CelticLo writes "ZeniMax Media Inc., parent company of noted game publisher Bethesda Softworks, today announced it has completed the acquisition of legendary game studio id Software, creators of world-renowned games such as Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, and its upcoming title, Rage. In an interview with Kotaku, John Carmack said, 'We're really getting kind of tired competing with our own publishers in terms of how our titles will be featured. And we've really gotten more IPs than we've been able to take advantage of. And working with other companies hasn't been working out as spectacularly as it could. So the idea of actually becoming a publisher and merging Bethesda and ZeniMax on there [is ideal.] It would be hard to imagine a more complementary relationship. They are triple A, top-of-the-line in what they do in the RPGs. And they have no overlap with all the things we do in the FPSes.' The press release confirmed that id's projects will remain under Carmack's control."
I saw Carmack give a talk a couple weeks ago and OpenGL came up in the Q&A session. Carmack's take on it was that OpenGL had not continued to be update to take advantage of newer technology and had therefore largely fallen into disuse, though he also said that the graphics code was not that large a portion of their codebase so they could fairly easily write OpenGL and Direct3D versions of their engines with minimal effort.
Do you have any more specific information on the talk he gave? Is there an online translation, audio or video version of the talk? OpenGL has certainly not fallen into disuse, in fact it is the standard 3D API for the PS3, Apple OSX and I believe the Nintendo Wii (correction?). And add to that list any non MS operating system. Direct 3D is Microsoft only so you are limited to the Xbox or Windows. Also consider the fact that OpenGL is not only geared toward hardware acceleration but can also be rendered in s
That is problematic since it means multiple code paths for different cards
As opposed to DirectX where you have capability bits and have to test whether a card supports a given capability, and have multiple code paths for the cases where it doesn't? Or with DirectX 10 where you have a feature set equivalent to OpenGL 3 but no support for cards that don't support all of this feature set and no way of supporting features on cards that aren't part of this?
You'll see some OpenGL developers deride GL 3 as "OpenGL 1.6" because it was not the truly new redesign promised, but rather some stuff hacked on the old GL
And, mostly, these developers are idiots. There is a subset of OpenGL 3 which is forward-compatible. This is a very modern API.
I doubt it will be GPLed that soon given that Wolfenstein is just coming out. If it's anything like how Q3 was handled, they're going to wait until some time after the last commercial game is released. Carmack had to wait for nearly a year to release the Q3 source code since someone new had licensed it shortly before he wanted to release it in 2004 (I think it was for the video game tie-in for UPN's abysmal Game Over)
I intended to release the Q3 source under the GPL by the end of 2004, but we had another la
Carmack also reiterated that the current plan is to open source Doom 3's engine sometime next year.
Carmack: "What we can't do is we can't take time away from [other projects]... it does take effort to get these things together. If we are still heads down trying to get Rage out the door, I'm not going to task somebody with putting together the Doom 3 source distribution. But when Rage ships, you can expect the Doom 3 source code to be coming out."
Sounds like they're waiting to get Rage finalized rather than on any licensees to finish shipping Doom 3-based projects.
Terminator: Future Shock and Skynet would like to have a word with you! Two of my favorite FPSs that most games still can't compare to. They paved a lot of the way for vehicles in a FPS, great depressing storylines, it was 100% pure awesomeness.
I was kind of hoping a new one would come out with the arrival of the new movie.
So after reading about Zenimax on wikipedia, it said that Dr. Chris Weaver was forced out of the company. (Dual Doctorates at MIT). And zenimax didn't pay its 1.2 million severance in the contract.
Kinda interesting, Weaver broke into Zenimax's email server and used the copies in court. So the appeals court dismissed his case due prejudice. The other interesting thing is the CEO of Zenimax was in a banking fraud scandal and banned from banking industry by the feds.
Doesnt sound like a great team heading it up. I bet this comes back to bite Carmack in the ass down the road.
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday June 24, @01:33PM (#28456285)
I bet this comes back to bite Carmack in the ass down the road.
As one of id's owners, Carmack has just become a very rich man at a point in time where id's flagship titles are fading from the limelight. Doom 3 is largely considered a disappointment.
