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Romero's New Gig
Eurogamer is reporting on John Romero's newest endeavor, a studio designing a Massive game. Slipgate Ironworks is currently hiring, to work on ... a game. From the article: "The site doesn't offer many clues to the game's nature (although it does reveal that it will include weapons. And animation. And light!), but we do know from Romero's public comments that it will be ready 'when it's done' and isn't down for a 2007 release as some reports have speculated." I'm sure it will be up to the standards of Mr. Romero's numerous other good works.
massive zombie mmo that doesn't suck :crosses fingers:
Maybe they can grab employees from the Rockstar exedous reported on /. the other day.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I'll have a look.. so long as he doesn't want to make me his bitch this time.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
... is he going to make you his BITCH?!
It's really doubtful anything new involving weapons and combat can be invented anymore.
What about Half Life's gravity gun? What about Black's art style? What about Prey's... EVERYTHING?
Yeah, there are only so many ways you can shoot a guy in the crotch, but FPS is the (second?) best selling genre on PC so people aren't getting tired of the genre yet.
Then again, I never thought I'd find fairly good shooters boring, but somehow paying $5 each for Operation Snowblind and Pariah felt like I got overcharged $8.
"Do ray mi fa so long, sucker!!" (repeat 30x)
Flamebait?
I mean, that's a pretty broad generalization. That's basically saying that "only puzzle games will be any good from here on out".
Riiiight.
Personally, I think there is plenty of innovation left in combat games. I mean, the Wii sword fighting game seems to be a step in a new direction.
burrocrisy
and that would be what? Ruling by jackasses? Never has a slashdot misspelling been more apropos
Surely, I'm not the only one here who automatically equates Romero with George A. Romero, right? You know, the director of the Living Dead films.
Has Roemero completed anything since Daikatana? (yes I know its "completion" is itself questionable) I know at one point he was with some "mobile" gaming company that flopped, then was supposedly with Midway but I never saw anything indicating he actually producted something. Interesting to see the hype machine starting up. Perhaps Romero is pissed that Duke Nukem Forever took his vaporware crown. At least with a mmorpg he has the excuse of never being finished so he never has to realease it.
Not to be abusive, abrasive, or hostile in any way, but Romero hasn't had any "good works" since he left id and not even id has been able to equal the greatness of the titles of that era.
Not like DNF, more like Daikatana. It *WILL* be released, just by that time nobody will care anymore. On that note, does anybody care right now ? Didn't think so.
Romero failed miserably at Ion Storm, and apparently had some fun in the cell-phone gaming industry.. remember this guy was fired from id Software after Quake 1 was out. Romero is a higher-profile, attention whoring fella, but Carmack is the real brains and that's why id Software still cranks out blockbuster engines while Romero's endeavors hardly cause a ripple in the time-space continuum.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
What, like Doom, Quake, & Wolfenstein 3D? I don't understand why it's so amazingly popular to bash Romero. Sure, Daikatana wasn't great, but neither was Will Wright's SimHealth -- and no one bashes Will.
It's not like Daikatana was this epic disaster. It was hyped, it had truly terrible advertising ("make you his bitch...," what were they thinking?), and sales were pretty pathetic, but it did make enough to cover the cost of production. So, technically, Daikatana has been more of a hit than, say, the XBox. It's time we all jumped off the "John-Romero-sucks" bandwagon.
He does suck. Hard. He is a spoiled, pompous shit for brains. His role in the great games of id's past was as the "wouldn't it be cool if..." kid. Thousands of people do that in their heads all the time, and do just as good a job, and in many cases better. He has no talent or skill, and is not capable of actually developing games. He just wants to think of cool ideas and get to live a rockstar lifestyle.
People hate him for more than just daikatana, they hate him for every aspect of ion storm. They hate him for being an arrogant cock who got famous off of the hard work of others, then proved beyond a shadow of a doubt with ion storm that id's success had nothing to do with him, and yet tards like you still defend him. I took a shit this morning with more talent than romero.
