John Romero On Reinventing the Shooter 266
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."
Cannot Read Without Racial Stereotype Sidekick (Score:2, Funny)
Sorry, I cannot read TFA without my trusty sidekick superfly
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Superfly was supposed to be French. [salon.com]
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He's never going to live it down (Score:4, Insightful)
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Mandatory penny-arcade?
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I am more interested in reinventing of John Romero (Score:2)
He's right (Score:5, Interesting)
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Duck hunt or a carnival shooter maybe.
But, really, there is little overlap between what you want for your children and what the people who play shooters want.
I think a game like you describe would be lame for people who play shooters, and not really remove the stuff you want except to mask them in paintball.
Kind of like trying to make a zombie movie without people getting e
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Or, I've seen games which try to span multiple segments and fail miserably and am skeptical you could make it successful.
Well, given that I had to google who he is, my point about it being a much smaller market seems to stand.
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Take a look at Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. Class-based arena shooter, but just mild semi-cute cartoon violence.
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Try Mirror's edge too, very minimal violence. Arguably, if the player needs violence it means they've failed to play the game as intended.
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Photography? Recording a film set is called "shooting" for a reason.
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To be fair, it's not quite so dire. There are plenty of shooters that do things differently. Shooters with RPG elements, shooters with stealth elements, shooters with puzzle elements... To ignore those is unfair because your ideas will probably fall into the same category - shooters with a twist (or many twists) to make them a little different than (most of) the shooters that came before.
My favourite shooters over the last few years have been "shooters with a twist". I've still got a backlog of them. There
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Don't forget Virtua Cop (fixed movement light-gun action.) I miss Virtua Cop and its clones. When VR becomes more mainstream I expect to see more of this kind of game.
Geez, he still has a point (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Geez, he still has a point (Score:5, Insightful)
The need has always been there. What's lacking today is the desire to obtain venture capital. In an atmosphere of Kickstarter, which is maybe the worst thing to happen to gaming this decade, why the hell should anyone worry about convincing people to invest when you can get people to just give you the money you want, whether or not you actually build (or finish) a game.
The phenomenon of "Early Access" games that never, ever make it to final release occurred simultaneously with Kickstarter, and not coincidentally.
Nah, the requirement to get money to make a game has always been there. But today there are too many shortcuts. And it's everywhere in the corporate world. Why do the hard work of selling an idea to investors, hiring people, getting facilities up and running, etc etc? The goal for most of the corporate world today is obfuscate your income stream so well that people don't realize they're the product. Like google or Facebook. It's one reason you have so many people unemployed and underemployed. When there's so much money to be made by NOT providing a product or service to people who think they are your customers and hiding who your end-users really are, it makes sense that they'd go this route.
The problem is this shows a deep hostility for your customers and/or users. And it's not sustainable.
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To be fair, Wasteland 2 hasn't happened yet.
The supporters of Kickstarter are always pointing to games that haven't been released yet as examples of its success.
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"The supporters of Kickstarter are always pointing to games that haven't been released yet as examples of its success."
Faster than light. Shovel Knight and Shadowrun have been successful, the first Shadow run was rough but they more then made up for it with Dragonfall. Developers who've never made a game in a genre or been away from it for many years go through a learning curve as they relearn the ropes of making that certain type of game. So that is somewhat forgivable.
Kickstarter has defintiely been abu
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While I totally agree that Romero was an abject failure...
Doom, Quake, Wolfenstien - "abject failure"? Please.
Re:Geez, he still has a point (Score:5, Informative)
It's not really fair to paint Romero as a complete failure, he brought soul to id's games, their games were just hollow without him. The success of Wolfenstein, then Doom, then Quake can't be pinned on one person, it was the culmination of talent at id with John Carmack doing great work with graphics programming advances, people like American McGee producing great maps, Romero coming up with great storylines, and Paul Steed producing great models and so on.
What Romero failed at was going it alone, he just didn't have what it took to manage a project and studio all by himself, that's where he failed. But credit where credit's due, he was responsible in no small part for breathing much of the life into id's games which is why without him, we just had these soulless graphics tech demos that id has produced ever since he left.
This guy above all else knows what makes an FPS great, what he needs is a great team to take the whole business side of things off him and a great project leader that will give him the freedom to do most of what he wants, but the common sense to reign him in where he starts pushing the boat out just a bit too much in terms of what's practical in a reasonable timeframe and with finite resources. If he finds that, I don't see why he can't breathe life into a great FPS like he's done many times before the great Daikatana fuck up.
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But credit where credit's due, he was responsible in no small part for breathing much of the life into id's games which is why without him, we just had these soulless graphics tech demos that id has produced ever since he left.
Quake 2 was the first post-Romero Id game, and I'd hardly call that soulless. But your point does stand; the book Masters of Doom paints a bleak picture of Id post Quake 2, which led to the storyless Quake 3.
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I do agree Quake 2 was decent, but as you say it was ultimately the exception. I suspect though even this may be because Romero in part must've had some influence there - he didn't leave id until '96 and Quake 2 was released in 97.
