'Doom' Creator John Romero Explains What's Wrong With Today's Shooter Games (theguardian.com) 126
An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian:
"Give us more guns!" is a common battle-cry among players of first-person shooters, the videogame industry's bloodiest genre. Doom co-creator John Romero has a rather different opinion. "I would rather have fewer things with more meaning, than a million things you don't identify with," he says, sitting in a Berlin bar mocked up to resemble a 1920s Chicago speakeasy. "I would rather spend more time with a gun and make sure the gun's design is really deep -- that there's a lot of cool stuff you learn about it...."
Modern shooters are too close to fantasy role-playing games in how they shower you with new weapons from battle to battle, Romero suggests. This abundance of loot -- which reflects how blockbuster games generally have become Netflix-style services, defined by an unrelenting roll-out of "content" -- means you spend as much time comparing guns in menus as savouring their capabilities. It encourages you to think of each gun as essentially disposable, like an obsolete make of smartphone. "The more weapons you throw in there, the more you're playing an inventory game." Romero contrasts this to the sparing design of the original Doom, which launched in 1993 with a grand total of eight guns. "For Doom, it was really important that every time you got a new weapon, it never made any previous weapons useless...."
Doom is also a game that knows how to keep a secret. It isn't just a firefight simulator but a treacherous, vaguely avant-garde work of 3D architecture. Its levels are mazes of hidden rooms and camouflaged doors that screech open behind you -- sometimes revealing a pile of ammunition, sometimes disgorging enemies into areas you've cleared. Today's shooters set less store by secret spaces, Romero says, because they cost so much to make.
Modern shooters are too close to fantasy role-playing games in how they shower you with new weapons from battle to battle, Romero suggests. This abundance of loot -- which reflects how blockbuster games generally have become Netflix-style services, defined by an unrelenting roll-out of "content" -- means you spend as much time comparing guns in menus as savouring their capabilities. It encourages you to think of each gun as essentially disposable, like an obsolete make of smartphone. "The more weapons you throw in there, the more you're playing an inventory game." Romero contrasts this to the sparing design of the original Doom, which launched in 1993 with a grand total of eight guns. "For Doom, it was really important that every time you got a new weapon, it never made any previous weapons useless...."
Doom is also a game that knows how to keep a secret. It isn't just a firefight simulator but a treacherous, vaguely avant-garde work of 3D architecture. Its levels are mazes of hidden rooms and camouflaged doors that screech open behind you -- sometimes revealing a pile of ammunition, sometimes disgorging enemies into areas you've cleared. Today's shooters set less store by secret spaces, Romero says, because they cost so much to make.
Flight Simulator 2020 (Score:3)
That sounds like a fun setting, resembling something real. I prefer something like Counter-Strike, which tries to be like something relatively close to the real world, asymptotically approaching it, over interactive cartoons which bear no resemblance to reality and are pretty much one permutation after another of Call of Duty, Minecraft, and Day-Z.
Re:Flight Simulator 2020 (Score:4, Insightful)
"Flight Simulator 2020"
Is very much a problem for modern action games, The way I see it you should be able to play the game with movement, jump, maybe crouch, a shoot button and an action button. I start getting pissed off when my run around and shoot things game suddenly needs a keyboard map like that of a Boeing 747 simulator.
Any other keys should be non-action and pause to use like inventory, map etc. Ok, 1 key for grenades and one for reload but NO MORE, stop already.
Comment removed (Score:4)
Exactly. (Score:2)
I remember several places in DN3D that I'd search thru the 3rd or 4th time thru the map, just to see if I could get there, and see what was there.
I remember finding writing on the wall several times, like "How did you get here?" and the like.
I didn't use noclip mode, so it was a serious effort every time, and made it a reason to Keep Looking.
Modern scripted games suck for exactly this reason; if I wanted to watch a movie, I'd be elsewhere, watching a movie.
Re: Exactly. (Score:2)
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Scripted games have low replayability and extremely short play time compared to more open world games, so simply a shite investment and to be avoided. Want to watch a movie watch a movie, want to watch a movie whilst playing a game, have it playing in the background on the idiot box. People want to craft their own adventure at their own pace, open world games are the most popular for that reason.
After three times watching am unskippable cut scene, I want to virtually strangle the developer and the best I c
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Scripted games have low replayability and extremely short play time compared to more open world games
Yes just like movies, music, books, TV shows, etc. What's wrong with that? Storytelling doesn't need to be confined to specific mediums.
