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Interview With John Romero
spensdawg writes "Here is an interesting interview with John Romero on Games.net. He gets into the original design philosophy for the first Doom games, what he would have done differently, and his plans for the future. Worth watching if you want to know a little more about the mad scientist behind Doom." A warning: this is a video interview
Doom was not just a game, it was a whole new genre. While it wasn't quite the first first-person-shooter, it was the first one to do 3D reasonably well. When it came out, no one had seen anything like it. The game design was OK, the plot was basically non-existent, but it had no FPS competition because no one else had written one that even approached Doom. Considering that 3D accelerator cards didn't exist, and this all had to be done in software, there weren't too many people at the time who could write a competing FPS engine even if they had thought of it. So the lack of fancy levels and other aspects of the game design didn't matter much; the only thing the level design needed to do was showcase all the cool engine features.
If there is any doubt as to whether it was the FPS concept and engine or the details of the game, consider what happened next. Other FPSs were released -- licensing the Doom and then the Quake engines, not the Doom and the Quake levels.
You're using level design in a different way than I understand it. (I am a pretty casual gamer, so there's a good chance my definition is wrong, BTW. Also I couldn't get the video to play, so I wouldn't know if you were using it the same way as Romero.)
To me, "level design" doesn't mean "designing the visual look of a level." That's an aspect of it, but not the most important part. More importantly is designing the layout of the level--where various paths lead, and where various obstacles occur, and where enemies lurk. This obviously has a major impact on how well a game plays, and having a good level designer makes a huge difference.
In this respect, I think the original Doom levels were incredibly well designed, especially given that they didn't really have the technology for true 3D play. It really created the feeling of not knowing what was around the next corner, and resulted in the famous Doom Lean, where you find yourself tilting your real-world head, as if that was going to let you peer around a corner in the game...
(I think we agree in substance, actually, but your use of the phrase "level design" was different enough that it made me wonder if I'm the only one who defines it as I do.)
Arr! Read The Government Manual for New Pirates!
Really, the article should be about who was best, first.
Carmack might be a bloody brilliant programmer, and that's what makes his early work so good, and that he had a brilliant design team to make his concepts into reality. Every product they made up to and including Quake 3 was off the charts good.
Everything since is just rubbish and not fun to play; it's just bad, rendering aside.
And Romero has nothing on his slate post ID that means anything; most of his work is the poster child of what not to do.
Carmack and Romero were neat topics like...10 years ago. Now that there are 100 companies doing it better and faster than they do, what of these guys? I hate to proclaim them relics because we are about the same age, but the truth is, neither Carmack nor Romero have brought anything new and good to the table beyond engine leasing and hair conditioner ad spots for the last 10 years.
There were games with much better levels and gameplay long before Doom, or even Wolfenstein 3D, they just weren't textured. E.g., Bethesda had a Terminator game that featured walking or _driving_ (yes, driving) around a town, with cars, pedestrians (yep, you could run them over), etc, years before Doom. It took the textured FPS genre almost a decade to get back to that point.
Or Ultima Underworld? It was a complex RPG and had a much more complex 3D engine too. It came out around the same time as Wolfenstein 3D and it still allowed far more complex and, well, "more 3D" maps than Doom would much later. E.g., the UU engine allowed bridges and tunnels under other tunnels, while Doom was still a 2D map with terrain elevation.
What Doom had was simply a more vocal gang of willy-wavers. The kind of personalities that just had to willy-wave about their deathmatch score were suddenly all over the place, making 10 times more noise than the peaceful SP RPG players, and acting as if they're speaking for some absolute majority. Doom was being proclaimed all over the place as the genre of the future, and indeed the only genre that anyone plays any more, at a time where SP console RPGs routinely out-sold it 10 to 1. Heck, even adventures were outselling Doom.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Not just that, but most hobby "level designers" lack the artistic talent to put together something like doom2. Sure you could make a fun level, but could you set an atmosphere? Keep it consistent with itself? Keep the difficulty level on par with the surrounding levels? Theres a lot more that goes into it than just dropping some monsters and halls.
I mean no disrespect of course, there are a lot of hobbiests that can pull all of this off, but a lot of good mappers have yet to pull off the kind of artistic talent you see from someone like Romero or McGee.
Generally I think hobbiests are better at multiplayer mapping and "the big guys" better at single player. Multiplayer doesn't have any storyline or sequence, it just is what it is. All thats important is making it fit how people play the game, and in that regard the hobbiests have the advantage of actually playing the game, and getting to make the maps after the games been out and gameplay finalized. I'd bet a map like Quake1's DM1 was made long before large scale multiplayer testing was out, compared to a map like Aerowalk which fits the multiplayer gameplay much better.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
In DOOM and DOOM II you didn't need to aim to shoot at somone/something. You could make a level where only shotguns were available as weapons, and when playing deathmatch, long ineresting figths would develop.