Ironically he left because of an argument between Carmack and him about the future of the company. The company hasn't done so well since Carmack got his way so as great of an enginer programmer Carmack is I'm still not convinced that he's a talented games developer, because he jus
no (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:no (Score:5, Informative)
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Wrong... the community created minecraft. All Notch did was let them do it.
Wrong. Notch didn't let them do it, he just didn't try to stop them. Minecraft had no hooks for moddability whatsoever until recently. Consequently you had problems with mods stepping on one another. It's not until 1.8 that Minecraft has switched to using namespaced block ids internally to prevent this.
What's most amazing about Minecraft is that none of the technically-superior free alternatives won out. Probably if they actually supported the same data files there would be some actual competition. It's not
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Notch's Minecraft was inspired by Zach Barth's abandoned Infiniminer, but infiniminer was just one gameplay aspect of Dwarf Fortress extracted, purified, and switched to first person graphics. (worth noting that the predecessor to Dwarf Fortress was in fact first person 3d [bay12games.com]. It was even voxel-based.)
And what was the inspiration for the mining and building in Dwarf Fortress? Roguelikes and sim games.
There are no ideas that don't build on other ideas.
Obligatory... (Score:2)
Female dog with a gun (Score:2)
So? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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"Oh yeah, you took a steaming turd on my computer."
I don't recall him having any part of Windows, Linux, or OSX development.
MenuetOS Master Race. Making n00bs like you into bitches one install at a time.
Please let it be single-player (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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"gamers would rather have an intensely fun one hour game than a grindy 100 hour one"
This is absolutely true. I don't want a grindy 100 hour game.
"players don't want long games"
This is absolutely false, I want a long game that I enjoy all the way through.
Just to give an example, I really enjoyed Far Cry 3, but I got bored of it after ~20 hours through, could not bring myself to finish the game. This left a sour taste in my mouth. After a while the gameplay just kept repeating itself, the gameplay itself was
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Do you want a long game all the way through or do you want a lot of small games tied together with a good story?
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In a way, I hope for a video game crash similar to 1983. This may be the only way we might see actual creative gaming again, since the cool games are not going to come from the big names.
Are you nuts? The world of games is better and more interesting than it has been in *years*. All in one: Kickstarter. From about a period of 2003 to 2010, the only interesting games for me besides WoW were things like Civilization series. (Oh, and Half-Life 2).
Now we have a *ton* of "indie"/kickstarter projects. Some are no
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Which is a huge oxygen-sink for the industry. Games that never get made or never get finished. The eternal "Early Access" of the spotless mind.
Kickstarter has been a disaster for gaming. The fact that you can only point to games that have not been released as its "successes" tells you everything you need to know about kickstarter.
If you're an indie game dev, Kickstarter is wonderful because it means you really don't have to perform. I mean, think abo
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Well Shadowrun has actually been fully released for a long while now, and Planetary Anihilation was just released I believe. I can't speak for PA as I haven't played it yet but Shadowrun's initial campaign was fun, and I have heard good things about the new campaign.
The best thing he's ever done was Stevie Case (Score:2)
everything else was lacking.
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Xonotic (Score:3)
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/ [xonotic.org]
Sounds like Red Faction (Score:2)
"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
I was with him until... (Score:2)
he used the phrase "take the lessons of"
AKA: Romero wanting to jump on the bandwagon (Score:2)
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.
"Design is law" still gets you no cred (Score:2)
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 [penny-arcade.com]
John Romero is going to make you his (Score:2)
Notch.
A Little Late (Score:2)
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.
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Saurbraten, based on Cube 2, based on Cube. Quake, but you can modify the level during play. It's from the 90s.
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His point is that build interesting things. Push whats out there.
Shooter? Well, that makes sense. (Score:2)
At first glance, I thought John Romero had reinvented the scooter. Segway 2.0 with a BFG on the handle bar?
!Shooter ? (Score:2)
One of the biggest limitations of the Shooter genre is right there in the name.
Fully destructible environments (Score:2)
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 co
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Divinity: Original Sin has a lot of interesting things you can do with the environment.
Re: Talk is cheap. (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know, pretty much every modern FPS is based on ideas thought up by this guy. I'm willing to give him a pass even on that last gigantic swing and miss.
Rob, Top five gaming crimes perpetuated by John Romero in the '00s. Go. Sub-question: is it in fact unfair to criticize a formerly great artist for his latter day sins, is it better to burn out or fade away?
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You must not have played many FPS games.
Re: Talk is cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
He's right, you're wrong. Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake. That's a career any developer would be envious of, and yes, those games clearly defined the FPS genre.
Has he done anything lately? Not really. Has he had some big failures? Definitely. But he's still a better game developer than anyone posting on this article will ever be.
That said, I'm not sure I'm going to go to him first as an expert on the future of the gaming industry...
Re: Talk is cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure I get your point. I was for the most part defending him and his career. But still, if he hasn't done anything notable in the industry in over a decade, there is good reason to question current relevancy of his opinions.