For this you will have to wait a few years longer. Shooters are not quite dead but in a crisis. There is a lot to do in them yet, but the hardware isn't nearly up to it yet.
Gravity gun wasn't really a weapon. I mean, how often were you using it as a weapon when you had a choice? Even in Ravenholm which was designed with gravity gun in mind, a shotgun was much better. Gravity gun was a great tool that allowed for lots of fun in the game, but usage as a weapon was just its minor perk. Bullet time is another non-weapon perk, a combat support element played into ground in recent years. Multiple vehicles are okay in multiplayer, but in single player they are not only old (Amiga - Armourgeddon?), they also suck without decent competitive enemy AI (or natural I in case of multiplayer...)
For now there are still a few perks that are to be added and explored but won't make a good game, then a break of 2-3 years till really good games can be made again. Fully destructable environment, actual smart, good AI both on sidekick and enemy side, locational damage that causes related effects, stealth-based combat that makes sense, massive active environments that don't limit your gameplay area, actual mass-scale warfare operations, these things are yet to come, but not anytime soon.
In the meantime there's a lot of long-overdue "genres" that were neglected because they weren't really possible on the old hardware, but are possible now. Assume most of the above combat elements but with dynamism needed in combat removed. Fully destructable environment that may take up to 3 minutes to precalc the effects of the destruction. Good decision-making non-realtime AI. Stealth-based non-combat operations. Mass scale non-military operations. Many of these things were tried but failed because they appeared before their times. Now they have a good chance of success.
The basic problem with the gaming industry is that it caters to idiots. Games are getting dumbed down to be playable and understandable by the most stupid of players and as result lose their charm, they stop appealing to more intelligent players. Perks and tricks are being added but they are still the same old games.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
But the real cost was not money but the fact that Romero lost the respect of his customers. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Who is going to buy Daikatana 2? For that matter any ION Storm game or any Romero game?
Daikatana was Romero's project and it sucked donkey balls as a game. I only downloaded it and still felt ripped off. It was so bad that it can't be believed.
Now the difference with Will Wright is that he A: never was going to make us his bitch and B had other successfull games. Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D are not Romero games. In fact judging by the turd that Daikatana was and that Romero has produced nothing else worth while it may be claimed that these ID games became successes despite Romero's involvement, not because.
Play Daikatana. I dare you to disagree that it is bad. Selling an overhyped game however isn't hard, there are always suckers lured in by advertising who are not warned by bad reviews and word of mouth. But the proof is simple. In an industry of sequels there is no Daikatana 2. How many success games have there been without a sequel?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The hype has just started.
Every month or so, we'll get small updates.
Then it will be within a year of release, and the updates will become more frequent.
Then finally when release is only 4 months away, it will be revealed.
Every magazine will be covered with headlines about...
Daikatana Online!
Shouldn't Romero have picked a project with a more finite scope after his last fiasco consumed at least 6 years of his working life?
As a game-industry vet who's been personally screwed by Romero, I agree with all of the parent's post...
I read an interview with him once, and the worlds he envisions are quite cool. It is making the translation from his imagination to the computer that is tricky. I think a large part of what made Doom so great, was his vision. When he did Diakatana, he was still on the high of making one of the most popular games ever created. Diakatana coming out to such horrible reviews pretty much kicked the crap out of his ego. Enough of that, and a person grows up. I think that he has the potential to bring us other great worlds, if he can keep his ego somewhat in check. :-) I have high hopes for games that Romero works on. One of these days, he going to get the pieces right, and blow everyone away. (at least, that is what I hope for)
The mobile games company only really flopped because the platform wasn't
suitable for gaming like he thought it would be. When the money didn't
come in quite like he'd hoped for, Monkeystone was put largely bed
(The site's still there and you can download the PocketPC and PC demos
of the titles he did ship under the Monkeystone name, but there's no
product info under the products tab, nor any way to buy the titles
at this time from the site...)- you can still get the Linux iteration
of Hyperspace Delivery Boy from Linux Game Publishing through Tux Games'
online store. He did deliver on the initial title and it's a fun,
playable, if slightly simple game like you might find on a GBA. Which,
is what he'd officially sought to accomplish with it and the Monkeystone
studio.
