Hurt Me Plenty - Remembering Doom 75
Thanks to TotalGames.net for reprinting a GamesTM article remembering the genius of id Software's seminal PC FPS, Doom. The article starts with the question: "How many of the lodestones of modern gaming do we owe to Doom?", and continues by arguing: "Without Doom conceiving the multiplayer deathmatch, it could be radically touted that the PC today would be an abandoned platform insofar as gaming is concerned." The piece finishes with comments on Doom 3: "While tradition alone will endear Doom 3 to many, the long-anticipated game may yet fail to make the evolving grade it was fundamental in establishing. Let it be said that the gaming world is nothing if not perverse."
Poor choice of words (Score:3, Interesting)
While tradition alone will endear Doom 3 to many, the long-anticipated game may yet fail to make the evolving grade it was fundamental in establishing.
By that first line it sounds as if Doom 1 was REVOLUTIONARY (and it was to be honest). However Doom 3 will probably be evolutionary and does not attempt to be revolutionary as Doom 1 was. When you look at it that way, Doom 1 managed to strike the right balance of singleplayer action and increable multiplayer action. Doom 3 simply attempts to return to the days of bloodpumping, 'not sure if the next room will hold some horrible monster that will use up half your ammo' singleplayer action, and four player 'run for your frikin life because someone got the BFG before you' multiplayer action.
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:1)
I was playeing Ep.2 first, for some reson i cant recall..
I tell you, i ended up having to kill it wiht my fists because i did use all my ammo.
I tunr a cornonr, i go charging, i see some stuff up ahead, drop my last two rockets and there all dead.. yay for me..
Then i turn the next cornor and that noise!
I sware i jumped 2 feet in the air, and by god it was fast to face with me, it clawed at me and i lost helth, not too much but i baccked off, and then t
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. I distinctly remember there being other multiplayer deathmatch games around at that time... such as SpectreVR, for example
DOOM was a great game, for sure, but it was more an evolutionary step, which everyone wanted and had a demand for, than it was a Revolutionary jump. What made DOOM 'special' in those days was that it was legal and expected that you could download it and copy it with your friends; in thos
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:2)
Wolfenstein3D was the revolutionary FPS game that I remember. I remember Doom because it was just the game I couldn't play until I upgraded to a 486DX2/66 because my 386DX/33 was too slow. Honestly though, I never played Doom multiplayer. I don't even remember it having multiplayer support! Perhaps over a modem, but I don't remember it having Internet multiplayer. In fact, it didn't!
All of those old games starting to support multi
Re:Poor choice of words (Score:1)
Big fucking surprise DN3D was better than Doom.
Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, right. Wolfie 3D was also a seminal moment in PC gaming, and made a *huge* impact on the entire industry. Doom was a major improvement, yes, but Doom couldn't have been made without Wolfenstein 3D. Multiplayer? No, W3D didn't have it, but all this means is that, had Doom not been made, all FPSs on the computer would be single player - maybe.
The development of the FPS on the comp has been linear, not arriving with Doom and being incrementally improved with subsequent iteration. Wolf 3d was the first major FPS (if not first in the first place; anyone remember when Marathon for the Mac was published?). Doom added better graphics and height (stairs!) as well as multiplayer. Duke 3d added shooting on the Y plane and not just X and Z, not to mention weapons that were more interesting than plain miniguns or rocket launchers (shrink ray, land mine, etc.) Quake I, II, UT... each had significant changes in gameplay, graphics, and capabilities - the shift from Quake 2 to 3 was huge, turning what was once a SP genre with a multi addon to a primarily multi game. If *any* game(s) cemented the shift from SP to MP, and help keep PC gaming alive today, I'd say it was UT and/or Q3, *not* Doom.
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, IIRC, it was Star Wars: Dark Forces that first introduced the three dimensional aiming. I remember an ad that ran in some gaming magazines when it was released. It was a simple screenshot showing your crosshairs aiming at a stormtrooper's head. The tag line went something like: We've added a new dimension to gaming.