Want to watch a movie watch a movie, want to watch a movie whilst playing a game, have it playing in the background on the idiot box.
That's not really the same thing, some people want to play scripted games at least some of the time, what's wrong with that?
People want to craft their own adventure at their own pace, open world games are the most popular for that reason.
If that were true of all people all of the time then open world games would be the only games, but there are different kinds of people. In fact even within individual games you can end up with a linear, storytelling component that goes alongside a comp
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I start getting pissed off when my run around and shoot things game suddenly needs a keyboard map like that of a Boeing 747 simulator.
I felt the same way about Shadow of Mordor until I played it with my 360 controller. I wanted to play it with KB+Mouse to make sniping easier, but having to remember which key was which was annoying. But wow, having everything separated out into different buttons was great. I almost never found myself doing something I didn't want to do. The play control is like ten times better than any of the Assassin's Creed games I've played (I think there's one or two I don't have yet.)
I was sure we'd have affordable k
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" I start getting pissed off when my run around and shoot things game suddenly needs a keyboard map like that of a Boeing 747 simulator"
Damn, I thought that went out of style after the mid 90s. Many of the "Doom clones" were very bad with this. Those FPSes with the insane amount of required keys just to be able to play didn't do very well in the marketplace.
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sitting in a Berlin bar mocked up to resemble a 1920s Chicago speakeasy
That sounds like a fun setting,
And certainly a lot more salubrious than the other alternative:
sitting in a Berlin bar mocked up to resemble a 1923 Munich beer-hall [wikipedia.org]
Staring at Inventories (Score:1)
“The more weapons you throw in there, the more you’re playing an inventory game."
One of the more interesting and salient points. I play a good deal of Destiny 2 and I've been fighting for inventory space in my "vault" (ingame mass storage of equipment) since a couple weeks after launch. I love these stupid guns, but there's so friggin' many of them... and I like having them in my collection, to pull out and play with any time I choose. Sometimes I wish I hadn't kept a huge pile of year 1 weapons
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“The more weapons you throw in there, the more you’re playing an inventory game."
One of the more interesting and salient points. I play a good deal of Destiny 2 and I've been fighting for inventory space in my "vault" (ingame mass storage of equipment) since a couple weeks after launch. I love these stupid guns, but there's so friggin' many of them... and I like having them in my collection, to pull out and play with any time I choose...
So, modern FPS games have been reduced to nothing more than a bloody game of fucking Pokemon.
Seems Romero has a point. Didn't realize it had gotten that pathetic.
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If it is not a railroad shooter then different people will play a game in a different way, hence the variety of weapons.
He's right and wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Romero is right, but time has passed him by. Games aren't about challenge any more. They're about a constant stream of *novelty*. Players want something new all the time. Don't give it to them, and they'll dump your game for another that fulfills their need for novelty. Challenge feels like frustration to them, and gives them a bad feeling. They don't play games to feel bad.
Time was, game companies didn't have psychologists working for them telling them the best way to addict players to their product by giving them good feelings. Today? They do.
Re:He's right and wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Romero is right, but time has passed him by. Games aren't about challenge any more. They're about a constant stream of *novelty*. Players want something new all the time. Don't give it to them, and they'll dump your game for another that fulfills their need for novelty. Challenge feels like frustration to them, and gives them a bad feeling. They don't play games to feel bad.
Time was, game companies didn't have psychologists working for them telling them the best way to addict players to their product by giving them good feelings. Today? They do.
They're just catering to the fact that people have the attention-span and commitment-capability of a goldfish with ADHD. I blame smartphones, social media and the "sound-bite" for, at least, part of this.
Re:He's right and wrong (Score:4, Informative)
I think we over estimate how much effect the "latest" tech has had on such a thing. There was a time in the late 1800s when newspapers and/or novels were blamed for pretty much the same effects.
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I think we over estimate how much effect the "latest" tech has had on such a thing. There was a time in the late 1800s when newspapers and/or novels were blamed for pretty much the same effects.
The scary thing is what if they were right? And we're that much farther down the drain ...
Re: He's right and wrong (Score:2)
I love the variety of looter shooters like Borderlands. You know why? Because I loved the variety of RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment, or action RPGs like Diablo 2. It's not about not being able to pay attention, it's that it can be an interesting mechanic in and of itself. Modern shooters are different, but I'm not sure why that's inherently a failure of design.
