Doomed: How id Lost Its Crown 491
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.'"
Re:DUPE (Score:3, Interesting)
Another whiny... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I see clearly now, id is doomed.
You know.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone craps on D3 so much, and it bugs me. Yes, gameplay is probably the most important quality in a video game, and I admit it was severely lacking in D3. But dammit, they really really excelled in other areas and did a few things other video games just don't do. They do deserve some credit.
Re:I don't recall... (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting question imo, since Valve been spouting off how they've build the Source Engine themselves, yet, when the alpha-code-leak happened, various people found entries from the Quake-C code inside (either commented out, or still in use) :
I wonder how much of that is still in there and, if it is, if id is getting something out of it.
An aspect not commented on before... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is the Doom3 really not as capabile of expansive environments, really not as easy to program? How did ID let that slide by?
What did you expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Carmack et al are on record as saying that games don't need story. Romero (that other one) was booted out of id after he tried to get them to focus on gameplay and design, not just graphics. Admittedly he failed spectacularly, but from that point one id was a one trick pony. They make pretty looking games where you kill zombies/cyborgs and collect keycards.
Is this behind the times in terms of gameplay? Sure. Imo, Deus Ex and System Shock 2 both beat the pants off DOOM3 (and Painkiller and Max Payne) in terms of gameplay and design. And they're more than five years old!
Frankly, DOOM was only "revolutionary" because it was the first game that really nailed how to do graphics good enough to make an FPS game work. Expecting fabulous gameplay out of id is like expecting a Terminator movie to bring you to tears.
DOOM3 is about shooting things. Period. Don't like it, okay, I can relate, but don't try to act as if this is a surprise.
Re:Headshot! (Score:4, Interesting)
So if you disable the brain it can no longer send signals to the main body or even "think" basicly. So a bullet to the brain disables their basic thought and movement in 1.
Secondly, brains is the "common" thing, but if you notice they just want to eat flesh. Most humans naturally consider flesh the "best" food source (meat and 2 veg, shows this perfectly). So they go after flesh, human or other wise (Most zombie films will show you dead animals being eaten or at least being attacked).
Of course each "universe" will have it's own way of making zombies and it's own rules, but the basic lay out if above.
Ahh but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Dupes - How Slashdot Guarantees Page Views? (Score:2, Interesting)
They really can't be lame enough to consistently do this by accident can they? There must be some reason behind it. I wouldn't think it would be for the humor, surely that would have worn off by now?
id makes engines, not games (Score:5, Interesting)
At least, now they do. The requirements for game development are increasing every day, stretching development cycles and requiring more resources.
id's games have always been about groundbreaking technology, so it's not surprising that as development costs expand, gameplay filligrees in id titles suffer (relative to the competition). id uses its games as technology demos. Don't get me wrong, I love 'em, but their focus is not on the sort of game logic that distinguishes the experiences this story refers to (no, I haven't RTFA yet). Let's face it: AI is an interesting area that needs improvement, but programming headshots is boring. Making realtime rendering engines as good as they can be is a real technical challenge, and something that id can do better than anyone else. That's what makes them unique, and consequently it's also what makes them money -- not from game sales, but from engine licensing.
Re:Headshot! (Score:2, Interesting)
But thats only the theory
So, to answer what you said, why shoot the head? Because if you blow up the brain, there's no way the body can still continu to work, or to be coordinated, so it should fall to the ground after that.
Re:It's the multiplayer, stupid. (Score:4, Interesting)
And you know this because? Based oin the lack of a available servers to log into? What? I know lots of people still playing Morrowind a year later.
Everyone plays ut2k4, hl2, CS, whatever because it's fun either sneaking around and sniping people, or jumping around flinging rockets.
I'll bet money that there are still more people playing Quake 3 than all those games put together. Tens of thousands of people every day on their office LANs. It's not generating any new revenue for Id, but Id is still the king by far if you're counting numbers of current players. "Hardcore" gamers and the gaming rags are so far out of touch with the mainsteram that it's rediculous.
Re:Seriously- (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:id makes engines, not games (Score:3, Interesting)
"Story in a game is like story in a porn
movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not
that important."
Such an attitude will lead to "dumb" games that provide about 20 minutes of fun and 3 hours of boring monotony. Running, shooting and getting scared is all that Doom 3 is. There are no advances on enemy positions, creeping around and no freedom on how to accomplish a task. There is no character development or storyline twists and turns. There was no room for a game player to develop their own story in the game, which is where the magic of modern gaming lies.
System Shock 2 is a great example of an FPS that has a lot of gameplay factors that places like Id should emulate.
Article blatantly mistaken (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And I'm willing to bet the underlying problem i (Score:3, Interesting)
The original versions of Doom 1 and 2 were called shareware, but they were not proper shareware. A possitive name for them would be 'demo', a less positive name would be 'crippleware'. ID used a shareware like method by lack of a proper and widespread distribution channel, but for the rest very little changed.
If you wanted, you could have downloaded a demo version of Doom 3, and looked at the game before buying it, just like I did.
What did make a difference of course is that due to the hype, more people got the full version of Doom 3 without ever seeing the demo.
Were Doom 1 and 2 good games? I think they were, but mostly due to being different from anything else at the time, and thus being revolutionary. Doom 3 just rehashes the same kind of content, and well, we have seen enough of it already.
An entirely different question is what will happen with the engine on the long term. For example, I do run the Quake 3 engine a lot, but not because I play QUake 3 a lot... I did run the Quake 1 engine a lot, but not ecause of playing Quake 1 that much (tho I did play and finish it)
As I mentioned in another post, ID is not good at creating content, and ever since total conversions of Doom 2 started appearing, it became clear that they needed others to make good games based on their engines. They fully realized this when they made Quake 3, but failed to remember while making Doom 3 obviously.
Re:Headshot! (Score:2, Interesting)
Multi Kill!
Ultra Kill!
Mon...
Mon...
Monster Kill!
Mon...
Monster Kill!
GODLIKE!
That's what it would sound like when sniping one of the bot spawn points on CTF-Face. There would also be an "Unstoppable" in there somewhere from being alive for so long.
Good times.
Re:The problem I have with Doom 3 (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, but that's not global illumination, it's local. You're simply computing the illumination on the visible polygons due to the light source (flashlight), which is quite easy to do in realtime. Global illumination, on the other hand, takes into account the fact that light from the flashlight doesn't always reflect off a surface directly into the camera, but also reflects onto other surfaces and eventually reaches the camera via a potentially long set of intermediate indirect reflections. That cannot be done in realtime, yet.
Re:Seriously- (Score:2, Interesting)