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ToxicFrog posted:First of all, I'm not sure why the fact that it's shareware is even relevant. Should shareware games be held to a lower standard or something? quote:Secondly, of those games, three of them (Pathways and both Underworlds) predate Doom, and the other two came out less than a year later - just before and just after Doom II. quote:Finally, I'm not saying that they didn't put a lot of effort into the actual implementation of the game; I'm saying that it's a low-effort design. Tom Hall may have spent half a year writing the Doom Bible, but in the end none of that got used; they basically said "gently caress it, let's do Wolfenstein 3d again except better". Regarding the technology, I don't think you're being fair to id if you are suggesting that they weren't experimenting with a sophisticated rendering engine. When Doom came out, it had the most advanced 2.5D engine around, and a very efficient one at that. Moreover, it enabled map designs and a kind of mechanics that simply weren't possible (or at least not practical) on the polygonal UU engine. Doom's tremendous success, I believe, is as much the result of its technology as its gameplay.
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Jul 19, 2011 22:56
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Funkmaster General posted:It didn't (at least not in the graphics department), but I have enough nostalgia for Unreal that I can overlook that, which isn't the case for Quake I, unfortunately. I'm totally willing to admit it looks like rear end, though, whereas I genuinely still think Doom looks fine, good even, with only a few exceptions (the bushes on certain outdoor levels, for example). Yeah, I didn't really play these games at the time that they came out, other than maybe fifteen minutes of Doom and quite a lot of Wolf3D's shareware episode. Only really started doing the Doom thing many years later and like most sprite-based games it still totally holds up. Can't say the same about Quake or Unreal just because early 3D has aged horribly.
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Jul 19, 2011 23:03
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Reive posted:I can't play either without using software rendering, I HATE the lovely smoothing they do to textures in OpenGL, and high-res textures don't look good on low-poly models. Depending on the version you're using, this can be addressed. For instance, if you're playing quake with darkplaces, you want to type gl_texturemode gl_nearest rather than gl_texturemode gl_linear (or something like that). You'll get your gloriously unsmeared pixels, but you can still take advantage of the fancier lighting like raytracing and projected shadows, which I think actually enhance the atmosphere when tweaked just right. Even old GLQuake had some pretty deep settings for texture stuff if I remember correctly. Going old school and using software rendering is still fun in a weird way though.
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Jul 19, 2011 23:05
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Sombrerotron posted:non-linearity and wealth of explorational content of, say, Deus Ex To be fair, Deus Ex is another game with really lazy design. The shooting and movement mechanics are incredibly clunky compared to Doom, a game that came out 7 years prior. You would think that they would get the basic shooting mechanics down first before building their crazy immersive world, but I guess they were too lazy.
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Jul 19, 2011 23:18
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emoticon posted:To be fair, Deus Ex is another game with really lazy design. The shooting and movement mechanics are incredibly clunky compared to Doom, a game that came out 7 years prior. You would think that they would get the basic shooting mechanics down first before building their crazy immersive world, but I guess they were too lazy.