I'm not looking to play the same game over and over again, even if the textures are better and the frame rates are higher.
I'd also b
incorrect nothing to do with attention span (Score:2)
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They're just catering to the fact that people have the attention-span and commitment-capability of a goldfish with ADHD. I blame smartphones, social media and the "sound-bite" for, at least, part of this.
I blame observer bias.
Re: He's right and wrong (Score:1)
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Romero is right, but time has passed him by. Games aren't about challenge any more. They're about a constant stream of *novelty*. Players want something new all the time. Don't give it to them, and they'll dump your game for another that fulfills their need for novelty. Challenge feels like frustration to them, and gives them a bad feeling. They don't play games to feel bad.
And GenY/Z still wonders why the older generations call them spoiled and coddled.
Time was, game companies didn't have psychologists working for them telling them the best way to addict players to their product by giving them good feelings. Today? They do.
You know what the largest downside to games purposely avoiding all challenge because it might induce stress?
Watching those same coddled idiots demand the same of the world.
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Romero is right, but time has passed him by. Games aren't about challenge any more. They're about a constant stream of *novelty*.
And GenY/Z still wonders why the older generations call them spoiled and coddled.
No they don't, they know it's because they're hypocrites. We wanted a constant stream of novelty back when too, that's why modding was so widespread. And it's not new to not want to fail over and over again, people have always liked success. That's why movies with happy endings dominate. It's not new.
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I disagree. I assert it was an explosion of creativity, added to a desire to learn programming. It was fundamentally a different ethos. Today, games are engineered not by programmers but by psychologists. They deliberately include hooks designed to addict players.
Challenge was once the end-all, be-all of gaming. Players were brainy types who liked learning things and overcoming obstacles. Today, the pool of players has expanded so greatly as to totally marginalize the former brainy types. The new players
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Challenge was once the end-all, be-all of gaming.
Yes, and we were poorer for it. Both challenge-type games and experience-type games are worthy of existence. The former is a skills test, some people like that. The latter is more like a movie, but where you get to feel like you're inside of it. Some people like that. Some people like both. Don't be so high and mighty, what you enjoy isn't the arbiter of quality.
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Romero is right, but time has passed him by. Games aren't about challenge any more. They're about a constant stream of *novelty*.
And GenY/Z still wonders why the older generations call them spoiled and coddled.
No they don't, they know it's because they're hypocrites. We wanted a constant stream of novelty back when too, that's why modding was so widespread. And it's not new to not want to fail over and over again, people have always liked success. That's why movies with happy endings dominate. It's not new.
You're missing the point here. We had both variety and the challenge of succeeding or failing. Games were created by gamers, not an army of head shrinkers hell-bent on making addiction the primary focus for game design, as we sit here and debate those "gambling" loot boxes.
This is the same society who won't sell a scratch-off lottery ticket to a minor because "addiction", and yet supports the multi-billion dollar gaming industry.
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You've very right. The relevance to today of FPS design from the early 1990s is about as relevant as early 1980s coin-op design was to Romero's time. The way people consume the content is different, so the content is itself different.
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Romero is right, but time has passed him by. Games aren't about challenge any more. They're about a constant stream of *novelty*.
Force a man to think and he'll hate you for it.
Make a man believe he's thinking and he'll love you for life.
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The original Doom also had very compelling limitations of system memory, disk space, and graphics capability to manage the subtlety of dozens of different versions of weapons. The evolution of Dungeions-and-Dragons like slow progression of your equipment as your money or range of foraging increase is not a surprise. I thought that the original Bioshock did a good job balancing weapons and allowing them some evolution.
I admit that I have a bit of time, and am going to go try out Jedi: Fallen Order. Please wi
I don't think it's just about addiction (Score:2)
Modern games aren't just designed to be addicting, they're designed to be endlessly addicting. That's John's point. Live Services have a big power creep [youtube.com] problem built into them.
Challenge in live services is usually there in the PVP. PVE games will do insanely difficult raid bosses to encourage teamwork (not out of kindness, they want you on teams so your friend
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Games aren't about challenge any more.
Nope. The games *you* play aren't about challenge any more. There are plenty of games out there that exist primarily for the challenge with ever increasing difficultly that make you wish you were playing some shitty lootershooter with a respawn point every 20 min.
Look around. There's stuff there for everyone, including the many players out there who still love the idea of challenge.
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Games aren't about challenge any more. They're about a constant stream of *novelty*.
