16 ms·

Dear John Carmack.

189 points by swah 15y ago

suivix 15y ago
Marathon was the first game with mouse-look, not Doom.
jilebedev 15y ago
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.
- navs 15y ago
  To be fair, it's firefox only. The Back button is broken but I don't think that was intentional.
- gerakinis 15y ago
  Second on ipad
- zobzu 15y ago
  it happens if you hit back on a redirect. just long click back and select previous page
jc-denton 15y ago
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.
- vitalysh 15y ago
  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).
wmf 15y ago
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.
jhermsmeyer 15y ago
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.
- panza 15y ago
  > So poorly written, I find it hard to take seriously. English is not the author's primary language.
cavalcade 15y ago
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.
- yannickt 15y ago
  He needs Romero back. I think if these two were still working together, we would see some amazing games being made.
  - palish 15y ago
    I'd say Carmack cares more about rockets than about games, at this point. Who wouldn't?
    - yannickt 15y ago
      His interviews after he received the gdc lifetime achievement award suggest otherwise.
      - palish 15y ago
        Really? Interesting. I haven't kept up. That's... Well, that's ironic. I wonder why he decided to pursue gamedev with more passion than rocketdev?
        yannickt 15y ago
        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. http://www.mytweetdreams.com/learning-twitter/inside-gaming-plus-john-carmack-interview-at-game-developers-choice-awards http://www.mytweetdreams.com/learning-twitter/inside-gaming-...
  - cavalcade 15y ago
frou_dh 15y ago
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.
petercooper 15y ago
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.
kennymeyers 15y ago
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. Give me a break.
- calebmpeterson 15y ago
  Half-Life
- hboon 15y ago
  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).
  - kennymeyers 15y ago
    I was not asserting that ONLY stories with games or great art direction succeed.
- thret 15y ago
  You think SC and SC2 stand out due to art direction? Well, sure, in the same way Chess does.
- brianobush 15y ago
  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."
  - xenophanes 15y ago
    you don't think starcraft, the best and hardest strategy game in esports, pushed any boundaries or brought new styles of play?
5hoom 15y ago
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. No gun to anyones head.
- palish 15y ago
  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.
  - 5hoom 15y ago
    Minor quibble accepted! 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 :)
- ary 15y ago
  > 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.
xarien 15y ago
The great thing about opinions is that..... 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.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
puredlx 15y ago
Start playing minecraft, it has all you desire.
z92 15y ago
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.
- 5hoom 15y ago
  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 :)
staunch 15y ago
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.
- palish 15y ago
  > It's one of my fantasies to work on this. Then why don't you? No, really, why don't you? Right now. http://nehe.gamedev.net http://nehe.gamedev.net http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/singlepage/bgnet.html http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/singlepage/bgnet.html http://developer.nvidia.com/physx http://developer.nvidia.com/physx These are the (free) tools that I used to build something very close to Quake. If a dummy like me can, then so can you. And if it's your fantasy, then you owe it to yourself to make it your reality. Go achieve what I didn't.
  - staunch 15y ago
    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.
    - palish 15y ago
      DaVinci tackled a dozen fantasies pretty much simultaneously. I think you're more capable than you give yourself credit for.
      - staunch 15y ago
        Hah. Da Vinci was a time traveler though. Unfair advantage.
eridius 15y ago
> Many games designers think its their job to tell stories, but games isn't a story medium, they should go write books or make films. Couldn't be more wrong. In fact, lack of compelling story is one of the things that's wrong with gaming today.
bnegreve 15y ago
> 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. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_%28video_game%29#Gameplay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_%28video_game%29#Gamepl...
grannyg00se 15y ago
Excuse me but how is this person the authority on what games are and are not. "Many games designers think its their job to tell stories, but games isn't a story medium, they should go write books or make films." Have you heard of Sierra? King's Quest? Or maybe Legend of Kyrandia? Or in the FPS genre, Half Life? Or the Deus Ex trilogy? These are all games in which the story has stayed with me much longer than the game mechanics.
- aw3c2 15y ago
  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.
seletz 15y ago
While one could argue that his post is just a "rant" and poorly written, methinks he knows what he's talking about. http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/video.html http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/video.html I find this game visually very appealing and different, and it seems to me that the gameplay is quite unique, too.
bazoom 15y ago
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.
- phaus 15y ago
  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.
babebridou 15y ago
> 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.
exDM69 15y ago
> With Doom3 something happened I agree. Doom3 didn't start with a gun in your hand. It's DOOM, for hell's sake, you gotta have a piece in your hand, right from the git-go. The article goes to a very wrong direction when he starts blaming artists for the decline of FPS games. http://gamovr.mx981.com/post/2654 http://gamovr.mx981.com/post/2654
rit 15y ago
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.
dsl 15y ago
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.
- bigsassy 15y ago
  No, you're wrong. Bethesda bought id Software when rage was well into development. Rage is a "pure id" game, as well as Doom 3.
  - dsl 15y ago
    You might want to check your facts. id Software is owned by ZeniMax, which also owns Bethesda.
    - aphistic 15y ago
      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.
83457 15y ago
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. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPIA2g8T6Hw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPIA2g8T6Hw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-A8xvFKaRA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-A8xvFKaRA
- swah 15y ago
  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.
- walrus 15y ago
  > made me lose my vision for a few days What?
  - 83457 15y ago
    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. http://quelsolaar.com/love/screen_shots.html http://quelsolaar.com/love/screen_shots.html
    - jamii 15y ago
      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.
bigsassy 15y ago
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. http://www.idsoftware.com/iphone-games/ http://www.idsoftware.com/iphone-games/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orcs_%26_Elves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orcs_%26_Elves Here's an interview with him talking about iPhone developmenet: http://mobilegames.about.com/od/gamecompanies/a/intcarmack.htm http://mobilegames.about.com/od/gamecompanies/a/intcarmack.h...
- phaus 15y ago
  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.
jeffool 15y ago
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.) ... God this post got a little crazy.
- Wartz 15y ago
  I'm having more fun with rage than I did with crysis 2 or CoD campaign. vOv
ja2ke 15y ago
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." (Watch the keynote at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28 ) 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.