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Jul 19, 2011 23:31
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Mak0rz posted:ToxicFrog, you might want to read this article and figure out why your comparing of Doom to System Shock and Ultima don't really hold any ground. How a game looks and behaves is only part of the formula. The other is how it feels. I've read that article before, actually. If you want to talk "feel" rather than technical merits, you might want to look at Pathways into Darkness and Marathon, which I also compared it to. Marathon has exactly the same sort of fast-paced, agility-as-defence shooting going on; indeed, many of the sections in that article would apply equally well to Marathon. Unlike Doom, however, it manages to incorporate a storyline as well, and - mostly starting in Marathon 2 - levels with a major sense of place without sacrificing playability. As for Pathways, it has a very different feel - primarily due to the slow movement speed of everything, including enemy projectiles - but a similar concept, and in fact if you activate the TURBO code it feels surprisingly like Doom. Except, of course, for the three plot threads to piece together, the cool puzzles, and the conversations with dead Nazis. Sombrerotron posted:Considering that shareware games were low-budget affairs by nature, and that most of them tended to be either unambitious or poorly executed (if not both), I believe it would be generally unreasonable to expect them to live up to the standards set by developers of retail games. However, I will concede that id may have had both the financial and material means to match those of a team like Origin's; I don't really know. Id's previous releases, Wolfenstein 3d and Commander Keen, had been record-settingly successful; they went with a shareware model for Doom because it had been so insanely profitable for them with Wolf3d. By the time work on Doom started, they had the kind of budget that Bungie and Looking Glass could only dream of. Don't know about Origin, but they had basically no involvement in UUW or Shock in any case. quote:I'm not so sure if you can just blame it on "laziness". The impression I have is that Carmack (and some others at id) thought the game would be better without implementing all sorts of elaborate ideas on plot and gameplay mechanics, and simply got his way in the end. Part of it may have been an unwillingness to go through all that trouble, but it seems to me that it was just as much a deliberate design choice. Consider also how Gabe Newell has argued against the kind of non-linearity and wealth of explorational content of, say, Deus Ex, in favour of a more linear but visceral approach in order to guarantee that the average player - who isn't going to endlessly replay a game - gets the most bang for his buck. Whether that's indeed a better approach is debatable, but it's not necessarily one motivated by laziness. Fair enough; I concede the point. (I have to say that I disagree vehemently with both Newell and Carmack on this, though.) quote:Regarding the technology, I don't think you're being fair to id if you are suggesting that they weren't experimenting with a sophisticated rendering engine. When Doom came out, it had the most advanced 2.5D engine around, and a very efficient one at that. Moreover, it enabled map designs and a kind of mechanics that simply weren't possible (or at least not practical) on the polygonal UU engine. Doom's tremendous success, I believe, is as much the result of its technology as its gameplay. And then Marathon came along a year later with an engine that kicked the poo poo out of Doom's, and was completely forgotten because it wasn't released on PC.  You're right, though. You could probably make a run-and-gun shooter in the UUW engine (and you can definitely make one in Shock), but limitations in how the map is constructed wouldn't give the level designers nearly as much freedom in overall structure. (The tradeoff is that you can include a lot more fine detail, but the worth of this is dubious if the player is just going to fire a rocket into it while running past at 80kph.) The Marathon engine is a lot more powerful, but didn't exist at the time. When you put it that way, I can't really fault them for making an upgraded version of Carmack's "faster texture mapper" rather than making Quake a few years early.
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Jul 19, 2011 23:33
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So, uh, this talk about story and Doom made me check up on the Doom novels I remember hearing about several times in the past. Wikipedia has a synopsis of the plot of the series on it's page. There aren't many words I can use to describe just what in the gently caress the authors must of been taking when they wrote the books. Did they literally take a look at the game and go "there's not much to go with here, let's go huff some spraypaint and see where it takes us" I kind of wish more game-book authors just said "gently caress it" to the source material and took the plots into all kinds of crazy territory (maybe the ME books might of been passable then)
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Jul 19, 2011 23:34
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Jblade posted:So, uh, this talk about story and Doom made me check up on the Doom novels I remember hearing about several times in the past. Wikipedia has a synopsis of the plot of the series on it's page. I tried to read one of those, but they kept referring to the demons as "Freds," called them aliens, and said cacodemons looked like pumpkins (they obviously look like TOMATOES, man), and I just couldn't do it.
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Jul 19, 2011 23:36
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Does Brutal Doom actually make the enemies stronger? I'm hoping so, otherwise my doom skills have really gone down the drain..
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Jul 19, 2011 23:39
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Jblade posted:So, uh, this talk about story and Doom made me check up on the Doom novels I remember hearing about several times in the past. Wikipedia has a synopsis of the plot of the series on it's page.  Book 1 sounds like about what I'd expect a novelization of Doom to be, but by book 3 I just don't don't know what the gently caress.
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Jul 19, 2011 23:43
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Jblade posted:So, uh, this talk about story and Doom made me check up on the Doom novels I remember hearing about several times in the past. Wikipedia has a synopsis of the plot of the series on it's page. This reads exactly like if Doom was directed by the people doing the original Resident Evil games.