Seems like an overly broad statement. Have you even looked through the Steam catalog lately? Sure there are some games like that but suggesting that all games are like that is pretty ignorant.
Players want something new all the time. Don't give it to them, and they'll dump your game for another that fulfills their need for novelty. Challenge feels like frustration to them, and gives them a bad feeling. They don't play games to feel bad.
Sounds more like you're projecting your views onto everybody else, I don't know what games you play but look at some of the most popular games, Call of Duty for example where there is a linear storytelling path but then there is a competitive online component or Fortnite which does indeed keep giving players new things
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Hardcore games do still sell. We've just realized over the decades that there's always been more casual gamers out there than hardcore, so the mainstream has changed focus.
There's plenty of challenging games out there. They just don't get the hundred-million dolllar budgets.
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Get Sublevel Zero Redux.
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I was so excited about playing a modern version of Descent. Unfortunately Descent (2019) while being 95% complete is stuck on distribution issues and all the developers have quit last I read. Dammit!
That's the bad descent, the real descent is overload. It's not perfect but it will scratch your descent itch. Descent underground kickstarter was not done by the original devs of descent, they were star citizen hacks that somehow got the descent IP form interplay before the real descent team got around to doing their kickstarter.
Overload (made by the original descent team), even has a level editor!
https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com]
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The real descent devs kickstarter didn't get the same cash as the star citizen devs... sigh.
Original Descent devs kicksstarter
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... [kickstarter.com]
Star citizen devs - Descent underground
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... [kickstarter.com]
They are made... (Score:2)
Romero is a hack these days... the reality is... (Score:4, Interesting)
... back in the 90's when many of us were playing Doom, Duke 3d, Descent and warcraft 2 over IPX emulators like kali. It was probably one of THE most creative times in all gaming history and it wasn't because of romero, it was because of people like John carmack who argued to release game tools and made modding and open sourcing games in the 90's a staple. This lead to huge amounts of fan made mods and levels for doom, descent, warcraft, quake and all sorts of other games. The creativity of the fans often surpassed the developers in many regards, so much that those early modders were hired by valve and other companies to make games proper or commercialize their mod as a retail product.
That stopped very quickly sadly when the general public got internet, that would lead to "the great PC game decline" of us owning our machines and programs. Why? The internet is one giant owrld sized computer which software companies now de-facto own and control because they write the laws that govern the machines. The public being ignorant of how tech works fell for every scam big business had up its sleeve to remove software ownership from the end user beginning with RPG's they had in development being rebranded mmo's and when the money started rolling in from Ultima online, everyone took notice and the main goal was to get rid of user control of software completely.
After the four horsemen of the PC game apocalypse, Ultima online, everquest, Guild wars and World of warcraft... this lead us to steam. The next 15 years from 2004 onward would see a big decline in tools/user moddable games in the AAA space, with drm on the rise and dedicated servers and exe's taken hostage on company computers and not fullly released with games. Then Team fortress 2 goes fully f2p in 2009 and a game fully f2p like league of legends is released and everyone wakes up and takes notice of the super profits of a locked down game that gamers don't own and control because now the dumb half of humanity has internet and those kids/stupid adults started sending money to SET MERE FLAGS for a skin or model to display in a game they didn't own or control. This further lead emboldened game developers and CEO's to steal the rest of game software right out from under us using a new generation of tech illiterate kids in asia and europe until we have today...
Overwatch's authoritarian you don't own the game model vs Quake 3 you own it and it even comes with level editors and the devs were nice enough to make PK3's which you can open and see the raw textures, models, etc.
So here we are 20 years later, of course creativity of modern games is ass. The game industry killed it once the internet enabled them to steal the software and take control of it by dividing the game into two pieces so you never have control of what you paid for. When Activision and others took away the ability of dedicated servers / LAN in many games so of course creativity would die. Since it interferes with microtransaction models of games like Destiny, Overwatch to fleece the cretinous and ignorant.
To watch all that go down for 20 years was pretty disturbing as a computer gamer from the 90's... that the interenet would be a force for mass software theft and privacy invasion unlike the world has ever known because the average gamer and member of the public is retard level stupid when it comes to technology.
Re:Romero is a hack these days... the reality is.. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a kernel of truth buried in your post but the idea that creativity have been removed is simply put completely bogus. Today anyone with the skills can download a professional quality game engine and start creating, at no cost until (if ever) revenue starts rolling in. Mods are everywhere with some popular ones becoming their own franchise, just as they were in the past.