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:2)
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:1)
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sig.
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:2)
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:2)
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:2, Interesting)
System Shock came out in 1994 with full 3D play.
Of course, it didn't have multiplay until the patch came out some time later.
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:1)
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:1)
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:1)
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:1)
actually this [idsoftware.com][idsoftware.com] was the first fpp game in 3d. And there was also Catacombs 3d, basicly the same engine.
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:3, Interesting)
Marathon was published in 1994 [bungie.net]; Marathon2: Durandal was 1995, and Marathon: Infinity was 1996.
Even the first Marathon was true 3D; at least the second and possibly the first had the ability to look above shoulder height. Even the first has deathmatch capability--only over AppleTalk, not IP!
(Offtopic, but Christ! What happened to the Bungie.com pages?! There's an obvious answer, of course--I guess they lost that gambit. At least they still have info on the old, pre-sellout games. But I digress.)
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:1)
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:2)
Actually, you could shoot on the Y plane in Doom (sort of). Try standing on a ledge above a monster below. Shoot "above" the monster, and the shot will automatically be aimed downwards towards it.
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:3, Insightful)
1) The hardware rush. Computer games were designed to the hardware available, not vice versa.
2) A need for sound cards. Wolfenstein wouldn't have been the same, granted, but it was playable without a sound card, just like most other games. Doom practically required one just for the ambiance.
3) Game editors. No other game before Doom had even close to the amount of player created content. Maps, skins,
X, Y and Z (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong. There are two "games" that helped cement the multiplayer culture, and you're wrong on both counts. One came before UT and Q3 and one was developed concurrently.
First of all, Quake was an evolution in multiplayer gaming. the community-supported Quakeworld was a revolution. It is one of the earliest multiplayer games to feature client-side prediction, and the experience was fluid even on 32-player internet servers...something that would bring a Quake server to it's knees.
Combine this with incredibly popular free mods and total conversions like Team Fortress that revolutionized gameplay, and you had a multiplayer platform that eclipsed even the popularity of Quake II at it's peak.
Half-Life is the second game on the list, not because the original HL multiplayer was anything special, but because it served as a platform for...
Counterstrike.
I know a lot of you bag on this game, but you just don't seem to understand how popular it is. The game is not even at it's peak anymore, and there are still over 100 THOUSAND active players at peak during the week. That's more players than every other current multiplayer FPS COMBINED.
Why?
It was free, well polished, and adapted gameplay styles from other genres. No rocket launchers plus the equipment purchase system made for a fresh look, and people ate it up.
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:2)
Quake was the genesis of FPS gaming as we know it. Simply put, it was the first game to allow people to join the game in mid play. The simple logistical problems of finding so many people to play the game, have them join; all before starting the game (and then doing it all again when someone dropped) is what hindered FPS gaming so much before Quake's time.
And I am one to bag on c
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:2)
As for Counterstrike, you have to realize something: in the gaming world, it's not whether your ideas are NEW, it's whether they're FRESH and well-presented.
Counterstrike borrowed heavily from Rainbow Six, which at the time was only a mild success on the PC platform. The reason the game had only narrow appeal was the game was TOO realistic: you had to prepare before each mission, the maps were relatively
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:1)
Personally, I still find Counterstrike to be too realistic, and it's purchase system to not add to gameplay as much as serve as a unbalancing feature that leads to one team dominating a map. But that's why I play other games...
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:2)
Maybe you weren't paying attention when you played Counterstrike. The losing team received "welfare" that increased with each consecutive loss up to a point. In fact, it was usually better to be on the losing team if you got no kills, especially if you died during the round.
As for your realism complaint, I don't buy it. Counterstrike made the Rainbow Six gameplay style more fun
Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree (Score:2)
I still feel other games such as the original quake TF, or Tribes 2 were much better games, even if they were not as popular.
