I will agree with one thing from the article,
he's John freakin' Carmack.
This is a man who has been pushing the boundaries of realtime graphics since Wolfenstein3D. We owe him a lot, and I think he has earned the right to work on whatever project he damn well chooses. People seem to imagine all the amazing things he could have done with his time while glossing over the amazing things he has done right here, right now.
No, Rage is not the panacea of interactive entertainment. It is, however, a stunning showcase of some amazing new technologies in the form of a fairly conventional shooter. It is what it is, don't like it, don't buy it.
Nowdays, anytime an id game is mentioned you can't help but be overwhelmed by the "id games are teh suck!" noise. Fine. Don't buy them. But concocting some conspiracy about Carmack being held hostage by the artists or whatever is just nonsense.
He has a team of artists who help realise the (visual) potential of the awesome new tech he has developed. The gameplay itself comes second. Heresy, I know, but this has been the pattern for a number of releases and if the id team are happy with that then more power to them.
> He has a team of artists who help realise the (visual) potential of the awesome new tech he has developed. The gameplay itself comes second. Heresy, I know, but this has been the pattern for a number of releases and if the id team are happy with that then more power to them.
What it really comes down to is that id games are basically showcases for their latest engine tech. The licensing income from the engines (which they call idTech if I recall) probably overshadows the games within a year of release.
I don't think they license engines anymore. I just hope their tech makes it into Fallout 4 or whatever Bethesda (which is now under the same corporate umbrella as id) ends up calling it.
Still being licensed, just with less demand, and with the new restriction that games developed with id Tech have to be published through Bethesda Softworks. id Tech 4 is due for a GPL source code release sometime in the next few months.
I really love most of the games they make, but Bethesda is a terrible company and lately they have been actively attempting to destroy the game industry. The only thing keeping Id software relevant is their ability to create amazing graphics engines. They haven't made a truly memorable game since Quake 3 Arena. John Carmack designs 3d engines, not video games. If Bethesda is restricting Id software's ability to license their engine, then Id software is being left to die. I had high hopes for Rage, I watched all of John's interviews and almost believed that this game would put them back on the map. Unfortunately when it released it was just like doom 3, a good game released in a market that is flooded with phenomenal games.
Their attitude towards the game industry in general. They have awesome developers who continue to make some of my favorite games. Unfortunately the people who manage the company don't understand the industry. They routinely make stupid trollish decisions. Here are a few examples.
- They signed a contract with Interplay, allowing the original creators of Fallout to make an MMO based on the Fallout franchise. As soon as the deal was inked, Bethesda regretted it and proceeded to do everything they could to delay the game's release. Then they cited the fact that Interplay promised to have the game finished by a certain date and used this as a basis for suing them.
- They tried to claim in court that the original creators of Fallout entered into a licensing agreement with the new owners not to make a game based on Fallout, but a completely different game having nothing to do with the franchise that just so happens to use the exact same name.
- As stated above, they are not allowing Id software to license their engine to anyone that doesn't publish their game through Bethesda. This is idiotic because as I stated above, the only thing that Id software is known for these days is for creating awesome 3d engines. Their games just aren't as good as they used to be.
- They are trying to claim that any games using the words "elder", or "scrolls" are deliberate violations of their intellectual property rights. Notch's game "scrolls" isn't even a competitor to anything Bethesda is working on, yet they are trying to sue a small developer out of existence.
- They claim that their game "The Elder Scrolls" is commonly known by it's fan base as "scrolls." This is a load of crap and I'm pretty sure that practically no one is referring to any of their games as "scrolls." The PC community commonly refers to the franchise as TES (The Elder Scrolls) and if they ever refer to it as anything else, it is normally by the episode's name (Daggerfall, Skyrim, etc.)
Disclaimer: I don't play Minecraft and I could care less about Scrolls. I just dislike it when software companies adopt selfish, cowardly practices in order to stifle innovation.
id Tech 4 is a weird beast. Carmack has said on multiple occasions that this engine is not made to generate a world like Elder Scrolls or Fallout. It will be interesting to see if they attempt to improve id Tech 5 and make all companies inside Bethesda use it or just give them the option if it fits their game.
Minor (very minor) quibble: You said "since Wolf3D"; but "since Commander Keen" would be more accurate.