One hopes he learned from each of the experiences of Daikatana and Monkeystone
and that this pass at doing things will do as well as DooM did for him.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This is a real problem in almost any entertainment medium. People have been complaining about this in movies and music for decades. In those mediums, the answer is underground or indy films/music. Luckily, we have something of an easier fix in gaming.
This problem with gaming is almost exclusively present in single-player, or cooperative multiplayer games. If the game maker has to judge how strong/hard to make enemies/puzzles, he often ends up going witht he lowest commen denomenator.
The fix is multiplayer. I've been getting my butt kicked time and time again at BF2. Those guys are talented and smart and they'll find very creative ways to use their environment for an advantage. These are the games that I think would most bennefit from fully-destructible and other ways that you can leave a mark on your environment. The ability to track, better ability to hide, and the ability to destroy hiding spots, etc. could all make games much more interesting, but they depend on the basic premis that your enemy is at least as intelligent as you.
The one big problem with multiplayer is that there's not enough work being done to pit enemys of similar skill against each other. In sports they have various leagues that seperate different skill levels, but in multiplayer I'm often playing against morons on one game or gods on another. Both can be frustrating.
TW
wow. . . I can understand your position on Halo but TES4? Did you even play it? You're right about the graphics, but the rest of the game IMHO is neither short, sucky, nor a hack and slash.
:P
If you want to judge it on the main arc alone then you might be able to stretch that ~25 hours is short. Add one guild and then it's probably closer to 50 hours. . . and that's IF you don't actually play the game, just grinding through it.
To be fair though, the leveling of the enemies in the game is completely retarded. Easily knocks 20% off of my score for it. I mean, since when do kobolds have like full set of dwarven plate armor and daedric daikatanas anyway?
Luckily there exists a masterfully done mod that fixes the leveling problem in a way that doesn't feel like a trainer. Also the alcohol mod is interesting too.
to answer your question about halo, it was definitely the best co-op FPS I've ever played. I would like to know though, what your favourite FPS game is. Your question made me think of that and to be honest there really aren't that many good FPS games. I think we value many of them simply because of the nostalgia value that we attach to them. I mean, Wolf3d was an awesome game to me when I first played it. Now if we don't attach the nostalgia, it really isn't that good. Niether are doom, duke 3d, or heretic.
were they revolutionary games? yes.
but can you honestly say they're better than games of this generation? And can we honestly say that the games of this generation are better than the ones of the next?
Even if the gameplay stays exactly the same, the graphics, level design, and soundplay will follow the technology, increasing with each generation. How can one argue that the games won't be better?
I mean, quake, half-life, and unreal all blow them out of the water. But what happens when we make new games based almost entirely on the nostalgia factor of the old? Doom 3 happens! I mean, its got squeeky clean (for dirty muddy mars) graphics but its almost a step down on the game play level.
Also it is unfair to qualify mods when we're talking about FPS in a context of comparing PC to Console. Sure some of the mods for half-life, quake, and UT2kx have been amazing as far as gameplay goes but it is unfair to compare them to the static console world.
So with that said if I absolutely had to pick one FPS as my favourite it might be Halo or it might not be, I suppose it will depend on when FPS games are no longer made, it would probably be one of the last couple dozen that come out.
ha ha, we can only hope that it is Deus Ex
Oh well, everyone's entitled to their opinion so I say we should just hope in a {insert latest fps game name here} match and blast each other until the next one comes out.
One last thing, I hope I don't get ModerRAPED for probably grinding a lot of fps'ers gears.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.