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John Carmack Says No Dedicated Servers For Rage
AndrewDBarker writes "Modern Warfare 2 will use a matchmaking setup powered by IWNet for online play (as we've discussed). It's too early to say what Rage will use, but Carmack indicated he believed the servers are something of a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. That said, he realizes the affinity many PC gamers have for them — and is glad Rage won't be leading the charge away from them. 'The great thing is we won't have to be a pioneer on that,' he says. 'We'll see how it works out for everyone else.'"
Since you didn't say which company, I'll point out that you're referring to Valve's Steam Stats for Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress 2.
I'll also point out that those numbers are the number of concurrent players, not the number of total players.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Just like we need another slashdotter's disproportionate observation as id provided the tech, while Raven provided the fun/or lack of fun factor of the new game. It'd help your argument more if you would read up on who's actually putting their hand into the cookie jar of the new sequels.
I'd rather deal with the occasional cheater than suddenly lose multiplayer because the publisher decided the servers were no longer financially viable. This is really about making games disposable, which, for me at least, negates any inherent value received at purchase.
Anyone remember the days before dedicated gaming and reliable, integrated server browsers? Remember not too long ago when Gamespy was just being started and provided the revolutionary service or helping people connect to servers, but had to be run outside the game and started the game?
Think back even further. Remember trying to set up peer to peer games? Yeah, I'd almost forgotten about it to.
That is until Borderlands came out. This game is a wretched reminder of the 'bad old days'. I spent hours scouring forums and search engines, fiddling with my router, and trying to set it up so that I could host a game for my friend. No dice. Even setting my computer as the DMZ host didn't help. The only way myself and another friend were able to play was through a third friend who didn't have any issues.
Meanwhile, games like UT3 and TF2 work like a charm. Not to mention it's frankly a really cool social experience of having a server you frequent and getting to know the other people who frequent it rather than only ever getting to see the friends you've already got or a continuous parade of people you play with once and then never see again.
With all due respect to a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, saying that dedicated servers are an artifact of the past is just a blatantly stupid assertion to make. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.
It's worth pointing out that the RAGE demo at QUAKECON was done on a 360 controller. That should be a pretty strong sign that this is a console port design decision, that will ultimately affect the PC port. Let's take a look at console games with PC ports that use the "no dedicated server" model!
The downside to no dedicated servers is that you lose the community aspect, community organization becomes MUCH harder, and the game doesn't live on as long. See also: Left 4 Dead. Great concept, but almost impossible to get dedicated servers running for it. Or you can look at the recently released-for-PC game Borderlands - what a clusterfuck; the community eventually figured out what ports to unblock on their firewall, but even now people are having problems getting people to connect to their game/server. Incredibly frustrating, and I'm not really sure game/community mechanics have progressed far enough to allow the community/communities to grow up around the game that you want to push further away from dedicated servers. The one console game that I saw with a decent community setup was SOCOM 3 for the PS2; it had clans and messageboards, a messaging system and a somewhat steam-like buddy system/join buddy's game function.
Case in point: Rage is a console game, with console server matching system. The fact that it's coming out for the PC means that it's simply going to be a piss-poor PC port of a console game, and last time I checked, PC-ports of console games were fucking terrible (see also: Borderlands).
moox. for a new generation.
Yep. The scenario you mentioned is the same one that went through my mind: a couple of generations of gamers goes by and suddenly no one even notices that you have to play on their servers because that's the "standard." Then it'll be you have to pay to play on those servers because bandwith is too costly, or storage or some crap. It's all bollocks, and it's setup to move the industry into a position to capitalize on the only portions where it's not making any money.
I think it is just more proof that they are doing their best to kill the communities and mods so they can shove DLC down our throats. All my favorite games were made favorites NOT by the designers, but by the communities and mods that built up around them and gave me MORE for my money and extended my fun, not screwing me over so they can "maximize profit potential".