He's been tinkering on rocketry and iPhone development rather than pushing the state of the art (megatexture?)
Despite the press release stating that all the key players have signed long term contracts, I suspect Carmack is angling to retire from the games biz in the next few years.
Posting anonymously because I am still a big fan but see the writing on the wall.
The reason I love him is because in the TFA he explains why they did this:
"We're really getting kind of tired competing with our own publishers in terms of how our titles will be featured... They are triple A, top-of-the-line in what they do in the RPGs. And they have no overlap with all the things we do in the FPSes."
They didn't sell because of Zenimax's leadership. They sold so they don't have to worry about the publishing end of the business. Zenimax now distributes id and Bethesda games, and since they don't compete in the market, id doesn't have to worry about Zenimax giving them the shaft. Meanwhile, id stays independent and keeps doing what its doing.
Seriously, Bethesda has been doing FPS/RPGs with both Oblivion and Fallout 3, which use the same engine.
I don't have any idea how relevant that is to the Quake engine, but to pretend it's totally irrelevant is a bit silly.
Considering that the Bethesda engine is somewhat buggy, what with people falling through to the void and glitching through walls, what would be nice is if future Bethesda FPS/RPGs used the Quake engine for their graphics and rendering.
If I understand correctly, the Quake engine is alrea
It seems like the Quake engines are mostly optimized for indoors rendering, and anything in a Bethesda-style RPG would need to be optimized for large outdoor spaces, with trees, times of day/night, weather, etc.
The first Bethesda game I ever played was The Elder Scrolls - Chapter 1: The Arena [wikipedia.org]. "Arena" was built on the iD Wolfenstein 3D game engine, however they did adapt that engine to include all kinds of really cool, ahead-of-its-time features. Reflective puddles, fog and rain effects, outdoors that synced night/dawn/day/dusk skymaps with lighting conditions, perspective rolling when being damaged, a 400+ city world. All this on the Wolf3D engine!!!!
I find it ironic that Bethesda's biggest cumulative game (The E
Their situation was very similar to Valve's before Steam became a viable platform. (ie: struggles with EA/Sierra)
But the two roads diverged: We see that Valve's initially puzzling move of developing their own distribution channels has lead to a period of unbridled growth and creativity. iD's decision to innovate only on their core competencies (graphics,graphics,graphics) has lead to the events of today.
Wasn't the core income of iD software from developing game engines and licensing them to other companies?
I might be wrong but the last major engine they built and sold was the one for Doom 3, and I don't remember many games that used that engine after that except Quake 4? And that title was repackaged garbage.
Valve on the other hand...well they haven't made a many mistakes, they built a complete distribution system that is the best around by far, they release amazing development tools for their games, and they still release new content for older games like Team Fortress 2 and that was released back in October of 2007, might I add they just released the source files for their official TF2 maps allowing anyone to view how they made them.
iD software has gone stale, they stuck with what worked for them, being the leading developer of game engines and graphics, and that worked when they were the only competitor back in 1993(Doom), 1996(Quake), 1997(Quake 2), and 1999(Quake 3), no game engines could compete with those. The biggest competitor between 1997 and 1999 was the Lithtech engine or the original Unreal, and post 1999, Lithtech didn't power much, and the Unreal was just beginning to shape up to what it has turned into today.
Now in 2009 we have the Unreal Engines which are cross platform compatible and easy to develop for, the Source Engine which anyone can mod with the help of the Valve SDK's, multiple open-source engines, and enough tools, online knowledge, and resources for a company to develop their own engine if they want to go down that path. The Doom 3 Engine is not as appealing, iD was the leader because there was no one else to go to for a quick pre-built game engine, today that isnt true.
I don't think iD software is in financial trouble but they definitely don't have the income like they used to have.
I agree. They can't compete in their traditional market due to capital. Look at the kind of money Activison can put behind a Call of Duty production, let alone the marketing. iD, being a fairly independent developer and thus capable of paying for their own development, doesn't really stand a chance when it's competing against a publisher funded project where the publishers have a vested financial interest in the title's success. iD didn't leverage their projects enough so competing with the likes of Inifinity Ward, who used the traditional "publisher funded" approach, just isn't possible. Their publishers simply didn't make enough money off iD's "niche" titles and self-funded approach.
iD's previous organic growth provided immense stability and financial independence, but it severely limited how quickly they could expand and thus compete in a rapidly changing marketplace.
