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Tabun
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« Reply #60 on: 2012-03-28, 15:34 »

I'd just like to say amen to Pho's bit on
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"Creative"

This is why the only game I've really played besides Gen is L4D(2). The gameplay has something new, something fresh, something that requires you do actually think and come up with countless strategies that never come down to simply "aim better = win" or "get items quickest & control = win". I'm surprised people still care for the crappy point and click shooters that are getting more straightforward every day.. :/
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Tabun ?Morituri Nolumus Mori?
Phoenix
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« Reply #61 on: 2012-03-28, 19:19 »

I did like Team Fortress 2 before they completely destroyed it with the alternate weapons and fashion trading show.  The mechanics were simple, but strategy was required in order to actually win.  That and the style was great.  Valve took an excellent concept and completely destroyed it by turning it into what I would consider a combination of "newbie"-style mod ideas that should never be implemented into a commercial game.
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« Reply #62 on: 2012-03-28, 20:29 »

Those mechanics are still there and if You don't like all added stuff, just make server with everything disabled and get a group of people to play on it.
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Thomas Mink
 

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« Reply #63 on: 2012-03-28, 22:05 »

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.
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« Reply #64 on: 2012-03-29, 02:50 »

For the record, the console versions of Quake (pre-Q4 but including QAA) are all class (Q2 on the N64 was an entirely new campaign).

My one wish for Q5 is that it returns to the Slipgate theme of the original. Q4 was little more than Quake II-2 which itself was a dolled-up installment as they couldn't come up with a better name at the time. Don't get me started on ETQW ...

The fact is that id are not the innovators they once were. My fear though is that they are falling into the crowd with Rage being basically Borderlands without the humour (and shite interface). In order to stand out id need to do what they do best, which is pure, visceral, fast-paced combat. Stuff what Activizzard and EA are doing, let them disappear up their own arses with their bloody screens and regenerating health and just dish out some classic mindless violence. Easy on the brown this time, though Slipgate - Wink

@~Va^^pyrA~: DLC in itself isn't a bad thing, except when publishers use it as an excuse to sell half a game. Say what you like about Rockstar, they're the only ones to do DLC properly this generation with the two traditional-style mission packs for GTAIV.

Also LOL at the Sequelitis vid.
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« Reply #65 on: 2012-03-29, 04:31 »

DLC in itself isn't a bad thing, except when publishers use it as an excuse to sell half a game. Say what you like about Rockstar, they're the only ones to do DLC properly this generation with the two traditional-style mission packs for GTAIV.

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.
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« Reply #66 on: 2012-03-29, 19:37 »

I agree with ~Va^^pyrA~ on DLC.  I want something on the lines of Scourge of Armagon or Ground Zero, or Deathkings of the Dark Citadel.  I want a real mission pack with more freaking challenge, not just a minor map pack with a few extra guns.
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« Reply #67 on: 2012-03-29, 23:14 »

The idea that twitch shooters are unplayable on a gamepad is a myth.
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.

Games today have no longevity because they are deliberately locked down. Modding is all but dead in gaming today. Whereas pay-to-play DLC and annual sequels are all the rage. That's what you get when you make a game that has mass appeal. Garnering a broad audience is of little use if said audience isn't right for the game to begin with.
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.

In the original Quake, it was HARD to get frags with the Thunderbolt owing to the fact that by the time you dealt one hit with the lightning you'd be bounced to the ceiling by a rocket.  The kickback made it very hard to keep the beam on someone.  Also, the Thunderbolt only fires 10 times a second, so it's more "gappy" than the Q3 lightning gun, which fires 20 times a second.  Remove the lightning bolt graphic and Q1's Thunderbolt is basically a pinpoint precision short-range machinegun that deals 35 damage per hit.  In the hands of an amateur the Thunderbolt is hard to use.  In the hands of an expert it can kill, but if we're talking pure Quakeworld-style deathmatch it's not nearly as much of a factor as the rocket launcher.

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.

Now as for the CoD hate on my part, I've maintained this about FPS games and any kind of combat sim games from the beginning:  Attempting too much realism will kill the fun factor.
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.