Keen was possible due to a stroke of genius, letting him trick the monitor itself into becoming part of his "adaptive tile refresh" system. I'm a little hazy on the details, but... it's just a cool, little-known fact that Carmack made the very first "Mario-style" side scroller for the PC -- a feat that no one else managed to pull off.
It's easy to forget how crap PC graphics were at the time of Commander Keen. It was the first PC platform game I can remember that wasn't an obviously-CGA sprite flickerathon :)
Well he was right too when he said that Doom 3 was some kind of rupture with the previous titles. I can't remember the last game when I fought more than 10 enemies in one room
This article is so full of incendiary bullshit, I'm surprised it even got on the front page.
Some of the most critically acclaimed games, as well as highest selling games, have stories.
For example: Grand Theft Auto 3. Final Fantasy VII.
Ico. Metal Gear Solid. Arkham Asylum. Mass Effect. Dragon Age. Dark Souls. Demon Souls. Starcraft. Starcraft II.
Modern Warfare. World of Warcraft.
Do you know what else made these games stand out? Art direction.
Some of the most critically acclaimed games, as well as highest selling games, have stories.
He's not saying games don't have stories, of course they do, he's saying that some game designers get distracted from making good mechanics, which I agree, is a huge mistake. Mechanics is the core of the medium, and shouldn't be put second on the list.
Valve gets that. Their attention and talent put into storytelling and art direction is top-notch, yet that has never distracted them from making sure their mechanics are excellent.
Mechanics are not the core of the medium. It can be for some games but the medium is much wider than that. How do you explain games that have basically no mechanics at all? I'm talking about simple point and click games like Myst. There are no significant mechanics there, but there can be a great story, and great visuals to keep you interested.
What about games like Minecraft? I don't know if it's possible to fuse a high quality 3D engine with less amounts of artist generated content and still have a great game.
Challenge assumptions.
But if anyone can do it, Carmack can. (and that was an assumption, but oh well).
Yes, these games made it big and were good, but did they really push boundaries and invent new styles of play? No, they are just a story with an engine - the OP is talking about JC going off and doing something "different."
Grand Theft Auto 3? The grand-daddy of open-world gameplay? It even gave birth to an entire genre of clones.
World of Warcraft? Didn't invent a new style of play? They took Evercrack and distilled it into pure, fine weapons-grade MMORPGing!
Metal Gear Solid? Didn't have an incredibly unique (and much cloned, and much parodied) style of play? Whose story and art direction is so famous that today we have people running around conventions with big exclamation marks over their heads?
Ditto Mass Effect - whose conversational mechanics practically redefined how all games do it today?
Arkham Asylum? Whose unprecedented combination of unique art style, stealth mechanics, pitch-perfect voice acting, investigative gameplay, and open-world format was widely lauded by both players and critics?
Oh yeah, those games. I'm sure the stories were not at all core to the games' success. It's all the mechanics, I'm sure.
Fortunately, I haven't played a single game you mentioned. So I can be serious and totally off base at the same time. However, I have played games by JC and they are more of the same. Hoping his next gig isn't Rage++, but something new
It's also full of spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors. I had to reread every other sentence to get the gist of it. If the content was gold I could probably overlook that, but it's not. It's basically a carelessly scrawled rant.
As a linguistics student, I have a good deal of sympathy for people using a secondary language-- but I don't think this author even proofread his post before submitting it.
That hurts to read. I enjoyed Deus Ex - a lot - but the narrative there is the stuff of cheap sci-fi paperbacks. It's just that such a narrative is more enjoyable when you get to actually walk around the world it's portraying.
1. Carmack stopped making games for us PC gamers and started making games for the true mass market: casual console gamers. Rage is a great competitor to Halo or Call of Duty or whatever.
2. He left a huge void in the world of FPS gaming. The "best" FPS games today (Battlefield 3, Call of Duty) are graphically beautiful, watered down, crap for console gamers. Their actual game play sucks.
Quake1 Netquake Deathmatch/CTF/Clan Arena/Rocket Arena is still more intense and more a test of skill than any other game to follow in the ~13 years since it was created.
Creating a modern replacement (for no other reason really than fixing a few minor issues and bringing in new players) is on my list of Things To Do.
I'm living out my top-choice fantasy already: working on my web startup. Gaming is a secondary love, but if no one else gets around to it I definitely will.
That's like saying that somebody should be pretty good at physics because Einstein was. Juggling lots of ideas at once was pretty much Leonardo da Vinci's thing.
