"The worst aspect of the continuing pace of game development that we fell into was the longer and longer times between releases. If I could go back in time and change one thing along the trajectory of id Software, it would be, do more things more often. And that was id’s mantra for so long: 'It’ll be done when it’s done.' And I recant from that. I no longer think that is the appropriate way to build games. I mean, time matters, and as years go by—if it’s done when it’s done and you’re talking a month or two, fine. But if it’s a year or two, you need to be making a different game."
This is what ultimately did 3D Realms and Duke Nukem Forever in.
There was a lot of overlap between Apogee Software (later, 3D Realms) and id Software in the early days. The mantra of 3D Realms was, during Nuke Forever, that the game will be done when it's done.
That mantra works great at a small scale. But when AAA titles go from Duke3d to Halo/CoD within the span of one development iteration, you're screwed. The cost of keeping up was, I suspect, just too great for a company the size of 3D Realms to keep up. Even id Software was diminishing, post-Quake 3.
Companies like Blizzard and EA have the resources to pump out WoW expansion #9, or Madden 2035 or whatever. For better or worse (my opinion, usually worse) the industry has become more like Hollywood blockbusters. The whole world hears about when GTA 5 comes out and makes billions of dollars the first week, or whatever. As a result, we're just going to get what Hollywood gives us in movies: sequel after sequel.
Perhaps I'm wrong but the opening sentence - "At the stroke of midnight on December 10, 1993, an executive at id Software uploaded a file to an FTP site on the University of Washington’s network" - seems inaccurate - the big ftp site back then was actually Washington University St. Louis - a different entity than U of W.
"A sympathetic computer administrator at the University at Wisconsin, Parkside, named David Datta volunteered to let id upload the Doom shareware to a file transfer site he maintained on the school’s network." (page 123)
Yes-- wuarchive.wustl.edu and ftp.wustl.edu are what I was thinking of, too. I fondly remember pulling Aminet and Linux-related files off those servers back in the early-to-mid 90s.
"And I have to say I was pleasantly heartened when the Call of Duty wave came over in more recent years and really took first-person back to the top of the heap in prominence."
CREATED DOOM AND QUAKE, THE EXEMPLARS OF ADRENALINE ACTION FPS
[Good Guy John Carmack]
HAS NOTHING BUT KIND WORDS FOR DILUTED ALSO-RANS LIKE COD
Seriously, I probably wouldn't be so soured on "modern warfare" shooters if I hadn't played so much Doom and Quake in my teens-to-early-twenties. They set the bar, a bar which has proven very difficult to meet.
You have to consider that Doom and Quake are on the same level that modern generic shooters. They were basically, find the keys( up to three ), find the doors and kill the monsters and nothing more. I think Doom and Quake were what CoD is today. And there is nothing wrong with that if you like twitch shooters, because that is what Doom is. ::hides::
What you're saying is that Doom and Quake had very basic mechanics. I won't argue with that. But the kind of gameplay they exhibited was very different from the CoD series. Doom's ridiculous weapon loadout, ridiculous number of monsters (especially on higher difficulty settings), the fact that your player character moved at highway speeds, etc. gave a sense of urgency and chaos to the game. CoD has nothing like the feeling of dread you get when you spot a bonus in a darkened room, naïvely cross the threshold, and hear the hissing of multiple cacodemons emerging from hidden chambers directly behind you.
Another interesting mechanic in Doom was the ability to either mow down monsters yourself, or save a bit of ammo by enticing them to kill each other and mopping up the stragglers. This was widely copied in "Doom clones" of the day; the instruction manual for Marathon even gave tips on "berserking".
CoD and its cousins in the "bloody screen, so real!" genre are quite different. They're fine for what they are, but some of us who have been playing FPSes for a while feel there's something missing. There's a series of parody videos on YouTube called "Call of Dooty" which are basically Doom with CoD tropes: QTEs, tutorial levels, waypoints which walk you through the path you're supposed to follow (and penalize you for straying off the path), NPC dialogue that refers to the demons as "Russians", etc.