"Creative".  That's a word that gets lost on the "modern" gaming community.  Too many games are carbon copies of each other.  We don't need more tactical shooters like MW[insert number here].  A fantasy shooter like Quake with a gothic horror theme is fine as it is.  Trying to make the game down to appeal to a "larger audience" is exactly why a lot of people - namely old-school gamers - got mad with Id over Rage and is what seriously hurt Duke Nukem Forever, well besides being stuck in development hell.  Both games were panned for Consolitis.  In the case of DNF it was the two-gun limit, regenerating health and linear level design.  For Rage it was the lack of control over graphics and not taking advantage of the PC's inherent flexibility in that regard.  The whole reason trying to reach a larger audience is that the CoD crowd will only play CoD.  Trying to copy the mechanics in that franchise to attract those players is just going to make everyone else unhappy.  Making Quake 5 a straight improvement over the original Quake is what's needed.  If it plays like CoD it will absolutely suck.  Make Quake 5 a kick ass PC game.  Screw the consoles.  Port it if you want, but make it absolutely awesome for the PC and people will play it.
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.
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Kingu
 

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« Reply #68 on: 2012-03-30, 13:48 »

Great wall of text Gnam.  Doom - Thumbs Up! Slipgate - Thumbs up!
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« Reply #69 on: 2012-03-30, 16:57 »

Look at Quake 4, Quake Live, UT3, Rage - none of them have been a stellar financial success.

Because those were all subpar titles. Slipgate - Tongue

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.
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« Reply #70 on: 2012-03-30, 18:03 »

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.
This is something I loved about Legendary is that you were using real-world weapons that had real-world weapon behavior.  The low-caliber pistol had very little recoil and was controllable but did little damage, the submachinegun was controllable but took a LOT of bullets to get through body armor or do damage to monsters, the .50 cal handgun (Desert Eagle) had one hell of a recoil and did massive damage, etc.  You could use the iron sights to help improve accuracy, but if you held down the trigger on, say, the M-249 you'd lose any accuracy beyond the first shot at long range, and reloading the thing was an eternity in which you could get pounced on by a wolf and have your face ripped off.  The weapons felt "right".  The game got panned because it was a fantasy shooter that didn't fit in with the usual Halo/CoD crap.  It had a few minor technical glitches and one major one (elevator bug at the end) but the weapons behaved exactly as I expected they should.

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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.
Fully-automatic fire is really more useful from mounted guns where you're needing a string of shots to increase hit probability on a moving target, to inflict greater damage on a hard target, or for area suppression.  For an assault rifle, the application of fully-automatic fire is misunderstood by most.  The assault rifle as designed by Kalashnikov is a dual-role weapon.  It's meant to be used as a short-range rifle in semi-automatic mode on open ground up to 300 meters, and in fully-automatic mode in situations where you would normally use a sub-machinegun, such as close-quarters urban fighting.  Beyond 300 meters you have a dedicated marksman using a larger caliber, more-accurate rifle.  This philosophy came about because the Soviets found in WWII that most engagements were occuring at less than 200 meters, and full-power rifle cartridges like the 7.62x54 were too much power for that range, while pistol-caliber cartridges as used in the PPSH were not powerful enough to use effectively beyond 75 meters with any semblance of accuracy.  The assault rifle was made to address this reality and provide an appropriate level of firepower for most engagements while maintaining an acceptable degree of accuracy where rifle-work would be required.  Your average jihadist just sprays bullets on fully-automatic fire because they don't have a clue how to use the weapon as the Soviets intended it, and often because their guns are of poor quality.  A good Russian or Bulgarian-manufacture AK is about 2 MOA with standard ball rounds, which is accurate enough to put a slug in someone's torso at 300 meters.  At 75 meters or closer it's a guaranteed hit if you're using sights, and at room-clearing range a full-auto sweep can take down a whole squad.  That's how an assault rifle is meant to be used - as a rifle and SMG, not just a "spray-and-pray" lead factory as a lot of arm-chair weapons experts often think.  Now as for the M-16, that's a different weapon system with a completely different development history from the AK so I don't want to touch on that, but the theory behind the application of the two weapon systems is largely similar.

