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Id Software

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Re: Id Software

#91

Post by alias_neo »

barrkel wrote: post #73
pizza234 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a strictly technological view of videogames is very restrictive. For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era. I don't think there is a golden age, though. There are still radical improvements to come in…

Modern video games too often have far more linear gameplay, because AAA budgets means assets get wasted if they don't get consumed. See the entire CoD series, for example - tedious to play if you're used to a different kind of game. Many people want a movie-like experience from their game, but that isn't what I played games for. It was more about emergent situations, rather than scripted. That was also what made game…

Can I ask, what does "assets get wasted if they don't get comsumed" mean?

Also, I agree with emergent situations, as a gamer, I'd call myself an "explorer" I'll check every nook and cranny, often, with modern games, I end up breaking things because I go places I shouldn't yet, instead of following what the developer expected of me.

As for replayability, I agree that it has mostly been lost, but, I don't feel it's a bad thing. I have a backlog of games on various systems to last me several more years, and I continue to buy games at a pace that means it'll sustain for some time to come.

Coupled with increasingly less time to game as I get older, I struggle to play some games at all.

Fallout 3 and Oblivion were two of my favs, New Vegas and Skyrim sit in their plastic wrap since day one, as I haven't found the time to commit to them. Fallout 4 got some 60 hours of my time compared to Fallout 3 in which I spend over 400 hours.

I don't play COD, or similar games, their "experience" is too shallow and linear, and it's easy to just keep them out of my backlog.

I want a game with a solid deadline that I can shelve when I'm done and move on in the backlog. The really greats will get a special "shelf" where they'll come back out, or are given to friends with similar taste.

Re: Id Software

#92

Post by superflyguy »

cubano wrote: post #88
kar1181 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the comments below observe, I think the types and number of experiences built on the back of new (to mainstream audiences anyway) technology were transformative. In 92 the Amiga 1200 came out, a wonderful computer with great hardware but unfortunately it never made it big. Four years later in 1996 mass market PCs were coming out with Pentium processors, 3dfx accelerators, high resolution bitmap displays, internet…

I always dislike it when the Amiga 1200 is mentioned as a forerunner to modern computing and the wonderful, albeit buggy, Atari 1040ST, released in 1985 , is totally forgotten about Using the Motorola 680000 with 32 bit internal/16 bit external buses and color bit-mapped graphics, my ST, hardware wise, totally blew away all other PCs from a technical POV and it just annoys me when the Amiga gets all this love the and…

The ST was not as good as the Amiga, that's why. The only advantage it had over the Amiga was the slightly higher CPU speed, because the Amiga's was reduced to keep in sync with the hardware it had. The hardware being what it needed to trounce the ST. You only have to look at the range and quality of games for each to see what I mean. ST ports always had that muddy look to them.

Re: Id Software

#93

Post by wilsonnb2 »

pizza234 wrote: post #51
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not GP, but I agree. The world of PC gaming was moving so fast in the 90s - sound cards, CD-ROM, "multimedia", the internet, 3D accelerators etc. (I appreciate that most of these technologies were invented earlier, but the 90s was when they really came of age and hit mass adoption). I grew up in that era and agree that it was a golden age, but of course I'm aware that nostalgia plays a big part in that. If you look a…

I think a strictly technological view of videogames is very restrictive. For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era. I don't think there is a golden age, though. There are still radical improvements to come in…

Really? Currently, I think video games are a terrible way to tell a story. Much worse than a book, tv show, or movie.

The way games are used as a narrative medium is by shoving movies inside them and forcing you to watch them instead of actually playing the game. Its like going to the movie theater, being handed a book, and told to read the book while we pause the movie between two scenes.

Obviously some games are exceptions, but they are few and far between.

