't or couldn't do previously, I did have a big smile on my face and press F5 to quick save before I die looking heh. Come on, you can't tell me you didn't jump when you hear "gimme back my baby!". I never played a game that made me jump out of my chair. D3 was the first one. Ravenholm was very very nice and I appreciate how Valve did it without annoying you with totally dark corridors and no duct tape. The town made me uneasy and didn't want to play at night alone. But it didn't make me jump. But then again, I couldn't stop playing HL2 and finished that instead. I appreciate what JohnC did and I believe the engine needs some time, or some new group (cuz valve has source now heh) to spice it up and finally use it well. Let's give it some time.
Quake succeeded because it was a hodgepodge of wild ideas--part Keen, part Doom, part Lovecraft--all undiluted by the bland design-by-committee unanimity that has subsequently marked id (and most industry) product. They went for it, following their passions and a little unsure of the destination.
Legend has it id was in a panic shortly before release when they realized the disparate elements didn't really fit together; and so the slipgate was born, allowing them to Frankenstein the whole thing together.
That happy accident will never happen again. Not at id, or elsewhere. Not in today's mega-budget corporate gaming space where accountants rule. Most games today follow Hollywood's model: carefully warmed baby food, free of impurities.
But it's wrong to speak of Quake as the past. Quake is still very much alive and in fact enjoying a dazzling new second life, thanks not only to Carmack's generosity in GPLing the engine but also to the very talented devotees whose artisty keeps it going.
Trust me on this. If you haven't played The Marcher Fortress, running on a supercharged rebuilt Q1 engine with eerie new enemies, you're in for the best single player FPS treat in years. And it's free.
Forget Doom III. And unless it radically reinvents itself, forget id. Take yourself here, and enjoy the fruits of a classic that refuses to die: http://www.planetquake.com/underworld/quakereviews .html
If its not a 6DOF , I dont play it.
Fair enough. I'm not trying to say it was a bad game and it surely had legions of fans. I just found it interesting that for the two Id games I really disliked, poor visibility was a major factor.
id Software has never been known for great single player games. There are two things the original Doom was known for: being the first truely immersive "3D" game and one of the best multiplayer games ever created.
That's not how I remember it. Doom II was the great single player game. It's been eclipsed since, sure. But it's still on my machine, and if I fancy a spot of mindless violence it's doom or doom2 I fire up.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
To give Carmack credit if you recall he didn't want to do Doom III. There was a confrontation among other id employees saying they wanted it to happen and nothing else was going to occur until it did. Can't remember the exact story but somebody left shortly after Doom III was announced.
As I remeber, the downloads had the full game engine and the wads for one third of the levels. The only criplling I remember (feel free to refresh my memory) was that some of the secrets were omitted.
If you wanted, you could have downloaded a demo version of Doom 3, and looked at the game before buying it, just like I did.
What did make a difference of course is that due to the hype, more people got the full version of Doom 3 without ever seeing the demo.
Initially though, wasn't the shareware+upgrade the ony way to get Doom. I know the sequel appeared in the shops, but I dont remember doom appearing there until the ultimate doom re-releases started. I doubt many peole would have bought doom3 if they'd had to try it first.
As I mentioned in another post, ID is not good at creating content, and ever since total conversions of Doom 2 started appearing, it became clear that they needed others to make good games based on their engines. They fully realized this when they made Quake 3, but failed to remember while making Doom 3 obviously.
Well, they were good at content, but most of the content creators seem to have left to do their own thing. Sandy Petersen and American McGee spring to mind. Doom and Doom II had some beautifl levels. But as you say, doom 3 is abysmal. And not in a good way.
It's going to be a while before I spend money on another Id game. If I'm going to underwite the cost of demoing their engines, I at least expect a playable game for my trouble
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
As I remeber, the downloads had the full game engine and the wads for one third of the levels. The only criplling I remember (feel free to refresh my memory) was that some of the secrets were omitted.
Crippleware is defined by not providing complete functionality in the 'trial' version. For all I can see, this was the case with both games. I'd prefer calling them playable demos, I don't think crippleware does justice to what you got when downloading them, but strictly spoken, neither were proper shareware.