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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.
Or, when it's been done right it's been done outside of the popular genre, as in my description of the guns in Legendary above.

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why didn't Rage do better? It seems like a marketing failure to me.
Rage had issues in the PC market because of the technical problems with ATI-based cards, texture popping, lack of expected menu options, and a generally unpolished release.  Things that should have been tested and fixed prior to a PC release were not.  They really, really needed to fix the texture popping and world corruption issues, and they should have leaned on ATI hard to get the drivers in order before releasing.  That's where the problem was.  Console sales for Rage were pretty good and it had fairly high ratings among console players, but the PC market is where Id is supposed to shine.  They tried to develop all three platforms equally and neglected to give the PC market the extra attention it needed.  It wasn't a marketing failure so much as it was a combination of errors on Bethesda's and Id's part.

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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.
This reputation I believe began with Quake 4, and not just among mainstream gamers.  Quake 4 was actually Raven's fault since they completely broke the style of Quake 2 and gave away a huge plot element of the game during the marketing.  Doom 3 was fairly well received.  Rage is the only post-Doom 3 game Id has done.  I think part of the problem is that CoD was becoming very popular while Id's games appeal more to the older generation of gamers.  The younger crowd that has been spoiled from the get go doesn't remember games like Wolfenstein 3-D when they were new and innovative.  They already have first-person shooters, and expect them to play a certain way, so when anything goes outside of that "tactical shooter" formula it's universally panned.  This is why I say the "larger audience" needs to be ignored.  If they're expecting just another CoD clone and that's not what they get they'll hate it, and Id's core fanbase will most definitely hate it.  Look at Duke.  The old-school and the newer gamers both panned it.  Why?  Old-school:  It wasn't Duke 3D.  New-school:  It wasn't Modern Warfare Duke.  It's lose-lose if you take that approach.

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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.
We may be an endangered species, but new gamers can find something fresh and different appealing.  It's possible, but it won't work if you try to make Modern Warfare Quake.

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Look at Quake 4, Quake Live, UT3, Rage - none of them have been a stellar financial success.
Quake 4 sucked, and that is why it was not a financial success.  I'm sorry, but as a Quake 2 die-hard it was the biggest disappointment of a sequel I have ever played.  It's the only Id game I've ever uninstalled to make room on my hard drive because I don't have any intention of ever playing it again.  Id handed the IP over to Raven, and Raven botched it.  End of story.

Quake Live is not Quake 3, and has no mod support.  Since it's not Quake 3 the die-hard Q3 players won't touch it.  I say it's not Quake 3 because it has been changed both weapon-wise and physics-wise to be more like CPMA.  Id hired Arqon to work on it.  I should not have to say more than that.

UT3?  Too close to UT2.  It was one of those situations where gamers did not see why they should buy the same game right after buying the previous game.  (The CoD:MW crowd doesn't seem to get this concept...)

Rage, again, mainly failed on the PC due to technical problems and a bad release.  That it also released after Borderlands complicated things, but having played both games they're not even close to being the same or even very similar.  Rage has all the FPS polish I'd expect from an Id title, and the vehicle element is completely different.  Borderlands handles open areas much better than Rage, but there's not nearly as much detail present.  Besides the fact that both have a wasteland theme and guns, there's really not much similarity between the two.


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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.
That depends on who you listen to.  The vocal minority that complains on message boards will always do nothing but complain.  Gaming publications like IGN and Gamespot will pretty much pan anything that is not CoD or Halo.  I've seen the same review sites laud pre-release versions of games for being fresh, innovative, and point out numerous things they like, then when the game goes gold they utterly trash it.  I've seen this happen on more than one occasion.  I no longer bother with review sites, metacritic scores, etc, because of this.  Developers don't need to cater to any community.  That's the failing point.  Trying to make something because you think people will like this, or like that, is a bad idea.  You make something YOU will like and then like-minded people will enjoy it.  Look at the original Doom.  The level design makes no sense, demons from hell invading a base on Mars makes no sense, chainsaws in space make no sense, but Romero, Carmack, Cloud, etc, had an absolute blast making and playing it.  Second guessing people or coding by consensus is a mistake.