Where to begin. The UI sucks, with unreadable text in many places. It constantly tells me my video card drivers are out of date when they aren't. Ditto with DirectX versions (it's upgraded my DirectX three times this week alone!) Half the time when you start it up, it just shows a blank white screen and you have to close and restart it to see your games list. The pricing in the store is frequently wrong, and they don't respond to tickets when you ask to buy a product at it's advertised price. In fact, suppo
id has made nothing except tech demos for years and years. Valve has made actual full good games. Being owned by a publisher is not likely to improve Id's games much.
Valve build on what 3d realms did with duke3d, and just went from there, making more and more fleshed out worlds, and encounters, more and more interactive environments. Id just remade Doom 2/quake 1 over and over with better graphics. They don't oven make the best engines anymore (CryEngine 3).
Zenimax with Bethesda makes great games with crappy software.
ID makes crappy games with great software.
Either this is going to be GREAT GAMES WITH GREAT SOFTWARE or CRAPPY GAMES WITH CRAPPY SOFTWARE.
I honestly can't think of a good ID game in the sense of a contemporary game. BRILLIANT technology. Great game engines, but the games themselves were always lack luster. In short: If it moves, it dies. That was it.
Doom series was nearly devoid of any literary content. It was literally just shoot stuff. Fun mind you but nothing to write home about.
Fallout 3 shows you can have an excellent game structured around bug ridden crap code.
Imagine ID's team doing the coding with the BETTER half doing the rest. Pure magic.
OR A COMPLETE DISASTER AS THEY BRING OUT THE WORST IN ONE ANOTHER.
Absolutely nothing wrong with that kind of game. Some of the best games have been exactly this. Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Unreal, Halo, Serious Sam, Far Cry, etc. were all "shoot anything that moves" games that only had the most superficial of stories. They are proof that games don't need strong storylines and can rely purely on gameplay.
Great game engines, but the games themselves were always lack luster. In short: If it moves, it dies. That was it.
What more do you want from a game?
Doom series was nearly devoid of any literary content. It was literally just shoot stuff. Fun mind you but nothing to write home about.
It's a game, the fun stuff is the point. Literary content is superfluous. If you want literary content, read a book. If you want to have fun and shoot stuff, play a game.
You obviously have never played "Redneck Rampage". I am still disappointed that there isn't a current sequel out. There is something about using a crossbow, with a stick of TNT tied to the bolt, and blowing up a cow, that is entirely gratifying. The pigs that attack you if you pop them with bullet were pretty cool as well. And don't get me started on the bra machine guns...
I love reading a good book. But all the books I'd describe as "good" are non-fiction. But that's beside the point. Looking to games for "literary content" is like looking to Saturday morning cartoons for great visual art.
Personally, I love RPG and adventure games. Both genres with strong stories. There's nothing wrong with putting a story in a game, but the game mechanics are the point of playing, not the story. You can have a great game without any story at all. You can't have a great game without
Personally, I've been real unimpressed with iD's engine offerings. When Doom 3 came out I was extremely underwhelmed. It was a great example of something that was maybe more technically correct, but didn't look as good. I felt UT2004 looked better, despite being an older engine. I mean the lighting in Doom 3 was a neat technology, but didn't work well in game. You ended up with extremely dark corners because the shadows were all hard and light bounced only once. Also it required some heavy hitting hardware
Perhaps this is OT, but I think it is likely the primary reason for this deal- What happened to iD's engine licensing? Before D3 it seemed 80% of games were iD based, the rest being Unreal. What happened to make iD's engines so unappealing today?
Yes, I know the company is still there, but is the team really still relevant? The company that's there now just doesn't seem to have much in common the id we always knew and loved, largely because of talent drain.
id lost a lot of it's best people years ago, Carmack is still there but hardly any of the greats from the Wolf/Doom/Quake days are still there. Romero? McGee? Petersen? Carmack (Adrian)? Steed?
