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J3E125
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Apparently, id's team managed to run the Doom glory to rock bottom with "Call of Doom", "An earlier version of Doom 4 did not exhibit the quality and excitement that id and Bethesda intend to deliver and that Doom fans worldwide expect...."
....“As a result, Id refocused its efforts on a new version of Doom 4 that promises to meet the very high expectations everyone has for this game and this franchise. When we’re ready to talk about the Doom 4 Id is making, we will let folks know.” This sequel determines both id's remaining quality for gaming and its fate, in the article, ZeniMax ordered for Doom 4 to sell as good as Skyrim or else. I'd like to hear your opinions, as I'm unsure of the future for id and Doom 4. Full article here: http://kotaku.com/five-years-and-nothing...o-show-how-doom-4-got-off-trac-468097062 |
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Gnam
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Woooow.
After hearing what the old Doom 4 build was like, I'm glad to hear it got scrapped. The whole "cinematic" Call of Doom approach sounds awful and exactly the opposite of what I want to see from Doom.
Unfortunately, based on reports, I have 0 optimism for the next build. It sounds like Id is falling apart, there's no management, and Bethesda is going to shut them down. With the kind of problems they're having, there's no way they can crank out a Skyrim-caliber sensation within a year.
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Thomas Mink
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Wait... so Id was, at one point, really making a Doom game that worked at least somewhat similarly to those 'If Doom Was Done Today' videos? That just blows my mind.
And as for starting over and making something new, I'm really not looking forward to it. Honestly, I didn't even like Doom 3.. and Rage just looked like a Borderlands knockoff (no idea if it was or not, but that feeling alone just kinda pushed me away from the product).
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Phoenix
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I read about this yesterday. I think Id's been making some mistakes. First, selling to another company was a bad idea. The first rule in creative endeavors is to maintain control over it. Letting someone else pull the strings was not good. Rage might not have had the bugs on release it did if more direct control was held over it.
Second... every ship needs a captain. I think Id lost its focus. Carmack is genius when it comes to making engines, but who's the genius behind the game play? Unfortunately, this is where Romero was right: Design is law. Without a coherent vision and plan, you have nothing. Someone has to be responsible for making that vision into a reality, and making sure the artists and technical crew are focused in the right direction. I think there was too much concern over trying to introduce new game mechanics or focusing on a story and not enough focus on the core elements of game play. I'm hoping Carmack's statement about Demons and Shotguns is a sign of things to come, as that is where Doom's core focus was and what made it great was the combat.
Third... consoles. I realize people game on them, and that game companies see them as a "must" for bringing in revenue. For some reason, focus on the PC is waning because of what I see as a myth. Proof that I'm right? How about $8 million in crowd funding for a PC-exclusive game? Id started out developing for the PC, and is at its best developing for the PC. PC-first, port it to consoles second. It's fine to keep consoles in mind when developing, but focus on the PC so that it runs as close to perfect as possible and work the bugs out before launch. Give the PC gamers as much tweak power as possible, and simplify it down for the consoles as needed. It's a lot easier to just not put something in a menu than it is to figure out how to add something that's really needed and put it in a patch after people complain.
I look at how things can go, and what Id did with Rage as an example of where things could have gone and what went wrong. Rage's main problem was a buggy PC launch, and lack of control over the graphics. Had those issues not been present it would have been received a lot better. Rage had some very, very tight first-person combat, and some massive landscapes that were impressive - if you could get it to work. Building from what was good in Rage there's huge potential for what they could do with Doom 4. Going from the closed in, claustrophobic game play of Doom 3 into a more open, chaotic world that is closer to how Doom 2 was would be a great path. A ruined city with buildings where demons might crash through a wall, or jump through a window, or come down stairs, or burst through the ceiling would put the player on edge constantly. Streets would be exposed, open, and dangerous places to fight, especially if larger demons were about. Now throw in some drivable vehicles - not like Rage, but like this. Your player comes across a non-wrecked car. The keys happen to be in it because someone abandoned it. You climb in, start it, and drive just as if it were a real city. Now instead of this being one of those contrived "you got to do this to get from point A to point B", let the player have freedom to use the car how they want. Maybe you can pick up some players from another building. Maybe you'll use it to ram into a larger demon that's giving some resistance fighters some trouble. Maybe you'll turn the corner and that cyberdemon you didn't expect to see will stomp the hood, grab it, and throw the car with you in it into the side of a building. Maybe by driving the car you'll miss some goodies you might have found on foot. Maybe a car isn't the best choice, maybe there's a motorcycle you can use. Maybe you'll run across a military vehicle that has some life left in it. Either way you stay first-person the whole time, and stuff laying around like that would be there as just something you'd find in the environment as a whole.
Avoid scripting when possible so that the game is as "live" as possible. That's one thing that bugged me in Doom 3 was the monster paths, particularly the trites. When I first saw pictures, I did not like trites because I imagined them coming from any direction. Instead, they either dropped from the ceiling in a scripted manner, or crawled out of holes in the wall but they always walked along the floor. They never climbed up walls or walked across ceilings or did things a real arachnid or insect-like creature could do. It made them boring, easy to kill enemies unless you were swarmed in a confined space, like the first time you have to fight a bunch of them. That's the sort of thing that needs to not happen in the next Doom game.
