I can't really top what Pho has already said, so I'll just agree there completely.


And for a side note, here's a semi-related video about dumbing games down:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM

I know the video is about Mega Man, but the beginning bits of it can be (and pretty much are) applied to almost every modern game. It's a fantastic watch just for that alone.

Sure, it can be utilized well. But it generally isn't. When I look at most DLC, it always looks too humorously small or insignificant to pay for. These things should really just be combined into an actual expansion pack instead.

I'm saying that on a control basis, a gamepad is capable of much more speed and accuracy than is seen currently in most games, because the software isn't up to scratch, resulting in jerky, slow aiming, excessive auto-aim to compensate, etc. If my girlfriend, a female who only started playing DM shooters a year ago, can beat Godlike bots on a gamepad by using predicted, aimed rockets, flak, and stinger shards, and not massive auto-aim and bullet magnetism (re: Halo) then you can too and so can other gamers.

It's worth pointing out that modding isn't dead entirely just due to developers "locking down" games and disabling mod support. Another major factor is that the game content has grown in size beyond the dedication of your average gamer; making assets comprised of thousands/millions of polys and pixels is HARD. Compare the mod scene of Doom 1&2 to Doom 3; D3 was probably the most hyped Id title since Q3 to date, yet most projects managed little more than a few WIP renders before they gave up. Meanwhile, people are STILL making Doom 1/2 mods because wipping up sprites out of <100 pixels is quite manageable; there's even a Megaman deathmatch mod made from NES sprite rips!

What's more, modding itself doesn't make the entire game. Doom 1-2 and Quake 1-2 were built for mass appeal, AND they had great mod scenes, but the root games were still solid.

If anything; the mod scene made Id lazy; Quake 3 was released as an incomplete, unfinished package with only a few good DM maps, extremely few CTF maps at all, and no team modes beyond DM and CTF. They left it to the players to invent new team modes, develop a large body of quality maps, and dick around with scripting and pk3's just to implement simple things like map rotations or instagib mode which should have been built into the GUI. Then with Team Arena, they tried to get players to pay for content which should have been included in the game in the first place, when it was inferior to the content fans had already created. Meanwhile, Epic was offering more, better add-on content as free downloads, AND they had a huge set of modes, maps, mutators, and options, right out of the box.

My point is not to start a UT vs Quake flame war, but simply point out how Id left it to fans to develop the basic stuff they were too lazy to do themselves, stuff which was considered standard in any professional, finished game. This has colored Quake players' view of modding as essential to games' success. Modding is great, but you don't need mods to deliver a complete well rounded game, that can be delivered out of the box by the developers.

In any case, it's all beside the point; appealing to a mass audience is not an option, it's a financial necessity for Id. I don't know if you guys have been following the headlines, but based on Rage's disappointing sales, Id may not even be allowed to finish Doom 4, let alone start a new project like Quake 5. If they don't figure out how to make their games attractive to anyone besides a few loyal fans, they'll be relegated to the role of a tech R&D division at Bethesda, where they just make engines for everyone else's games, and Quake 5 will never see the light of day.


I believe one of the key design elements of deathmatch shooters like Doom, Quake, and UT, is a skill-based fantasy weapon balance which emphasizes leading and prediction with projectile weapons like rockets, nails, and plasma, over "realistic" hitscan, point-and-click weapons. This is done primarily by following a root damage rate for projectile weapons which is 2-3 times higher than its hitscan alternative; otherwise why give your opponent a chance to dodge when you could score a gauranteed instant hit for the same or greater damage?

You can follow the trend across hitscan weapons from the Q1 and Q2 single shotguns, to the Q3 MG and its move to 5dmg in TDM and CPMA, the railgun and its move from 100 to 80dmg in CPMA, and even UT's change from the 60dmg, 600ms reload Sniper Rifle, to the 2k3/2k4 Lightning Gun with 70 damage, 1500ms reload, and finally it's Assault Rifle which closely emulates the Q3 MG. It becomes very apparent that through the continuing search for optimal competitive balance in deathmatch shooters, a median of 50 damage per second is optimal for hitscan weapons.

Meanwhile, if you looks at the explosive weapons across these games, you get an optimal median damage of 125 per second for projectile weapons.

How do we apply this information? When creating a deathmatch shooter, you start with a hitscan MG or pistol which does 50 damage per second (i..e. 5dmg, .1 refire time). The sniper weapon can follow this same rule; for example CPMA's CQ3 railgun deals 80 damage with 1.5 second reload time. Both these weapons can be enhanced with the option of double damage for headshots (i.e. UT). The super shotgun can have a damage rate of 100 per second, because the heavy spread is typically more than double that of any other weapon, and only allows max damage at point blank range; beyond that the tradeoff of lower damage and easier hits balances itself. For a weapon like the lightning gun, a damage rate of 100 is also acceptable, considering it has a range cutoff and must be picked up, unlike the MG.