Discouraging people from having confidence in themselves (even when that confidence is unrealistic) is one of the biggest tragedies brought about by modern-day mediums such as HN et al.
I'd rather strike out a dozen times than watch from the stands.
Call of Duty is pretty good and also idtech3 based ;) Of course the IW engine has had years of work put into it to the point where it could be considered a different engine, even though the core code base is still the same.
Red Orchestra 2 is pretty good, but it is super buggy and the community is small. If it didn't suffer from so many game breaking bugs on release it would easily be the best FPS of the last 10 years.
Sadly and relatedly, the Descent series (6 degree of freedom FPS) was an intense test of skill unmatched anywhere else, and the last release in that series was ~13 years ago. I don't know of any other newer games in the genre.
Competitive FPS gaming reached a peak around 1998. Since then, the only games I've heard of with similar high-level competition have been in the RTS genre. "Watered down" seems to be the name of the game nowadays.
If you are interested in game design I highly recommend Warren Spector's master class on Video Games and Digital Media. In his first lecture he talks about how eg those point and click adventure games are no games to some extend. Highly interesting and thought provoking.
So poorly written, I find it hard to take seriously.
tl;dr Make fun games, not pretty ones.
The problem is that it is never obvious when mechanics make a game great, and when art direction does. See Bioshock for the latter. See something like Everquest for the former (and which was later eclipsed by a game with better mechanics AND art direction). Great games are rare. You need both of the above, and more.
> I don't even feel the need to save my progress when I play because I know rather just replay it next time.
As an amateur game designer, this sentence hits home like none other. This is the embodiment of the fine line between a short-lived game and one that will stay in history books. Quake, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D had it for me. Starcraft, Super Mario Bros or Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo had it for others. When you enjoy every single second and wish you could do it again the minute after, then you know you have a true immortal game in front of you.
One of my prominent design patterns when I try to work on games is to focus on very elementary satisfaction and a promess that doing it once more will still make the player smile. On FPS games for example, a cool and straightforward way to achieve that is to design levels so that they would work in all of single player, cooperative and deathmatch modes. Unfortunately, such good practices were lost in translation when we entered the third millenium and the era of in-game cinematics.
Since 90s John Carmack wrote games for hardware planning two years in the future. During his planning and development stage, those games were barely playable on standard gaming machines of the time. But he correctly knew that by the time these games will be released, hardware will get two to four times faster.
Thus for long he was the fist to come up with games that demonstrated the full capabilities of new hardwares. This formula worked until around mid 2000s when suddenly processors weren't getting the yearly speed boost as usual. Doom3 was it's first casualty. It was designed for a hardware that never appeared in market. Game designers had to trim down on-screen characters to make the game playable and released it late.
And rest is what we see now. That's my understanding of the situation.
While I would agree that Doom3 was a casualty of the effect you outline, most of the stuff Carmack is working on now is very much within the realm of current & future hardware.
The megatexture tech is a clever use of 'clipmaps' or virtual mipmaps and runs on current-gen hardware. They are currently looking at a sparse voxel octree technique to create a megatexture-like (theoretically)infinite LOD system for geometry. This is also intended to be used on current (or near future) hardware.
A lot of the graphics techniques used by id aren't invented by Carmack, his genius is making them run in realtime on consumer computers. And yes it can be a guessing game :)
On a related topic, the author's game LOVE is worth checking out -- a very evolutionary and programmer oriented (no surprise here) approach to game development. Check out this demo a few years ago of the tools he created and of the game. I haven't followed the game in over a year and when I played it was a bit broken and made me lose my vision for a few days but still worth checking out. Reminiscent of Minecraft actually and released around the same time.
I hoped LOVE would get traction, but felt it didn't work for me because it was too unconstrained (no clear objectives). I don't know how Minecraft has solved this.
The visual style is such that it looks like a painting viewed through a sand storm through a camera with a lens smeared with vaseline. It looks amazing initially but literally is painful to look at for any significant amount of time. I think the developer essentially takes very basic geometry at low resolution then layers on graphical affects.
You may think that looking at the gameplay demo that the game was simply recorded at low resolution but that is not the case. Bump the video to 720p and full screen then that is actually what it looked like at the time. Not sure if it has changed since the last time I played.
Love is beautiful in still shots but the actual game gives me motion-sickness. Even Mirrors Edge, which is renowned for being vomit-inducing, didn't have that effect on me. I think it's because the background just won't stay still.