I disagree. (Score:4, Interesting)
RtS games? The Sims? Civilization? Heck, SimCity did come out before Doom, after all. Notice the general lack of pure Adventure games on consoles? Notice the difference between computer RPGs and console RPGs?
Maybe I'm biased since I'm one of those rare cases that never got into Doom in the first place, but it wasn't the original first person shooter, and heck, from all I hear it's not the original deathmatch either [vgmuseum.com]!
Do you seriously think that if deathmatches had been invented on consoles (and they may well have been--see above link) that they would not be transferred to PC with online and LAN capabilities, quickly becomming more popular than the corresponding console equivalents?
Though yes, I'll agree that Doom deserves credit for popularizing it...the same way FF7 deserves credit for making RPGs more mainstream than niche.
Re:I disagree. (Score:2, Interesting)
I also never got into Doom. I tried, but after 5 minutes into the second episode, I realised I was just playing the first episode again with different maps.
People like to point out the pseudo-3Dness of Doom, but a certain first person PC RPG had came out many months previous that did it already: Ultima Underworld. The difference is play pace.
However, I do acknowledge Doom for what it did ie the popularising.
Didn't Ultima Underworld... (Score:1)
Re:Didn't Ultima Underworld... (Score:1)
Re:I disagree. (Score:1)
Re:I disagree. (Score:1, Informative)
That game is several years old, and the fan community is still developing new and interesting things for it, and begging for more addons from Bethesda. I really doubt that the popularity for the non-expandable console version is as heavy.
Good game all around though, and glad that it's just as successful on console as
Nah... (Score:2, Interesting)
Doom was a classic. The reason I jumped to PC gaming. Can't say Doom 3 interests me in the slightest. Too little, too late.
Re:Nah... (Score:1, Interesting)
Too late? Doom 2 is still extremely fun at LAN parties, so I don't think Doom 3 is particularly "late". As far as "too little"? See, for me and the two groups I regularly deathmatch with, that's exactly the attraction. We still play Doom 2. Some CS, sure. But strip it all down to the most essential components, and Doom 2 is still poetry. Give me $200 to upgrade my PC to its minimum requirements and I'm all over Doom 3. Keep the g
Re:Nah... (Score:1)
Id have released little more than tech demos disguised as games since Quake.
1987 LAN parties: via MIDI (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, it was one of the first popular multiplayer deathmatch games for PC, but Doom didn't invent the multiplayer deathmatch idea.
I'm pretty sure that MIDI Maze & Faceball 2000 [wikipedia.org] can claim the FPS multiplayer deathmatch credit for home gaming. It came out in 1987 and you actually used MIDI cables to create a ring network of up to 16 machines. Faceball followed in the same vein for the Game Boy (up to 4 players plus drones) and Game Gear (2 players plus drones). The ST game became quite a cult classic at user group meetings.
LAN parties before LANs! Yee ha. MIDI cables in the 80's. Where there's an FPS deathmatch will, there's a way...
Re:1987 LAN parties: via MIDI (Score:1, Informative)
Infestation [atari.st], released by Psygnosis in 1990. Completely 3D, with flat-shaded polygons used for the world and for monsters. Seems bloody difficult, though - either that or the version I downloaded is broken, killing the player within a minute or so. From screenshots I've seen, it appears to go indoors as well, in full 3D again.
Castle Master [atari.st], released
Re:1987 LAN parties: via MIDI (Score:1, Interesting)
1990. And no way is it the first FPS...
Re:1987 LAN parties: via MIDI (Score:4, Interesting)
The multiplayer deathmatch credit bothers me. I know Doom was really popular, and I don't argue that it advanced the industry, and I can see where we might have fled to dedicated gaming hardware if not for some amazing game like Doom. But really... we were all doing multiplayer deathmatch in text mode with nSnipes [textmodegames.com] shortly after the first networks were born. And Macs were running Bolo [lgm.com] before Doom was ever around.
