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John Romero On Reinventing the Shooter
An anonymous reader writes: John Romero helped bring us Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein, but he's also known for Daikatana — an immensely-hyped followup that flopped hard. After remaining on the periphery of game development since then, Romero announced last month that he's coming back to the FPS genre with a new game in development. Today, he spoke with Develop Magazine about his thoughts on the future of shooters. Many players worry that the genre is stagnant, but Romero disagrees that this has to be the case. "Shooters have so many places to go, but people just copy the same thing over and over because they're afraid to try something new. We've barely scratched the surface."
He also thinks the technology underpinning games matters less than ever. Romero says high poly counts and new shaders are a distraction from what's important: good game design. "Look at Minecraft – it's unbelievable that it was made by one person, right? And it shows there's plenty of room for something that will innovate and change the whole industry. If some brilliant designers take the lessons of Minecraft, take the idea of creation and playing with an environment, and try to work out what the next version of that is, and then if other people start refining that, it'll take Minecraft to an area where it will become a real genre, the creation game genre."
He also thinks the technology underpinning games matters less than ever. Romero says high poly counts and new shaders are a distraction from what's important: good game design. "Look at Minecraft – it's unbelievable that it was made by one person, right? And it shows there's plenty of room for something that will innovate and change the whole industry. If some brilliant designers take the lessons of Minecraft, take the idea of creation and playing with an environment, and try to work out what the next version of that is, and then if other people start refining that, it'll take Minecraft to an area where it will become a real genre, the creation game genre."
This guy is remembered best for an abject failure and hasn't produced anything good enough to change that in a long time. Perhaps he ought to make something that lives up to his own hype if he wants people to believe that he can make something that lives up to his own hype.
Sorry, I cannot read TFA without my trusty sidekick superfly
Like the dozens, possibly hundreds, of minecraft spinoffs? He is just now realizing that the genre has potential?
http://www.penny-arcade.com/co...
So he's going to take a decade to make a version of Guncraft his bitch? This sounds like comedy gold waiting to happen.
So, if it were offline, it would be Skyrim with Fallout weapons, yes? Or perhaps GTA?
Don't get me wrong, I love Bethesda and Rockstar games, so if someone wants to make more in that style, far be it from me to complain. But reloaded? Ugh.
But how do you know you're not in a local maximum? Not everybody can be Miles Davis and know exactly when something new is working, and be commercially successful at it. Hell, Miles Davis is probably the only person who ever did that in a low-probability field.
I'm probably preaching to the choir but this week's Zero Punctuation was all about Romero and doesn't paint him in the same positive light as TFA.
Son of a bitch, we don't need any more "reinventions" of this and "reimagining" of that and "rebooting" of franchises.
Any time anyone tries to do such things, the end product is total shit.
Look at GNOME 3. It tried to "reinvent the Linux desktop experience". It's total, utter, absolute shit in every way possible.
Look at Firefox. It has recently tried to "reimagine" itself as if it were Chrome. It's now total, utter, absolute shit in every way possible.
Look at all of the "rebooted" movie series. It's one total, utter, absolute shit Incredible Hulk reboot after another.
Going in with the reinvent/reimagine/reboot mindset just results in total, utter, absolute shit being produced. Please, if you're thinking of doing this sort of stuff, do us all a favor and DON'T FUCKING DO IT!
Speak for yourself, not all reboots are bad.
Would you still prefer to be using a text browser, or *shudder* Internet Explorer instead of Firefox? Technically Firefox is a re-invention of those.
Going in with the "lets do the same thing as everyone else is doing" is not a good mindset in any way, shape, or form. I for one love innovation, and ultimately despite road bumps along the way, it often leads to better products in the long term.
Games Programmer And Designer
I am more interested in reinventing of John Romero, the old one only good as a bait for the inevitable flamewars. I am sure we can add more features.
Uhhhhhh, you do realize that the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, was in fact a graphical browser, right? Lynx and other text mode browsers didn't come out until years later.
If you're going to question the GP, at least have your facts straight, son.
Daikatana was the only FPS where you could be killed by a mosquito.
Son of a bitch, we don't need any more "reinventions" of this and "reimagining" of that and "rebooting" of franchises.
Yeah, Call of Duty is the peak of FPS, everyone can pack up and go home now, no more FPS needed ever again.
I'm only being half sarcastic actually; there are far too many FPS and not enough good games nowadays. This paint by numbers, lets just make the same thing over and over is really fucking tedious.
Uhhhhhh, you do realize that the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, was in fact a graphical browser, right? Lynx and other text mode browsers didn't come out until years later.
If you're going to question the GP, at least have your facts straight, son.