This article definitely puts the random thoughts I was having tonight after seeing Rage into words.
In the as-close-to-an-id-biography-as-you'll-get Masters of Doom, Carmack's preference for avoiding story and focusing on industry-busting gameplay and technology is stressed many times, yet something does seem to have changed in this regard since Doom 3. In terms of blowing the competition's efforts away, Rage isn't a Doom, Quake, Commander Keen or even a Quake 2.
The RAGE tech and artistry is great, but my opinion of the game is cooling as I play it. The character seems to essentially be a dogsbody courier who sometimes gets to shoot things.
Edit: Good snippet from the Ars review:
> The sense that gamers are being trolled extends to many of the missions. Some of them go so far as to force you to drive to a location, hit a button, and then drive back to tell someone you hit a button.
An interesting perspective. The industry needs some people to blaze new trails and other people to pave the successful trails into roads. A really successful person like Carmack could do either if he chose to; it seems like he's happy with his current role of engine development. Would he be more effective designing new game mechanics? It's not clear.
Carmack on Rage in his own words, when giving the QuakeCon 2011 keynote (most important bit is probably after the ellipses):
"If you've seen me I've been spending a lot of time over there [at the demo stations] just watching people playing, generally with a big old grin on my face.
"We had so much that we set out to do on this that was different than what we had done before. Id had been almost a stereotype of what you do - first person shooter, run and gun, corridors, monsters jumping out at you, this type of thing. We invented this genre and we followed it for a long ways, but people thought that was all that we were doing.
"And with Rage we set out to be really pretty ambitious, to do a lot of things that we had never done before, and in hindsight knowing that it took six years, we would look back and say, 'Maybe we shouldn't have been quite as ambitious, maybe we should have done a few more of the things we had plenty of experience doing,' but in the end everybody gets the benefit of... we picked hard battles, we fought all of them, and in the end we did a really damn good job on it.
[...]
"It really is probably the most enjoyable id game, from my perspective, that we've ever made. I've played all of our games to degrees, but I was never one of the people who could spend eight hours deathmatching. I know there's a lot of you out there, but that was never kind of my take on our games.
"The pacing on Rage allows us to go ahead and have a game where you have moments of abject terror and intensity, and it's nicely balanced by the areas where you're going through, you're exploring, you're talking in town and doing these things. And we learned a lot through this process. By no means are we ready to be stood up next to Skyrim or something as an adventure game -- that's not what we're doing -- but it is clear at this point that there are beneficial things we can add to the gameplay experience, where we take everything that was fun and good about classic id games, and you can do these other things that add additional layers to it, that don't take anything away."
Carmack's take on his own game seems to be a very very far cry from the parent article's "blame the artists!" whinging. It sounds from what he says about his own take on the game, and probably more importantly from how genuinely excited he seems up on stage, that Rage's mixing up the tried and true id gameplay formula was, personally for him, an exhilarating breath of fresh air.
Off-topic: I could not click back in Firefox - I was redirected to the current page. While I felt the points in the article were well stated and poignant, the 'forcible no BACK' feature left a sour taste in my mouth. I won't be returning.
Carmack needs to be paired up with a real gameplay/product/market counterpart. His Steve Jobs so to speak. But if he is happy doing it his way then he should continue. I just hope Bethesda won't punish him for Rage's commercial disappointment.
He actually said that "there is more opportunity for technical innovation [...] in gaming than practically anywhere else I can imagine". A modern game like Rage can stimulate one's intellect for a very long time.
Games should be about story the same way a painting should be about story. Gameplay mechanics are the paints, and should be applied with intent for best results.
Sure, some abstract painting is great. Tetris is as well. But that's not the norm.
As for Carmack, we all know he's the tech guy and great at it. What's important is how the tools he creates are used. I've not played Rage yet, but I hear it's mediocre. I'm not brokenhearted over that.
What does hit me though, is QuakeLive.com's irrelevance in id's/Bethesda's planning. I'd love to see them first add a second game with worthwhile teamplay to compete with Team Fortress 2 (which is something id/B should've been ahead of.)
Secondly they need to provide a strong modding API and let players rent servers to host their mods on, and even let players run ads or charge for access if they want. Become the platform.
Finally, since I now realize I'm just writing a long id wishlist, I want the original team back for one more romp... I want them to be leads for Bethesda in relaunching Quake. Only this time, do it as an open world FPSRPG a la Fallout/Morrowind. Base it off of the old pen and paper rpg sessions that they all used to play that Carmack DMed, and Romero destroyed when he took the Diakatana from a demon. (All wonderfully discussed in the Masters of Doom book.)