It seems they lost their key people in various areas, sure people like Romero became laughing stocks when they left because the guy clearly wasn't a CEO when it came to, that doesn't mean of course he wasn't a great designer and developer when working at id. McGee and Petersen - almost certainly their greatest level builders. Steed, their best 3D artist. Even people like David Kirsch who did the Quakeworld netcode that is still the foundation of the netcode in many modern FPS such as HL2.
Carmack was always id's best programmer when it came to visualisation, but the loss of other key characters seems to sum up what id Software has become - a developer of games that are graphically impressive, but hollow beyond that. With the rise of the newer versions of the Unreal engine and developers like Crytek even Carmack's prowess in the graphics world seems to be lagging a bit.
It's sad in a way, I'll always respect id for what they were, but I think the loss of so many key figures was a big deal. I don't mean to detract from the staff working there now, id still has some brilliant people but I think what id doesn't have anymore is a dream team which I think it did have back in the old Wolf/Doom/Quake days.
I'd love to see that team reunite for one more game but that's little more than a dream.
Actually, if you compare Doom and Quake to Oblivion and Fallout3, you basically have two companies that have really made their names on two franchises. You might think that id is in a better position because they made the Classics, but "classic" is also just another word for "old", or in this case, "not generating revenue any more".
Honestly, Bethesda may not be the industry pioneer that id was, but they're certainly just as successful, or perhaps, even more successful than id in the present time. That's all that matters for a business decision.
The company is still going to be run by John Carmack. It looks like it's more of a business decision to make publishing/marketing easier and to get a hold of new tech than to merge IPs.
"The company is still going to be run by John Carmack"
Everyone company that gets sold to another company says things like this. My question is, "The company is still going to be run by John Carmack"... yes, but for how long?... I've lost count of the number of companies who say this sort of thing and then a year or two later their founders leave saying they are going to pursue new business avenues and new opportunities etc..
Which leaves ID high speed easy to control style of games and ID's attitude t
Competition. (Score:3, Interesting)
Looks like they might have a bonafide Atari stomping machine.
Re:Competition. (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks like they might have a bonafide Atari stomping machine.
That job is already filled by Atari themsleves.
Parent
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The name is still around, but it's definitely not the same company. See Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for the full history.
Linux native games (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope they will carry on using OpenGL and providing Linux native binaries.
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I saw Carmack give a talk a couple weeks ago and OpenGL came up in the Q&A session.
Carmack's take on it was that OpenGL had not continued to be update to take advantage of newer technology and had therefore largely fallen into disuse, though he also said that the graphics code was not that large a portion of their codebase so they could fairly easily write OpenGL and Direct3D versions of their engines with minimal effort.
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Do you have any more specific information on the talk he gave? Is there an online translation, audio or video version of the talk? OpenGL has certainly not fallen into disuse, in fact it is the standard 3D API for the PS3, Apple OSX and I believe the Nintendo Wii (correction?). And add to that list any non MS operating system. Direct 3D is Microsoft only so you are limited to the Xbox or Windows. Also consider the fact that OpenGL is not only geared toward hardware acceleration but can also be rendered in s
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That is problematic since it means multiple code paths for different cards
As opposed to DirectX where you have capability bits and have to test whether a card supports a given capability, and have multiple code paths for the cases where it doesn't? Or with DirectX 10 where you have a feature set equivalent to OpenGL 3 but no support for cards that don't support all of this feature set and no way of supporting features on cards that aren't part of this?
You'll see some OpenGL developers deride GL 3 as "OpenGL 1.6" because it was not the truly new redesign promised, but rather some stuff hacked on the old GL
And, mostly, these developers are idiots. There is a subset of OpenGL 3 which is forward-compatible. This is a very modern API.
Re:Linux native games (Score:5, Interesting)
I am surprised. Wolfenstein is based on Doom 3 engine, which is OpenGL. Isn't the alledged switch for the future engines ?
Also, I wonder if Doom 3 engine will be GPLed. id always GPLed their code after a while.
Parent
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Around one year ago Carmack said Doom 3 will GPLed right about now. Few months away at most, supposedly.