Though if you want to talk those with higher batting averages - John Carmack is the Babe Ruth of the Game Developer Hall of Fame, but even his recent games have been fairly mediocre. How about Michael Morhaime? Ray Muzyka? Sid Meyer? Tim Schafer? Sam Houser? Jason Jones? Ken Levine? Mostly relevant for 15+ years with consistent hits the whole time.
Romero did make at least one good point in his interview - it's not all about the technology. Good design, writing, understanding the customers/market, and adapting to that new market is just as important, and all of this I listed are still relevant because they focused on all of those things beyond the technology...
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Re:That was the start (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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And it was shareware!
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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
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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 th
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Wait, the Simpsons has no violence (and adult content)? You must have been watching a different TV show from what I have been watching the last 20+ years...
And I think you are talking about a completely different game genre. Do you actually know what the S in FPS stands for? Pretty sure there isn't a "whole market just waiting for" Nerf Deathmatch.
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Pretty sure there isn't a "whole market just waiting for" Nerf Deathmatch.
Actually, there very probably is. Deathmatch without the completely-unnecassary-anyway blood splatters. Fun weapons that cover you in goo, or shrink you to a tiny size, or whatever. Stuff you can play with your kids without the whole simulated murder thing going on. And yes I know we should all be outside climbing trees and/or inside singing songs around the piano, but video games can be quite fun.
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Pretty sure there isn't a "whole market just waiting for" Nerf Deathmatch.
Actually, there very probably is. Deathmatch without the completely-unnecassary-anyway blood splatters. Fun weapons that cover you in goo, or shrink you to a tiny size, or whatever. Stuff you can play with your kids without the whole simulated murder thing going on. And yes I know we should all be outside climbing trees and/or inside singing songs around the piano, but video games can be quite fun.
There are lots of Nerf Deathmatch games. One I remember in particular, was based on the Unreal 1 engine Nerf Arena Blast [wikipedia.org]. It came out around the same time as UT so it felt very similar. There are plenty of gameplay videos on youtube [youtube.com].
I had fun with the demo back in the day
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Re: Talk is cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are trying to avoid having your children exposed to all forms of violent entertainment? Including violent cartoons?
So what happens when they get into their teens and you no longer can control what they watch? (I assume that you don't have them locked up in the basement.)
They are going to be exposed to violence at a time when they feel the need to rebel against their parents and become more independent while associating the censorship with you. Does that sound like a good idea?
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You obviosly watched too many beheading videos as a kid!
You and the likes of you are a good reason NOT to expose young children to violence!
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You and the likes of you are a good reason NOT to expose young children to violence!
Thought control through censorship doesn't work. A better approach is gradual exposure combined with thoughtful reflection and ethical training, of course that takes work and who wants that?
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It just seems hypocritical to let you kids watch the 'Simpson's' with 'Itchy and Scratchy', then claim FPS are too violent.
Also, his post mention Duke Nukem, but he doesn't seem to know you can turn off the gore.
In short: It sounds like he is making it up. In fact, I hope he is because otherwise he is sending very mixed messages to his kids, as well setting them up to rebel in a violent manner. you know, based on his 1 post :)
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A first person SHOOTER without the violence? wtf? Go play nerf arena.
I guess it explains why I dont' watch the simpsons.. it's about as boring and bland as possible while still calling it 'comedy. I want the violence. It's part of the fun.
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Portal, Portal 2, QUBE, Antichamber
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You do know the 'S' in 'FPS' is for shooter, right? It's inherently violent because you are shooting cartoons.
I wonder what kind of kid is old enough for portal; which has some grim themes in it, but not for TF2.
BTW, you can find TF2 servers with the Birthday mode turned on; which I actually enjoy more the n the blood. It cracks me up when my character explodes in balloons, streamers, and a trike wheel.
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For whatever reason, I found it, despite it's lack of thematic consistency, the most fun FPS by far.. or maybe I'm just waxing nostalgic.
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is it in fact unfair to criticize a formerly great artist for his latter day sins, is it better to burn out or fade away?
Doesn't matter as long as you're doing it in dignity.
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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 ca
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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 d
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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
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" 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,
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Obvious troll is obvious.
Re:I can't leave without my buddy Superfly... (Score:5, Informative)
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why not? it happens in real life....
Re:Please retire... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!".
Re:Please retire... (Score:4, Interesting)
"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
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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 f
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"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 thin
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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!"
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like Warzone 2100 (technically console first, but it lived on with PC)
I thought it was simultaneously released on PC and PSone. Yep, April '99 on the PC, May of '99 on the PSone.
Very interesting game. For those who haven't played it, it's an RTS with 3D map and units. (which is why it runs better on the PSone than the C&C's do) You design/build the units from building blocks of chassis, drive systems, weapons. Unlike other RTS's your units are smarter and collect experience. You actually want to recycle units and repair units and have the commands available to tell y
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Also, to point out, it was open sourced a while ago, and has been improved and has quite a vibrant community behind it:
http://wz2100.net/ [wz2100.net]
I played the original when I was young, and was happy to see it still exists, and is still a lot of fun to play. Plus works flawlessly on Linux :-)