Carmack Didn't design the game. He built the engine.
He also didn't design the id games of the first half of the 90s. John Romero was the driving force behind those game-mechanics. Romero was the one who decided that Doom and Wolfenstein had to be all about speed, and everything that slowed the games down had to be cut out.
Romero left id after Quake, because of conflicting design visions for the game.
The magic happened when Romero and Carmack were building games together.
I mostly agree with you. Quake II was a decent game, but it didn't leave a lasting impression. The original quake was the last single player Id game that mattered.
I think Id was able to recreate the magic for Q3A though. When it released it wasn't considered phenomenal, but now that I look back over the years, it is one of the top 3 shooters of all time.
I think Id could be great again if they got together with some of the designers from fallout or the elder scrolls. Some cross training would be beneficial to both parties. The character animation in Bethesda's games are terrible; Id software can't write a decent story.
The author says we've been robbed of 3 John Carmack games, but he must have forgot about id Software's iPhone games. He's been playing with the platform for a while now, and has been shipping smaller games with a fast turn around for a few years now.
He actually stated in an interview that his contract requires Bethesda to allow him to work on mobile projects every year. He enjoys mobile development because it reminds him of what game programming was like before the $100 Million budgets existed.
> Build an engine based on Raytracing, Voxels, particles, Signed Distance fields, vorenoi patterns, or something else we haven't seen.
Yes, back then graphics and gameplays were carefully designed in consideration of the 3D engine limits (eg. doom and its raycaster, or outcast[1] and its voxel-like engine). Today the polygon-based rendering seems to be the only viable technology (and it is hardware accelerated). I believe it's taking away all games' originality.
Anyhow, games are merely products. They have a target audience and are generally designed to appeal to that segment. For many, being immersed in a virtual [believable] world, holds high value when trying to wind down from stress.
For someone like the OP, I'd suggest checking out a game like Demon's Souls or Dark Souls. These are very lite on story, but heavy on game play. Be warned, the games are not easy. I think Demon's souls took me close to a year to finish with an hour or two here and there.
Keep in mind as well that id Software was sold in 2009 to ZeniMax Media (The company behind Bethesda Softworks which did Oblivion/Skyrim and Fallout 3).
Obviously I don't know any internals of what happened post-acquisition but it's likely that John has a lot less control over the game shipping. More specifically, with a huge company behind him the likelihood is the artists etc will continue to have influence in a way that will perpetuate the OP's frustration.
The author seems to miss the fact that id Software didn't make Rage.
id Software made id Tech 5. Bethesda was tasked with making a game on top of it that would be a well rounded showcase of the engines capabilities and a good game.
Before Bethesda was Raven, Nerve, Gray Matter Interactive, etc. I believe Quake III Arena was the last "pure id" game.
While they may have been wrong about Bethesda vs ZeniMax (and it's an easy mistake seeing as Bethesda is doing the publishing) they were right about RAGE being an id game. Doom 3 was also a "pure id" game released after Quake 3.
Wtf Rage is amazing and I've never seen a game that looks better. I would say that getting Rage done is quite an achievement. If hoped that JC would do a different game then you can doit yourself.
Probably he is talking about Rage on PC. Rage on PC looks alright, but not the best looks ever. Quite often it looks like it is 2000 outside (the textures are meh, they are not crisp at all).
This is a man who has been pushing the boundaries of realtime graphics since Wolfenstein3D. We owe him a lot, and I think he has earned the right to work on whatever project he damn well chooses. People seem to imagine all the amazing things he could have done with his time while glossing over the amazing things he has done right here, right now.
No, Rage is not the panacea of interactive entertainment. It is, however, a stunning showcase of some amazing new technologies in the form of a fairly conventional shooter. It is what it is, don't like it, don't buy it.
Nowdays, anytime an id game is mentioned you can't help but be overwhelmed by the "id games are teh suck!" noise. Fine. Don't buy them. But concocting some conspiracy about Carmack being held hostage by the artists or whatever is just nonsense.
He has a team of artists who help realise the (visual) potential of the awesome new tech he has developed. The gameplay itself comes second. Heresy, I know, but this has been the pattern for a number of releases and if the id team are happy with that then more power to them.
No gun to anyones head.