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I doubt it will be GPLed that soon given that Wolfenstein is just coming out. If it's anything like how Q3 was handled, they're going to wait until some time after the last commercial game is released. Carmack had to wait for nearly a year to release the Q3 source code since someone new had licensed it shortly before he wanted to release it in 2004 (I think it was for the video game tie-in for UPN's abysmal Game Over)
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From QuakeWorld 2008 [linuxgames.com]
Carmack also reiterated that the current plan is to open source Doom 3's engine sometime next year.
Carmack: "What we can't do is we can't take time away from [other projects]... it does take effort to get these things together. If we are still heads down trying to get Rage out the door, I'm not going to task somebody with putting together the Doom 3 source distribution. But when Rage ships, you can expect the Doom 3 source code to be coming out."
Sounds like they're waiting to get Rage finalized rather than on any licensees to finish shipping Doom 3-based projects.
Could this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Could this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Could this mean that ID is now going to become less OSS/Linux friendly?
Carmack has said before that the Linux port did not make much sense from a business point of view.
[The port to the Wii almost certainly does make sense. The cell phone. The portable media player.]
He has waffled now and then on DX vs OGL.
iD released game engines that were well past their commercial prime.
Never the games themselves.
The IP that makes a Commander Keen or Doom or Wolfenstein a unique and valuable property.
Bethesda's focus is on the sale of its games - and not on the sale of its game engines.
I can't see any very compelling reason for it to open source anything.
Parent
No FPS competition? (Score:3, Interesting)
I was kind of hoping a new one would come out with the arrival of the new movie.
Chris Weaver (Score:5, Interesting)
So after reading about Zenimax on wikipedia, it said that Dr. Chris Weaver was forced out of the company. (Dual Doctorates at MIT). And zenimax didn't pay its 1.2 million severance in the contract.
Kinda interesting, Weaver broke into Zenimax's email server and used the copies in court. So the appeals court dismissed his case due prejudice. The other interesting thing is the CEO of Zenimax was in a banking fraud scandal and banned from banking industry by the feds.
Doesnt sound like a great team heading it up. I bet this comes back to bite Carmack in the ass down the road.
Re:Chris Weaver (Score:4, Insightful)
As one of id's owners, Carmack has just become a very rich man at a point in time where id's flagship titles are fading from the limelight. Doom 3 is largely considered a disappointment.
He's been tinkering on rocketry and iPhone development rather than pushing the state of the art (megatexture?)
Despite the press release stating that all the key players have signed long term contracts, I suspect Carmack is angling to retire from the games biz in the next few years.
Posting anonymously because I am still a big fan but see the writing on the wall.
Parent
Re:Chris Weaver (Score:5, Insightful)
First, let me just say that I love John Carmack.
The reason I love him is because in the TFA he explains why they did this:
"We're really getting kind of tired competing with our own publishers in terms of how our titles will be featured... They are triple A, top-of-the-line in what they do in the RPGs. And they have no overlap with all the things we do in the FPSes."
They didn't sell because of Zenimax's leadership. They sold so they don't have to worry about the publishing end of the business. Zenimax now distributes id and Bethesda games, and since they don't compete in the market, id doesn't have to worry about Zenimax giving them the shaft. Meanwhile, id stays independent and keeps doing what its doing.
Sound familiar? [wikipedia.org]
Parent
No Overlap? (Score:3, Insightful)
They are triple A, top-of-the-line in what they do in the RPGs. And they have no overlap with all the things we do in the FPSes.'
What about Fallout 3?
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But the thousand dollar question: Will Rage be refashioned/re-written as a Fallout game, er- Fallout, with cars?
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Seriously, Bethesda has been doing FPS/RPGs with both Oblivion and Fallout 3, which use the same engine.
I don't have any idea how relevant that is to the Quake engine, but to pretend it's totally irrelevant is a bit silly.
Considering that the Bethesda engine is somewhat buggy, what with people falling through to the void and glitching through walls, what would be nice is if future Bethesda FPS/RPGs used the Quake engine for their graphics and rendering.
If I understand correctly, the Quake engine is alrea
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iD Tech 5 is is supposed to be able to do large outdoor spaces just fine.
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It seems like the Quake engines are mostly optimized for indoors rendering, and anything in a Bethesda-style RPG would need to be optimized for large outdoor spaces, with trees, times of day/night, weather, etc.