Thanks Dad, you raise a good point. Maybe you should go back and use that and tell me if Firefox is any better than that version. If Mosaic (which ultimately Firefox came from) had not come out in 1993, we might still be using that original version which was pretty crappy and difficult to use.
Bottom line: Not all reboots are bad and doing the same thing is not always a good thing.
Thanks for playing.
Games Programmer And Designer
I've got ideas for plenty of shooters that do things differently. Two have actually made it to playable prototypes, and confirmed that yes, the ideas are fun. I'd describe them, but I'm in talks to produce them so I'll keep my mouth shut for now. All the marketers think we want are "realistic" modern arena shooters, "realistic" modern open-map shooters, "old-school" twitch shooters, or maybe an occasional squad-level tactical shooter. In other words, a CoD clone, a Battefield clone, a Q3/UT clone, or a R6 clone. That's it. That's 90% of the industry, just remaking the same three games over and over with different settings or skins or variations on the same fucking theme. It's really quite infuriating, since half of them aren't even *good* clones.
While I totally agree that Romero was an abject failure, his point still rings true. The need to obtain venture capital to launch a decent game has created an atmosphere stagnation in the genre, and dare I say, the field of game development as a whole. The requirement to produce results has superseded the game designers ability to implement new and interesting game mechanics in my opinion. It would be awesome to see more games that take the genre to a new level, even if the main proponent is someone who has't innovated in years.
Look at Minecraft – it's unbelievable that it was made by one person, right?
Wrong... the community created minecraft. All Notch did was let them do it. Shooters used to let you do that. Remember that? When we were allowed to make our own maps? I used to not even play the boxed game at all! I'd just go strait to the player made maps. Now you want so much control over the experience because you feel you need to monetize every damned pixel on the screen...
Hell, if you want to monetize it... monetize the map editor tools...
Want copy&paste? $5!
Pre-fab German bunker? $1!
Allow map makers that attract a lot of players to earn these tools based on visitors...
Give the players up-votes that would give the map makers in-game currency to improve maps with.
That would sell.
Let me guess, he's gonna make us his bitch?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Why anyone cares what this guy has to say boggles my mind. He may have had a hand in some good games decades ago, but what have you done for me lately?
Oh yeah, you took a steaming turd on my computer. Thanks.
In other news, North Korea is the best Korea.
A female canine player character might be an audience-alienating premise. Furry characters (as seen in Robin Hood and Star Fox) tend to be associated with E and E10+ ratings, while first person shooters tend toward M.
I hope that whatever Romero is doing doesn't turn out to be Free-2-Play or co-op or with multiplayer focus.
The beauty of his best games was that they were single-player, with some very fun multiplayer as a bonus. The current gaming industry mode seems to be co-op or multiplayer primarily with maybe a very short single-player campaign thrown in.
I understand that this trend started primarily as a way to prevent some kid in Estonia from having a nickel in his pocket that didn't belong to the gaming industry, and I don't fault them because their nature is to be money-grubbing monsters who basically hate their customers. But somehow, the great single-player games managed to make a nice profit. Nice enough to finance a stinker like Daikatana.
Oh, and there's a new meme going around the gaming industry and the domesticated, corrupt gaming press: The notion that someone current games are too long and give players too much to do. You'll hear phrases like "shorter, more focused game experiences" which basically means they can spend less on development (and let's face it, the gaming press is mostly made up of wannabe indie game devs). If they could figure out a way to sell a $59 game that lasted 45 minutes, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Yeah, it's going around. You're hearing about how "players don't want long games" and "gamers would rather have an intensely fun one hour game than a grindy 100 hour one", as if those were the only two choices. Of course, this ignores the wild success of games like Skyrim and even current ones like Divinity: Original Sin.
Anybody who observes consumer culture knows where this is going. It's not a new concept. Give people smaller boxes of cereal for the same price as a large box and maybe they won't notice or care. Start with a subscription-only service which markets itself as "commercial free" and then start slipping in commercials, as if it were always inevitable (maybe it was).
No, I'm pretty sure the big difference between the successful game publishers of today and the old-school types like Romero is that Romero actually seemed to like gaming and gamers. The level of cynicism in F2P, co-op, Day 1 DLC, etc etc is pretty shocking really when you step back and look at it. Until people start to understand the enormous power in their consumption choices, it will only get worse, and the industry is doing everything it can to make game customers feel helpless in the face of these inexorable industry changes. When in reality, they are anything but helpless.
I hope consumers wake up at some point, but I won't hold my breath.
You are welcome on my lawn.
everything else was lacking.
To be fair, the American reboot of "Old Boy" was pretty great, I thought.
But generally, I agree.
However, I don't mind one bit if a game company reuses assets from a successful game. I thought Saints Row IV was one of the best games to come out that year (in fact, it was my GOTY), even though it was the same location, the same character models, the same voice talent (with a few additions) and the same textures.