I'm saddened and disappointed at the direction things have been going with Id. I liked Rage, despite the bugs, and despite the, uh... ending. I have yet to play the DLC. I liked Doom 3 (with a few modifications to the shotgun), but everything from Quake 2 and prior was just so much more solid. Even Quake 1, which I never really liked that well, had some great moments. Scripting? What scripting. You walk into a room and a wall drops down, you see and hear fiends ready to pounce on you and realize you're in deep trouble. In Doom, you didn't need some guy laying on the ground wounded telling you to "be careful because there's some big badass demon around". You saw a bunch of gibbed marines and demon faces on the walls and knew there was trouble. The best moments in Doom 3 for atmosphere did not involve a scripted demon jumping through a window, but turning a corner and seeing the floor and walls smeared in blood and hearing noises of a creature I had not seen before (turned out to be the Archvile). Another was opening a doorway and seeing all the skeletons all over the floor and bloodied walls with no monsters around whatsoever. Nothing scripted there, just good design elements. That's what Id needs is designers that know how to be psychological in their approach to things. I'm hoping they figure it out. I love Id's games and I really do not want to see them go out with a whimper due to a lack of organization.
Mink: Rage is nothing like Borderlands at all. I've played both heavily. The driving in Rage is very, very different - especially vehicle-on-vehicle combat. There's also organized races, and the wasteland environment is much different from Borderlands. Most first-person combat is corridor shooting, and most outdoor combat is in vehicles. If you're not in a vehicle and try to go head to head with a vehicle you're more than likely going to get killed, which holds true for player vs vehicle or player's vehicle vs bad guys. That's completely unlike Borderlands where running your vehicle into a "badass" enemy can blow up your runner and leave you on the ground bleeding out. Your vehicle in Rage is actually pretty durable. Rage has an inventory system and does not feature "leveling" in any way. The first-person shooting is more akin with a normal FPS. I can't say if you'd like it or not, but I can say that Borderlands and Rage are not alike beyond the fact that they both feature vehicles, FPS combat, and some kind of wasteland setting.
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  I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
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J3E125
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At this, point I have nothing to hope for Id. They've made some of the darn best games I've ever played, and they led technological advances. Now, Id is beginning to starve and they are quite behind the modern competition, close down is inevitable and hope is all but lost. It's only a miracle if they pull through with a sleeper hit.
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Angst
Rabid Doomer
Team Member
Elite
  
Posts: 1011
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RIP THQ..
id has been on the ropes, and I'm hoping they can recover, but this is a brutal environment and I don't know if they can survive another tepid launch. Raven is already dead to me, and to see id limping along like this doesn't fill me with a lot of hope for the market. We're running out of titles that sell on much beyond graphics, and that makes me sad.
I warned people that the Madden/Fifa/etc yearly releases would hurt gaming, and now we see it everywhere.
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"Who says a chainsaw isn't a ranged weapon?"
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MadTux
Ogre
Posts: 54
*Personal* text? No way!
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I must say, Valve *still* looks promising, if they ever make HL3 that is ... But I have more hope for them than anyone else in the industry at the moment. EDIT: I see id has a new wobsite. It's even worse than the last one  EDIT 2: Why is the server down again? :*( |
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« Last Edit: 2014-07-29, 22:09 by MadTux »
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Phoenix
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Because Idlebot had a Kernel_stack_inpage_error. Rebooting. Also, my IP address changed so I have to reconfigure the link. 
Edit: Fixed. Also... if the server's down, please shoot me A PM. It's easier for me to fix than to run across it randomly on the board. 
Now about Valve... I don't expect Valve to do much in the line of creating games. They're making more money as the defacto online publisher right now. Steam has made Valve's fortune. Maybe they'll get around to another chapter in the Half-Life series, but Half-Life 3 or Episode 3 or whatever incarnation you want to call it is getting the Duke Nukem Forever treatment right now with one key difference: It's not costing Gabe Newell his personal fortune like it did George Broussard. I have no idea if it's even in production.
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« Last Edit: 2014-07-30, 00:11 by Phoenix »
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I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
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MadTux
Ogre
Posts: 54
*Personal* text? No way!
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In a way that's a good thing. They can concentrate on making a truly stunning game without the financial troubles waiting usually has. For once I trust that their next game, whatever it will be, will actually be incredibly good. Look at Half-life 2. That was also turning into a DN Forever thing, but the demo I have downloaded is one of the most polished games I have ever played, and I'll buy the full version ... next time it's on offer. I have a (cool) laptop with Intel graphics and not too much money to spend.The thing is, those games are (almost) the only that I find as much fun as Doom 1/2, Quake (+Generations), and other old games. Even Commander Keen is just hilarious  |
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MadTux
Ogre
Posts: 54
*Personal* text? No way!
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I'm not really a fan of these Hitler parodies, and I'm part German, so I understand the original, but this just cracks me up  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KLzp5LTHgo |
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MadTux
Ogre
Posts: 54
*Personal* text? No way!
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Maybe I'll actually use my Youtube account and upload something in the near future ...
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Thomas Mink
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They made another Wolfenstein game for God's sake! Hasn't that bastard BJ killed me enough already? I'm not even charging royalties for letting them use my likeness, so you'd think that After all that I could at least get a God damned peek!" Kind of a shame, to me anyway, but Hitler is only mentioned in passing like twice in the newest Wolf game.. and one of them is a newspaper clipping. But you did get right that his likeness is used.. as a gold collectible. I do agree that that particular 'Hitler reacts' was one of the better ones I've seen, though. |
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