I'll give you a small example of my own experience with this.  In working on Gen, I've had to reject probably 95% of the ideas and suggestions thrown at me, and of the 5% I've been willing to compromise on, I'd consider a lot of those compromises to have been mistakes.  Why?  They were suggestions or ideas that, while someone might really like the idea, took away from the core gameplay and detracted from what Gen is supposed to be about.  A lot of the complaints early on in .99a and prior were about game balance and weapons being overpowered, etc.  In .99b, a lot of these balance issues were "fixed", but it muddied the game down and made the classes feel homogenized.  I scrapped this in .99c and reworked stuff from the ground up to be more in line with the nostalgic lineage of the classes - weapon physics, movement physics, armor absorption rates, ammo counts, etc.  The effect was dramatic - a much more polished and proper feel, with each class feeling more unique and the playing styles fitting more closely with those of the original games.  I learned from this that you cannot succeed in any project if you try to please everybody.  You have to stick to your vision.  Romero, ironically, was right when he said "Design is Law" (even if he did spork up with Daikatana).  You cannot stand out by looking the same as everyone else.  It is a mistake to even try.
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« Reply #71 on: 2012-03-30, 22:55 »

This is something I loved about Legendary is that you were using real-world weapons that had real-world weapon behavior...
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.

Now as for the M-16, that's a different weapon system with a completely different development history from the AK so I don't want to touch on that, but the theory behind the application of the two weapon systems is largely similar.
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.

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Console sales for Rage were pretty good and it had fairly high ratings among console players, but the PC market is where Id is supposed to shine.  They tried to develop all three platforms equally and neglected to give the PC market the extra attention it needed.  It wasn't a marketing failure so much as it was a combination of errors on Bethesda's and Id's part.
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.

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We may be an endangered species, but new gamers can find something fresh and different appealing.  It's possible, but it won't work if you try to make Modern Warfare Quake.
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.

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A lot of the complaints early on in .99a and prior were about game balance and weapons being overpowered, etc.  In .99b, a lot of these balance issues were "fixed", but it muddied the game down and made the classes feel homogenized.
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.
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« Reply #72 on: 2012-03-31, 16:15 »

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.
I was saying that if Id does this it will fail badly.  I wasn't meaning to say that's what you're suggesting.  Slipgate - Tongue
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« Reply #73 on: 2012-04-01, 00:23 »

Hell, even giving the game a bioshock paintjob, or making it cell-shaded, would do wonders for the series' marketing.
If that sort of thing was done to Quake... I would feel utterly betrayed.
I think expanding on the Lovecraftian themes would be enough.
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« Reply #74 on: 2012-04-01, 04:19 »

...wasn't Bioshock more or less the same generic HD/Brown/Grey/Bloom look that all shooters have had this console cycle? I don't know that I would hold its look up as an example of fresh aesthetics. I know that the Randian overtones made it popular with the liberal art majors, but the game was fairly boring otherwise.
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« Reply #75 on: 2012-04-01, 15:01 »

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.
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« Reply #76 on: 2012-04-02, 01:41 »

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.
I loved the part where you entered rapture, the beautiful lights, it would've been cool if they added that color within the buildings.


Modern games dissappoint me. Well atleast most, some are a great play but are sadly rejected by dull rehashed modern games. I personally I think consoles are needed for a great success. The hate with the joypad could be answered with a joypad-mouse controller, you have flawless accuracy and thumbsticks give a console feel, I own one, but it should come with consoles.

 I think the new generation of gamers seem ignorant to the games they play, which is basically CoD. If you want something real and authentic (mostly) you should try out Rainbow Six Vegas 2, you have multiple ways to confront enemies, lots of guns, great customization system, and pulling off your plan just makes you feel even more badass. A current game I'm playing is Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it strays away from linear mission, and gives you total freedom to play an rpg game with some fps elements, or an fps game with some rpg elements.