Re:Romero is a hack these days... the reality is.. (Score:4, Informative)
There's a kernel of truth buried in your post but the idea that creativity have been removed is simply put completely bogus. Today anyone with the skills can download a professional quality game engine and start creating, at no cost until (if ever) revenue starts rolling in. Mods are everywhere with some popular ones becoming their own franchise, just as they were in the past.
Sorry to tell ya, modding still exists but not to the same extent in the AAA space. The space we actually care about, since it takes significant capital to make game tools to aid in mod creation. All those 90's games I mentioned were the the AAA big budget games of their time. So for that to go away in the "main" gaming space is tragedy.
Imagine mass effect, more modern Battlefields, Final fantasy, Darksiders, Transformers Fall of cybertron, with full blown modding. If you haven't played any of these games you should all go pick up or pop on youtube to go look at the future that could have been once we started getting ports... imagine all those games with open file specs, programming sdk's and tools like we had in the 90's.
I also suggest everyone get a copy of the old Neverwinter nights and open it's toolset, that's where game tools were headed briefly in the 90's before the hammer came down and mmo's/drm/microtransactions messed up modding on the PC something fierce.
https://www.gog.com/game/never... [gog.com]
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Sorry to tell ya, modding still exists but not to the same extent in the AAA space.
Did you forget the literal thousands upon thousands of mods for Skyrim, some of which were DLC-quality overhauls and expansions?
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Sorry to tell ya, modding still exists but not to the same extent in the AAA space.
Did you forget the literal thousands upon thousands of mods for Skyrim, some of which were DLC-quality overhauls and expansions?
You're missing the point, the point is while a few games from former era's still are around, the trend has been towards locking down games in the AAA space completely, aka no dedicated servers, no technical documentation, encrypted files, etc making games difficult to preserve/mod/etc. The fact that many games need to basically be reverse enginered, whereas in the 90's games CAME with programming sdk's and tools and were mod friendly. The trend is towards us never owning games and it's going to get worse
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You seem awfully upset about games. I wonder what you are going to do when you realize that all closed source software is moving this way?
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You seem awfully upset about games. I wonder what you are going to do when you realize that all closed source software is moving this way?
I'm upset about software in general, games just make a good example. The fact that our rights and freedoms are being stripped away from us at the operating system level and people are just rolling over. So yeah as a 90's slashdot nerd, the things we feared in the 90's came true and then some. None of us back then figured the population of our planet was as stupid as the internet has shown it to be. We underestimated our species intelligence in not buying stolen software. Since there's no reason for an
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Be specific. I don't believe you've got the term right.
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For the curious, stuff like this would happen for more modern games if modding hadn't been curtailed:
Descent 1+2 fan updates
https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ [dxx-rebirth.com]
d2x
http://descent2.de/ [descent2.de]
Freespace 2 -- Fan update comparisons of original graphics and fan updates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Freespace 2 source code project
http://scp.indiegames.us/ [indiegames.us]
Brutal doom
https://www.moddb.com/mods/bru... [moddb.com]
Re: Modding Half-Life got me started (Score:2)
I think modding is an incredibly important first step for many future programmers. I started learning C++ back in high school in order to mod Half-Life as well as how to use 3D Studio MAX for making units for Total Annihilation.
I had no idea how games were made, I remember emailing Valve asking if they could record a few lines of dialogue, not realizing they were hiring voice actors for their games. I got an answer back, explaining that.
Modding is great as you don't have to start from zero. And whateever yo
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You're missing the point, the point is while a few games from former era's still are around
You're looking at history with rose coloured glasses. You remember your favourites, but the fact remains gaming in the past was just as locked down as it is now with modding being a gift granted by some developers for *some* of their property. Gaming in the 90s wasn't the wild west, :do whatever the hell you want:, situation being described.
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You're looking at history with rose coloured glasses. You remember your favourites, but the fact remains gaming in the past was just as locked down as it is now with modding being a gift granted by some developers for *some* of their property. Gaming in the 90s wasn't the wild west, :do whatever the hell you want:, situation being described.
You can't be serious, there was no mass internet penetration in the past. So software companies couldn't steal parts of games and trap them on the other side of the internet. The internet allowed companies to literally steal RPG's out from under us by rebranding rpg's mmo's to take control of the software. So no, you're suffering from "fustalgia", the the future is always necessarily better than the past.
