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.'"
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
This is an ingenious mod. Seriously - in my view, the main reason Doom 3 was such a poor game was the fact that you could see *nothing* without the flashlight. Who cares about the super new graphics engine if you're barely given an opportunity to take a look at the environment?
But some of the Doom zombies don't even have heads, they just rise headless off the floor. Therefore it stands to reason that the head is a non-critical part of a Doom zombie.
A better place to get the book IMO. You might also want to check this out while you're there too. Ninjas and zombies whee.
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 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.
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.
"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
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.
Marathon and System Shock 2 both scared the crap out of me, and both were much, much, much superior games to Doom 3. So yeah, you're a sissy (Aliens vs. Predator? Wuss.) But if you had admitted to crying during System Shock 2, I'd be hugging you and saying, "ssh, I understand."
Comment of the year
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
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.
Here's what I don't get. Why do people care that there are dupes? Did Taco hold a gun to your head and make you read the article twice? Or read through and make comments? Why don't you just ignore dupes?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score