Hey, I'm all for companies looking for ways to get it done cheaper and more efficiently, as long as the product gives real value for the price, which SRIV most certainly did, IMO.
I guess it's not about "reboot or not reboot" so much as it is about, "Make your goddamn products worth their price for a change".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Just make the next Minecraft and you'll be rich" "all you have to do is be the next notch"
That's a different game that entirely changes many aspects while adding a cartooney-amusing factor.
Hell I just bought "Rock paper Scissors" in TF2 as a taunt. We play a few rounds with teammates before the match begins. If you play an opposing team member the loser explodes. Amusing and fun.
For some reason TF2 still seems to be a benchmark of insanely fun multiplayer with maps designed so well that it seems we're always having a blast trying to overtake the next checkpoint.
" Maybe you should go back and use that and tell me if Firefox is any better than that version."
Nope, because WWW didn't leak memory like a fucking sieve. Firefox 32? Just like every iteration before it, from XP to Win 7, is a straight up piece of swiss cheese when it comes to memory. I actually moved back to IE.
"we might still be using that original version which was pretty crappy and difficult to use."
Funny, having installed it in a Windows 3.1 VM and tested it out, it's nowhere near as bad as you think, assuming you have the brains and intuition to find stuff.
"Thanks for playing."
Oh please, you weren't even a player in the first place. You were just a pawn.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Reinventions and creatively redesigning games and activities into a virtual space is like, the thing that made the big devs of the old studios of yor. I don't think people inspired to change paradigms are bad people to design.
It's just a risky business model. But the results can be gr8. Most likely this guy can survive another failure and is more than happy to get the chance to take a risk on this next en devour they dream of.
Honestly I don't know really where the hell FPS's can be taken... that they havn't at some point by a mod... but I guess someone could roll out an fps quite quickly by mashing up mod ideas and just using a stock engine.
Wanna try something different check out the Hook and Minsta servers on Xonotic. Not my cup of tea but some super fast game play while you can fly around better than spider man.
http://www.xonotic.org/
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I dunno. I kind of agree with him [shudder]. FPS is sorely missing new ideas and his link to Minecraft is the most promising observation in years. I have always said that I may not be the best shooter but I am a good designer. Give me the ability to design my own weapons in-game and I will win a lot. But we are not talking about mech type building. We are talking fine-grained physics with metalworking, advanced chemistry and other real world complexity. This level of gaming is still beyond what computers can do but minecraft-type building would be a great step in that direction. I really want to see a game where you spend a month building, testing and refining your designs and five minutes in the actual battle. I am sure Romero will find a way to screw up but he sure is talking a good vision.
"take the idea of creation and playing with an environment, and try to work out what the next version of that is, and then if other people start refining that"
Red Faction: originally you could destroy terrain, in the newest you can rebuild some of it
he used the phrase "take the lessons of"
Please retire
Hell no!
Romero is right. Good quality entertaining FPS have been thin on the ground lately.
It's become a stagnant genre, and it's time we had an Doom/Duke Nukem/Unreal/Half-Life successor. Daikatana was a failure in a large part because the AI for both enemies and the NPC sidekick characters was crap and messed up the rest of the gameplay. The bad guys, Barney and Alyx etc in HL2 showed that's a solved problem now.
In the words of the Duke, I say "Bring it on!".
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Praising one-man work (Minecraft), then "if only some brilliant designers take the lessons from Minecraft" (aka like Romero, right?), then it would elevate the genre and the gaming scene etc etc.
Hey Romero, people have already been creating/playing with the environment, if you want to "refine", better start working and stop talking, others are ahead in the game.
I wish there was something similar to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory in the pipeworks. In its simplicity it was a huge hit with an active modding community. Ah, all those countless hours playing TrueCombat: Elite!
Technology is essential to gaming, because without great code to back up your design (no matter how modest that design may be) your game will be glitchy, slow, or unplayable. In fact, Notch is a programmer first, designer second. The design of Minecraft (and many of his other games) seems to have evolved organically out of his programming experiments as well as the community.
So technology is still a big deal in gaming. Stop trying to convince us you're still relevant, Romero, and go sling some code. No game, no weiner.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Bullshit. You were probably 3 years old when it came out. For those of us who were into gaming at the time, it was revolutionary.
It did convincing pseudo-3D before 3D was even remotely possible though some brilliant use of precompiled BSP trees and sectors. And it had stereo audio and a kick ass sound track that were almost as creepy and immersive as the graphics.
And if the mind blowing graphics and audio at the time wasn't enough, it also supported 4 player gaming as well. The version that they released supported 2 player serial or 4 player IPX, but they released the source to the network drivers, which was another early first - game companies releasing source and working with players to add features and content. It wasn't long before a full Internet/UDP networked version was available, making it one of the early real-time multiplayer Internet games.