Well, they were good at content, but most of the content creators seem to have left to do their own thing. Sandy Petersen and American McGee spring to mind. Doom and Doom II had some beautifl levels. But as you say, doom 3 is abysmal. And not in a good way.
Hmm.. What content did ID create after Doom that qualifies as 'good' by any standard?
WHile I agree that they made some pretty decent maps for Doom II and Quake for example, making a decent map is not enough to provide for good game content.
Before they ever got into this FPS business they created some very good content, but that is a long time ago.
It's going to be a while before I spend money on another Id game. If I'm going to underwite the cost of demoing their engines, I at least expect a playable game for my trouble
Well, same was true for Quake III Arena imho. While it was a superb engine for FPS games, the initial game was crap imho.
I am glad I payed for it anyway, the return on investment has been very good for me so to say (think RTCW, Enemy Territory etc)
It is why I obtained a copy of Doom III as wel, I hope they do get someone to release a good game based on it, and besides, while Doom III nowhere matches the awe and inspiration of the first Doom game, it is not as bad a game as many make it. It did get me quite a few hours of entertainment still.
Stop being a flame-supporting troll. The dude gets all self-righteous, and yet he's completely fucking wrong.
Morrowind was kewl and I played it for a long time. The engine was neat, especially with all the mods out there (some facemods in particular are brilliant, my Guild Wars characters never look so real).
But once you find out that there is an "ideal" way to build your character, by starting your primary and secondary attributes low and playing "ideal" to always get 5 attribute points, it becomes a leveling treadmill until you are at the level cap, then do the main quest, get bored, and stash the game away.
I think its safe to say that the leveling mechanism has "broken" the fun for me in this otherwise almost perfect game.
But hey - Morrowind II is soon to hit the shelves, isn't it?
I have faith in Bethesda to make all of these features actually work.
*wry grin* I wish I had your faith. They're very big thinkers, and they've been known for promising much more than they can deliver. The idea of having the townspeople adapt to your deeds has been present since Daggerfall. If you poke around the data files, you can actually find the database of rhyming lines that were supposed to be used when the minstrels sang your praises.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
RTCW and enemy territory?
arguably superior multiplayer than either quake 3 and doom 3, and a lot more fun and complex than counter strike.
I would love to play a newer version of enemy territory running off of the doom 3 engine.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
yeah its almost as old as Q3, but id argue that it was a better FPS than Q3. much more complex, and the team oriented elements were a ton of fun.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
I prefer "on the rails" to a certain extent. The fact is, normal life is, by and large, dull. A game where the plot is what you make it ends up having a relatively dull plot. Games are meant to be an escape from reality, not a reflection of it. You say it's like a movie as if that were a bad thing. Movies are entertaining, mostly because they're not random, they have a well done script and a plot that draws you in. Being the hero is a good experience, but only when there is a hero, when there is heroic stuff to do. With Morrowind, you're completely free to do anything, yes - just like you are in real life. I didn't start playing the game to go into another world just like this one, I play to have an entertaining experience.
I am trolling
It sold largely because it was a sequel to the awesome daggerfall. In what it set out to do, rather than in a commercial sense, it failed.
I am trolling
It's very much a RAM-limited engine, because it relies on keeping the objects that affect you in memory. The renderer is performing fine on the graphics hardware and would be fine on the GF2, try turning down the view distance and the distance away that the AI considers things (can't remember exactly what it's called) and then the graphics card will have more effect. Or slap another gig of ram in there assuming you can afford to.
I am trolling
Haven't you also noticed that it's mainly Taco that does the dupes? Sure, there are others but Taco makes most of them.
:-)
... to the rank of zombie. There can be no other explanation for the dupe rate, it's not an occasional accident.
He's had his last warning. Next dupe, it's 3 [s]lashes (appropriate really) and we rip off his stripes!
Seriously though, I think he's busted himself already
It was a long time ago, but i don't remember the original DOOM or DOOM2 being horror games, or particularly scary. I remember them being colourful, and the lights going off ocasionally, but mostly I remember them for the big levels, the holy s**t moments when loads of monsters or huge bosses came out, the frantic gameplay (dodging dozens of fireballs) and the amazing vistas.