The first Bethesda game I ever played was The Elder Scrolls - Chapter 1: The Arena [wikipedia.org]. "Arena" was built on the iD Wolfenstein 3D game engine, however they did adapt that engine to include all kinds of really cool, ahead-of-its-time features. Reflective puddles, fog and rain effects, outdoors that synced night/dawn/day/dusk skymaps with lighting conditions, perspective rolling when being damaged, a 400+ city world. All this on the Wolf3D engine!!!!
I find it ironic that Bethesda's biggest cumulative game (The E
Carmack's condition (Score:2, Funny)
Valve and iD, twin snakes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Valve and iD, twin snakes (Score:5, Insightful)
I might be wrong but the last major engine they built and sold was the one for Doom 3, and I don't remember many games that used that engine after that except Quake 4? And that title was repackaged garbage.
Valve on the other hand...well they haven't made a many mistakes, they built a complete distribution system that is the best around by far, they release amazing development tools for their games, and they still release new content for older games like Team Fortress 2 and that was released back in October of 2007, might I add they just released the source files for their official TF2 maps allowing anyone to view how they made them.
iD software has gone stale, they stuck with what worked for them, being the leading developer of game engines and graphics, and that worked when they were the only competitor back in 1993(Doom), 1996(Quake), 1997(Quake 2), and 1999(Quake 3), no game engines could compete with those. The biggest competitor between 1997 and 1999 was the Lithtech engine or the original Unreal, and post 1999, Lithtech didn't power much, and the Unreal was just beginning to shape up to what it has turned into today.
Now in 2009 we have the Unreal Engines which are cross platform compatible and easy to develop for, the Source Engine which anyone can mod with the help of the Valve SDK's, multiple open-source engines, and enough tools, online knowledge, and resources for a company to develop their own engine if they want to go down that path. The Doom 3 Engine is not as appealing, iD was the leader because there was no one else to go to for a quick pre-built game engine, today that isnt true.
I don't think iD software is in financial trouble but they definitely don't have the income like they used to have.
Parent
Re:Valve and iD, twin snakes (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
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Where to begin. The UI sucks, with unreadable text in many places. It constantly tells me my video card drivers are out of date when they aren't. Ditto with DirectX versions (it's upgraded my DirectX three times this week alone!) Half the time when you start it up, it just shows a blank white screen and you have to close and restart it to see your games list. The pricing in the store is frequently wrong, and they don't respond to tickets when you ask to buy a product at it's advertised price. In fact, suppo
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Valve build on what 3d realms did with duke3d, and just went from there, making more and more fleshed out worlds, and encounters, more and more interactive environments. Id just remade Doom 2/quake 1 over and over with better graphics. They don't oven make the best engines anymore (CryEngine 3).
Graphics hardly make a game good, and w
Perfect Marriage (Score:5, Interesting)
Zenimax with Bethesda makes great games with crappy software.
ID makes crappy games with great software.
Either this is going to be GREAT GAMES WITH GREAT SOFTWARE or CRAPPY GAMES WITH CRAPPY SOFTWARE.
I honestly can't think of a good ID game in the sense of a contemporary game. BRILLIANT technology. Great game engines, but the games themselves were always lack luster. In short: If it moves, it dies. That was it.
Doom series was nearly devoid of any literary content. It was literally just shoot stuff. Fun mind you but nothing to write home about.
Fallout 3 shows you can have an excellent game structured around bug ridden crap code.
Imagine ID's team doing the coding with the BETTER half doing the rest. Pure magic.
OR A COMPLETE DISASTER AS THEY BRING OUT THE WORST IN ONE ANOTHER.
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In short: If it moves, it dies. That was it.
Absolutely nothing wrong with that kind of game. Some of the best games have been exactly this. Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Unreal, Halo, Serious Sam, Far Cry, etc. were all "shoot anything that moves" games that only had the most superficial of stories. They are proof that games don't need strong storylines and can rely purely on gameplay.
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Great game engines, but the games themselves were always lack luster. In short: If it moves, it dies. That was it.
What more do you want from a game?
Doom series was nearly devoid of any literary content. It was literally just shoot stuff. Fun mind you but nothing to write home about.