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Jul 19, 2011 23:49
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ToxicFrog posted:Id's previous releases, Wolfenstein 3d and Commander Keen, had been record-settingly successful; they went with a shareware model for Doom because it had been so insanely profitable for them with Wolf3d. By the time work on Doom started, they had the kind of budget that Bungie and Looking Glass could only dream of. Don't know about Origin, but they had basically no involvement in UUW or Shock in any case. quote:And then Marathon came along a year later with an engine that kicked the poo poo out of Doom's, and was completely forgotten because it wasn't released on PC. :sigh: quote:You're right, though. You could probably make a run-and-gun shooter in the UUW engine (and you can definitely make one in Shock), but limitations in how the map is constructed wouldn't give the level designers nearly as much freedom in overall structure. (The tradeoff is that you can include a lot more fine detail, but the worth of this is dubious if the player is just going to fire a rocket into it while running past at 80kph.) The Marathon engine is a lot more powerful, but didn't exist at the time. When you put it that way, I can't really fault them for making an upgraded version of Carmack's "faster texture mapper" rather than making Quake a few years early.
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Jul 19, 2011 23:57
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KozmoNaut posted:Then again, I don't really get all the Quake 2 hate either. I absolutely loved it back when it was released and I still replay it from time to time. It was loving amazing when it came out. Even though Quake 2 is the low point of the Quake series, I still replay it every year or so. I have no idea why, but its just one of those games I can go back to, even though its got garbage like the bad "Mine" hub and just above average level design.
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Jul 19, 2011 23:58
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Funkmaster General posted:I tried to read one of those, but they kept referring to the demons as "Freds," called them aliens, and said cacodemons looked like pumpkins (they obviously look like TOMATOES, man), and I just couldn't do it. The Freds came later, they were their own kind of thing.
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Jul 20, 2011 00:01
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Sombrerotron posted:Considering that shareware games were low-budget affairs by nature, and that most of them tended to be either unambitious or poorly executed (if not both), I believe it would be generally unreasonable to expect them to live up to the standards set by developers of retail games. The shareware model, once they figured out that "here's the full version, please pay us just cause" didn't work, was actually pretty business-viable because there simply wasn't that much competition from retail so nobody cared if the full version was only sold via mail order. Also, blaming the simplistic gameplay of those titles on laziness isn't really fair, the landscape at the time was mostly puzzle-oriented adventure games and action-oriented arcade games, so they really were a bit inventive in mashing them together into essentially puzzle-oriented levels with a bunch of arcade-like action between you and the exit. quote:You would think that they would get the basic shooting mechanics down first before building their crazy immersive world, but I guess they were too lazy. On another the state of the art for location damage at that time was really bad. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Jul 20, 2011 |
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Jul 20, 2011 00:05
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Sombrerotron posted:All right, never mind the shareware connection then. And I meant Looking Glass Studios, of course; don't know why I was thinking of Origin. Sleep deprivation, probably. :| It's not an unreasonable mistake to make; Origin made everything else with "Ultima" in the title, and published Looking Glass's early stuff. System Shock and both UUW games have Origin Systems splash screens along with the Looking Glass (or, in the latter case, Blue Sky) ones.
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Jul 20, 2011 00:14
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The Quake games go as follows, in order of perfection. Quake I, Quake II, Quake III, Quake IIII(Which blows in my opinion). I liked Quake 3 enough when it came out. Sure it's more "polished". It still doesn't hold a candle to Q2 multiplayer, let alone Quake multiplayer. Quake Fortress in Co-op with leveling could only be ruined by the cries of a Klesk being shot over and over. The models in QuakeI/II move like each inch of skin is some scummy parasite, festering in it's sheer jubilation.
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Jul 20, 2011 00:35
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Kazvall posted:The models in QuakeI/II move like each inch of skin is some scummy parasite, festering in it's sheer jubilation. Was that an artifact of the technology or the lack of skeletal animation? I always thought it made quake1 look eerier. As much as I love quake1, I do wish it wasn't as bare in terms of ingame story, I guess. I get the whole doom-without-hell vibe, but the way the levels tie together always bugged me. Even the inclusion of a doom-style overworld map showing the relation of say, the Wizard's Manse and The Dismal Oubliette, would've helped the game feel less disjointed.