Re: (Score:1)
Maze Wars (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember playing this on a mac in the late '80s.
Re:How bout Wolfenstin!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Not quite true (Score:5, Insightful)
Then we have the way that the game was designed artistically - the quality of audio, textures, monster designs was superior to anything on the market.
Then we have the gameplay - not just multiplayer, but with a wide array of weapons including the almighty BFG that all other megaweapons follow meekly after, and the chainsaw for hacking up evil monsters. What's not to like?
But these things have all been done before. DooM3 will carry none of these revolutions - Far Cry has already hit the market before DooM3 and HL2 are even "ready". DooM will have a hard time improving on the state-of-the-art graphics of Far Cry. Physics engine, audio... Will DooM3 even let you drive vehicles as you can in Far Cry? I can't imagine boats or buggies or even the awesome hanglider having a place in DooM3.
DooM3 will sell well, of course, because of the hype, and because of the brand name. But I think it has become too little, too late. Fary Cry does all of the "revolutionary" things that DooM3 has been claiming it will do for years. And DooM3 has one handicap that Far Cry doesn't... DooM3 has been engineered to run on XBox, with all the weaknesses of the underpowered console pedigree to carry like a chain around its neck.
Re:Not quite true (Score:2, Informative)
Ye 'ol evolution vs revolution debate (Score:1)
I expect Doom 3 will be a great game (as a not-so-random side note, anyone have expensive hardware they'd like to donate to, um... me?), but twenty years from now, I doubt it will be remembered as a "classic revolutionary" game. Most every feature people have imagined has already been implemented in some first-person shooter or another. Now it's basically
If it doesn't make the grade... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If it doesn't make the grade... (Score:4, Funny)
That's like saying the plot of a newspaper is better than than of the dictionary.
+5 Funny (Score:2)
Re:If it doesn't make the grade... (Score:5, Insightful)
A large part of Doom's success was due to the fact that there was really nothing else like it at the time.
I just finished playing both Doom I and Doom II through Doom Legacy, and I want to say -- there still isn't anything like Doom I.
Doom I is brilliantly balanced.
Its interesting, its scary, and it encourages brains, not mindless shooting. [Mindless shooting will get you through Doom I, but tactics will make the job a lot easier.]
The lighting is superb, the level designs are smart, the hidden areas well done.[0]. 10 years later, its still a hell of a good game.
Quake doesn't have it, Half-Life doesn't have it, and even Doom II doesn't have it, but there's something about Doom that makes it worth replaying.
I wish there were more games like Doom I.
[0] Compare this to Doom II, which had a tendency to throw monsters at you in large groups just to increase "difficulty". Even with the double-barrel shotgun, secret Wolfenstein levels, and elder sign, I still prefer Doom I.
DOOM determined Administrator of boulder.general (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the 1995, the Usenet group boulder.general had some bozo who kept asking who the "Administrator" of this Usenet Group was (for those that don't know, there is none!) ... so a couple of us kept speaking up and jacking him around by saying we were ... but then (in typical Uselessnet fashion), there was a a big discussion about how come WE were the administrators, and how it should be decided ... it was all light-hearted.
We talked about settling with Rock Paper Scissors (aka RoShamBo) [komar.org] ... but we decided the best way was a DOOM deathmatch ... and thanx to Google, I actually found a web page that documents the DOOM Deathmatch to determine who is the Administrator of boulder.general [toddbradley.com] ;-)
I also found a Usenet thread courtesy of Google Groups [google.com] Note that we played on Pentium 90 MHz machine - was pretty state-of-the-art back then! ;-)
SW Patents? (Score:1)
It's a good thing they didn't patent MPDM then.
people still play doom online to boot (Score:2, Informative)
Re:people still play doom online to boot (Score:1)
You are all missing important point. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not the point.