It did convincing pseudo-3D before 3D was even remotely possible though some brilliant use of precompiled BSP trees and sectors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
I'm not saying Doom wasn't revolutionary, but 3D wasn't the reason. And saying it wasn't remotely possible is easily disproved.
Notch.
And it came on 4 floppies!
Romero's example of re-defining the creation/sandbox genre post-Minecraft is a little late to the game (pun shamelessly intended). At least one big player, Sony, has introduced a next-gen sandbox (currently in open Beta) called Landmark, and I'm sure others are forging ahead as well.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
This genre already exists, and if you consider it heavily, it has existed for a while now.
In the console area, I'd say it mostly exists in something like LittleBigPlanet style games.
And in part, games like Timesplitters, Far Cry and others that let you make your own maps.
In the PC area, it exists in things like Sims where you still have to actually manually BUILD things in it. There aren't any prefab structures, just objects you can place in them. Not so much crafting admittedly.
And with extension, some other games overlap, like Warzone 2100 (technically console first, but it lived on with PC) where you have to do heavy research to unlock the ability to build certain things at all.
These aren't even exhaustive and I've likely missed loads. But I did just wake up recently, give me a break. Plus, I also like the games above.
Well, except new Sims, Sims 4 is an embarrassment. EA are dead. They have ruined everything they have touched. I was willing to give them a chance, but they have ruined it all. Again. I highly expect Mirrors Edge 2 will be butchered to an unrecognisable state too.
but he sure is talking a good vision
I'm with you. I still recall fondly the DOOM levels that you can't forget, mostly because he had a hand in designing them. Rising platforms, teleporters at the edge of the lava pit? I say bring it on
" Maybe you should go back and use that and tell me if Firefox is any better than that version."
Nope, because WWW didn't leak memory like a fucking sieve. Firefox 32? Just like every iteration before it, from XP to Win 7, is a straight up piece of swiss cheese when it comes to memory. I actually moved back to IE.
"we might still be using that original version which was pretty crappy and difficult to use."
Funny, having installed it in a Windows 3.1 VM and tested it out, it's nowhere near as bad as you think, assuming you have the brains and intuition to find stuff.
"Thanks for playing."
Oh please, you weren't even a player in the first place. You were just a pawn.
I think you are getting a little confused.
Firstly if you are seriously suggesting that Firebox is worse than Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb brower, you are seriously deranged. The original WWW had no image support, and no bookmarks, to name just two features.
Ridiculous to suggest Firefox is not a massive improvement.
Secondly I genuinely would like to know how you managed to get a program designed for the NextStep platform to work on Windows 3.1. Here is a hint. You didn't.
The original WWW was developed in 1990 and was developed for the NextStep platform, Windows 3.1 came out in 1992. So you were probably using Mosaic if you indeed setup Windows 3.1 in a VM to make a point! Well done on that. Thanks actually for completely proving my point, Mosaic is significantly easier to use than the original WWW program. Go back and use the original WWW and compare the two.
Games Programmer And Designer
Descent 3D, one of the best games ever. Its from back in the DOS days, and the graphics were not great back then. BUT it was a well designed and fun game, something many of today's games are sadly lacking in. Far too many of today's games are vastly overpriced crap despite having great graphics. It takes more than than the latest high end graphics to make a good game.
I'm not saying Doom wasn't revolutionary, but 3D wasn't the reason. And saying it wasn't remotely possible is easily disproved.
Yeah. It was. Doom came out at a time when most 3D was little more than wireframe (Flight Simulator, LHX Attack Chopper, etc ), or still renders. (Links Golf), or various first person in a plainly 2D maze (Wolf3D, Ultima Underworld, Might and Magic 3...)
Then Doom showed up, and it was a revolution.
The moving platforms, the stair cases (and not just staircases away, but to platforms within the larger room, there windows between rooms, lights and shadow effects and the capper: the skyboxes -- you could see outside throw skylights, windows, even outdoor courtyards... it all combined to make the illusion complete --- it was still really a 2D maze at its heart, but the illusion of being in a 3D world was literally jaw dropping at the time.
Ultima online was impressive in its own right, but it had NOTHING on Doom. UO was claustrophobic, and it was very "square". It was an advancement forward, but they just are not remotely in the same league. UO was also still an Ultima RPG at its heart; it was much slower paced, the 3d viewport was confined to a small pane instead of being nearly the full screen, and the movement controls were odious (mouse click driven) which did not immerse you in being there. So in UO you still sort of stepped through it room by room step by step- click by click. That's how it was designed.