So let me get this out of the way, because you're obviously illiterate politically - the USA is a la
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I was about to mention GTA V since it has tons of mods too, but it's actually a perfect example of the anti modding craze with encrypted game files, and a developer desperately trying to kill the free modding tool OpenIV.
I started to exchange all my legal CD/DVD games with cracked ones years ago when I got enough of the bullshit.
Every time I wanted to play GTA V story mode it had to upgrade with a 1-2GB patch that took 30 minutes to download and install,
the third time it ruined some mods I used and I uninst
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The space we actually care about, since it takes significant capital to make game tools to aid in mod creation.
Similar* tools used to create the games in the first place.
*Obviously payware like Maya is problematic, but that's a process pipeline problem. Not a, there's nothing available to do this, problem.
Re: Romero is a hack these days... the reality is. (Score:1)
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Was Romero ever -not- a hack? My understanding is he has massively played up his role in Doom and the others are too good to correct history. IIRC he did a bunch of QA on levels and a small amount of level design. Bumping into walls as a QA tester is important but doesn't make him a critical figure.
When the original doom 2 team split up single player in iD games took a major hit because Quake 1 was such a disaster. So think of the original team with romero on it being "more then the sum of its parts". AKA team members check each others good and bad ideas and the result is a solid game. If you go lookup some videos of romero on youtube of him talking about quake 1 dev, you realize because iD was at the beginning of becoming a tech company they made some huge mistakes, aka not dividing the teams in
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Mod parent +1 informative.
Quake gave us CTF, ThunderWalker, TeamFortress and MegaTF -- the golden age of shooters IMHO.
Every time I play co-op Vermintide 2 or Rainbow Six Las Vegas 2 it is a brutal reminder that AAA doesn't give a fuck about long term community health -- just give us a dam map editor so we can KEEP playing the game, but nope they want to push the latest "shiny."
This is one thing that Valve did right with L4D. When a custom campaign I Hate Mountains [ihatemountains.com] was SO good that it got Valve to record NE
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Not to even mention that Counter Strike and Team Fortress started as mods. Former for Half-Life and latter for Quake. MOBA games started as a map for Warcraft 3. Etc.
And that is never happening again, because all major companies are locking down their games as fast as they can. Even Bethesda, the last company to allow massive amount of free modding is almost certainly going to lock their future games down for "paid mods", essentially paid DLC.
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it wasn't because of romero, it was because of people like John carmack who argued to release game tools and made modding and open sourcing games in the 90's a staple. This lead to huge amounts of fan made mods and levels...
But to that point, that was happening when the current /. demographic was largely in their teens and 20s. When we had too much free time and not enough money, and needed to entertain ourselves, and there was nothing else out there. No netflix, no social media, no youtube or even much online gaming. This is the Magic and AD&D era, before pokemon, at the dawn of Mario.
It was a perfect storm.
That's just not going to happen today, not just because of how locked down AAA titles are, but because there are soo
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I'm guessing that the lack of modding and mapping tools today stems just as much from publisher resistance as it does from lack of demand.
The demand is there from the gamer side, but all big companies are interested in making now is F2P/MTX garbage. So tools may or may not return depending on whether or not passionate game devs can get through to thickheaded management. I'm sure the fire still burns in the heart of certain game devs despite the madness.
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That's just not going to happen today, not just because of how locked down AAA titles are, but because there are soooo many other ways to be entertained.
The reason you're wrong is because there are soooo many more gamers alive today than there were back then. Any game which is moddable tends to have tons of mods.
I'm guessing that the lack of modding and mapping tools today stems just as much from publisher resistance as it does from lack of demand.
It's 100% publisher resistance.
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You make good points, but I cannot tell if you are agreeing or disputing the comment by blahplusplus that you are responding to. True, there are many ways, sitting in front of your computer, to be entertained that are not gaming. But even "back then" in the 80's and 90's, there were equally many ways to be occupied, from programming your PC or XT or AT, even writing a great game using Basic or Borland Pascal, or chatting on BBS's and Usenet, or else going to the mall arcade to play video games there. In
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But even "back then" in the 80's and 90's, there were equally many ways to be occupied....
That's so hilariously wrong I'm having a hard time even reading the rest of your comment. We have everything we had in the 80s and 90s now, with the addition of.....the entire fucking internet. And smartphones. Smart devices of all shapes and sizes. A connection to the world while we're hiking up a mountain in the middle of nowhere. Arduino and raspberry pi. Programmable lego sets.