No mods? No money from me. No dedicated servers? Again no money from me. If we PC gamers get together and make damned sure that any game that screws us over rots on the shelves, while buying up the ones that treat us right, maybe then we won't end up in x360 hell, which is what they seem to be pushing us towards. I don't want a damned 360, thanks ever so much!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
They don't want people like you as customers. They want people that toss a game after one month and go buy the next big shit. They want to limit a game's life span by being able to shut of things like multiplayer. They're not making money when you are playing something you already paid for.
Authentication and dedicated servers are not mutually exclusive, every game I can think of since Quake 3 (and probably earlier) has authenticated the player against a master server before letting them join. While possible to run hacked servers, it generally requires everyone involved to have the hacked client, and they have always been few in number and full of hackers and such to make a guaranteed shitty player experience. This is about selling DLC, plain and simple. I know that this decision is going to cost them my sale for MW2 and Rage. I bought the first Modern Warfare and loved it and was already sold on the second one when they announced this nonsense. They've lost my sale, and it will probably be blamed on piracy and used as an excuse to shove more drm and more DLC down our throats. Speaking of DLC, it has also cost Bioware a sale of Dragon Age, I was actually credit card in hand ready to buy it when I found out about the 3 or 4 different "editions" with different amounts of content, and even the most expensive one still doesn't get you all the content, theres more DLC to buy. It's ridiculous! Why buy and navigate the DLC maze they have created when I can pirate and have all the content and all the DLC and all the pre-oder "rewards" without jumping through hoops?
Yes, it is. Most major game engine packages, including IDTech contain a networking layer. In fact, John Carmack was the guy who pretty much pioneered the client-server model for graphical games back when he made Quake.
However I've never had a major problem with his game's network layers. The issue is only that the game itself (content and gameplay wise) has been fairly bland for the last few iterations. If what the grandparent post is saying is correct, John Carmack is only responsible for the technical side, (including rendering and networking) and not the game experience itself. However, if "Masters of Doom" is correct, that is simply not the case as that book attributes most of the decisions as to the focus on recent games to John Carmack. It argues that it is the direct consequence of his conservative policy in game design that lead to Quake2, Quake3 and Doom3 being how they are, for better or worse.
The grandparent is claiming that John Carmack's technical record is unblemished and if he says P2P hosting is the way of the future then he should be given the benefit of the doubt and not questioned until he either recants, delivers a bad implementation or proves not to be able to implement this system in reasonable time. Even if he is responsible for the boring combat of Doom3, that suggests nothing about his ability to write game networking layers. I wrote a lot of the network system of a commercial game engine. My personal reaction towards this statement is to acknowledge that past history suggests that he will be able to deliver something very good and there is nobody who can really call him wrong until they have tested his implementation. I however, have not abandoned the client-server model and neither should anyone simply on the words of John D Carmack without thinking exactly about the priorities and requirements of their game.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Back in the original Doom days, John Cash and his friends who worked for Novell used to play deathmatch games on the corporate network in the evenings. When they discovered that the Doom network code was horrible, Cash sent Carmack an email pointing this out.
Carmack responded by sending over the source code (which had been written for id by a contractor), asking Cash to fix it. Basically a 'put up or shut up' situation. :-)
The result, after a few mostly sleepless nights was a totally rewritten network layer which got used by the later Doom versions.
This experience made Cash figure out how a networked game should work, so over the next 2-3 years he did a presentation every year at Novell's Developer Conference (later called BrainShare), the title was something like "How to write networked games".
Another year later, after Carmack had hired Mike Abrash to help with the low-level optimization of the sw 3D engine for Quake, they hired Cash to write the nextwork and AI code.
After Quake 3 shipped, Cash left id for a more relaxed environment, moving to Blizzard who were working on this new massive multiplayer game at the time.
Afaik John Cash is now the chief programmer for WOW.
Terje
PS. I've known Mike since about 1985 and I worked with John Cash for a year in 1991-92.
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"