Doom was big open spaces, with loops, and corners, and obstacles to hide behind. The controls put you there. And you could RUN.
Nothing else was comparable.
At first glance, I thought John Romero had reinvented the scooter. Segway 2.0 with a BFG on the handle bar?
#o#
O Moo.
I don't disagree. I just think that it'll be someone else who breathes live back into it. The cycle goes on...
You suck!
That is all.
"It's become a stagnant genre, and it's time we had an Doom/Duke Nukem/Unreal/Half-Life successor"
The reality is many games single player aspect back then don't hold up very well if you play them back to back with modern games if you measure them on a feelings and "this is so awesome" standpoint, the rise of the cinemtic game - even as me an older gamer has shifted my preference hierarchy to want "both". I force myself to play brutal doom to get my "gameplay vegetables" because I hate the fact that hollywood props and cheap tricks give human brains higher highs in terms of excitement over intrinsic gameplay in terms of single player experiences. I really hate the fact that when I go back and play doom 2 I wish it was some hybrid of the cartoony doom I know and love and the best elements of hollywood deadspace, but minus the hollywood hyper realism. I was never a fan of the push towards realism in doom 3 on mars, I always loved the pixel art/toony type style of doom 2 and it was kind of awkward seeing the Cyber-Demon rendered realistically, when doom 2 had more of an artistic comic vibe with it's enemies like the walking spider brain that felt poached from Teenage mutant ninja turtles.
To say that modern games are all boring is a bit of an overstatement, they certainly DO cause excitement in their hollywood parts. I enjoy Assassins creeds world even if I have serious issues with the dumbed down combat when compared to prince of persia series also made by Ubisoft. I really do think the push for hollywood has seriously made developers dumber, newer generations of developers raised on Halo regen shields and hollywood handholding campaigns has been infecting all of gaming, I seriously question developers, that "they know what they are doing". Too often even simple and cheap to program things are missing in many modern games.
The problem modern games main problem is gameplay, PC (modding/dedicated servers) and challenge related but this is publishers trying to drive DRM and control the market by confiscating game ownership with encrypted steam games via steamworks DRM for multiplayer/matchmaking. Shooters FPS/TPS, they are most certainly by the numbers but the mass gaming audience prefers hollywood action movie over intrinsic gameplay generated by fun and challenge. To be honest with you, I thought half-life 2 was just a giant pile of fail, trying too hard to be the hollywood action movie type game it never really was really "here's an empty base with an experiment gone wrong, you are on your own". Half life one did it's best to get out of the players way, while Half-life 2 feels like a very force sequel. I think it comes down to Valve not really not know what they are doing storywise. When I got to the buggy desert/section I gave up, I just got too bored. Half-life 2 was poorly made in many areas and poorly paced. I lost interest.
Half-life, while it was one of the first 'movie based games' where there was story integrated into it, but it wasn't done as obnoxiously and overbearingly as it is done today. That being said, some obnoxious overbearingness works, if you play the singleplayer campaign of Transformers - Fall of cybertron, you'd be hard pressed to say that it couldn't compare in terms of fun to Doom 2.
Doom was made at a time before the integration of 'hollywood action movie/cartoon show inside a videogame' was mastered. The newer generation has problems going back and playing games that haven't mastered the hollywood integration like Mass effect 2, Call of duty and transformers fall of cybetron (sp campaign). I don't fault newer genreation gamers for that because even I as an older gamer know that when CPU/GPU power hit a threshold it was just easier to use high def AV to flash our primate brain in sensation, problem is instrinsic feelings related internally generated gameplay are easily overwhelmed and outcompeted in many (not all) instances of set piece hollywood bullshit. The kind of excitement we get from the hollywood is of a different character them the stre
One of the biggest limitations of the Shooter genre is right there in the name.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
First off, UO=Ultima Online. But that's not important.
You could definitely walk seamlessly, using the keyboard, in Ultima Underworld, it's not at all grid-based like Dungeon Master. You could also run and swim, you could have platforms you could see above and below at the same time(something not even duke 3d could do when it came out years later). It had 3d objects, not just sprites for everything(but still for most things). It had inclines and leaning walls, also something Doom lacked.
I'll give you that the lighting was better, the sky effects helped a *lot* with the claustrophobia, and the shooting was better since it was a shooter, not an RPG.
various first person in a plainly 2D maze (Wolf3D, Ultima Underworld, Might and Magic 3...)
Ultima Underworld was not a 2D maze. Look at the first screenshot in the wikipedia article for instance.
Doom was revolutionary due to the efforts of John Carmack, not Romero. Even so, it still wasn't all that special graphically as there were other games out at the time with comparable or superior looking 3D environments.