I played a lot of Doom and Quake back in the day. I also enjoyed CoD:MW and MW2. All those games are very linear and scripted. The feeling of dread you describe works the first time you see it. The second time you get there you know what is going to happen - and that's perfectly fine!
Both Doom, Quake and the Modern Warfare games are essentially built on linear scripted sequences like that. I'd urge anyone to play "All Ghillied Up" (which may be one of the best levels of all modern shooters) and try to tell me they didn't feel at least some excitement.
By the way, if you're looking for something that carries the Doom/Quake torch of mowing down lots of enemies at crazy speeds, check out the Serious Sam series.
Yes, but no. Quake and especially Quake II multiplayer back in the day was a crazy and super intense experience that still hasn't entirely been replicated in the modern era. Everyone running around in their custom skins on custom maps, like threewave, grappling everywhere, leaving grenades and trip mines everywhere, trying desperately to get the flag back to base. It was delicious chaos, and it was so incredibly fun.
A lot of modern games are still fun, TF2 still captures a good bit of what the old times were like, but many modern multiplayer games have a lot of MMO and leveling mechanics added to them which introduce a fair amount of "grinding" into the game which makes it a bit too much like work and not enough like just raw fun.
If you want a fun FPS, check out Sanctum 2. It mixes FPS with tower defense, sure, but you are usually severely resource-constrained in terms of the towers you can build and have to mop up quite a few baddies that make it through your gauntlet. It requires some high-level strategic thinking in terms of weapon, perk, and tower load-out, how and where to spend your resources to place towers, and tactics against the enemies that make it through. But it's pretty much jump in and have fun.
CoD is not a shooter on rails despite being mocked as such. In rails shooters you have literally no control over movement.
I agree that levels are more linear, but at expense of other gameplay elements. Also CoD franchise is getting sucked dry. If that happened to some other game it would get criticized more as well.
Take a look at Half-Life 1 & 2 one the best games of all time. They are pretty linear[0]. And they also have keys and doors, which have the form of scientists, switches and valves, but they are there.
I found HL2 really boring precisely because it was so linear.
Actually, it was worse than that; I had no agency. For example, I recall spotting an interesting nook in one level, investigating where it went, then doubling back to see where the main path went. But then I found that the main path was blocked, and in fact the only way forward was the interesting nook. It wasn't the first time this happened; but the cumulative effect was that it completely broke the game for me, because it removed any incentive I had to pay attention to my surroundings - I realized I would be beaten into submission by the direction of the game, with heavy-handed clues bludgeoning me to go the approved path.
I saw the levels like evented puppet boxes. Early on in HL2, there's a bit where you pop out of a sewer, and around a corner to the right, there's a bunch of guys on a ledge shooting at you. It is impossible to kill them without going all the way around the corner and into another tunnel to "cleverly" pop up behind them. After a couple of hours, you could almost see the bounding boxes of the script triggers, it was so predictable. The forced nature of the encouters were quite different from the action bubbles of HL1.
Deus Ex had moved the art so far forward, while HL2 was stuck in the past.
HL1 was what I might call a tactical bubble game. There's one action scene followed by another, with the paths in between fairly linear. But the action bubbles themselves were reasonably open to different tactics, and especially when fighting the black ops enemies, fun. But it's a very dated by today's standards, because Freeman never talks, and indeed, has no agency himself.
So I feel justified in calling CoD a shooter on rails, because when I talk about agency, I mean a lot more than what those games give you. You do literally have control over movement, but it's an illusion; you have no choice but to go where the directors force you to go, and to the extent that you break out of your box, you're finding bugs in the experience.
You alluded to the difference in your last sentence: as budgets have escalated, many AAA titles have moved towards directors, script writers and DoPs from Hollywood. So we get games that follow mature, established tropes that work well in AAA movies, but the games themselves lack any true agency for the player because they're designed to be slightly interactive action movies.