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Jul 20, 2011 00:51
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Quake 3 is not a real Quake game and should not be considered one when discussing the series as a whole. This is my position and I shall maintain it no matter what arguement you throw at me  I honestly didn't think Quake 4 was bad at all personally. id seemed to have learnt their lesson from Doom 3, while there were a fair amount of forced story sections the action felt visceral and engaging and there were some interesting environments. The same can't be said for Quake 2, which while impressive at the time for all the little graphical touches it had (Weapons kicking up dust, flies on rotten corpses, various kill animations), had absolutely abysmal level design and a horrendous colour palette. Of course, I have to admit that I'm not a huge Quake fan at all, I find the games entertaining enough but they never really clicked with me. 4 was the only one I've managed to play to completion.
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Jul 20, 2011 00:53
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0 rows returned posted:Was that an artifact of the technology or the lack of skeletal animation? Songbearer posted:Quake 3 is not a real Quake game and should not be considered one when discussing the series as a whole.
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Jul 20, 2011 00:54
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OneEightHundred posted:Keep in mind that "retail games" barely existed at that point. The poo poo sold in stores was mostly edutainment titles, simulator-esque stuff, adventure games, and occasionally straight ripoffs of old Atari games. PC software retail was largely lumped in with office/school supplies, so selling gun-and-gore simulators on PC was a bit of jump for both office stores and entertainment stores. quote:The shareware model, once they figured out that "here's the full version, please pay us just cause" didn't work, was actually pretty business-viable because there simply wasn't that much competition from retail so nobody cared if the full version was only sold via mail order. Songbearer posted:I honestly didn't think Quake 4 was bad at all personally. id seemed to have learnt their lesson from Doom 3, while there were a fair amount of forced story sections the action felt visceral and engaging and there were some interesting environments.
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Jul 20, 2011 01:01
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OneEightHundred posted:Sort of both. Skeletal animation was computationally expensive, so they used vertex animation. Memory was scarce, so they used 8-bit coordinates that jiggle from rounding error. The worst jiggling I've ever seen from that era was in Kingpin. It was Quake 2 based but they did a much worse job at keeping things under control than id did.
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Jul 20, 2011 01:08
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Any single-player TC's for Doom that have come out recently that are worth a look? Stronghold is epic, but I've tried looking around for something with a similar level of polish and, well... There's a lot of crap out there.
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Jul 20, 2011 02:26
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Anyone remember Chex Quest? Best cereal prize ever.
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Jul 20, 2011 02:34
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RickVoid posted:Any single-player TC's for Doom that have come out recently that are worth a look? Stronghold is epic, but I've tried looking around for something with a similar level of polish and, well... There's a lot of crap out there. You can look at the recent Cacowards, though it will be a bit before the 2011 awards are up. The Wads forum will generally catch anything we don't post here, since the creators want to pimp their stuff there.
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Jul 20, 2011 02:34
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Funkmaster General posted:Anyone remember Chex Quest? Chex Quest was the first FPS I ever played. Good times.
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Jul 20, 2011 02:36
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moms pubis posted:Chex Quest was the first FPS I ever played. Good times. I had actually already played through DOOM when Chex Quest came out (which is actually kind of startling to me now, doing the math to figure out how old I was at the time), but not the extra content from Ultimate Doom. I enjoyed Chex Quest in its own right, but was ecstatic when I started loving around with the .wad and realized that all the original content was still there, waiting to be rebuilt into DOOM with a bit of tweeking.
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Jul 20, 2011 02:44
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I'd play Brutal Chex Quest. Make it happen.
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Jul 20, 2011 02:48
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Are there any good Mac Doom source ports? I know Skulltag has one but it doesn't work (as has come up before in the thread). I would play it on my gaming PC, but it's hooked up to my TV now, and I'd rather play Doom sitting in front of a monitor.
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Jul 20, 2011 02:48
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:I'd play Brutal Chex Quest. Make it happen. Chex Quest is just a DOOM TC wad. I don't know how Brutal Doom works but if you can play other WADs in it, you might be able to do that.
