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Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

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Re: Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

#41
post #10
post #3

Also, today is the 30-year anniversary of DOOM's release.

What a time to be a kid. Computers and games were absolute magic . Some of us were lucky enough to have a 386 and if we squished the screen down far enough we could get a reasonable framerate. Some of us were lucky enough to have mates with a 386. I was particularly lucky in that my mates dad had a small pc store in his shed. So we also had a laplink cable for transferring software and a serial cable for multiplayer…

This magic feeling. Can we find it in modern games ? I was searching and just couldn’t.

Did you manage to find something ?

Re: Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

#42

Romero is a strange figure. Why wasn't he able to really make it after id? From Daikatana to Empire of Sin, everything was a flop, more or less. Who is John Romero?

You could pretty much say the same thing about Carmack. He just kept making the same doom and quake game over and over with better and better tech. Carmack's space company venture didn't work out, then he went to work at Oculus where he couldn't get anyone to listen to him and got frustrated and left. Now he's at some AI startup. In some ways Romero actually saved ID software and made everyone a ton of money by worki…

Carmack was key for many aspects of modern VR and I'm currently still enjoying the fruits of his labours. Even a partial success is pretty good for someone like him.

Re: Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

#43
post #16

Romero is a strange figure. Why wasn't he able to really make it after id? From Daikatana to Empire of Sin, everything was a flop, more or less. Who is John Romero?

This is a common pattern in a lot of creative industries; some people have early, groundbreaking success, but once they're successful have a tough time replicating that. Some combination of now that they're rich, no longer really the pressure to succeed as they already have, they were in the right place at the right time and no longer are, they have less pressure from other people telling them "no", they no longer ha…

Not inconsistent with this, what seems warped to me is having these huge expectations for individuals after their first success in the first place. (Writing this thinking about someone like Romero working on something like a game; lot of what follows doesn't carry over to, say, music or writing.)

They needed talent to pull it off, but also lots of stars aligned for a bold experiment to work out, and true experiments don't always work out. Conversely, for each success there were many talented folks who tried good ideas and didn't see them work out. The more surprising the first success was, the more foolish you'd be to expect a repeat, it seems like.

If that's the basic problem, you can't "fix" it in the sense that you can't make someone keep churning out revolutionary new things. But you might get better outcomes and fewer embarrassing failures the more you think of individual talent as one factor. Folks still have to iterate, get feedback, work with good people, sometimes put a lot of work into an idea then see it they have to rework it, or even release some quick experiments that don't do that well. You don't maximize your odds of great results by sending someone off to work in isolation as long as they want.

One thing I see hints of here and there, but don't really have a great picture of, is the inner workings of organizations that produce new/weird but successful things more than just once. It interacts with business, luck, and changes in the world outside of course, but internally--how do they balance single vision vs. input from many folks? Do they build a lot they throw away? Do they go outside the team a lot for feedback (in Romero's world "playtesting")? Of course there's no one Right Way to do things, especially across domains, but it could be fascinating to see a bit more how various places work.

Re: Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

#46

John Carmack and John Romero are going to discuss Doom live on Twitch in about 55 minutes (8PM GMT). https://www.twitch.tv/theromero

Is there a way to watch it from the start?

I don't see a way. I'm sure you'll be able to start from the beginning once the stream is over.

Re: Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

#47

$75 for just levels. The game doesn't come with it. That's asking more than a AAA game.

There's this expectation for how much a AAA game should cost, which seems entirely cultural and not based on an accounting of the resources that went into it. Remember when the standard price of a AAA game was raised by $10, and there was a bit of outrage (from some camps), despite the fact that the previous standard price dated from a time when game budgets were less than half of what they are today? Clearly, many g…

>There's this expectation for how much a AAA game should cost, which seems entirely cultural and not based on an accounting of the resources that went into it.

The price of a video game is not a function of how much it cost to make it. The price is set by maximizing unit price * expected sales where expected sales is a function of cost. The demand curves are cultural and that is how it works for any industry.

>despite the fact that the previous standard price dated from a time when game budgets were less than half of what they are today?

Conversely, gaming is a mass market that appeals to a larger amount of people than it did in the past. The masses may be less willing to spend as much as an enthusiast.

>What matters more is that he's selling to an audience that doesn't need to be convinced to buy his product.

He chose to make it a niche product. It would not have been that much extra work to make it into a full game and release it on Steam. He could have even outsourced that work. There are freely licensed doom clones that could be used so it would not need much development time.

Re: Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

#48

Romero is a strange figure. Why wasn't he able to really make it after id? From Daikatana to Empire of Sin, everything was a flop, more or less. Who is John Romero?

Reminds me of Notch. He took his incredible Minecraft success and pitched this new game where you’d have a space ship and a CPU with limited resources. I downloaded some tech demo and… it was just another janky Java-based FPS engine. He had that adequate but short-lived card game but that’s about it. I’m not sure there really is any surprise here. We all know that being a success doesn’t imply generalizable skill, wh…

0x10c had serious promise. In many ways it was one of the 300 attempts at creating a successful SS13 clone (but with Mojang on it it _might_ have worked?).

Who knows.. Even Minecraft was catching lightning in a bottle. It was there just at the right moment at the right time. The odd choice of Java was just the right thing needed to make it take off. First since you could play it in the browser(remember applets?), later when easy decompilation and modding arrived.

Re: Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

#49

John Carmack and John Romero are going to discuss Doom live on Twitch in about 55 minutes (8PM GMT). https://www.twitch.tv/theromero

Is there a way to watch it from the start?

Yes: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2000693432
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