DOOM3 seems to be a sequel to an entirely different game, and if they had called it Resident Evil 3.5 it would probably have gotten much better reviews.
I enjoyed D3, but i never "got into it" in the same way i got obsessed with DOOM2, Half-life, or currently FarCry.
These days games need either great cinematic stories, or much more freedom.
Personally i'm still really waiting for the true sequel to Deus Ex.
As you like. The "try-then-buy" aspect is the bit i'm interested in.
Hmm.. What content did ID create after Doom that qualifies as 'good' by any standard?
After Doom II? Sod all I can think of. I'm just saying that the content on the early dooms was excellent IMHO obviously. RtCW had its moments, but I'd have been happier if they'd stayed with the wolfestein theme and not tried to sell Counterstrike to a bunch of guys who were looking for more twisted nazi gothic superscience. But that's a different issue, really.
Well, same was true for Quake III Arena imho. While it was a superb engine for FPS games, the initial game was crap imho.
I am glad I payed for it anyway, the return on investment has been very good for me so to say (think RTCW, Enemy Territory etc)
I don't do multiplayer on the whole, so QIIIA had zero appeal.
I'm glad the engine sold, but somehow I don't think I want to encourage this trend. If I happily buy game X saying "the gameplay is crap - but good things will come of it", does that not encourage game companies in the belief that gameplay is unimportant?
I demand good gameplay and some sort of plot from my shooters. I dont get them, I't's going to put me off buying from that company.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
I'm sorry, but that's just not true. Daggerfall was largely unknown, and most copies of Morrowind were sold for the X-Box.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
id sells gaming technology. Really, the game is just a vehicle to sell the engine to other game companies. OK, every now and again they do appear to put a lot of effort into a game, but for the most part they just put nice visuals in so that they can showcase the engine.
It takes imagination and intelligence to appreciate and desire freedom to "do what thou wilt". Personally, the reasons you cite for liking Morrowind are the same reasons that I like GTA3 and beyond: freedom. It would be nice if more people were able to appreciate or value freedom... especially in the real world.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I would hardly call the universe of Morrowind "another world just like this one". It is about as different as you could imagine. The people, the geography, the presence of magic and even the foliage is strange and new.
I find this highly entertaining.
As for your basic criticism of game worlds that resemble our own, I will have to agree to disagree on that one. What I consider enjoyable is being able to do things in games that I would never have the opportunity to do in real life. Often times I've wished that I could save, try something out and go back to my save again and do things differently the next time.
Obviously you cannot do that in real life, but immersive, non-linear games set in realistic surroundings offer that. Life is too short to explore even the slightest fraction of possibilities of the world around us. No matter how much we would like to do some things, they will never happen and in many cases, should never happen.
Non-linear, freeform worlds give us all the chance to overcome the deficiencies of space and time and really make our dreams and some of our darkest fantasies come true. I find them entertaining and millions of others do, too.
What tends to bother me is when some gamers get angry at non-linear games and demand the next version be more on-the-rails. There are thousands of linear games out there worth playing, there are only a very, very small number that give you real freedom. I don't see why they need to feel so threatened by games like Morrowind.
Anyway, I'll stop babbling now.
I'd never heard of any Elder Scrolls game before I got Morrowind, which I did based on what appeared to me to be a unanimous chorus of glowing reviews from game sites.
I bet plenty of Morrowind players were n00bs to Elder Scrolls just like me.
BTW can some mod please up soccerisgod's parent post? Please? Thanks.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
i think id is right on track. yea, i play counter-strike 1.6 more than any other game because it's sooooo much fun to play even though the gfx sucks. the same for quake1 -- awesome gameplay, not so great gfx.
id can easily retake the online multiplayer gaming crown by going back to what they started with games whose playing physics is equivalent to quake1 and counter-strike (it uses the quake1 engine!) BUT with the added addition of SUPERB gfx -- which NO OTHER engine out there can match!