Re: Id Software

#94

Post by the_af »

pizza234 wrote: post #51
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not GP, but I agree. The world of PC gaming was moving so fast in the 90s - sound cards, CD-ROM, "multimedia", the internet, 3D accelerators etc. (I appreciate that most of these technologies were invented earlier, but the 90s was when they really came of age and hit mass adoption). I grew up in that era and agree that it was a golden age, but of course I'm aware that nostalgia plays a big part in that. If you look a…

I think a strictly technological view of videogames is very restrictive. For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era. I don't think there is a golden age, though. There are still radical improvements to come in…

Like a sibling comment says, in the 2010s videogames have "gone Hollywood". My perspective is similar to what you say, but actually in the opposite direction: I think videogames in the 90s experimented more and were less focused in graphics, even though of course there were very technical programmers like Carmack. In the 2010s, videogames seemed to think graphics were the most important improvement; but even worse, every game designer thought of himself as an amateur movie director. Unfortunately, most game designers would make terrible directors. I'm going to single out David Cage of Quantic Dream as someone who writes embarrassingly bad plots for his videogames (Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain), and actually calls himself a "director".

The problem with "games as movies" is that most games tell a story that would feel amateurish or childish if told as a movie. But also, as one piece in the Atlantic controversially argued [0], games are a different medium than movies; trying to "tell a story" with a game, in the traditional sense, is failing to take advantage of the medium.

----

[0] Note I don't entirely agree with it, but it raises some valid points: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video...

Re: Id Software

#95

Post by zimpenfish »

a008t wrote: post #80
pizza234 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a strictly technological view of videogames is very restrictive. For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era. I don't think there is a golden age, though. There are still radical improvements to come in…

Video games have gone Hollywood. Largely because of improvements in graphics, game budgets have gone way up and studios are afraid to take risks. Hence you get mostly sequels, online cash cows, linear on-rails shooters/cinematic experiences that are easy to sell. Content is expensive to produce so studios are afraid of "wasting" it. Yet I was still discovering hidden things in the original Deus Ex 10 years after I fi…

> Video games have gone Hollywood.

Only the triple-A developers.

> [...] small-ish creative studios could compete. Games were popular enough to make it profitable for studios to make them yet not too mainstream to dumb them down for the lowest common denominator.

I would venture that Ninja Theory with "Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice" fulfills this - they're were[1] a small studio with a game you can't really call dumbed down and it was a profitable game with a relatively small budget ([1] Now they're part of Microsoft.

Re: Id Software

#96

Post by froasty »

coldtea wrote: post #65
pizza234 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a strictly technological view of videogames is very restrictive. For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era. I don't think there is a golden age, though. There are still radical improvements to come in…

>* For a variety of reasons, in the last decade (or in the last couple), videogames matured as a narrative medium, which is a radical difference from the 90s. One could argue that, from an whole - including artistic - perspective, 2010s are the golden era.* In an era when most mainstream movies are way dumbed down, I doubt games got much more "artistic" and "narrative". (Especially if one considers the text and graph…

Agreed. Just look at franchises that were around in the 1990s and compare them to their 2010s counterparts. Almost none of them look good in comparison to their antecedents.

Deus Ex -- You play as a cybernetic anti-terrorist operative in a prosaic and cynical vision of the future fueled entirely by the conspiracies of the mid-90s BBS scene. The world is complex, coherent, and fleshed out. You have the illusion that your choices matter.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution -- You play as a super bad-ass private security in a neo-Renaissance world populated fueled by the hyperbole surrounding transhumanism. The developers deliberately make it less complex compared to the original for the sake of streamlining, use banal pop culture for their "inspirations," and intentionally design the game so that player choices are irrelevant. [0] It can be boiled down to "We want to make a western Metal Gear Solid."