189 points by swah 15y ago

Marathon was the first game with mouse-look, not Doom.

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.

navs 15y ago
To be fair, it's firefox only. The Back button is broken but I don't think that was intentional.
gerakinis 15y ago
Second on ipad
zobzu 15y ago
it happens if you hit back on a redirect. just long click back and select previous page

jc-denton 15y ago

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.

vitalysh 15y ago
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).

wmf 15y ago

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.

jhermsmeyer 15y ago

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.

panza 15y ago
> So poorly written, I find it hard to take seriously. English is not the author's primary language.

cavalcade 15y ago

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.

yannickt 15y ago
He needs Romero back. I think if these two were still working together, we would see some amazing games being made.
- palish 15y ago
  I'd say Carmack cares more about rockets than about games, at this point. Who wouldn't?
  - yannickt 15y ago
    His interviews after he received the gdc lifetime achievement award suggest otherwise.
    - palish 15y ago
      Really? Interesting. I haven't kept up. That's... Well, that's ironic. I wonder why he decided to pursue gamedev with more passion than rocketdev?
      - yannickt 15y ago
        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. http://www.mytweetdreams.com/learning-twitter/inside-gaming-plus-john-carmack-interview-at-game-developers-choice-awards http://www.mytweetdreams.com/learning-twitter/inside-gaming-...
- cavalcade 15y ago

frou_dh 15y ago

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.

petercooper 15y ago

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.

kennymeyers 15y ago

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. Give me a break.

calebmpeterson 15y ago
Half-Life
hboon 15y ago
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).
- kennymeyers 15y ago
  I was not asserting that ONLY stories with games or great art direction succeed.
thret 15y ago
You think SC and SC2 stand out due to art direction? Well, sure, in the same way Chess does.
brianobush 15y ago
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."
- xenophanes 15y ago
  you don't think starcraft, the best and hardest strategy game in esports, pushed any boundaries or brought new styles of play?