I completely agree on the first five paragraphs. Well written. I have yet to see a game as good as the first Deus Ex. Do you have any suggestions besides the usual?
The first Crysis had some good things in terms of freedom of movement and tactical options. I'm told Far Cry 2 is pretty good in this regard as well.
Otherwise, the original Operation Flashpoint/ARMA are pretty much the ultimate FPS sandbox. As long as you are ready to eat bugs and suffer the terrible physics. Completely different from Deus Ex, obviously, but definitely not on rails.
I completely agree. It amazed me that people hailed HL2 as one of the greatest games ever. I thought it was awful - and as you say, all because of the lack of agency. It's not so much a game as a series of set pieces to show of the cleverness of the level designers.
> HAS NOTHING BUT KIND WORDS FOR DILUTED ALSO-RANS LIKE COD
I'll go on record as saying I liked the first few CODs (up to the first Modern Warfare). Sure, they were full of scripted set pieces, but pretty enjoyable set pieces. A completely different experience than Doom, to be sure, but atmospheric in their own right.
The original Call of Duty from 2003 is built on the Quake III Arena engine (id Tech 3) so John Carmack and ID made money licensing it. So of course he has kind words for that franchise.
After reading this book, I realized I had WAAY underestimated Romero's impact on iD.
Point blank - without Romero, there is iD Software (it was his idea to form a new company). There is no Doom. There is no Quake. Romero was one of the primary creative forces behind iD.
Carmack was the tech genius who made their ideas come to life.
I've not read the book, but I've often wondered if things would have been that different without Romero.
Maybe in the beginning he was a driving force but I speculate something changed. Be it something with him, technology changes, or whatever but he later did not seem to have as big an impact.
I met Romero back during the beginning of the Ion Storm days and based on that short chat with him I was convinced that Ion Storm would succeed. Sadly it did not. Granted, Ion Storm did turn out some of the best games ever made but not the one that Romero made.
I think it's exactly this, which makes the comparison to Lennon / McCartney so apt.
Even as readers of the book learn that they are rather compared to Metallica.
I agree that it needed the two Johns to make iD happen.
On a sidenote: To me John Carmack is one of the true hacker heroes. That's for his almost militant stance aganst patents and for his generousity in sharing his code.
I enjoyed this book SO MUCH. I've actually begun learning C++ because of it. The world of programming is just fascinating. I know I'll never be the next Carmack, but I really want to turn some of my ideas for fun games into a reality.
As I've also recently finished reading _Masters of Doom_ (as a result of HN's discussion of Jeff Atwood's blog post about it [0]), I know that the Wired article has it wrong in the first sentence. Doom wasn't uploaded to a Univ of Washington server, rather Univ of Wisconsin.
The book was a really good and quick read. One point I'll make about its content was how it told of Carmack reading Steve Levey's _Hackers_ (1984) and thought that's where he belonged. I was happy to learn about his alignment with free software.
Wolfenstein 3d was my first non-console game. I enjoyed it tremendously, as with Doom and Hexen. I'm currently a COD addict.
The term "deathmatch" was an insight of Romero's upon experiencing the beginning of multiplayer. That was also nice to find out, that deathmatch came from Doom. It has totally stuck since, as team deathmatch is considered the default game type in COD.
If you enjoyed reading this and want to learn more about Carmack, Doom and id software, Masters of Doom by David Kushner is a well researched and enjoyable read.
"The worst aspect of the continuing pace of game development that we fell into was the longer and longer times between releases. If I could go back in time and change one thing along the trajectory of id Software, it would be, do more things more often. And that was id’s mantra for so long: 'It’ll be done when it’s done.' And I recant from that. I no longer think that is the appropriate way to build games. I mean, time matters, and as years go by—if it’s done when it’s done and you’re talking a month or two, fine. But if it’s a year or two, you need to be making a different game."