When Doom was released everyone realized obvious things:
- you need fast video card (it was _before_ 3D accelerators!!!), after change from low-end VGA into high-end VGA you could clearly see why it's better
- you need sound card! before doom sound card was just "bonus" for rich players, but can you imagine playing doom without sound? if yes, then you don't know doom at all
- you need fast CPU _only_ for game, and there is no limit - just faster means more fps
Doom was game which started "hardware run".
Maybe you haven't noticed, but there is huge set of missions, graphics, sounds, etc... for Doom. It never happen before Doom. No game had so much contrib stuff. I had whole CD-ROM of that. Whole game was just few MB, CD-ROM had more than 600MB data. It's like 200 CD-ROMs of Civ3 missions.
Thanks to Doom players community changed. Players are important now. There is hardware made only for games (not just joysticks!), mission editor is stardard, there is always downloadable stuff for each popular game, there are servers working only as game servers, there is whole industry around. Was it really same before Doom? Compare budget of standard Atari game from 80s with any game today. And Doom was just milestone.
Re:You are all missing important point. (Score:1)
Re:You are all missing important point. (Score:2)
Re:You are all missing important point. (Score:1)
However, I stand with those who don't see much in the FPS movement because really, it's these players who are shouting about Doom. So for what it's worth, I may hold bias.
For me, the game that screamed "sound card, video card, and CPU" was Dune 2. Then it was X-Wing, then Tie Fighter.
Doom splashed big I think because of the style and pace of its gameplay which has endured for so many shooters since. It's fast to get into and get going, by yourself or with a group of people. That's where it def
Doom had a unique gameplay mode (Score:5, Interesting)
Machine #1 : doom -devparm -nodes 3 -left
Machine #2 : doom -devparm -nodes 3
Machine #3 : doom -devparm -nodes 3 -right
and you'd have your main machine as the front screen, and the other two showing the left and right side, for a 270 degree wrap around mode
I actually got it working one night at a LAN, but couldn't 'unlock' my play style enough to use it effectivly.
Now you have video cards like the Matrox Parhelia-512 that do the same thing onboard, a mere 11 years later.
The real innovator (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The real innovator corrections (Score:2, Informative)
I'd hate to say it but.. (Score:1)
What about Castle Woolfenstein? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What about Castle Woolfenstein? (Score:2)
--trb
Error in article about the rendering in Doom (Score:5, Informative)
Unless they're referring to Wolfenstein 3D, which uses raycasting, this is wrong. Doom doesn't use raycasting, it renders by recursively walking a precalculated binary space partition tree
Simplified (I won't provide a detailed explanation because I don't know it), the BSP tree is, as the name implies, a binary tree that partitions space. The level is partitioned recursively so that the root of the tree is the entire map, each node divides the parent node in two parts, and the leafs are convex subsectors which don't need to be divided further.
Determining what to render is then done by walking the tree recursively, starting from the root. The clever thing here is the occlusion: if the bounding box of a node is outside the field of view, it can be ditched, along with all of its children.
A node can also be ignored, along with its children, if its bounding box is fully occluded by nodes that have already been drawn. Since the child node closest to the camera is drawn first at each branch, close objects are generally drawn before far-away ones, efficiently allowing things out-of-sight to be occluded.
BSP rendering is not only fast but also elegant in its simple algorithmic setup. It has the disadvantage, however, that the tree has to be precalculated. This means walls can't move during the game, as the BSP tree would have to be recalculated continuously. Doom's BSP is two-dimensional, though, so it is still possible for floors and ceilings to move up and down.
Wolfenstein is able to do raycasting efficiently because all walls are aligned to a perpendicular grid; the same technique wouldn't work as well with the arbitrary geometry Doom allows, at least it wasn't possible with 1993's hardware.
And for the record, neither raycasting nor BSP were Carmack's revolutionary ideas, though he might have been the first to use BSP in a game - I'm not sure.
Contrived Origination (Score:1)