When I was a kid playing cards, I was limited to the half dozen card games I knew. Today I can pull out my phone and download hu
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Overwatch's authoritarian you don't own the game model vs Quake 3 you own it and it even comes with level editors and the devs were nice enough to make PK3's which you can open and see the raw textures, models, etc.
So here we are 20 years later, of course creativity of modern games is ass.
When you cherry pick your titles you can say whatever narrative you want to push. Let me try.
Final Fantasy VIII (same year as Quake)'s authoritarian you can't play this on anything other than this one specific console model vs Fall Out 4 (same year as Overwatch) you own it and it comes with a never ending string of mods and levels made by fans and the developers worked with steam to create a system where you could install these mods with a click of the button for free.
Creativity is only dead when you cherry
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And I can play at my pace, because there is a pause button, to give me time to think, examine and make a smart choice. I would have loved to have suc
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I thought levels from Doom I and II through Quake were awesome. When I got Quake II it seemed great in tech and oddly flat, soulless, boring, dry. Only after I read "Masters of Doom" I realized why -- Romero quit id after Quake.
He and Carmack were the yin and the yang. All of Carmack's games after Quake were technically awesome and playwise dry, and Romero couldn't ship a single game of great technical quality. Such a shame.
Pretty much agree to that (Score:5, Interesting)
That is one reason I have stopped playing shooters, with some rare exceptions. Most are generic and boring.
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They were generic and boring when doom came out as well
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They were generic and boring when doom came out as well
I think you'll find precisely zero people agree with you there.
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I still miss the days of Quake MegaTF. We had so much fun playing that online, and at the small company I used to work for where we had our own server, and we created some of our own maps. I try and explain it to my son, but he loves TF2 and other games where there are a bajillion HATS you can buy. He's good at the FPS part, but also really likes all the things that Romero mentions. And honestly, it's ok to like those things! There are plenty of things I don't like that many people do. But it's the in
You know what I miss about the old FPS games? (Score:3)
I miss dogfighting. With the exception of maybe Overwatch, the new FPS games are like tactical strategy games. One or two hits and they go down. It isn't as much fun. Overwatch even is kinda meh...
Re: You know what I miss about the old FPS games? (Score:1)
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Over watch was always over rated, from day one. I could never figure out why it was popular. Cartoony repetitive shit on the same small and highly boring maps? Zzzzzz.....
Generational turnover, and it appeals to those with low skills. It's basically the first person shooter for people who are bad at fps games.
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that is absolute BS.
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Generational turnover, and it appeals to those with low skills. It's basically the first person shooter for people who are bad at fps games.
You think that's bad you should see those noobs playing Doom. Can't even handle looking up and down or having to reload weapons. They couldn't handle a modern game to save themselves.
Incidentally what I said is absurd, but no where near as absurd as your comment. But please prove us wrong. blahplusplus, we look forward to see you at the top of the league tables. When you get there there with your 1337 skillz I'm sure we'll consider your comment worthy of attention.
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Generational turnover, and it appeals to those with low skills. It's basically the first person shooter for people who are bad at fps games.
You think that's bad you should see those noobs playing Doom. Can't even handle looking up and down or having to reload weapons. They couldn't handle a modern game to save themselves.
Incidentally what I said is absurd, but no where near as absurd as your comment. But please prove us wrong. blahplusplus, we look forward to see you at the top of the league tables. When you get there there with your 1337 skillz I'm sure we'll consider your comment worthy of attention.
I'm not talking about "skill" in the absolute sense, any skilled player in any fps will dominate regardless of how hamstrung they are. I'm talking about the skill gap and the general game design - game designed around people who are bad at videogames. VS a game like quake 3, a game like quake 3 assumes it's audience want's punishment. So the gaps between players will emerge quickly and the weak will be curb stomped, in Overwatch the specials and special abilities are specifically designed to give weaker
Meh (Score:3)
Correction (Score:1)
Modern shooters are too close to shit fantasy role-playing games
Some Substance, Some Rivalry (Score:3)
He didn't seem to like Quake, but Quake brought many things to 3D FPS gaming, such as the 3D. Doom didn't really have it. Quake also brought Quakeworld LAN and Internet play, 3D adversaries instead of sprites. Quake also brought better lighting, and if it weren't for Quake many of you might not of heard of OpenGL
I think that the problem in 3D games is, and here Romero hints at but never really spells it out: most 3D games--especially 3D first person shooters used to be made like places--not a series of random modules, not a boardroom created goal, but imaginary places. Many 3D fail at this.