In Q3, the LG damage is 140 (double the FFA MG), which IMO is too close to the Plasmagun's 200 damage in vQ3 and 180 in CPMA. I can't tell you how many times I've carried both the LG and PG across Q3DM6 and thought "why would I ever want to use the PG when I have the LG? If 2 or more plasma balls miss, the LG does the same damage without the need to lead or the possibility that the enemy moves out fo the way."

The point of all this is to illustrate just how far off the mark the Q1 Thunderbolt is. It's more than double what anyone has seen fit to use for hitscan weapon damage in any other deathmatch game, and is almost the same as the kind of full-auto, hitscan damage you see in military shooters like COD. The rocket launcher may still have a higher rate, but think of the nail guns. It's preposterous that the nails should travel only 1000ups and deal half or a quarter of the Thunderbolt's damage, when the Thunderbolt is hitscan, point-and-click, and requires no leading.

To clarify, I'm not out to critcize Gen's implementation of the Thunderbolt; the whole point of Gen is to reproduce the behavior of the weapons as they appeared in their original games, and I enjoy it for the nostalgia and variety (in the context of Gen, the Arena LG is boring).

My point is though, that the behavior of the Thunderbolt in Q1 is an oversight which shouldn't be repeated in future games, and by comparison, the Railgun is far more balanced and skillful. Yes, there are moments when you can dominate with it, but that applies to most other weapons as well; if a rocket or grenade wielding opponent gets smashed, they have no right to complain, their weapon does more than twice the damage per second. With the right aim, they still could have hit you from a distance, or they could have snuck to close range, or dodged better; they have only themselves to blame.

I'd say the problem with the vast majority of military shooters is that they portray a fake realism which mirrors all the added ease of real combat (as compared to deathmatch shooters) without any of the difficulties of real combat.

In your average military shooter, your assault rifles and machineguns are all nothing more than a Q3 MG modded to deal 33-50 damage per hit, score headshots, and force a reload after 30+ rounds. The simple truth is that hitting someone with a full-auto hitscan weapon just isn't that hard, that's precisely WHY they were weak in Quake and UT. Military shooters are boring, mindless, skill-less n00b0-fests because their root mechanic is the equivalent of playing Instagib with the Q3 MG instead of a Railgun or Shock Rifle.

The ultimately pathetic thing is that military shooters have failed to even copy the most obvious form of weapon balance, that bestowed by mother nature; every action has an equal and opposite reaction. With a real weapon, the recoil is equal to the power it has, and a 9mm weapon recoils more than a .22 LR, while a 5.56 recoils even more than the 9mm, and 7.62x39 recoils even more than that, and a 7.62 NATO recoils even more than that, and so on.

Weapons in BF and COD recoil like a .22 LR even though they pretend to portray a .223. Even with assault rifles, in real life the recoil is high enough that semi-auto is favored over automatic fire and even short bursts in most situations. The more you spam, the harder it is to keep your shots on target; COD and BF don't follow this rule, even the largest caliber weapons barely have a noticeable amount of recoil. Thus, there is almost nothing to separate the weapons in their function, and nothing to motivate you to place your shots carefully; it's a spray fest.

My point in saying all this is to illustrate that military shooters don't have to be as awful as they are. If done properly, they could be simply a new and different metric for structuring skill-based shooters, rather than an excuse to strip all the skill out of the game and play instagib Q3 with a "gritty realism" paint job. Unfortunately, outside of a few niche titles like Arma, Infiltration, and a bit of the Rainbow Six series, there's little way to experience this theory because no one else has had the sense to do it right.

You can gear the game to appeal to a larger audience without changing the actual gameplay mechanics as I have already suggested. While skill-based games are hard to sell to mainstream gamers, it can still be done. After all, the Street Fighter games have a hardcore competitive community, yet are still well respected by the mainstream, despite their unrealistic, archaic mechanics. There are more examples, which I'll mention later.

While Rage's buggy PC release was a seriously botched tragedy, the PC market is small enough that it should have made a relatively small dent in their overall sales. After all, similar games have sold well on consoles in the past - why didn't Rage do better? It seems like a marketing failure to me. Let's face it, while a few of them sell really well, FPS have a bad reputation among mainstream gamers, especially those by "old school" developers like Id, which are alleged to be entirely composed of generic brown and grey corridors. Showing the public a bunch of brown screenshots and a cover image of a sepiatone buzzcut marine on a white background isn't going to get many people excited. If there was any creativity in Rage, the public surely didn't see it, or else they'd have bought the game.