It's a game, the fun stuff is the point. Literary content is superfluous. If you want literary content, read a book. If you want to have fun and shoot stuff, play a game.
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You obviously have never played "Redneck Rampage". I am still disappointed that there isn't a current sequel out. There is something about using a crossbow, with a stick of TNT tied to the bolt, and blowing up a cow, that is entirely gratifying. The pigs that attack you if you pop them with bullet were pretty cool as well. And don't get me started on the bra machine guns...
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I love reading a good book. But all the books I'd describe as "good" are non-fiction. But that's beside the point. Looking to games for "literary content" is like looking to Saturday morning cartoons for great visual art.
Personally, I love RPG and adventure games. Both genres with strong stories. There's nothing wrong with putting a story in a game, but the game mechanics are the point of playing, not the story. You can have a great game without any story at all. You can't have a great game without
Eh, not so much (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I've been real unimpressed with iD's engine offerings. When Doom 3 came out I was extremely underwhelmed. It was a great example of something that was maybe more technically correct, but didn't look as good. I felt UT2004 looked better, despite being an older engine. I mean the lighting in Doom 3 was a neat technology, but didn't work well in game. You ended up with extremely dark corners because the shadows were all hard and light bounced only once. Also it required some heavy hitting hardware
Hey, whatever. (Score:3, Interesting)
In the meantime, howsabout an official version of Morroblivion [morroblivion.com]? I'd pay good money for that!
Carmack's Plan (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds like Carmack may be setting things in motion to shift his attention to Armadillo Aerospace.
Next thing we know, he'll be performing secret experiments with teleportation... we all know how that story turns out.
Re:Carmack's Plan (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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The one where both him and his funding get telefragged out of existence. I would recommend he experiment with kittens first.
What happened to iD's licensing (Score:3, Interesting)
Does id even exist nowadays? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I know the company is still there, but is the team really still relevant? The company that's there now just doesn't seem to have much in common the id we always knew and loved, largely because of talent drain.
id lost a lot of it's best people years ago, Carmack is still there but hardly any of the greats from the Wolf/Doom/Quake days are still there. Romero? McGee? Petersen? Carmack (Adrian)? Steed?
It seems they lost their key people in various areas, sure people like Romero became laughing stocks when they left because the guy clearly wasn't a CEO when it came to, that doesn't mean of course he wasn't a great designer and developer when working at id. McGee and Petersen - almost certainly their greatest level builders. Steed, their best 3D artist. Even people like David Kirsch who did the Quakeworld netcode that is still the foundation of the netcode in many modern FPS such as HL2.
Carmack was always id's best programmer when it came to visualisation, but the loss of other key characters seems to sum up what id Software has become - a developer of games that are graphically impressive, but hollow beyond that. With the rise of the newer versions of the Unreal engine and developers like Crytek even Carmack's prowess in the graphics world seems to be lagging a bit.
It's sad in a way, I'll always respect id for what they were, but I think the loss of so many key figures was a big deal. I don't mean to detract from the staff working there now, id still has some brilliant people but I think what id doesn't have anymore is a dream team which I think it did have back in the old Wolf/Doom/Quake days.
I'd love to see that team reunite for one more game but that's little more than a dream.
Re:Sooo... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, if you compare Doom and Quake to Oblivion and Fallout3, you basically have two companies that have really made their names on two franchises. You might think that id is in a better position because they made the Classics, but "classic" is also just another word for "old", or in this case, "not generating revenue any more".
Honestly, Bethesda may not be the industry pioneer that id was, but they're certainly just as successful, or perhaps, even more successful than id in the present time. That's all that matters for a business decision.
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And what the hell has Bathesda done?
Oblivion, which I can't comment on, and Fallout 3, which I've found very enjoyable. I'm sure there are others... have you tried googling?
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Generic FPS (granted the first generic FPS) Doom, Fantasy Doom, Nazi Doom, and future Doom.
To each his own I suppose.
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ID still makes games? I havent played an ID game since Doom 3.
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Everyone company that gets sold to another company says things like this. My question is, "The company is still going to be run by John Carmack"
Which leaves ID high speed easy to control style of games and ID's attitude t