John Romero was an excellent level designer, and I state that as an ex-professional level designer.
This is really about attention span (Score:2)
What Romero really means is that kids today don't have the attention span to explore for secret rooms on their own when they can just look it up on YouTube on day one and have it handed to them. You weren't playing Doom over the internet; you were playing it by yourself. It was originally released as shareware, so you had incentive to play through and explore what you could without the real game. Nowadays, everyone goes to YouTube to see if the game will be "fun" before doing anything. It's not just games.
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Romero's problem is more that in Doom style 'invisible magic walls' fit in perfectly with the storyline world graphics. Cheap effects inserted into equally cheap worlds. Do that in a modern, visually rich world and immersion flies out the window. Its simply not cheap to do it the way Doom era games could without compromising game immersion.
We tend to just leave 'secrets' in the open now. Bits of world that have to be there to maintain continuity that don't need visiting for story development. Our secrets ar
It's better to have a few really different guns... (Score:2)
Rather than having a lot of em that are basically identical in terms of gameplay, only changing the damage value, ratio of fire and some hidden "hit or miss" RNG value.
On doom, the weapons that cause most damage are not hitscan things, so you had to deal with the way shoots move etc to use em optimally.
Realistic physics (Score:2)
True. (Score:2)
We still play Q2, although we've changed it up a bit. :)
We have lan parties that eventually morph into heavy drinking and movie watching, but the gaming is still fun.
The latest game we play is UT3, with probably 10 people at a time, and bots to fill.
For Q2, we play Ground Zero, and do a give all at the opening, and after every kill; it's a WFO fragfest from hell.
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Candy Crush for men (Score:4, Insightful)
The games Carmack is talking about are Candy Crush for men. They are not so much "fun" as addictive. And they are designed to be that way.
Liquor stores make a lot more money than little bookshops that sell intellectual books.
Who? (Score:3)
Isn't John Romero the guy who had one or two hits and then proceeded to develop the biggest flop in video game history (until Duke Nukem said hold my beer)?
I get it some of what he is saying is relevant, but he purposefully picks examples of games that aren't even trying to be Doom kind of ruining what little credibility he has.
It sort of says it all that he can't even get a game going on Kickstarter these days.
Side note: Doom Eternal comes out soon. A sequel to Doom (2016) a game which John Romero had nothing to do with and yet captures all the intrigue of the original ones.
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one hit wonder tells kids to get off his lawn! (Score:1)
Well said (Score:2)
Funny 'cos that's something I've been preaching for years about photographic equipment! People spend tons on new kit every few months and wonder why they never get any better at taking photos. If you don't learn the complexities of any tools you use for your chosen activity then you'll only ever scratch the surface of what those tools can offer you.
Huh? (Score:2)
I don't remember getting showered with weapons. You could pick up the guys the enemies dropped, and there were obvious sign saying use this gun for this set piece, but that was about it.
Gameplay (Score:2)
Oddly enough I was thinking about this this morning for some reason. However more in the context of what has made Fortnite and PubG the huge successes that they are. Full disclosure however I've only ever played Fortnite like once or twice, and it wasn't for me.
I go way back, so have the context. Doom wasn't all that innovative, other than it was leaps and bounds ahead in terms of graphics, specifically 3D graphics which were pretty new at the time. Only Wolfenstein 3D was before that, and it was the innova
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"pro-marry-young-girls"
I have no clue what that means?
The legal sexual age here in Denmark is 15 and marriage is 18.
In the old days where children of unwedded mothers was a thing, you could get married at 17 with permission from the Royals, but nobody give a rats ass about that in 2019. So do he wanna have sex with a 11 years old or marry a 16 years old that is the question I need an answer too before looking into that game.
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Humans are finite state machines.
Oh yeah? Prove it.
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LOL RIght. Cows.
Re: What's wrong is that they are shooter games (Score:2)
I'm old. My vision has declined to the point that I can no longer focus on the rear sights and still see the target. Fortunately my muscle memory allows me to hit pistol and carbine targets without using sights, while moving. I've lived an interesting life, punk.
And judging from your email, my adult children are older, and better adjusted, that you.
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Did you ever play TacOps for UT? That was a more arcade-style game, but still rewarded teamwork. And if you wanted the big guns you had to either pick them up off corpses, or successfully take out enemies and then buy them with your reward cash. You didn't just get the big loadout to start with.