In order to appeal to a larger audience, which Quake 5 would HAVE to do to keep from putting Id out of business, they could retain the same gameplay, but dress the game up with style and marketing to overcome the reputation Id Software has (among mainstream gamers) of churning out uncreative, uninnovative, boring, brown games. Take Bioshock for instance - the franchise has a good reputation among mainstream gamers, even though it's structured almost identically to Doom 3 and Quake 4, merely because of its classy early 20th century style, which is perceived as novel and original in public eyes. A few stylistic gimmicks, some novel ideas, and a shiny coating can go a long way to changing public perceptions of a game.

That's why I suggested making fantasy rocket or pistol-propelled footgear an integral part of the game - it explains the mechanics which already comprise movement in Quake's gameplay as an aesthetic/story concept people can understand. Without a sugar coating, to the outside world Quake's movement looks like a nonsensical, glitchy mess full of homoerotic constipation sounds.

-- HURGH! HURGH! HURGH! I'M FLYING AROUND THE MAP AT 50MPH BY JUMPING UP AND DOWN! HURGH! HURGH! HURGH! I AM SUPERTARD! --

Dress it up as a function of scifi super gear, with cool animations and the sounds of rocket thrusters and pistons firing in place of the grunting, and suddenly it's not a nonsensical glitch anymore, it comes across as a novel, innovative idea which allows for different gameplay than your average COD clone. That's the kind of thing that makes headlines on trendy gaming blogs, not more of the same brown corridors and bald space marines.

The same applies to Quake's weaponry. Without pitching the weapons as creative fantasy ideas based on a carefully-crafted competitive weapon balance, people try the game and simply assume that the machinegun and rocket launcher are weak because the developers don't know what they're doing. Make up some story around the weapons, name them differently, avoid typical military cosmetics, and use some tutorials to introduce the gameplay, and people may actually understand and appreciate what's going on.

In any case, whatever the means, appealing to both hardcore Quakers and a larger audience is not an option. There aren't enough hardcore Quakers to support Id's business; we're an endangered speces. Look at Quake 4, Quake Live, UT3, Rage - none of them have been a stellar financial success. Even when developers cater exactly to games' hardcore communities, they just find more stuff to bitch about and go back to playing their favored older games, and there are strong examples of that in the histories of all the games I just mentioned.

Because those were all subpar titles.

Quake 4 was a fairly generic sequel to Quake 2. It was alright for a quick run-through, but little more.

Quake Live should have been released on Steam for $10, with mod support. It's no fun playing Q3 without custom maps and characters. And it's certainly no fun playing Q3 without a proper server setup.

UT3 never really looked worth playing until after the Titan Pack. Even then, it felt slow and boring in comparison to the far superior UT2K4.

Rage is... well... Rage is Id trying to appeal to console gamers. The driving and RPG stuff all feels like fluff, but the shooting is tight and very satisfying. It's also the first game in a looong time to actually look impressive. Of course, it does the game no great service to have been released after Fallout 3 and Borderlands was still fresh in everyone's mind.

I hadn't heard of Legendary, and I'll have to check it out, but I know what you mean. I actually wished L4D had more of these characteristics; all of the SMGs and AR's handled the same, making for little variety and very easy spray headshots, especially once you get laser sights. I also wished Doom 3 was a little more this way; for the purposes of a single player game, particularly a horror game, it enhances the challenge and immersion if you really feel the recoil of each shot and have to pick your shots carefully to land hits.

I've often heard it alleged that Soviet assault rifle doctrine was more full-auto-focused than in the west, and the sequence of its fire selector as safe/auto/semi (instead of safe/semi/auto) is often used as evidence of this. However I think by now it's pretty much universally accepted that semi is generally more effective. In any case, this link has some interesting and often amusing quotes and discussion from military vets about the use/disuse of automatic fire with assault weapons, from the M16 to even the BAR and Stg-44.

“The principal value of the M.P. 44 lies in its accuracy and high rate of fire (22 to 28 rounds per minute) as a semiautomatic weapon, and in its alternate use as an automatic weapon, when it is fired in short bursts of 2 to 3 rounds (40 to 50 rounds per minute). Generally, the weapon is set for single fire. Bursts will be fired only when beating off an enemy assault, making a counterthrust (against a penetration, in close combat), or at very short ranges during combat in trenches, towns, or woods. Strict fire discipline must be observed. Conserve ammunition!”

- General Hans Guderian's instructions to Fortress Infantry Battalions

That these truths were observed almost immediately during the earliest combat use of the first assault rifle speaks volumes about how far off holywood and videogames' depictions are of assault weapons.