I never really played a lot of more recent games like conter-strike, etc. But the few times I played, I was quickly bored by: "I'm walking in a big empty place. Oh, there's somone there... Oh, I must aim with a lot of precision to hit him. Oh, I died/killed him. Now I'm walking in a big empty place..." repeat to infinity.
give me a fast-paced, no-aim-necessary, long-and-lasting-figths doom II any day, no matter what the graphics look like.
I worked, for a time near the end, at Ion Dallas. While I didn't work directly with Romero's team on what they were doing at the time (I worked for Tom Hall on Anarchonox), I can safely say that the bashers need to just shut the fuck up at this point. The guy didn't kill your first born. He didn't even want to "make you his bitch". That was a "joke". You know, something intended to get you "laughing", which a lot of you fail to do WITH him. You can only laugh at him, and you've never even met him. Real mature fellas. Good call. He's actually a fairly cool guy to sit around and shoot the shit with, always brimming with ideas and thoughts about things. (Though this interview strikes me really as quite absurd for a lot of reasons I won't go in to...)
His big problem wasn't the ads, the hype, or the lack of John Carmack. His biggest failure was that he had nobody there to keep him going forward on projects. That's what he needed to keep his projects focused towards a goal, and it's what he failed to find at Ion at any point. This isn't something he said to anyone, or something said to me or anything like that. It's just what I picked up on because I have the same issue when I direct projects. If you're an easily distracted director, you should have an assistant director or producer that's really good at putting their foot down when it's time to start work, and you should listen to them.
Romero didn't have that.
If Daikatana had released on time and not been mediocre (yes, I played a good part of it. My feeling was that it was hopelessly mediocre for the time it was supposed to have released at originally. Not bad, just nothing amazing.) everybody would have laughed with him about the ad, the hype, and there would have been peace and love in the world.
You wanna lump hate on somebody in the games industry? Smack Broussard around for his publically insulting other games and talking about how DNF will be better than them. Smack any jerk exec at EA (or any number of abusive publishers) around for raping their employees on hours and pay. Smack Ken Kutaragi around for being a fucktard. But c'mon guys, lay off Romero. He got over it and got on with work at Monkeystone and Midway, you asshats need to get over it too.
- Windows Media
- Quicktime
- Real Video
Now, which of these work on the majority of platforms without another plugin to download or better yet lots of dedicated custom streaming servers? Also, which of these provide a simple means to display multiple videos on a single page or can scale to the browser window size automatically? The flash video stuff is used because it's a least common denominator without all of the work associated with managing a true streaming server. Instead the flash client is responsible for pulling the content down dynamically and provides an easier way to provide custom controls to the end user.I'm not saying this is the best possible solution, it has it's problems. Quality is far worse. CPU requirements go up. People end up downloading an entire video without watching all of it. Genius content providers can require flash 8 and exclude us linux users (despite the fact that google and youtube managed to do it with flash 7). But on the up side there are far more videos I can easily watch from linux using the flash 7 compatible video players than I could with the crash prone mplayer, xine or totem plugins.
Finally if your system is dropping frames it's you. Check your cpu utilization, is it spiking? If so something is wrong with your system. I'm running an Athlon64 3800 on linux running win2k in vmware running flash 8 in firefox and I'm seeing 5-10% cpu utilization for everything and I haven't seen a single dropped frame.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
Daikatana tried to have a story in a FPS long before Half-Life
...once John Romero was gone, Id reverted to John Carmack's view that a plot is as needed for a game as for a porno movie.
Half-Life came out long before Daikatana.
When Romero was at Id, none of their games had plots, either. They didn't revert; they remained consistent.
So me say just one thing: if a _quarter_ of the people posting all "Daikatana sucks!!!" all over the place had actually played the fucking game, it would have been a major commercial success. It would have probably outsold The Sims.
Are you being facetious? Daikatana's target audience was hard-core FPS players. The Sims reached out to every segment of the market. What a ridiculous statement! You are greatly overestimating the number of people who read game sites at the time. Your general gaming audience had never even heard of Daikatana, and the name "John Romero" was meaningless. They saw an ugly red box with a silly title and bad graphics. That's why it was a poor seller.
A lot of people still bitching about how bad Daikatana's design or gameplay supposedly was, still haven't actually even _seen_ that design or gameplay.
The first level of the demo consisted of killing small frogs in the rain. The whole level. Design genius? Perhaps in an abstract fun-is-not-cool hipster universe. But in this world, it was stupid, and pointless.
> The game design wasn't particularly bad
"I CAN'T LEAVE WITHOUT MY BUDDY SUPERFLY!"
QED.