Also, the FM synthesis music in Doom sucked, as does pretty much everything Bobby Prince has poorly ripped off and slapped his name on. If you want to hear how proper FM routines were done, go play Dune or any other old Cryo game.
Couple of things straight: Ultima Underworld (not Ultima Online) was released roughly a year before Doom. Wolfenstein 3D came out a couple of months after UU (May vs March 1992).
And while UU was real a 3D environment with sprites for characters and objects, Doom was not. It was a 2D map that faked the 3D view. Point in case: while you could have 2 different z points in UU (over and under a bridge for example), Doom had no such thing. This said, they were 2 different games and both were ground breaking milestones, with Doom being the one hitting solid in terms of sales.
NO?
One thing which has long irked me about the FPS genre is the static nature of the game world.
The advent of realistic physics engines has made it possible to move past this limitation, but very little effort has been expended to actually do so. Admittedly, I don't game as much as I used to, but the only game that's coming to mind right now is Crysis. I don't think I ever got very far in the game, but I vaguely remember buildings and other larger structures actually being made up of smaller pieces which could then be blown apart. A step in the right direction, for sure, but I've played a few shooters since then and this feature doesn't seem to have gained adoption in other games. In any case, even the implementation in Crysis was rather limited; as far as I know, the distinct structural elements of buildings couldn't be subsequently broken down into smaller-still pieces.
In Fallout 4, I want the explosives skill to be useful for gaining entry to otherwise-inaccessible areas by way of blowing up walls, doors, rubble. Wishful thinking, I know, but why can't we have this level of realism in 2014 when game physics engines have been impressing us for nearly a decade now? Couldn't this level of realism be used to enhance gameplay instead of just serving as eye candy?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
... this is the innovation that was Minecraft has led to a whole bunch of copy-cats by itself just like with the FPS games.
And within those groups many may not be very innovative.
Ah, good old -1 Troll (Disagree). And this is why I posted AC.
I like how to consider better visuals = Hollywood = bad.
Every part of that is wrong.
" I think it comes down to Valve not really not know what they are doing storywise. "
Portal and Portal 2 had great stories. Subtle, interesting. Details left to the imagination. Fantastic
HL 2 had an interesting story. I never ran into any bugs, so I can't comment on that.
Just to be clear, you can have great graphics and a great game. Those are not mutually exclusive.
I also enjoy TF 2. For me, it's the perfect shooter... so far. Challenging, a lot of replay. Doesn't get boring.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And it was shareware!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I can just say, playing Dooms and Quakes back in the 90s and having no idea about who was doing what at id, Doom I and II and Quake were incredible, and Quake II I wanted to like as it was visually awesome but it was dry somehow, something was missing; I don't think I even finished more than 4-5 levels. Years later I read in Masters of Doom that Romero quit after Quake. With Romero, the fun was gone too.
"I like how to consider better visuals = Hollywood = bad."
It's not merely "better visuals", it's the cinematic techniques where you stop say in Call of duty, to say call of duty isn't one giant action movie would be an understatement. I'm saying the "trying to be in a movie" bits distract from actually making a game because "immersion" and videogame like gameplay are at odds in say a single player campaign.
What happens is you start to obey the generic laws of the real world and the expectations of how things 'should' behave to a larger extent which limits the kinds of gameplay you can have in the game, which makes for incredible boredom from one sequel to another.
So you have little idea what you're talking about sadly. It's not 'merely' great graphics, it's the kind of design vs hollywood action sections in a game that conflict with one another. You simply can't do insanely crazy things because you've got the hollywood mindset happening and not the videogame mindset happening.
Obvious troll is obvious.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Quake 2 was a pretty dull single player game IMO, and the only thing it brought to multiplayer (IMO) was the railgun. I really wanted to like it, but like you said, it just felt hollow. And starting off with nothing more than that lame laser pistol, that thing just sucked all kinds of hairy balls.
More than anything else, Q2 was a demonstration platform for, "Look- color lighting!". Too much of it, in a way. Much like Doom3 was, "Look, shadow volumes!"
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
-1? because you've never played dikatana? that is a quote from the first level of an american made game. either they are bad at being good, or bad at being bad on purpose, but either way, romero is an idiot, and so are slashdot moderators.
I ditched Firefox back at v3 due to the horrible memory leak. Recently, with spyware Chrome and the shit reboot of Opera being so slow and uncustomizable, I have gone back to Firefox. The memory leak seems to be gone, but a new problem has cropped up where sometimes Firefox won't die. I close the browser and see the process still sitting there until I manually kill it.
I am highly disappointed in all current web browsers. Despite not supporting such things as HTML5 video, Opera 12 will remain my primary browser until someone can create a better browser.