I seriously doubt that merely releasing the PC version free of bugs would have boosted Rage's popularity to that of GOW, COD, or even less popular titles like Borderlands, Fallout, or Bioshock. Those are the sort of sales that modern developers shoot for, because developing games is just too expensive to justify anything less.

From this link:
The apparent source says that Zenimax and Bethesda made the decision based on the "the issues and reviews" surrounding RAGE's launch, which in their eyes has demonstrated "a serious lack of confidence in the project management at id".

Even Rage's console reviews, while not awful, were not stellar, much less the stuff said of blockbuster titles. We could sit here all day and exchange our own personal disappointments with Q4, UT3, QL, and Rage, but that doesn't change the fact that these titles simply aren't grabbing the public's attention.

As I've said before, I'm not proposing turning Quake into a COD or Battlefield clone (Enemy Territory has already done that and failed anyway), but the game needs a new level of stylistic sophistication in order to change the public's negative perception of the series as "more of the same brown corridors and bald space marines". Hell, even giving the game a bioshock paintjob, or making it cell-shaded, would do wonders for the series' marketing.

Again, you're putting words in my mouth, and none of my suggested changes have involved making the game more like MW; if you'd read them, you'd know that.

The truth of the matter is that in order for new gamers to discover the series, it has to appear fresh, different, and appealing first, otherwise they'll never give it a chance. Instead, they'll just see a glitchy, archaic game about bald space marines jumping up and down yelling "HURGH! HURGH! HURGH!" in brown corridors, honking like a clown on a bike when they're shot (donkdonkdonkdonkdonkdonk!).

Look at how Street Fighter IV restored mainstream interest in the series despite its archaic mechanics; they didn't do it by recycling the same SFA sprites from 1994, or even by upgrading to 3D graphics using bland realism, they had to give the series a complete stylistic overhaul, including not just stunning polygon detail, but the stylistic flair of brush stroke effects and exaggerated facial expressions.

I actually think this is a driving factor in why COD's weapons all come out so equally homogenized. When the idea is proposed of including a battle rifle like the G3, which offers increased power and accuracy at the cost of heavily increased recoil, they listen to the weeny gamer who cries "no! why would you want a weapon with increased recoil? that only makes the game harder!" Rather than considering the fact that the game offers many weapons and players that don't like recoil can simply choose a different weapon, developers like Infinity Ward can't bear to deny any gamer the option of yet another cosmetic option for what is essentially the same watered-down AR configuration. Thus, you end up with a G3 which performs like a semi-auto MP5.

In any case, my point still stands that there are plenty of ways for Id to stylistically overhaul the series in order to grab mainstream attention, none of which involve making it more like COD or BF. It's simply a matter of marketing, something even John Carmack has admitted to being a weakness at Id.

If that sort of thing was done to Quake... I would feel utterly betrayed.
I think expanding on the Lovecraftian themes would be enough.

I thought it's underwater + art deco mix was beautiful. The gameplay and plot weren't anything to write home about, but ever since I played it, I've wanted to make a Q3A level in its style.

It's worth pointing out that for better or for worse, the idea of "Lovecraftian themes" is very vague and widely interpretable.

More seriously, we all know that Q3 exists in a world of mutants, cyborgs, space marines, scantily-clad women, ridiculous violence, and fast-paced action which emphasizes fun over realism. Bright primary colors are used to identify its weapons, ammo, and powerups, and some parts of its maps (particularly where team and custom maps are concerned). Competitive derivatives such as CPMA, OSP, Warsow, and UTComp have turned to brightskins and/or cell-shading to make opponents stand out rather than allowing them to hide as mottled brown characters over mottled brown backgrounds. Despite all the brightly-colored ques, the game still retains a sci-fi/fantasy/gothic style.

Knowing all this, look at the following screens and tell me again that a game adapting such a look would consitute a total betrayal of what Quake is all about: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Actually, if you had to generalize a specific color to describe a majority of its environments, I'd have to say it's blue, which is evident via a quick google search. By contrast, a google image search for Quake turns up mostly grey and brown screens. Also, given that most games today don't contain art deco architecture, the answer to your question is clearly 'no'.

Moreover, the important part is not whether you or I see the game as different, it's that Bioshock's unique style turned the heads of many mainstream gamers that don't normally play FPS, garnering a reputation for being creative rather than more of the same paint-by-numbers. Given that (rightfully or not) Quake has become representative to the mainstream as the root of all generic FPS design, Quake V simply cannot be a financial success without adopting a visual flair which is undeniably more stylistic than anyone has come to expect from Id. The usual space marines, grey/brown hallways, blood and guts simply will not cut it anymore.