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Jul 20, 2011 02:49
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Anal Volcano posted:Are there any good Mac Doom source ports? I know Skulltag has one but it doesn't work (as has come up before in the thread). I would play it on my gaming PC, but it's hooked up to my TV now, and I'd rather play Doom sitting in front of a monitor. Skulltag OS X works for me if I use Doomseeker to launch and Doomseeker knows where the IWADS are. It also works if you put the IWADS into the Skulltag.app container file in the same directory as the Skulltag binary.
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Jul 20, 2011 02:51
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Songbearer posted:Quake 3 is not a real Quake game and should not be considered one when discussing the series as a whole. This is my position and I shall maintain it no matter what arguement you throw at me What is a "Quake game" though? None of the games in the series have anything to do with one another, except for II and IV (and Quake Wars, I guess). The first Quake has more in common with Doom, in both story and gameplay, and Quake 3 is basically Super Smash Brothers: id Edition. Quake isn't so much a series as it is a brand; in the late 90's the name was just synonymous for "id-developed FPS".
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Jul 20, 2011 03:15
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Funkmaster General posted:Chex Quest is just a DOOM TC wad. I don't know how Brutal Doom works but if you can play other WADs in it, you might be able to do that. It actually does kind of work, but Chex Quest with Doom's weapons is hardly Chex Quest.
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Jul 20, 2011 04:15
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CyRaptor posted:What is a "Quake game" though? None of the games in the series have anything to do with one another, except for II and IV (and Quake Wars, I guess). The first Quake has more in common with Doom, in both story and gameplay, and Quake 3 is basically Super Smash Brothers: id Edition. Quake isn't so much a series as it is a brand; in the late 90's the name was just synonymous for "id-developed FPS". Stop playing Devil's Advocate. We all know the truth. Also, BLAKE STONE just popped into my mind.
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Jul 20, 2011 04:24
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Kazvall posted:Also, BLAKE STONE just popped into my mind. I loved those games.
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Jul 20, 2011 04:53
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Songbearer posted:The same can't be said for Quake 2, which while impressive at the time for all the little graphical touches it had (Weapons kicking up dust, flies on rotten corpses, various kill animations), had absolutely abysmal level design and a horrendous colour palette. I don't get this. sure the mission packs are just awful, but Quake 2 itself had nearly perfect level design. they did a really good job of sprawling you all over the place and making sure you had constant forward progression. and they always made sure you were blowing poo poo up so that you could feel all badass for clearing an objective. And while i'm thinking about the mission packs, gently caress Ground Zero. it's got points where you can't actually avoid damage or just flat out make it difficult to do anything. TURRETS ON TOP OF DOORWAYS WITH OVERHANGS, OH BOY! FOUR ROCKET TURRETS WHILE YOU FIGHT A MEDIC, A GLADIATOR, AND 3 OF THOSE loving SPIDER CYBORGS, THIS IS TOTALLY DOABLE IN ONE TRY! Turrets in a quake game are the loving worst decision ever. Diabetes Forecast fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Jul 20, 2011 |
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Jul 20, 2011 05:12
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Holy hell, the third episode of Heretic starts off a lot more hectic than the first two. You start off in a closed square with a couple imps, nothing new. Then you see there's phantoms above your head in a gated portion that can still take potshots at you. THEN you head out and start running into those axe-throwers around every corner and there's hardly enough ammo for your starting staff to take care of things.
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Jul 20, 2011 06:16
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iastudent posted:Holy hell, the third episode of Heretic starts off a lot more hectic than the first two. You start off in a closed square with a couple imps, nothing new. Then you see there's phantoms above your head in a gated portion that can still take potshots at you. THEN you head out and start running into those axe-throwers around every corner and there's hardly enough ammo for your starting staff to take care of things. Do you have the episode 4/5 expansion?
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Jul 20, 2011 06:26
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Fag Boy Jim posted:Do you have the episode 4/5 expansion? Yeah, it's part of the Steam iD super pack so it has all five episodes. This is just gonna hurt more isn't it? 
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Jul 20, 2011 06:27
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The id Super Pack for $35 is probably the best gaming purchase I've ever made.
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Jul 20, 2011 06:31
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