I'll just grab a quote from a random Fallout 3 retrospective here -- "[...] Fallout 1 and 2 were defined by complex storylines, detailed characters and far-reaching consequences to the player's actions. And that these elements are less prominent in FO3, while faster action and stunning visuals have been brought to the forefront." [1]

Or a Thief (2014) review: "The three major strengths of past Thief titles - wide open mission design, sound propagation and narrative - are this game’s biggest weaknesses. That is a fundamental problem it cannot hope to overcome." [3]

Video games "matured" in the sense that they became more like movies interspersed with interactive segments, but the notion that that made them more artistic is pretty unfounded.

---

[0] http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015489/Reimagining-a-Classic-T...

[1] https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/fallout-3-retrospective-21...

[2] https://www.pcinvasion.com/thief-pc-review/

Re: Id Software

#97

Post by dfxm12 »

barrkel wrote: post #72
DEADBEEFC0FFEE wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious that you think it was a golden age.

It was a golden age for the first person immersive simulation game. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Thief, System Shock II, Half-Life, Deus Ex - there was a period of classics with large improvements and innovation from one game to the next, where game design space was explored just as the technology to render it became available. First person immersive sims are generally best played on the PC. When consoles that were a…

first person immersive simulation game

FPS stands for First Person Shooter. The games you're listing don't simulate much, even if some of those games have RPG elements.

Re: Id Software

#98

Post by kar1181 »

cubano wrote: post #88
kar1181 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the comments below observe, I think the types and number of experiences built on the back of new (to mainstream audiences anyway) technology were transformative. In 92 the Amiga 1200 came out, a wonderful computer with great hardware but unfortunately it never made it big. Four years later in 1996 mass market PCs were coming out with Pentium processors, 3dfx accelerators, high resolution bitmap displays, internet…

I always dislike it when the Amiga 1200 is mentioned as a forerunner to modern computing and the wonderful, albeit buggy, Atari 1040ST, released in 1985 , is totally forgotten about Using the Motorola 680000 with 32 bit internal/16 bit external buses and color bit-mapped graphics, my ST, hardware wise, totally blew away all other PCs from a technical POV and it just annoys me when the Amiga gets all this love the and…

I still own and love both :) I mentioned the A1200 because it was basically the apex of that line of computers (and indeed that entire approach to computing).

There's some great videos on Youtube (particularly the Computerphile ones) on the Tramiel era Atari computers. They are a great little machine to help learn computer organization on. They were powerful yet still relatively simple machines that you could fit in your head.

E.g. I love this one on linked lists where they write some 68k assembly and run it on a STE and Falcon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyG9S9nAlUM

Re: Id Software

#99

Post by toolslive »

kchr wrote: post #54
ddtaylor wrote: post #52

Here is the famed "Fast Inverse Square Root" trick: https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/dbe4ddb1... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

Thanks for lifting this up!

That trick was published in Graphics Gems V (1995) by Ken Turkowski.

Re: Id Software

#100

Post by the_af »

alias_neo wrote: post #91
barrkel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern video games too often have far more linear gameplay, because AAA budgets means assets get wasted if they don't get consumed. See the entire CoD series, for example - tedious to play if you're used to a different kind of game. Many people want a movie-like experience from their game, but that isn't what I played games for. It was more about emergent situations, rather than scripted. That was also what made game…

Can I ask, what does "assets get wasted if they don't get comsumed" mean? Also, I agree with emergent situations, as a gamer, I'd call myself an "explorer" I'll check every nook and cranny, often, with modern games, I end up breaking things because I go places I shouldn't yet, instead of following what the developer expected of me. As for replayability, I agree that it has mostly been lost, but, I don't feel it's a b…

> Can I ask, what does "assets get wasted if they don't get comsumed" mean?

I think the parent poster means this: that because each "scene" in an AAA game cost a lot to produce, they want every player to experience it. If it was entirely optional, then some players would miss it, and then how can you explain to them why the game was so expensive? So they must see scene; in order to ensure this, the game becomes more linear and with fewer optional missions/situations/paths.

Think of it as a big budget movie: they filmed the action-oriented, CGI-ladden scene, so they want you to watch it.

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