Um, technically Firefox (2004) is a branch of a rebrand (Mozilla Suite, 1998) of an open-sourced product (Netscape Communicator, 1997) that was the successor of a commercial suite (Netscape Navigator, 1994) written by the same guys who did Mosaic back in 1993.
Apparently IE was also based on Mosaic around the same time. But did IE end up in the same boat as Windows 1.0-3.0 where nobody actually used it willingly until 3.1? 3.0 was August 1996, then 6.0 sat and chilled from 2001 until 2006.
With the amount of redesigning they've done with IE over the last several years I hardly think it's accurate to say Firefox is more of a reinvention. It was a long evolution that kept getting new names and teams working on it (although the Mozilla Suite lives on as SeaMonkey today, too).
P.S: For some bizarre reason, the IE Wikipedia article jumps from 1.5 to 8 in their main narrative. Um...pretty sure 6 was pretty noteworthy for a long time...
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Before 3D was even remotely possible? Doom, pseudo 3D, was released on December 10, 1993. Ultima Underworld, real 3D, was released in March 1992.
We had a Duke Nukem successor.
Unfortunately, by the time it came out everyone who loved Duke had enough time to grow up, have kids of their own, and realize just how immature they were back then. It was by no means a great game [the uncomfortable mix of new and old design paradigms was just awkward], and was by no means a bad game [for its faults, it was no Aliens: Colonial Marines]...but because of the differences between nostalgia and reality it only did well among two groups: those who are this generation's crass horny kids, and those who knew going in that they were going to get a Duke Nukem game...not a modern FPS with Duke in it.
You never played or even saw Ultima Underworld except for a few picture here and there, didn't you?
So we're getta a Diakatana 2!?
I was never a fan of the push towards realism in doom 3 on mars
Mod parent up. I was (still am) a big fan of the old Doom/Doom 2/Quake/Heretic type of games .I was seriously put off by (IMO) the excessive interactive dialog that I had to do with Doom 3 just to get going. I didn't buy Doom 3 to have a dialog with the characters, or to listen to them telling me the back story. I bought it to shoot demons and blew shit up. Almost every other game I've tried since then, I've felt them to be overly verbose and "immersive" in Hollywood crap.
It was like dealing with the FPS game version of Microsoft Bob!!!
If I wanted to be immersed, I would simply GTFO and talk to people or something else IRL.
sounds good to me. I always felt like minecraft was missing rocket launchers and warthogs .
Uh, dude, posts end with an ellipsis. Not a period. Ending a post, or even a sentence, with a period makes your English teacher cry...
Don't forget the awesome single-player three-monitor gameplay experience that was present in early versions of Doom 1. Sure you needed three computers to do it, but AFAIK no other PC game could do that.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Shooter games -- what could be in poorer taste these days?
It worse when the desire to make an action movie works in detriment of the action game. Half Life had an almost perfect pacing. Valve knows how to lead the player. But many of those modern shooters don't. At a moment playing Battlefield 3 I was baffled because the game demanded that I stepped on a specific point before it would throw enemies against me and it all felt too artificial, like a director that wanted me to take my position before shooting the scene. That breaks immersion completely.
Speak for yourself. I was an adult when Duke Nukem 3D came out and I loved it. I also enjoyed Duke Nukem Forever fifteen years later. DNF certainly didn't live up to the hype, but it was still Duke and it was still entertaining.
When I was younger, I used to think like you, always trying to be "more mature" and thinking that meant being serious with a stick up my ass. At some point in my life, I realised that true maturity is understanding that it's OK to be immature, to have fun and to not care what anybody thinks of what I do. Life is too short to waste on such pretentious notions of austerity and on the philistines who wield them.
As a friend of mine at PDI/Dreamworks (who has worked on most of their movies from Antz to Shrek to HTTYD) told me "studios that brag about their time consuming and expensive 3D rendering but with results that don't look at good as those who take shortcuts just don't get movie making". Same is true for game making. If you can trick the viewer's brain to see what you want them to see, the technology doesn't really matter.
DOOM ran at 30FPS with 4 player multiplayer with *lighting*, doorways/windows, huge open spaces, outdoor/sky textures, etc. UU, which was a revolutionary game as well, rendered about 1/3 of the pixels with horrible frame rate and comparably little fast action. It was a revolutionary game, but *certainly* not as a full screen action FPS. High framerate full screen 3D FPS (the point of my comment) were not remotely possible, no.
UU was a revolutionary game, but a 3D FPS is was NOT. It rendered in a small window at an awful framerate and minimal action/responsiveness. Obviously 3D was possible using high end hardware, tiny viewports, or single digit frame rates, but none of those are traits of an FPS.
Two totally different games. DOOM's expansive spaces (including large convincing outdoor areas), colored lighting, high res textures, and amazing framerate for what it did was most definitely revolutionary as a "3D FPS".
