Posted by shadowtree 6 hours ago
Now cutting edge graphical features are mostly pushed by Epic and their Unreal engine. Like ray-traced global illumination, virtual shadow maps, virtual geometry, and fast ray-traced direct illumination.
But id software's games themselves arguably improved after Carmack left, despite not pushing technical boundaries. Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and Doom TDA all were received very favorably at the time. Not sure whether this had anything to do with Carmack leaving though.
Is there going to be someone out there who doesn't like it? Sure, take absolutely any game whatsoever and there's someone out there who will tell you it's not good... but by any reasonable measure: critical reception, awards, lasting cultural impact, influence on future games, it's almost across the board on the positive end of the spectrum. You're of course free to dislike it, but claiming it to be a "serious letdown" treats your singular point of view as if it were a consensus, when the actual consensus is overwhelmingly the opposite.
The company was successful, had one of the most prestigious brand in the game industry, was early enough to capitalize on the rise of PC gaming, incredible talents and tech.
Yet it didn't transform into a Blizzard or Epic.
And it seems that both the early success and stall were the responsibility of one very talented but somewhat obtuse nerd.
Now what was that thing about living long enough to become the villain.
Arcane dimensions
Brutalist Jams 1,2,3
Call of the Machine
Alkaline
But when it came out I found Quake dissapointing. I still feel that DOOM is a more fun game. It's just always way more fun to kill 10 weak enemies rather than one super tanky one. Also the art style of DOOM is more varied and vivid and fun and heavy metal.. Quake is so dull and dour and brown. Even the movement in Quake seems a bit off imo, its too easy for your great honking non-rotating cube hitbox to get hung up on tiny bits of geometry (I know its actually a point, but it works out the same a non rotating cuboid).. Also making new maps and enemies and content just seems so easy in DOOM.. There is some great modern Quake content (mentioned above) but the amount of stuff for DOOM dwarfs it.
Doom++ was already well under way in the form of Ken Silverman's Build engine. Duke Nukem 3D beat Quake to market by ~6 months as I recall. A shorter timeline on the latter would have put them in direct competition with each other, damaging both.
It was Carmack's job to assert technological dominance and give the industry its next generation of game engines. He did just that, and shouldn't apologize or second-guess himself.
Yes carmack may have been an asshole, but it takes a real man to recognize and own up to your own human flaws. Kudos. We need more of that in this world.
I still hack on the engine and its derivations from time to time.
Quake 2 was a development of that, will a deep focus on multiplayer. And it won at that. As a singlr player game it was boring but LAN play was just amazing.
So quake 3 did rethink the engine but went all in on multiplayer.
As funny as it may sound but in the end, it is quake 1 that just keeps going thanks to its easy moddabilty.
I don't care for the story, and I wouldn't play Doom++. Electric polar bears and some Shrub lava mule, whatever. But swimming in deep underwater ruins with full 3-axis freedom was awesome.
I couldn't play multiplayer back then. Dialup sucked and was more expensive than AI tokens. Ethernet was still rare. Lugging a CRT monitor to friend's house was a chore reserved for a once-a-year LAN party.
Current Carmack would not have been capable of making Quake.
Demand was high. I doubt they'd have suffered even if released on the same day.
Did they really?
Did ID make more money with engine licensing than with game sales?
They needed to ship. I think Quake Engine could wait, and have Doom++ would have given them some slack
This is the opposite to the Boeing problem (shipping the rehashed product instead of the brand new thing)
iD's engines were famously known in the industry as tech demos first, first-party game platforms second. I'm not sure how the revenue picture ended up looking, though. They obviously made a lot of money from their 'tech demos.'
Yes and Wikipedia claims it was a "heavily modified" version of the engine
And while I get the tech demo angle, doesn't mean that Quake had to be one of those