 The disappointing sales of recent Id and Epic's games are because they haven't been very "Creative". Another factor is the aging of older generation games, but that something else. Raven disappointed me with Quake 4, I loved quake 2, but Quake 4 killed the strogg universe for me. The multiplayer could've been something, but it was a mediocore Q3 multiplayer. UT3 was good, but it was bad compared to UT2004 and '99.

As for the recoil thing, I doubt children would would bother to notice.

 I want Quake 5 to reinvent twitch shooter and DESTROY generic shooters. If its for consoles- coop, devasting weapons, grand level design, beautiful art design, lovecraftian theme, obliterate monster armies.

Admin edit: Learn to edit previous posts. Don't double post. If you want an artificially inflated post count, ask an admin, they'll be happy to set it to 99999999 for you.
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« Reply #77 on: 2012-04-02, 14:18 »

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

...wasn't Bioshock more or less the same generic HD/Brown/Grey/Bloom look that all shooters have had this console cycle? I don't know that I would hold its look up as an example of fresh aesthetics. I know that the Randian overtones made it popular with the liberal art majors, but the game was fairly boring otherwise.
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.
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« Reply #78 on: 2012-04-02, 15:11 »

Maybe I wasn't remembering Bioshock correctly. Outside of some water physics, I don't recall it being very impressive in any regard... visual or otherwise. In fact, it felt extremely confined. It gave you lots of choices in ammo and powers, but the levels were so linear that it never actually mattered. It felt like it should have been more of an RPG/FPS, or had some Metroidvania style backtracking to utilize the various powers.

I agree that an interpolation on the Lovecratian themes would be more than distinctive. Looming cyclopean cities, alien visages, non-Euclidean and Escher-esque geometry, etc. In many ways, Id's past few games have failed in one regard or another specifically because they felt like they were trying to follow the modern shooter crowd. Slow movements, laughable jump heights, iron sights, cut scenes galore, etc. We don't need a homogenized genre, we need diversity.

But... Halo and Call of Duty do just fine. They're both about as generic as they come. In fact, if anyone is going to argue for the root of mediocrity, it's got to be Halo. I think that most gamers today simply have no heritage due to their age. They only appreciate what is currently or soon to be in front of them. Furthermore, most are now console players. Faster, more twitch based games like Quake simply scare them. Those people will never be interested in a proper Quake... not until they can hide and regenerate health while carrying their only two weapons. The mainstream populization and mass commercialization of video games has largely ruined the medium... just as it had for radio and television beforehand. Just as the internet itself is slowly being walled off into portal sites to benefit corporations. Mass appeal means catering to the lowest common denominator. It's not a good thing.
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« Reply #79 on: 2012-04-02, 15:56 »

Mass appeal means catering to the lowest common denominator. It's not a good thing.
Pretty much this.

Now, going back to wishlist mode, I want the runes to actually do something beyond just be items to get at the end of a level.  I want them to imbue the player with some powers.  It could be kill-based, or time based, or something.  I keep thinking of how the Thule medallion in Wolfenstein 2009 gave the player abilities.  I think the runes should work along their names, say, the rune of earth magic would let you turn enemies to stone, or use the environment to some effect.  Black magic could let you possess enemies and have them fight along side you for a while, or Hell magic could make your weapons scorching hot (lava nails, anyone?).  Somehow tie these runes in with the game so you can inflict more pain on the bad guys.

I'd also like a return to a more episode-based game as opposed to a once-through slugfest.  Part of the fun in the old Doom and Quake games is that each episode was progressive.  You started out with nothing, and picked up weapons and items as you want, gradually becoming more powerful again.  This made the game a bit more challenging and allowed for more interesting play.  I compare Doom 1 with Doom 2, and there's a huge difference in the feel.  Doom 2 is a mosh pit of monsters, while Doom 1 focused more on how and where you'd encounter things.  Same with Quake.  Some mechanism as to how and why you lose your equipment might be needed.  Quake also had some pretty mean traps in it, like stepping through a door and having the floor drop you into a pit with about three ogres or fiends on you.  The environment needs to be dangerous, not just the creatures.
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