Please name all of those other "3D environments" that were superior in 1993?
You could definitely walk seamlessly, using the keyboard, in Ultima Underworld,
Wow, you are right. I only played it years ago, and didn't get that far. I remember using really clumsy mouse controls. Apparently UW uses szxc isntead of wasd, with w as run, and a/d as turn.
You could also run and swim,
Swimming wasn't really that interesting though, it was surface only. Making it little more than viewport elevation change, with a sound effect.
It had inclines and leaning walls, also something Doom lacked.
True.
Ultima Underworld was not a 2D maze. Look at the first screenshot in the wikipedia article for instance.
That screenshot looks no better than Doom's '2.5D', but I agree UW was actually doing more sophisticated rendering, since you could look up and down, and had angles etc.
But despite being technically more true 3D than Doom, the effect was less impressive, overall.
Doom, by restricting the view angle, was able skip or precalculate a ton of stuff, enabling it to deliver full screen action with a decent framerate. UW was confined to like 1/4 of the screen. Add to that the tricks Doom pulled with lighting and skyboxes and it was just a lot more impressive.
Perhaps a bigger element of it being a 'revolution' was that Doom ep1 was shareware, so everyone had it. And it was multiplayer. So it was installed in high school computer labs, and in offices etc.
Screw the rail gun! Give me the NAIL gun and get out of my way!
DOOM was the shit because you could turn off every letter and number and punch zombies in the face and you'd be dead in like 10 seconds just like in real life.
But despite being technically more true 3D than Doom, the effect was less impressive, overall.
Doom, by restricting the view angle, was able skip or precalculate a ton of stuff, enabling it to deliver full screen action with a decent framerate. UW was confined to like 1/4 of the screen. Add to that the tricks Doom pulled with lighting and skyboxes and it was just a lot more impressive.
Perhaps a bigger element of it being a 'revolution' was that Doom ep1 was shareware, so everyone had it. And it was multiplayer. So it was installed in high school computer labs, and in offices etc.
We're in full agreement here. I did play a lot of UW, but nothing compared to the days upon days spent in Doom playing local deathmatches, or the single player maps or TCs, etc etc.
Doom is one of the best games ever made, I just took issue with the "before 3D was even remotely possible" bit :)
Ultima Underworld, Ultima Underworld II, Betrayal at Krondor, Comanche, Strike Commander, X-Wing, Frontier: Elite II, Epic, CyberRace and pretty much anything on 3DO or that used true polygonal graphics. Doom was a 2D game.
Ultima Underworld was also running on less powerful hardware. Ultima Underworld 2, released the same year as Doom and run as well or better on the same hardware. I also remember having to reduce the screen size and resolution in Doom so that it could run on the 386s which were common at the time.
No, Firefox is an evolution of those. "Reboots" are abrupt and major changes to establish franchises that come without warning. Everybody saw where browsers were heading long before Firefox.
No, sorry, flight sims don't count. Flight sims in 1993 were either one awful ground texture with 1-2 objects on the screen (or in the case of X-Wing no ground textures). Some were good games, but not even remotely similar.
Beyrayal at Krondor used 1/2 the screen, could do maybe 1-2 FPS max in the world with *turn* based combat, and the graphics were awful compared to DOOM (though it was a fun game, just not competitive in gfx).
UU/UUII has been discussed already, they used 1/3 size screen and had single digit frame rates anyway. Felt very claustrophobic, really. But again great games, just not FPS. With FPS it is and always has been about the full screen immersive experience and the frame rate.
And AFAIK 3DO didn't have any decent 3D games in 1993. Later they did, and one of the better ones was - wait for it - DOOM (unfortunately in using real 3D effects it sacrificed one of its biggest strengths over the other games at the time - frame rate...)
I said *superior*, and - graphics wise - none of those came close.
386's were relatively ancient by 1993. I got a 486 in late 1992 to replace the 386 I bought in 1989 and was already jealous of the new Pentiums. Moore's law was in hyperdrive back then and the cutting edge games always relied on that.
UU2 still ran in 1/3 the screen size with slower average frame rate, awful navigation/controls and (intentionally) slower paced gameplay compared to DOOM. Face it, it was a great game but a different game, and it was NOT a fast action FPS by any stretch.
Why? Because it proves you wrong? A game engine is a game engine, it was be used for anything. I could just as easily say that Quake was a flight sim because some people made a flight sim mod for it.
Move the goalposts some more, why don't you?
In 1993, most people with a PC were using a 386. UU2 had a much larger viewport than UU1. Basically, you don't know what you are talking about. Were you even alive back then?
First Person Skiing
Are you referring to Tribes ?
Doom stopped working ?
My copy is still working.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"