5hoom 15y ago

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. No gun to anyones head.

palish 15y ago
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.
- 5hoom 15y ago
  Minor quibble accepted! 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 :)
ary 15y ago
> 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.

xarien 15y ago

The great thing about opinions is that..... 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.

deleted 15y ago

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puredlx 15y ago

Start playing minecraft, it has all you desire.

z92 15y ago

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.

5hoom 15y ago
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 :)

staunch 15y ago

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.

palish 15y ago
> It's one of my fantasies to work on this. Then why don't you? No, really, why don't you? Right now. http://nehe.gamedev.net http://nehe.gamedev.net http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/singlepage/bgnet.html http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/singlepage/bgnet.html http://developer.nvidia.com/physx http://developer.nvidia.com/physx These are the (free) tools that I used to build something very close to Quake. If a dummy like me can, then so can you. And if it's your fantasy, then you owe it to yourself to make it your reality. Go achieve what I didn't.
- staunch 15y ago
  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.
  - palish 15y ago
    DaVinci tackled a dozen fantasies pretty much simultaneously. I think you're more capable than you give yourself credit for.
    - staunch 15y ago
      Hah. Da Vinci was a time traveler though. Unfair advantage.

eridius 15y ago

> Many games designers think its their job to tell stories, but games isn't a story medium, they should go write books or make films. Couldn't be more wrong. In fact, lack of compelling story is one of the things that's wrong with gaming today.

bnegreve 15y ago

> 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. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_%28video_game%29#Gameplay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_%28video_game%29#Gamepl...

grannyg00se 15y ago

Excuse me but how is this person the authority on what games are and are not. "Many games designers think its their job to tell stories, but games isn't a story medium, they should go write books or make films." Have you heard of Sierra? King's Quest? Or maybe Legend of Kyrandia? Or in the FPS genre, Half Life? Or the Deus Ex trilogy? These are all games in which the story has stayed with me much longer than the game mechanics.

aw3c2 15y ago
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.

seletz 15y ago

While one could argue that his post is just a "rant" and poorly written, methinks he knows what he's talking about. http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/video.html http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/video.html I find this game visually very appealing and different, and it seems to me that the gameplay is quite unique, too.

bazoom 15y ago

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.

phaus 15y ago
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.

babebridou 15y ago

> 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.

exDM69 15y ago

> With Doom3 something happened I agree. Doom3 didn't start with a gun in your hand. It's DOOM, for hell's sake, you gotta have a piece in your hand, right from the git-go. The article goes to a very wrong direction when he starts blaming artists for the decline of FPS games. http://gamovr.mx981.com/post/2654 http://gamovr.mx981.com/post/2654

rit 15y ago

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.

dsl 15y ago

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.

bigsassy 15y ago
No, you're wrong. Bethesda bought id Software when rage was well into development. Rage is a "pure id" game, as well as Doom 3.
- dsl 15y ago
  You might want to check your facts. id Software is owned by ZeniMax, which also owns Bethesda.
  - aphistic 15y ago
    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.

83457 15y ago

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. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPIA2g8T6Hw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPIA2g8T6Hw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-A8xvFKaRA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-A8xvFKaRA

swah 15y ago
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.
walrus 15y ago
> made me lose my vision for a few days What?
- 83457 15y ago
  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. http://quelsolaar.com/love/screen_shots.html http://quelsolaar.com/love/screen_shots.html
  - jamii 15y ago
    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.

bigsassy 15y ago

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. http://www.idsoftware.com/iphone-games/ http://www.idsoftware.com/iphone-games/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orcs_%26_Elves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orcs_%26_Elves Here's an interview with him talking about iPhone developmenet: http://mobilegames.about.com/od/gamecompanies/a/intcarmack.htm http://mobilegames.about.com/od/gamecompanies/a/intcarmack.h...

phaus 15y ago
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.

jeffool 15y ago

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.) ... God this post got a little crazy.

Wartz 15y ago
I'm having more fun with rage than I did with crysis 2 or CoD campaign. vOv

ja2ke 15y ago

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." (Watch the keynote at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28 ) 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.