4 ms·
John Carmack wasn't wrong: Those games are still legends, and rightfully so. A focus on gameplay is a blessing and a curse: when you strip away all but the most
by qwertyuiop924 10y ago
John Carmack wasn't wrong: Those games are still legends, and rightfully so. A focus on gameplay is a blessing and a curse: when you strip away all but the most basic context and themes, there's a certain sense of purity which, much like HL's innovations did for it, give a distinct feel to your games. OTOH, if you rely on gameplay and level design alone, your game lives and dies how how good that gameplay feels, how tight those mechanics are, and most of all, how solid the levels are. Doom, Quake, and Quake 3 all pulled it off. Doom 3 and Quake 4, ironically id's most story-focused games... didn't.
It may not be a coincedence that all but one of id's best games came before Romero left, and the other one was a pure multiplayer gameplay experience, rather than the standard story-driven affair.
- digi_owl 10y agoI'm tempted to say that what gave the likes of Quake1 longevity was mods rather than the base game itself. It was so damn easy to mod, and so damn easy to stick mods on magazine covers. A single individual was able to turn Quake1 into a rudimentary flight simulator after all. Later games have become more complicated to mod because of their adherence to realism in rendering, thus requiring the mod makers to be as skilled and equipped to make anything worthwhile.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoThat was certainly part of it. OTOH, the actual language that Quake mods were written in, QuakeC, belongs in nightmares. And you might say it's not that bad. You might say that it's okay, given its domain. And then you realize that Xonotic is still, to this day, written largely in QuakeC. And then you start to feel a bit ill, just contemplating a codebase of that size in a language that actually has less abstraction powers than C.
- DiabloD3 10y agoAnd then you realize they gave me the ability to steer rockets and remotely detonate them on command. Combine that with the fact I grew up with Descent 2. Disclaimer: I've been banned from Nexuiz/Xonotic servers. For winning. Using their rules. Written in QuakeC.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWell, yes, but the language itself is a mess, so the codebase is a bit ugly.
- justin66 10y ago> I've been banned from Nexuiz/Xonotic servers. For winning. Using their rules. Written in QuakeC. Botting?
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoThat would be me immediate idea. It's unlikely you'd be banned for winning if you weren't suspected of it. It's a community mostly consisting of migrants from Nexuiz, Quake, and Quake 3: Very competitive.
- DiabloD3 10y agoNope, but repeatedly accused of it even when the head developer of the engine said I wasn't. That community has infinite salt, but it made my day^Wweek^Wmonth^Wyear.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoOuch. Well, I guess it's time to move to QL, Q3, or QW. That sucks.
- DiabloD3 10y agoQuakeLive is basically dead due to id mismanagement (which QuakeLive is essentially Q3 + a CPMA-like mod), I switched to Nexuiz/Xonotic because QW died, and Q3's community is finally dying off. There's Reflex, but that community never really seemed to form, and there's also the newly announced Quake Champions game that is basically a QuakeLive-esque game via Doom 4's multiplayer engine (whereas Doom 4's multiplayer gameplay as-is is a lot like classic Doom/Doom 2 multiplayer). I'm looking forward to Quake Champions, but I'm afraid all the younger kids are going to bring too much salt to make it worth investing time into.